Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it." -- Thomas Hobbes (b. 1588-04-05, d. 1679-12-04)

Have any of you ever heard a disk drive make this sound? ( WAV, ~15 seconds, 644 KB) The beep at the start is the POST beep through the PC speaker. The falling-whistly tones at 0:07, 0:10, and 0:14 are coming from the hard disk, not the speaker, and if I let the system finish booting (it complains about short reads on a couple of sectors, but does boot Linux) and leave it running, the drive will make that noise a few times per minute all day. (It's a 3 GB Western Digital Caviar 33100 IDE drive, if anyone cares.) It wasn't making that sound on Friday. On Saturday it was doing so constantly.

A week ago or so, as I walked through my mother's living room, the ceiling roared at me. I found this rather startling. (I backed up two steps and figured out what was haappening. The rain that night was of a sort that produced mostly high frequencies hitting the skylight, and most of the sound didn't spread out from the cone under the skylight shaft, so I didn't hear that it was raining until I crossed just the right spot.)

I understand that when I hear the phrase "Tea Party", the idea behind the name is that I'm supposed to think of Colonial protesters dressed as Native Americans, vandalizing somebody's cargo. Thing is, the first image that pops into my head each time includes the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and Alice, with nary a revolutionary New Englander in the scene!

This past Wednesday was a fairly annoying day, which included a stuck brake getting hot enough that I could taste metal in the air and my eyes stung, and later a tire with a blown-out sidewall (on the same wheel, but it was after the brake had spent a couple hours cooling off). On the plus side, on Thursday night the van went to the garage my mom uses, the brakes all around weren't nearly as bad as I'd thought they were (they've been squealing long enough I was afraid I was scraping the rotors), and the car feels happier now (though it still has a few obvious problems). Uh ... the fact that post-repair, stepping on the brake pedal while the left turn signal is active causes the hi-beams to turn on, is a little disconcerting. (But Sheepie pointed out that the mechanic who test-drove it may have adjusted the position of the steering wheel (the hand control for the brake clips the turn signal stem, which is also the hi-beam switch), so if I'm lucky all I'll have to do is remember where the tilt-wheel adjustment lever is.)

So by Saturday I was mobile again, just in time for a nastybad headache that pretty much sidelined me for the day. Bleah. (Sunday wasn't a very good day spoonwise either, though the pain levels were a bit lower than Saturday. Today my head isn't too bad, but all the muscles between the bottom of my rib cage and my jaw hurt a whole hell of a lot.)

What should be a straightforward, mostly-cookbook electronics project continues to remind me why I went into software instead of hardware. I think I've got the timing worked out, but apparently even the itty bitty relay I scrounged needs a higher voltage across the coil. (I have a four-C-cell battery holder, but need to go buy some C cells.) I should probably be using a transistor instead of a relay, but (a) I'm still a little scared of transistors, and (b) I'm not really sure which direction the current I want to switch is going to flow. Still, it feels like I'm Almost There in terms of tweaking the circuit, assuming that jumping from a 2.4V supply to 6V fixes the last problem.

A month or two ago AAAS randomly sent me a free issue of Science, obviously with the idea that once I saw what a wonderful magazine it was, I would buy a subscription. (Alas, impressive as it is, there's no way I'm going to have that much money to spare for what is, for me, recreational reading.) I took it to my mother's house, and after a while it wound up on the bathroom counter next to the sink, along with a few issues of Science News, a gunsmithing catalog, and some sale fliers.

Disturbingly, Science kept getting more water-spattered than any of the other printed matter in that spot. Any page it was left open to developed those droplet-wrinkles much more quickly than any of the other magazines/catalogs/fliers did when they were left at the top of the stack (even though some of the others were printed on paper that showed the effects of minor water damage more easily than the paper Science uses).

I have no idea why there's such a marked difference in the amount of splashing/dripping water that lands on Science and the amount hitting everything else. Obviously, additional observations -- even controlled experiments -- are required. I suppose, to be thorough, I should add Readers Digest, a few guitar magazines, alumni newsletters, and at least one tabloid to the mix. ("I'm buyin' these guitar mags for science, not for fun¹, honest!")

Except that I don't have any money for the other magazines either. Hmm ... blank sheets of paper as a control sample ...?

Recent observations regarding a rather small human: (1) At four years old, while my nephew's fingers may be juuuust large enough to reach the holes on a soprano recorder (the sopranino is a better fit), he still lacks the coordination/dexterity to keep multiple holes covered even when he can reach (what'll that be, another year? More? Less?) even though he seems to understand the idea; (2) he wants to play the tenor and bass recorders anyhow; (3) showing him the case o' woodwinds and letting him play the kazoo apparently makes me The Cool Uncle, at least for now; (4) he's convinced my drum practice pad² is a mini dancing stage.

[1] Deliberately overlooking the fact that science can be fun, of course, since that would undermine the excuse.

[2] The kind that's designed to sit on top of a snare drum, so when used away from the drum kit it looks like a cartoonishly squished top-hat with a floppy brim (and Mom did ask me what had happened to my hat when she saw it).