Unsolicited Advice

I am saddened to report that Casper left us to rejoin his brother late on Wednesday night. It was very quick. One moment he was fine; the next, there was a sudden flurry of noise from his cage, as his legs failed him and he fell off a shelf. I sleep through normal rat sounds, but this was unusual. I bolted awake and went to see what was wrong. Cas was never a lap rat. I wasn't even allowed to pet him, when he first came home. Mickie wanted to live in the armpit of my shirt forever, but Casper permitted me only to politely boople his snoot through the cage bars. Actually picking him up was reserved only for dire emergencies, like the fire alarm. This was a touch awkward when it came to play time, since I needed a way to get them from the cage onto the bed where their rat-safe blanket and boxes were set out. But if he didn't want to be picked up, he didn't want to be picked up, and I wasn't going to argue with him too much. Instead I just offered them use of the box they

The last load of Amazon boxes contained a microphone. It is a Shure SM48 handheld vocal mic, with dynamic cardioid pickup. This is a piece of professional audio equipment. Not a pricey one -- they're about $40 -- but not the sort of thing you'd buy for fucking around with your friends on Discord. It hooks up with balanced stereo cables, and you have to run it through an amp to do anything with the signal, or an audio interface box if you want to get the sound into a computer. It is well-fortified and feels like it was carved out of a chunk of solid metal. It would probably survive being used to drive framing nails. Or being handed to your drummer. Same thing. It came with a stand adapter, a zippered case, and a warranty card. It did not come with any instructions. They figure if you've got one of these you probably already know how it works. It was on my Amazon list because these things are really good for general environmental sound. I've used them at work to mic every

(Note to the public: This is an expansion on an earlier Patron-only update . If you want those updates, sign up! I do post extra stuff, and Patrons get to see public blog entries at least 24 hours early.) Packages continue to arrive. The Amazon guy must be so confused by now. I am intentionally not trying to figure out who's behind it. I do know a few people IRL who could pull it off, but the reason I know them is because they're very public supporters of the arts -- I'd be aware that it was them, because they'd also be forwarding me grant applications and pitching me into networking meetings. At least two people were involved at some point, because one of the early anony-mice chose a pseudonym instead of using the default 'enjoy your gift!' message. Amazon lets you put a name on gifts, so if they wanted me to know who it was, they'd have said by now. I do keep sending thank you notes. Nobody would keep it up this long if it wasn't fun, so good for you!

I've been wearing contact lenses a long time. I was first issued daily-wear disposables when I was fourteen. After being late to school every goddamn day for two weeks, my mother marched me back to the optometrist and got me extended-wear disposables -- the kind you could sleep in -- instead. A lot of people don't tolerate these well, but I do, and I've been wearing them ever since. Fitting these lenses is not the exact science they would like you to believe. Getting eyeglass prescriptions in general is not. They stick you in front of a rig with switchable lenses and ask you which one you like  better, ffs. You go to the eye doctor to make sure your eyeballs aren't going to fall out, not for custom tailored prosthetics. Neither glasses nor contacts are ever 100% custom-fitted to your needs, at least outside of very specific circumstances. Glasses are ground to "close enough" specs from the settings available on the machine, and lenses come in fixed size/power

I went down a few rabbit holes while researching the Advent Calendar last year, that didn't make it into the queue because they got too long or went too far afield. Here's one of them! One thing you notice when you watch a bazillion videos about old games consoles is how the design of circuitry has evolved. If someone says 'circuit board' today, you think a light piece of leafy green board, filled with parallel lines of copper at 45° and 90° angles, dotted with lots of tiny inscrutable plastic and metal doodads. But it took a long, long time for them to get that way. If you look at really old circuit boards -- and I mean really, really old circuit boards, like from the beginning of the transistor era, they look completely different. They're brownish, for one thing. And kind of... wiggly? Apologies for the transfer quality. It's not your connection, it just sucks. This piece appears to be some sort of promo-tainment thing from Tektronix themselves, from 1969. The

A lot of groceries have been landing on my porch lately. Still, actually.  My roommates are a little confused, and asked me why the internet is mailing me sixteen jars of marinated artichoke hearts? And I had to explain that it's because Amazon is not really set up to let the internet mail me one or two jars of marinated artichoke hearts. They won't drop normal human quantities of perishables from Amazon Fresh on your porch without giving you a delivery window, and they can't book you a delivery window without ruining the "surprise" of getting things off a Wish List, so you can only order off Amazon Pantry, where people shop in bulk when they can't get a ride to Costco.  Ergo, sixteen jars of marinated artichokes. Which I will eventually eat, because I've also taken custody of sixteen boxes of pasta, a dozen cans of chunked tomatoes, and some amount of canned mushrooms and roasted bell peppers. I am generally a tired/lazy cook, and that's about the lev

Well, gang, this is our last video game entry for the Advent Calendar this year. Tomorrow and the next day are reserved for photos of food and rat cage decorations. I hope you've had fun with all of my nerdery. I actually specialized in this in college, not that anybody knew what I was talking about. My faculty advisor was the one dude who admitted to owning an Intellivision in the '70s. People study it now, but this was in the early Aughts, when video games were still a degenerate pastime that rotted your brain. But what of the video games we leave behind? Do they, as the song asks , know it's Christmas? It turns out that some of them do. Big kid computers have had real-time clocks forever. There was a business need -- early mainframes were timeshare systems. You couldn't charge someone for their computer time if the computer didn't know what time it was to record the billing data. Home computers didn't get them until the PC and Macintosh came on the scene. The