DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

For about a year we’ve been wanting to move the living room stereo into a wall cabinet. It was a big project, because I also wanted to replace every component. The speakers were huge, old, and always sounded too mid-rangey for my tastes. The integrated amp has lost two input channels, and lacks a remote control. And the cables were junk.

But even the decision to proceed took me a while. Rooms that have stereos ought to look like proper listening environments: speakers at one end, facing the length of the room; couch halfway down the room facing the speakers; remote control conveniently placed; beverage-table nearby. (The best image of this configuration is suggested by the famous old Maxell advertisement, created in the 1980s and still adorning the company’s audio tape products.)

In this case, though, the listening-room approach made little sense. We use the living-room stereo daily, but usually we’re cooking or cleaning or exercising, not sitting still with our hair blown back by high-SPL progressive rock music. With no regrets I compromised my audiophile tendencies to better utilize the space.

Shopping for home-theater equipment generally takes me a long time. First, I pursued auditions of exotic speakers. Months passed. The audition was definitive: the exotic round speakers sounded terrible. The promise was so great, and the reality was so disappointing… I was lost. I thought I was waiting to arrange a second audition, but in fact I was doing a whole lot of nothing.

A few months passed. My wife, ever logical, and more importantly eager to put a loveseat where the old stereo still sat, proposed a means of dislodging me from my, err, lodging? She suggested that I put the speakers from my office stereo up on top of the living-room cabinet just as an experiment: would box speakers look ridiculous up there? How would they sound?

We spent a Sunday evening hefting my desktop speakers (Polk Audio RT25i) onto stands on top of the cabinet, and ran cables to the amp. I spun up my audition discs, the remastered Moving Pictures and Simon Phillips’ Protocol, and … grimaced. The speakers, which work so well in my office, sounded awful: boxy, thin, un-real.

Placement is everything, though. I climbed back up the ladder and turned the speaker cabinets slightly so they’d not be parallel to the rear walls. The sonic improvement was drastic and immediate. The speakers sounded great. In fact, these little 2-way Polks, mounted nine feet in the air and haphazardly aimed, sounded better than the big 50-lb, 3-way Yamahas in perfect “listening room” position.

Decision in hand, I ordered a pair of Polk Audio RTi38, the newer and larger sibling to the RT25i. Next I ordered speaker cables: Clearview Golden Helix from Mapleshade. (As I wrote once before, I could hear the improvement when I installed these cables on my office stereo.)

Finding appropriate speaker stands was more complicated. I had decided to mount the speakers from the wall, and although there are only a few wall-mount bracket manufacturers, identifying a specific model took three calls to the manufacturer and one returned shipment. I ended up with a pair of OmniMount’s 20.5 ST-MP brackets.

OmniMount makes a quality product, but their website is frustratingly out of date. For example, the 20.5 series is not listed on the site, but only in the Specifications document (a 900k PDF file made of over-compressed JPEGged scans of the original documents?!)

Worse, the documentation shipped with the product is outdated and incorrect: I received instructions for the older “50” model, which is rated for 15 lbs., not 20. Even more confusing, step 10 of the instructions notes that when mounted to the rear of the speaker cabinet, rather than the top or bottom, the capacity of the bracket falls to 7.5 lbs. Remember, this part is supposed to carry 20 lbs. A support guy at OmniMount told me that the documentation is incorrect, but honestly I didn’t know what to believe. Could they really have tripled the capacity of this bracket, from 7.5 lbs to 20, when they renamed it?

Anyway, I’d finally received all the parts. The next step should be easy: installation.

I don’t know where they got my name, but the Seybold Seminars people have been sending me junk mail for about five years. The mail pieces are big, colorful, high-production-quality designs.. which means they took a lot of toxic chemicals to produce and lots of gas to deliver, and they take up too much space in my mailbox. It’s all a waste — I never asked for the stuff and don’t plan to attend the seminars.

The mailers never show opt-out information. This is the only reason Seybold has been able to send me stuff for five years. That is, if they’d made it easy for me to “unsubscribe,”, I would have done so a long time ago. (I quote “unsubscribe” because it implies that I requested this junk. In fact, Seybold most likely bought my name from a DTP software vendor or maybe the MacWorld Expo people.)

Finally I ferreted out the opt-out procedure. It is this: send an email detailing your request to remove@medialiveintl.com. If that fails, look for the Contact Us page at Seybold365.com to see if they’ve come up with a new method for sending these requests.

If your Windows machine crashed today, you have lots of company. As reported by Macintouch, John Dvorak writes, we can estimate that there are a minimum of 30 billion Windows system crashes a year.

Dvorak did the math based on estimates from Bill Gates. It’s an astounding level of non-productivity, all that rebooting and recovery. I guess people don’t know that it’s just not necessary. to put up with that ridiculously poor level of stability.

Most geeks cite the stability of Linux as a server platform. And it’s true — I’ve personally had Linux servers run for over a year, and even then they didn’t crash, but got powered down safely for one reason or another. But servers aren’t an equal comparison because they run a limited number of very stable apps.

Workstations crash more because users run lots of whacked-out, unstable, untested applications. Like web browsers. Like Java “crapplets”. Like rushed-to-market file-sharing apps with piggybacking spyware, or home-brewed Photoshop plugins. The list goes on.

But still, to crash three times a month? That’s the average figure Dvorak calculated from Gates’ numbers. It’s sad that computer users have come to accept this, as if they had no choice.

Here’s the choice: OS X.

My (Apple) Powerbook endures daily use, running all manner of applications, including the typical complement of beta-ware. It has crashed twice since I’ve owned it — say, about once every seven months. That is, my laptop has crashed one-twentieth as often as the average Windows machine.

Dvorak writes something else that ought to inspire about twenty million Windows users to switch: “the jury is still out on whether XP dies more often or less often than Windows 2000. From my experience, the number of crashes for each operating system is about equal.” If that’s really true, what the heck is the point of upgrading? To have a bunch of new features that don’t work well? If Microsoft isn’t trying to improve system stability, then who is?

Besides Apple, I mean.

Undeniable Forensic Proof that Paul McCartney really was replaced with a Look-Alike in 1966.

(Seen at the headline archive of The Morning News, a really great site.)

I consider myself a skeptic, but Andrew Spooner Jr. offers compelling photographic evidence. He presents a strong argument that Sir Paul is not the original Paul McCartney.

I’m less convinced by Spooner’s analyses of vocal recordings, as there have been controversies about who actually performed all those songs for years. I would not be surprised to learn that the original recordings were “augmented” by studio musicians and stand-in vocalists. In any recording session, performing sonic surgery to improve on reality is standard procedure.

(We even did some of that on the JAR album. Although, ahem, all those drum tracks really were mine.)

But performing plastic surgery to make an imposter look like the deceased original… that’s something else.

The idea that the person we’ve all called Paul McCartney for 40 years is an imposter makes McCartney impersonators even more ridiculous.

In related news, I never posted the resolution to the story of the Mike Portnoy imposter. The phony was arrested in April. He told the police, “I’m Mike Portnoy,” not knowing that Portnoy was waiting for them at the precinct house. Ha!

Here’s an entertaining and amusing novel, a mystery, on the subject of faking a celebrity death: The Suspense is Killing Me, by Thomas Maxwell. Buy it at half.com; it’s the best two bucks you’ll spend this week.

Earlier this year I became a fan of Amazon’s Gold Box. I hit Amazon.com nearly every day, rabidly clicking through the 10 offers. I remember buying at least two items I wouldn’t have bought had they not appeared there: a high-end rice cooker, for example, and a Calphalon griddle (75% off!). I didn’t purchase, but I appreciated, the steady parade of MP3 players and NetGear products and Leatherman tools in my daily offer set.

But last week, my Gold Box became infected with toys. Gone are my sleek, charcoal gray metallic audio components, my hardened steel drill bits, my eternally-warrantied kitchen appliances. In their place: “Pose Me Pets Environment: Bedroom”, which I can’t even parse much less fathom… Fisher Price Screwy Looey… some kind of Home Depot action figure… Seven of my 10 offers are for toys today. Never has any single product category so monopolized my Gold Box.

I think the problem is that I searched for a toy at Amazon’s site recently. Two friends have recently given birth, so I’m following the traditional American response pattern of sending some molded plastic crap with a happy face stamped on the outside. Amazon’s opportunistic profiler instantly branded me as a parent. It’s bad AI, and it has cost them a customer. It’s just too depressing to see my 10 Gold Box offers wasted on day-glow plastic baubles that don’t even plug in.

This idea is not original; I’ve seen it suggested before: Amazon ought to have a widget on their site so that users can indicate “I’m just researching — don’t construe the following action as any statement of my actual interests.” It could be as simple as a “gift mode” button. It would allow me to browse items from a category I find distasteful without being subjected to more of the same for months to come.

I emailed a complaint to Amazon’s customer service group. Here is their response:

We select your personalized offers based on a variety of factors. I’m sorry, but it is currently not possible to request or exclude Gold Box offers in specific product categories.

But even though they don’t offer overt control, I ought to be able to influence the profiler. I’m going to try searching for anti-toys for a few days, in hopes that that will skew my profile back from the realm of “things that get sucked on.” I’m not real sure what constitutes an anti-toy, though… wrestling videos, maybe? The cure could be worse than the disease.

I just discovered a tool on the account page called “Improve Your Recommendations.” Maybe this is the overt control I’ve been hoping for? I’ve tried to check all the aggressive and unfriendly categories, the genres of entertainment media that imply impatience and close-mindedness and callousness, in hopes that Amazon determines I could not possibly be a parent.

Is it worth it to me to have Amazon’s profiler conclude that I’m a mean-spirited, selfish prick? If that’s what it takes to get Playskool out of my Gold Box, yes.