Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

This entry is composed of bits and pieces started at various times over the last two weeks (whoops, four weeks -- I just checked the datestamp on the files I'd been jotting these snippets in) and set aside mid-thought for one reason or another.

As I write this paragraph, Stevie Nicks is on Soundstage on PBS. And I find myself wondering how "Rhiannon" would sound in silmaril's voice and style instead of Nicks'.

The second night with the DTV converter, it stopped being able to receive MPT, displaying an error message saying "signal lost". Later in the evening, it stopped seeing any of the other channels that it had tuned in easily the night before. Hmm.

A few nights later, my impression so far is still that things worked better (other than getting a couple of alternate channels) with NTSC, and the event timers on each of the converters leave a lot to be desired (but are basically useable, apart from stuff like their clocks not agreeing with the VCR clock or the actual time or the television stations' clocks). There's still a bit of confusion for me, as to which one should be turned off beforehand so the timer can take over, and which needs to be already turned on for the timer to work. I still haven't gotten around to reading the manuals though, so it may become clear when my head hurts less and I feel like reading.

I got a music catalog in the mail a little while ago. A few things about it caught my attention, other than the expected "gosh, I should buy more mic cables" reflexive reaction. First, I see that stage lights use LEDs now. I wonder how much cooler that makes the stage (or does most of the waste heat from incandescent stage lights go up anyhow, and most of the heat the performers feel come from the light itself, in which case LED lamps would just be a way of heating musicians with less electricity?). Kinda neat that LED lighting has hit that area. I wonder how long ago that happened (while I wasn't paying attention). And gee, cymbals suddenly got interesting-looking, with odd patterns of holes in them, and sound-altering paint. No idea whether these innovations really do things to the sound that couldn't be done in more ordinary ways, or are just things tossed in to be New And Different and suck more money out of drummers' wallets -- maybe I'll check whether Bill's Music has the funky cymbals and try 'em out there. Or maybe I'll just reflect on how I can't afford them whether they're really all that special or not, and ignore them.

The other thing I noticed, right on the cover, is the pre-washed *cough* "Road Worn" guitars that probably don't need much more said about them than what's already been covered in speaker2animals' journal.

Argh. Folks, if you're going to specify much smaller type than what your readers have chosen as the default in their browsers, ya' gotta pick your typeface carefully. I was wondering what V-radioactivity was, until I noticed that the 'V' was lowered and thought that maybe it was a poor rasterization of a 'y'. I was all set to Google 'y-radioactivity' before I remembered that in many fonts, 'γ' is indistinguishable from 'y' at any size other than huge. Dammit, stop tweaking font settings in ways that reduce legibility, or I'll be forced to invent a phenomenon called 'V-radioactivity' and turn it into a weapon to use on you! (Yes, I jacked up the font size a notch on this paragraph to make the letters easier to distinguish.)

(And yes, I know that some folks, mostly using habits learned in the pre-Unicode days, substitute Roman letters that look kindasorta like Greek the letters when they need a gamma or a mu, but I found a lowercase 'y' elsewhere on the page and it's different, so this really was the world's lamest rendition of a lowercase gamma.)

I know there was more that I'd started composing in my head, but those are the snippets that got enough typed in to serve as a reminder.