Author: DOuG pRATt

Out With the New, Out With the Old, In With the New

Oh, such fun. At least a dishwasher is an appliance you can live without for a while. When the Samsung was dropped off, the delivery guy admonished me to save the packing materials, “in case it has to go back.” Which I did, because it did.

The return was arranged and the refund came through (thank you, Lowe’s). The dead KitchenAid was picked up by the local trash service for $60.

So what will replace the dead Kitchenaid? A new KitchenAid, with the exact same controls. Express Wash is a favorite button. Purchased online from Best Buy, it should be delivered and installed tomorrow before noon.

KitchenAid KDFE204KPS

Pondering Numbers

1. As a young comic book kid, I looked forward to seeing the circulation figures in the October issues. Total Paid Circulation was the number that mattered. The New Yorker is the last magazine I subscribe to by mail, and the total paid distribution of the print edition is down to only about 650,000 copies.

2. I have a digital-only subscription to The New York Times. It recently had a feature on physical fitness, and I did a double-take on the percentiles by age and time to run one mile. When I was 17-21 years old I could run a mile in 6:15. I was never good enough a runner to qualify being on a track team. It’s laughable that I was in the top 1% of males. How many people run at all after high school, anyway?

3. You know how I go on about the dominance of Epic Systems in the electronic medical records market? Here’s a chart showing how Epic has performed since I retired, relative to the other two prime vendors.

Foot Don’t Fail Me Now

Snoopy accurately captured my present situation in yesterday’s Peanuts reprint (presented here with permission, for a nominal fee).

PEANUTS © 1977 Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Dist. By ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

I’m in physical therapy for the collapsed arch in my right foot. I’ve been good about doing the exercises at home, and the results are promising.

Yesterday, the foot felt good enough to go running, but I don’t dare risk undoing the progress I’m making. As I told the podiatrist and the therapist, my goal is to avoid surgery. If that means no longer being able to go running, then so be it.

Feeling Loanly?

I put myself through college, which was something a person could do while attending a small state school fifty years ago. Today, attending that same state college costs $20,000/year. No student could possibly earn enough to put a dent in that cost.

John Oliver once again connects the relevant dots and provides a clear explanation of a topic. This time it’s student loans.

LMS Loss and Gains

With my usual obsessive behavior, I have been deep-diving into Logitech Media Server, now that its MySqueezebox intermediary service has been shut down. I am very pleased to have restored some long-lost streaming services.

Years ago, for whatever reason (probably non-technical), the TuneIn app for LMS that I relied upon dropped AAC codec support. The result was the loss of iHeart and BBC stations. The fact is, although my TuneIn account is needed when using a Web Browser, the phone app, and Roku, I shouldn’t have bothered with it for LMS.

Thanks to some plugins, iHeart stations and BBC Radio are back on my LMS network. The only iHeart station I care about on LMS is WBZ in Boston*, but the BBC is a variety-filled candy store of listening. By chance today, I caught this radio play with Prue’s old drinking buddy Norm Rossington.

There are two plugins for accessing the BBC stations. Shown above is the official, full-featured method, BBC Sounds. But take note below of the alternative selections I have set up for BBC Radio 2, and the Classical station, BBC Radio 3. Why the three ↑↑↑ arrows?

The answer is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/help/questions/about-bbc-sounds-and-our-policies/codecs-bitrates

The BBC Sounds stations, that are so nicely presented with images and descriptive text, run at Profile 3, HE-AACv1/96kbs (high efficiency). The other plugin I’m using accesses the raw audio feeds, including Profile 1, AAC-LC/320kbs (low complexity) that is not available outside of the UK on BBC Sounds. One arrow for good quality, two for better, and three for best. No fancy features, but the sound quality on headphones and IEMs is as good as streaming stereo audio gets.

* I listen to iHeart’s WZLX-FM, Boston’s Classic Rock, on the porch’s Bose Wave.