Damn. Now that I have this journal-thingie I feel compelled to write in it, and stuff. I don’t remember what I did all afternoon, but evening-to-night I was testing out this old car CD deck I was going to install (you know, to double my car’s resale value and all). So I scoped it to see how much power it REALLY puts out (25 watts, my ass) and noticed it was putting out way-y-y too much DC for my and my speakers’ liking. (Hey, Tim, are the speakers SUPPOSED to smell like that? or have you taken a job transporting burnt fetuses?) So I spent the evening doing what any normal, everyday person would do and took it apart on my bed, scattering its guts far and wide like some kind of sadistic consumer-electronics cult ritual. The next couple hours consisted of tracing connections back from the output amplifiers to find out what the hell they are and (hopefully) which one had the fault on it, being simultaneously amused and saddened by its brain-dead design and cheap manufacture. (Resisting anti-consumerism old-man don’t-make-em-like-they-used-to rant…)
Then, being the sticktuitive person that I am, I got bored with that and decided to go online. This friend of mine was on and, AHEM, supposed to be doing her homework, but slackingmaking origami instead, so I went over to her house with the intention of helping on stats homework or at least holding her at chainsawpoint and enforcing a no-slacking order. I may as well use this stuff before I forget it (har har har), and if I’m going to geek out all night anyway, I’d much rather do it WITH someone.
Unfortuantely not much stats got done, as her room seems to be caught in, to paraphrase the Kentucky Fried Movie, a slacking force of extraordinary magnitude–and I seem to have forgotten pretty much everything I ever knew about statistics–and the book authors were on crack, and kept changing the terminology from one page to the next. (Granted, us EE folks are guilty of this from time to time, but always with good reason: we’re lazy, and imaginary numbers scare us. Why fiddle with that j-omega crap when we can just call it ‘s’, and forget all that icky complexity?) So ANYWAY, most of this time was in fact spent talking (whispering) a bit and admiring her artwork, and trying unsuccessfully to mentally disassemble this bendable paper lizard guy she made but swore she would never tell me how.
Now, for my adoring Internet public, I should probably qualify a few things. By ‘this friend of mine’ I mean someone I just recently met online, and her folks, and probably her other friends, don’t know of my existance. By ‘went over’ I mean crawled past the parentally-occupied front windows and neighbor’s motion-sensor light late at night and snuck in through the bedroom window, which is higher than I am tall and has nothing to grab onto except this aluminum non-load-bearing sill that, while she assures me that her, oh, 80-lb self has used without problems, my 150-lb self was a little less sure about :-) (Can you believe it? My first time sneaking into a house thru a window! After considerable difficulty in trying to boost myself through while not leaving telltale scuff marks all up the side of the house, I make an early New Year’s resolution to start working out more…)
Afterward, I came home and felt like I could use a big mug of tea, only to find that we’d had a water main break somewhere upstream of us and of course no water. (Hmm…broken water mains in Willow Springs? It must be winter or something.) So I just grabbed a bunch of Mountain Dew instead. The nerd stuff portal site known as Slashdot has been down for, like, a day or so, so the withdrawal symptoms are giving me the shakes :-) Maybe a little caffeine will calm my ner(d)ves. Or just keep me up all night, with not much to do except write in my text file….
QOTD: Double-deuce action!
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