Frayed or Fried?

Since I’m not getting anything done in the way of reviews, a report on why is in order. Simply put, things have needed doing and they have exhausted all my energy while absconding with my brainwaves. The trigger was having to mow the lawn, which is not good due to depleting my limited stamina along with the fact I’m allergic to grass. Not just grass pollen, but the plant itself.

A week later and the itching is finally gone, but the sinuses still hate me. Can’t say I blame them.

Dad may finally making some small progress. For the first time since March there are indications of fluids (water in this case) making its way from the stomach to the intestine. Cheap no calorie drink mix with very potent red dye revealed this when his feeding tube in the small intestines became tinted pink. Having spilled this stuff on white clothing, I can say it was a positive match.

Also, he has been measuring oral intake in milliliters in comparison with what he drains from the relief tube in the stomach. In the past few days, more than one hundred milliliters of water has gone missing with the implication that they have passed through the gastric outlet.

Too early to get really excited, but hey this is something that hasn’t happened before.

Technical woes of various types have kept me busy too. The living room media center started locking up Windows 7 while throwing off video card driver errors. So of course, swapping video cards made no difference at all except audio driver errors started showing up too. Guess what swapping did?

Yeah nothing at all,  therefor memory tests were conducted. Nada. Suspicions fell on two possibilities: motherboard dying or Windows 7 corrupted during an update that hung during a thunderstorm several weeks ago. At my wits end, I reinstalled Windows 7 and so far the PC is remaining stable, though without the Razor Barracuda soundcard to output optical signals to the decoder used for surround sound.

Reinstalling that is next, though the quality of C-Media based drivers leave a lot to be desired in 2014. As a result of the incredible speed increase to the media center from swapping to any other sound card including the Realtek on the mother board, I’m going to be replacing my Asus Xonar DSX on my personal computer with a refurbished current generation Sound Blaster Z. Also, a need for good headphone amplifying built into the card has become a must since I don’t get to use speakers as much as before.

A report on how that fares will be a subject for a future post.

On top of that lengthy drama that ate up several days, my CMOY headphone amplifier stopped transmitting the left side of the stereo signal from any device hooked up to it. After some fretting, an accidental find of opening the mints tin cover correcting the issue led me to the cause, which wasn’t as dire as I thought. It turned out the output jack hole wasn’t perfectly dimpled in and contact was being made causing a short.

I love dental tools, they have saved the day on too many repair projects for me to list and once again one made a fix easy. It was a simple matter to carefully press in the thin metal of the cutout so it couldn’t make contact. All is well so far more than an hour of listening later.

Now that I’ve experience amplifying for headphones, the realization that it is a must for good studio monitor level cans has changed my approach to PC audio somewhat. Decent headphones come alive when properly driven, though bad ones do not. Detail in sound means a wider spread in frequencies needing neutral boosting for full clarity, something I hadn’t appreciated until using this cheap CMOY amp.

A new used camera and used laptop have also kept me busy evaluating them. Frankly, I feel like a thief given the high quality of the two and how very little I paid for them on eBay. Both are massive upgrades over the decade old equipment being replaced.

On the more trivial side, television season has started again, with more comic book adaptations to sample. Gotham had its season premiere last night and I’m going to keep watching to see if it capitalizes on the strengths shown or succumbs to the flaws. Uneven would be a polite descriptions to its shotgun approach employed to appeal to Batman fans.

Best parts of it are any time Jim Gordon, Alfred, and young Bruce Wayne are together along with Oswald (The Penguin) Cobblepot’s scenes. The rest is shaky at best, over the top bizarrely mixed with wooden acting at worst. Modern noir is what they are going for, but they need to slow down a bit for that to work. Hopefully, the pilot was over stuffed out of a desire to get picked up. If not, this series may end up a huge disappointment.

So far, the female cast members are flat out awful both in the writing and acting departments. To keep an audience today, that will have to change, ASAP.

Sleepy Hollow started its second season in frenetic fashion as if they are trying too hard after the excellent cliffhanger earlier this year. More setup than resolution was presented in sequence of events that would have been better split up between two episodes. That said, War’s new look along with the expanded cast promises good things down the road. Best part of the show had to be how it was all about the Benjamin.

Enough typing, I’ve got things needing doing, not the least of which getting the dining room rearranged for a hospital bed for Dad. Acquaintances from church have a rather nice one that belonged to a deceased parent that they are willing to give us. It sounds like a bear to move, so I’ve got to get things prepped before they can bring it over later this week.