Tech – Page 131 – Prattling before the Pratfall

Audio Fidelity Stereo Spectacular

Stereo Spectacular

The year was 1963. My father bought a big table-top GE stereo with an AM/FM radio and a swing-down record player. Something that came with the stereo was a demonstration record.

I enjoyed the first side of the record a lot, and I listened to it many times. I liked the way that one audio sample or snippet of music flowed into the next. The frequency sweep was something I used ten years later to test a stereo system I bought for myself with money earned washing dishes at a restaurant.

Also included on the record were a few so-called Cartoons in Stereo, that I think are still pretty funny. Side B was mostly a sampler of jazz music, but there were also a couple audio cartoons that were parodies of then-current TV commercials. The audio player below has the 20 minutes of side A, and the gags from side B.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/08/StereoDemo.mp3|titles=Audio Fidelity Records Stereo Spectacular]

Netflix Watch Now

Fahrenheit 451

My friend Bismo reports that he finally has the Netflix Watch Now service. I’ve had some trouble with it. Every so often it insists I don’t have enough available hard drive space, and that’s annoying. My 20 gigabyte C: drive is, I admit, tight but my 200 gigabyte D: drive is wide open.

The movie selection is still rather limited, but the service is a free add-on to the subscription. When the player isn’t telling me I don’t have enough hard drive space, and the connection speed measures high, the picture is DVD quality, as seen in this reduced frame from Fahrenheit 451.

Don’t Register!

Previously, I highlighted the fact that it was possible to register yourself with this Web site. It was this feature that provided the recent infestation a way in. The updated software should prevent it from happening again, but nevertheless I have disabled the feature.

I don’t want to go through another attack like that! After I realized what had happened, I sat stunned for five minutes, wanting to read “My Pet Goat”! 😉

Non-Union Jobs

I don’t own an iPod or a MacIntosh computer, but I admire Steve Jobs. He’s made mistakes, of course.

One mistake was hiring John Sculley; a man of limited ability, and zero vision, who successfully maneuvered to have Jobs removed from Apple a short two years after being recruited from Pepsi.

Apple barely survived the incompetence of Sculley. Jobs returned to run the company in 1996, and take on the seemingly impossible challenge of competing against Microsoft. Jobs’ stunning comeback is one of the all-time great business success stories.

The Jobs stock option scandal doesn’t interest me. What does are comments he made recently at an education forum, concerning public school teachers. He doesn’t like unions. He wishes school principals could fire teachers.

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Michael Dell, who was present, explained succinctly why unions came into existence.

“The employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.”

Thank you, Michael Dell.

Beastly Studio Trick

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/BeautyBeast.flv 400 263]

After I played around with the audio speed for the Ross Bagdasarian posts and South Park, my sister wanted to hear a speed correction of Robbie Benson’s voice from Beauty and the Beast. There’s a video clip above, and below is the audio sped up by 15%. Not sure if that percentage is exactly right, but it sounds close enough.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/BeautyBeast.mp3]

Banner and Favicon

So, finally, I put up a banner, as I hope you can see above. It’s not the ambitious, evolving comic strip I envisioned, but maybe later. It’s a crop from a photo of my computer monitor. The TV tuner was playing CNN, and the “WHY” on the screen just happened to be there. For emphasis I sharpened the monitor and blurred the wall behind it.

A while ago I succumbed to my friend Tom’s interest in seeing a more interesting favicon (pronounced fav icon, like two distinct words). So I did neither dog nor rat, but my walrus character. It was done pixel-by-pixel in the Windows Paint program. The intent was to make it appear as though the walrus was moving out of frame, and to make him seem a bit menacing. Tough to do with 256 pixels, but I think I succeeded.