DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

When I came home from rehearsal Wednesday night, I noticed a slightly funky smell in the kitchen. I couldn’t find any obvious explanation; the smell seemed to hang in the middle of the room without having actually come from anywhere.

Thursday afternoon the indoor temperature hit 90°, hot enough to melt the fatbucket. The heat must have advanced the mystery decay; by Thursday night the odor had aquired an unpleasant piquancy: an edge of sewer scent to accompany the rottenness. I began to search, nose first.

I sniffed under the sink (dank vinyl floor scrap, cleaning products in plastic bottles). I sniffed the refrigerator (fresh produce). I sniffed the baking cabinet (dusty grains). I sniffed the tea and spice cabinet (a wild mix of dried, crushed plant parts). Desperate, I started to sniff the silverware drawer when I realized what the source of the bad smell must be.

Oh yeah! That pan of discarded sourdough starter that’s been sitting on the counter for 30 days! Gah.

A co-worker turned me on to the Mixerman Diaries — a view from the console of six weeks in the studio with a “bidding-war” band. Mmmm, I can already taste the bitterness.

In celebration of my successful LCD swap I have created a pair of desktop images suitable for composite 2560x1024 workspaces (that is, 2x1280x1024).

Side by side, they show stunning Mount Shasta, adapted from a panorama I made in June. This version is slightly less contrasty and less blue (especially in the trees, argh). Some treetops in the foreground got smeared due to an overly aggressive blur operation in LAB mode — an attempt (largely successful) to clean up a noisy red channel that was causing artifacting in the sky. Live and learn, I always say, or just live.

The desktop image on my laptop is still the old Levi’s billboard wall from last summer.

This week has been a drag. I think I need a cheer transplant; mine seems to have atrophied.

I’m most of the way through a series of workstation upgrades. I can’t justify a new dual-processor G5, but I feel pretty good about installing a CPU upgrade, faster video card, and additional RAM. Total cost of the upgrades is under $500, whereas the G5 would cost about $2500. So I’ll be getting about 1/10 the performance of a new system for, umm, 1/5 the price.

No, it makes no sense. My financial decisions rarely do. (Hey, wanna buy some Syquest stock?)

The CPU upgrade went too smoothly. I mean, I just plugged it in, and it worked. What’s up with that? I’m supposed to have near-death experiences when I do hardware maintenance. I’m supposed to make desperate phone calls to experts, late-night runs to the electronics store, and offer prayers to the gods of Sts. Torvalds and Jobs.

Fortunately my first attempt at an LCD upgrade was a dismal failure. I’ve had a mismatched pair of LCDs for a few years, and decided to buy a second unit of the bigger one so I’d have a matched set. But then I bought the wrong screen.

Here, see if you can do better than me. See if you can tell these model numbers apart:

• 1900
• 1801

The difference is subtle, but if you look closely you’ll see it.

The replacement’s replacement just arrived. I’ll set it up shortly. I want to publish this first in case that workstation implosion I’m overdue for finally catches up with me. There’s nothing quite as cathartic as having something really disastrous happen to justify having felt bad where there was no obvious reason for it.

Oh, wait — this is election season. Scratch the line about not having a reason to feel unwell and depressed.

[T]he state of Illinois whipped out a lawsuit against the Dave Matthews Band and its tour bus driver Stefan Wohl, accusing them of violating state water pollution and public nuisance laws for allegedly dumping human waste from a bus into the Chicago River onto the upper deck of a boat filled with tourists.

More than 100 people on tour boat were splattered with the foul waste dumped from the bridge. Some of the passengers suffered nausea and vomiting, and five entered a local hospital for tests.

Befouled victims were somewhat appeased when the Matthews Band invited them to enjoy private booths at an upcoming concert.