• Tag Archives technology

  • Coming Down off a Techno High

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                         New Moon

    Watched an HD movie tonight:  An American Haunting. Sissy Spacek, Donald Sutherland and James D’Arcy provided the core of a good ensemble cast.  This movie tells of the Bell Witch, an early 19th century century haunting in Adams, Tennessee. There is a cottage industry of folks who believe, including debunkers of other believers.  A bit like a snake biting its own tale.  The book An American Haunting: The Bell Witch recounts the supposedly true events which ended in 1821 with the death of John Bell.  The movie suggests incest, but fails, at least to my satisfaction, to link it to the strange occurrences at the Bell House.  Here is a website with further information.

    Feel like I’m coming down off a techno high, a sort of cyber electric dream occasioned by optical cables, coaxial cables, HDMI cables, speaker wire, subwoofers and high definition televison.  Alice could tumble through an HDMI cable into a virtual wonderland, I have.  This is an enchantment of sorts, and as such it must be encountered with awareness, not naivete.

    Hey, how about that Hilary, huh?  Coulda fooled me.  Looked like Obama was a shoe-in in New Hampshire.  Just what this means for the race is anybodies guess right now.  I love it.  Real candidates in a real horse race.  Jockeying for position, fighting over the issues and over how to organize campaigns for types of candidates who’ve never run before in this serious a manner.  This is (to use a much abused phrase) a historic moment for American democracy.  It can be a time when we win back the world’s admiration if we allow ourselves to enter the process without cynicism.  Hard, I admit, but possible and desirable.  Imagine a campaign about real politics and not weirdo ideologies.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television GeekWorld Politics 📎and tagged

  • Can You Hear Me Now?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    32  72% 28% 0mph WNW  bar29.83 rises windchill32 Winter

                     New Moon

    Inching closer.  I now have sound through the av receiver and into the surround sound speakers from the DVD player.  That’s a step in the right direction.  But.  After I plugged in the HD box from Comcast, I noticed it has coaxial outlet–coax to coax on the AV receiver.  That would be the coax cable I returned this morning.  Hmmmmmm……  So, maybe one trip.  This is a lot like plumbing except I don’t understand plumbing.  This I get; it’s just more complexity than I’ve dealt with for awhile in terms of externals like wires and connections.

    Took a nap, feeling somewhat refreshed.  Gonna workout now.  Faery and the Gunflint Trail has become a fascination to me, carrying me places I didn’t know existed.  Which is the fun of writing. 


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • Lovecraft Meets Sigurd Olson

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    39  74%  29%  0mph NNW  bar29.59 steady 39windchill  Winter

                   New Moon

    New technology takes some time to absorb.  This setup has optical links, which I’ve never used before, and the cables I have don’t work with the receptacles situated on the DVD player, TV and audio receiver.  So, back to Ultimate Electronics.  Then, since I’m using an HDMI connector with the cable HD service the box Comcast has with the HDMI cable is the DVR which costs more.  Of course.  And so on into acronym chaos.

    As luck would have it, however, the Woollies meet in Minnetonka tonight at the Istanbul Bistro.  The route to there from here takes me both both Comcast and Ultimate so I should have all the supplies necessary to put this puppy to bed by tomorrow.  The speaker connections are all in place, the subwoofer is ready to woof and I’m ready to hear the damn raindrops.

    No joy on the Asia tour as a result though I do have a plan:  faith traditions of Asia.  I’ll hit the Ghandara Buddha, the Mandala (tour requested), Poet Contemplating the Waterfall, Confucius, Kuan Yin, Pocket Buddha, Jizo and the Divine Rainmaking Boy.  

    The Gunflint story progresses nicely.  Sort of HP Lovecraft meets Sigurd Olson.

    Kate’s off today.  Nice having her around.  She’s finishing up the second curtain for the living room, a red brocade with a pale gold dragon fly motif.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Family GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • Lashed to the Mast

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    31  91%  29%  omph WSW bar29.75 rises windchill31  Winter

                                 New Moon

    There is something seductive about the large screen TV experience, seductive in an Ulysses lashed to the mast sense.  The visual image is close to movies in a theatre, though not the same.  Hard to describe, but it makes me want to keep watching.  I don’t like this part of it and will have to pay attention so I don’t fade into the couch and become one with the fabric.

    On the other hand the picture is fantastic.  The set has so many different bells and whistles that it can accomodate different formats with ease and its easy to use.   Well, sort of easy.  I’ve still got the manual to read.  RTFM as my cello playing significant other in law likes to say.  The HD DVD player upconverts and it does make non-HD DVD’s look great, not HD great, but crisp and clear.  Since DVD’s are my main interest in the large screen, not sports (though I do watch football if the Vikings co-operate and win games), this set will take my interest in cinema to a different level.

    I’ve gone down two belt notches since the middle of December when Kate and I started Nutrisystem.  I’m already scanning for maintenance after we finish with it at the end of January.  At the end of twenty-eight days I’ll get on the scale and take my blood glucose.  I expect both will show positive trends.  It’s the blood glucose level I really want to manage; so if it’s down, it will be a great reinforcer for maintaining a lower weight.

    The New Year has begun well: some weight loss, workouts going well, writing in the AM underway with a good story happening, the new TV, the video calls with the kids and plenty of snow.  That last, unfortunately, has melted some over the last couple of days.  I hope we get some more snow soon. 

     Asia tour work tomorrow, finish the speaker setup, work some more on the Gunflint Faeries.  Good night and good luck.

                           -30-


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld General 📎and tagged

  • The Fun in Making Things Work

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    32  91%  30%  omph bar29.72 steep rise windchill32  Ephiphany

                                  New Moon

    Long ago in a lifetime faraway I learned mechanical projects and I don’t go together well.  Connecting the $#%!~& speakers has me mumbling to myself, but I have made headway.  It’s straight forward intellectually but when the finger meets the wire to connect the speakers to the receiver, not a pretty picture.  Feels my fingers become non-opposable thumbs.  But just think of the satisfaction I’ll feel when I’m done.

    Just got off the video phone (skype) with Ruth, Jon and Jen and +.  Thursday is ultrasound day when we find out if the Olson line will continue with a male heir or whether we have to start saving for another dowry. 

    I’ve seen a man on the moon, picture phones, video on telephones and computers at home far more powerful than the room-sized behemoths of yesteryear.  Clones, cell phones, test tube babies.  Geez.  Seems like immortality is not too much to ask.


    📂This entry was posted in Family GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • One Good Ear, Five Speakers and A Subwoofer Later

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    39  78%  29%  0mph WSW  bar 29.60 steep rise  windchill39  Epiphany

                                        New Moon

    Worked some more this morning on Faeries on the Gunflint Trail.  This story has legs. 

    After the morning writing session, I set out on a quest to finish the installation of the 50″ Panasonic which now sits astride our Stickley coffee table turned TV stand like a colossus.  Speaker stands.  As I passed the $400 mark in post-purchase expenditures (a few really expensive cables, some new DVD’s and these damned speaker stands), I realized I hadn’t thought through this purchase quite as well as I thought as I had.

    Best Buy (near by) have speaker stands?  Oh, yes.  Stands that fit my speakers?  Oh, no.  So, instead of working on my Taste of Asia tour for next Friday, the little red car headed across country to the Maple Grove temple to I just gotta have it now and turned in at the now familiar Ultimate Electronics store.  Clutching my tiny satellite speaker I walked in and a few minutes later walked back out with the four omni-post speaker stands.

    Back home.  All the while listening to the adventures of poor Charlotte Simmons as she matriculates to Dupont University.  She’s sure out of her element in the co-ed dorm.

    Up from my nap I have renewed determination to wire up everything and those speakers pounding so I can hear the rain drops in the opening scene of the Bourne Identity which the installer yesterday assured me I could hear once I had the speakers set up.  I’m no audiophile, hell, I’m barely able to hear with one good ear and the high sounds going in that one, but those rain drops.  Soon.


    📂This entry was posted in GeekWorld 📎and tagged

  • Techno-Lust Satiated: For Now

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    26 82% 26% 3mph WNW  bar 29.97 steady  windchill25  Yuletide                       Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

    A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
      – Friedrich Nietzsche

    2007 saw the Ellis-Olson household become late adopters in two of the more dynamic techno-revolutions abroad in the land.  Last month we got a, wait for it, second cell phone!  That means we now have, like many, three phones: A daddy phone, a mommy phone and a just because we trust Qwest so much phone.  Then, this morning I went over to Ultimate Electronics and after some back and forth over price bought a plasma TV, a receiver, five speakers and an HD-DVD player.  Due to some weirdness about Money Market checks it will be a week or so before it arrives in our house, but then it will be 24/7 movie watching for this electro-cowboy.  Of course, that conflicts with all those hours I spend writing and working out and giving tours and eating and such, so I’ll have to pick something to give up.  Sleep, maybe?

    Next post will comment on an interesting article, Twilight of the Books, a New Yorker piece on the decline of reading and the rise of what they author calls, the second orality.  Some disturbing implications.


    📂This entry was posted in General 📎and tagged