solarbird | Entries tagged with murknorth

PSE customer? SERIOUSLY UNPLUG SHIT IF YOU ARE ON PSE. We're seeing variable power between 0 and 14V AC on the hot lead, and that is not okay.

Current Mood: uncomfortable

Puget Sound Energy has dropped the power ball for either the eighth or ninth time this year, I've lost track. The Bandcamp site is still up, of course ( http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/bandcamp/com ) but nothing else is. Invest in diesel generators, I guess? Because PSE sure as fuck can't keep the lights on.

Current Mood: angry

A couple of weeks ago I needed to replace a floodlight and discovered makers have mostly stopped listing CRI numbers, which pisses me off, and that I think is probably because they've decided 80 is Good Enough, which - okay, it's pretty good, and it's a lot better than anything off a compact florescent bulb. But >90 bulbs are available and I want them!

So I started ordering high CR and replacing/relocating-to-less-important-area other bulbs and it's kind of got away from me a bit. Because if CRI data is going to be difficult to get I'm gonna buy a lot of bulbs that I know are right and install them because they will last a good little while, so.

(Don't get me wrong, 80 is entirely reasonable. But I can get 92-93 and I will pay extra for it, where 'extra' translates to "$1-2/bulb.")

I also figured out that what I was really doing when I was mixing colour temperatures of CF and traditional tube bulbs wasn't so much for the colour temperature itself as for filling in the gaps in spectrum and improving the overall CRI.

So if anybody in your house cares, these are good:

A19 60 watt equivalent: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00O75K6AS/
A19 40 watt equivalent: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RQPHU5K/
BR30 (overhead can) 60/65 watt equivalent: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LTAOIA8/

"A19" means "ordinary bulb" for people who don't speak bulb types. The BR30s are not always as good in dimmers as the packaging says, according to reviews; I don't have any of that type dimmers, so I don't care.

If anyone is wondering, the CRI of LED filament bulbs is 80, which is, again, perfectly reasonable. But one can go above that if one so desires.

Current Mood: accomplished

We've just had two Stage 3 power events (multi-second complete outages) and come back from both. The first was a good 30 seconds, and I was headed to the server room to bring the murknet down. Then back up. The second one was a couple of minutes later, down seven seconds and back up. THIS IS FREAKISH AND NEVER HAPPENS, so nice re-routin' there, PSE.

But there is no way we are staying up through this storm. XD

Current Mood: bouncy

With a new Raptor-class shuttle comes new landing tolerances. I didn't have the traditional tennis ball, so I just used a bit of old muppet pelt.

I sure could use some help counting to four!

And if you're in the Seattle area, the surplus one's up for sale.

Current Mood: okay

The chandelier in the media room was really meant to be used in a dining room or something - it's too low, there's a big lower heavy bell that's the largest shade on it, stuff like that. I've raised it and removed the lower bell with the idea of pulling out the arm carrying the bulb entirely, but I fiddled with a much smaller porcelain shade and some decorative copper wire and I think I'm onboard with it.

The bulb in the new small lower shade needs to be brighter, I think, but not as much brighter as this picture makes it look.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I really need to get that antimatter generator up and running. We’ve lost power again. Going down; back up when we… can be back up. No ETA yet. http://music.crimeandtheforcesofevil.com will continue to work.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Current Mood: annoyed

someone’s gonna wanna swear at me later
it might just be me

someone’s gonna wanna swear at me later
i can’t disagree

this is the kind of crap we’ve all seen before
the kind of hack that we all know I abhor

someone’s gonna wanna swear at me later
might as well be me!

friends don’t let supervillains design+build late at night with alcohol
this is why supervillains have minions instead

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Current Mood: giggly
Current Music: see above

Murknet is going down. See you on the flip side.

It is so weird looking outside right now. The sky suddenly went all gold and dark blues, the east a wall, the southwest on fire.

And just before that, rainbows, one the brightest I've ever seen - and I've seen triple rainbows in person.

And now, even before sunset, it is almost completely dark.

Here it comes.

Current Mood: spooky

There’s a windstorm coming in tonight and tomorrow; it’s supposed to get quite windy (95-100kph gusts) by Thursday afternoon, so we may lose power and go offline around that time. There won’t be much warning, necessarily; we have 45 minutes or so of offline power, but we don’t tend to want to use all of it staying online if we know we’ll be down overnight.

And since tomorrow is the day I was planning to remind everybody about the Hey, Creative Followers! Show People your Stuff! post, I’m doing an extra round of that now, just to be safe. Go add your creative output to the list in comments for Monday’s big repost!

Or if you don’t have something to post, go look at the list now, it’s pretty cool. :D

If we do go down, the Bandcamp site (http://music.crimeandtheforcesofevil.com) will stay up, and we hope you’ll consider pre-ordering Bone Walker just to help us dig out. And pay for the mastering. And all that. Or really just to make us feel better. One or more of those. :D

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Current Mood: calm

It's been fix-many-small-annoyances through small amounts of money time lately. Did you know through-house-wiring networking adaptors are down to like $28 for a pair? I did not. But someone mentioned on Facebook that they'd bought a pair (a more expensive pair, but this cheaper brand I've successfully used before) and wow has that fixed the ASUS microserver and streaming of Legend of Korra on the television.

And some other things, too.

I've been doing a lot of that lately. I migrated to a not-as-stupid not-by-me password manager. I built a small shelf (and bought another) and rearranged problematic storage in the kitchen. The three-day packs? Recertified and up to date! I made a replacement couch cushion cover for the one that had ripped almost a year ago. I bought a $20 pair of motion-activated LED battery lights for one studio closet and the costuming/sewing supplies/paperwork storage closet and wow that's nice to have done, I didn't realise how bad it was. I bought a $15 curtain rod (with wall attachments) to replace the saggy clothesline in the laundry room and there's so much more space suddenly you have no idea.

It goes on like that a while. I posted a little over a month ago (on the band blog) about finally working my way back down through the to-do list to things from Before Eye Explosions, and I haven't really stopped. Tomorrow I'm finally going to polycoat the iPad case I made for Anna over a year ago.

CHUG CHUG CHUG MOTHERFUCKERS SHIT IS GETTING DONE and none of it is really, truly important? But yeah it feels nice to be sorting all this shit out.

I think the surprising part is that as I do this, I'm starting to get experimental with music again too, in ways I haven't been for a while. It's been entirely eye surgery recovery OR work on soundtrack album and exactly fuck and all else. The last few days, tho'? Noodlin'. On a new instrument! I was at it for so long on Sunday that Paul begged me just to STOP FOR THE LOVE OF GOD and that was fun. :D

Anyway, so that's just kind of nice. I like sorting things out. I really do.

Current Mood: calm

Dammit this autumn is so broken - my lilies are sprouting. NO LILIES IT IS NOT SPRING, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. :(

Current Mood: frustrated

Anybody know a good pest control person in Seattle/North King County? Some sort of creature seems to be trying to take up residence in my house's exhaust vent. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds rodentia-like. Fred and George are really interested in this, too.

Current Mood: curious

Most of my weekend involved power outages and damage control, fortunately relatively little of the latter given everything. So it’s a music links roundup of awesome.

NASA have dumped a huge library of space sounds you can use in music. For free. They’re public domain. THIS IS AWESOME. I have no idea what I’d use any of this for, but I WILL FIND A REASON.

Not on Bone Walker, maybe, but I will find a reason.

Here are some posters about music theory which I have confirmed are incredibly useful, particularly if you can read music. (I can’t, I’m still getting a bit out of them. Also wow some of this shit is weird.)

My friend Ben Deschamps of The Heather Dale Band has finally started releasing some solo work. It’s one of those song-a-week things, and he’s been building up a backlog of material in a bunch of different modes – instrumentals, silly, rock. You might enjoy giving a listen; he’s a really strong guitarist.

And I don’t know Four-Stroke at all, but if you like your punk thrashy, 80sish, and funny, check out Ottawa’s number one punk band on Reverb Nation. I particularly like “(I Wanna Be a) Suburban Jihadi,” which is a free download.

So, yeah. How was your weekend? Less power-spikey, I hope.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: Want You Gone | The Doubleclicks

Remember that review I did of LED filament bulbs? We used to not use this fixture because it drew 345 watts - more than our server core. Now it draws 30 watts, for the same output light. yikes. Now we'll actually use it.

The "dark" photo is me getting my phone camera to set levels based on the bottom part of the fixture, to try to show the filaments from ground level. It didn't completely work but you can see them a little.

Current Mood: pleased

Heading north again tomorrow, to Victoria and then up the island to Cumberland. This time I’ll try to remember to take the camera, tho’ I’ll have less, sadly, to photograph. Ah well, such is the way of things.

MIDI is still giving me problems on Ardour; everything works (including the on-screen mouse-click keyboard) except it’s ignoring/not seeing my actual MIDI keyboard, the one pictured yesterday. I know the keyboard works, I used it with Garage Band a week ago when using those other chimes. I don’t suppose anyone has experience with this, do you?

On the other hand, I’ve been shown Sound Fonts. Sound Fonts are like fonts, but for sound, and are plug-in/software independent (to the same degree typography fonts are) and this is super awesome. Imagine that you had to get a different company’s word processor to use this other typeface you like, and that’s what instrument VSTs seem to be like. Then someone throws typefaces at you and suddenly you’re all I LOVE YOU FORVER.

That’s what sound fonts are, for sound font supporting plugins. It’s so obvious and yet soooooo cooool. Or will be, if I can get Ardour to see my @&$#(*!!! keyboard.

Separately, the water heater has sprung a leak. It’s not much of a leak, but any leak is much worse than no leak. That’s what I get for playing with the 15 tesla pocket magnetic field generator in the basement, I guess. Live and learn. And mutate some genomes. But really, that goes without saying.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby

Current Mood: busy

Second Thanksgiving went well; we had 15 people, as it turned out – a nice size. We were expecting possibly as many as 20, so had a 30 pound bird for the first time in years – but that’s good, because mmmmmmm turkey tacos, mmmmmmm turkey jos, mmmmmmm turkey leftovers on sammiches, etc. :D

It ran late, into the night, and felt a lot like one of the Homeless Waifs Thanksgivings our housemate Vicka used to throw, before she got her doctorate and moved back to Boston. I don’t know exactly why, honestly; it just did. Good circulation and a crowd large enough to form several groups made up part of that. More new people than usual probably helped too, I suppose.

I imagine the return of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Turkey Day Marathon didn’t hurt anything. I missed that – we were singing the “We Gather Together (To Watch Cheesy Movies)” theme over and over again while cooking. We named our turkey Clayton McLargehuge, in honour; Anna told @JoelGHodgson about that on Twitter, who retweeted it. XD

Also, we need more Thanksgiving songs. One isn’t enough.

My long-term undefeated Jenga streak fell this year, I hate to say; that lack of parallax thing really hurts when it comes to tower stability wars. Even when winning the first game, I was telling people, I could feel it – I could be owned, in my current state. And was, alas, the very next round.

We had more music than usual, too, with LasFas and Fred both being around and having more time than usual, and with me and Anna, that made a pretty good bit of jam.

The last people left Saturday, which says a bit about it. We overbought alcohol (darn) and food (like we always do) but it’s all being eaten and much will be frozen or stored.

For real, this is my favourite holiday. How was yours?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
Bandcamp (full album streaming) | Videos | iTunes | Amazon | CD Baby