better living through electronics

I'm reading the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, translated from the Chinese. It's really good, on its own terms, but also in the same way Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon is good, which is that it's a non-Western example of a (largely) Western genre. Translation is a miserable set of tradeoffs, but the translators have written English that probably no native speaker would write, which combined with the Chinese names does keep it fresh.

I've been sick all week, starting right after I spent Thursday and Friday in the office last week. I mostly only go there when I have a new minion starting, and #10 started on Monday of last week. Monday is my big meeting day, so I pushed through that, then I was useless Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday I wore myself out with 90 minutes of hiring tasks.

As you might imagine, I handle the home IT tasks, which extends to the A/V gear. We've been running for a while on my Yamaha "PianoCraft" receiver that was already discontinued when I bought it in 2008. In addition to the companion DVD player dying (who plays DVDs any more?), it doesn't handle modern video cables (HDMI), and as is always the case with these kinds of setups, only the person who set it up can really remember that in order to use the PlayStation you have to set the receiver to TAPE/MD and use the HDMI Y-junction to select Input A, and the Windows gaming laptop is DVD/CD on the receiver and Input B on the HDMI. The speakers are nice enough, though.

I did the usual research on how to solve this problem, and the answer appears to be precisely the kind of Home Theater AVR (Audio/Video Receiver) that I've avoided as being too awkward and expensive, which was true until recently. They look like this:

Incredible as it seems, I have avoided them, as they are large, and used to be expensive. My late housemate J.D. bought one, a Harman-Kardon, and I'm not sure he ever got the full value from it. They're better now in pretty much every way, and the base models start at $180: not too shabby for something that will stay mostly up-to-date for a decade.

This being the Bay Area, people are always selling this caliber of stuff, so after some painstaking research to count HDMI ports and try to understand what I'd be able to do with it, I picked up an older sibling of the Denon shown above, for $75 from a very nice Irishman who moved into a smaller place. Maybe his new place was too small for 5.1 Surround Sound? Dunno.

The digital music devices I use, the now-Logitech Squeezeboxes, were originally made by/for audiophiles, so they have a digital optical output I've never used. But behold! a few minutes with the on-screen menu, and I've reassigned the OPT port to the DOCK source, rename DOCK to "Squeezebox" (because changing the name is a thing you can do), and it's done! BD (Blu-ray Disc) becomes "PS3," DVD becomes "Laptop," and then that's it. If we ever get the yen for more speakers, there's 3 more speaker outputs, and an automatic setup function using the included calibrating microphone, although I don't remember where it is.

In other respects, it's been an extraordinarily messy few weeks. But the stereo is easy to use now!

We do what we can.

pens pens pens

I'm processing some very deep emotional crap these days, and need a way to express what's going on with me. Visual art is sort of an alien language that doesn't viscerally satisfy, but writing does: just journaling, writing to write and form my thoughts, without much point.

I had a very large Leuchtturm 1917 notebook I'd accidentally bought when I thought A4 paper was close to 8.5"x11" (it's not), and it wasn't worth sending back. So I write in this enormous tome.

Then there's a question of the pen. My 25-year favorite, the Pilot Precise V5, worked okay, but there's a whole world of other pens out there. My friend Frank runs the Tokyo Pen Shop, so I trawled the Internet and found some likely candidates, and briefly switched to the Uniball Vision Elite. (Japan, besides just being Japan, has those highly-detailed writing systems that benefit from better-quality pens with finer tips).

But, I also ordered a Platinum Preppy fountain pen. I'd tried disposable fountain pens in high school, the Pilot Varsity, and I like the way they wrote, but the ink "feathered," meaning it soaked into the paper and made the written line all fat and fuzzy. I realize I was only using shit paper at the time, but right now the Internet said try the Preppy. It was really nice! There's a scratching physicality to writing with a fountain pen, and Leuchtturm uses excellent paper that just holds the ink rather than sponging it.

The Internet's next-step recommendations were the Lamy Safari and the Pilot Metropolitan, and hey, sure, might as well get both. They both feel so much better than the Preppy; the Safari is pure joy, if a bit light in the hand (I've since ordered the metal version, the Al-Star), and the Metropolitan is amazing to write with, but the line is puts down is crappy and feathered, so I've cleaned it out, to try with some sample inks I've ordered from Goulet.

I had always thought of fountain pens as being what are actually dip pens, but it turns out people had been annoyed with dip pens for a long time, and a couple centuries of science and engineering went into the comparatively painless modern fountain pen. Even with a low-end cartridge pen like the Platinum Preppy, there this nice connection with our quill-dipping past.

There is a whole universe of fountain pen nerdery out there, especially for people with disposable income. It's hard to imagine spending $200 on a pen, but that may just be because I haven't tried one yet.

regalitos

The Ministry of Education sends every English Opens Doors volunteer a box full of school supplies. Last year, the boxes arrived pretty close to the end of the year, which was less useful, and much like our stipends, we were told not to count on them. But mine came last week! I finally opened it, and unlike many colleagues, mine hadn't already been opened and raided. (I already bought a bunch of supplies in Santiago, because of the uncertainty, and in fact I needed them.)

• 3 rolls Scotch tape
• 2 rolls brown packing tape
• 4 quality blue ball-point pens
• 1 white-out pen (these things are awesome)
• 3 packs skinny markers
• 4 sharpened pencils
• 1 rubber eraser
• 2 stab-bind folders
• 1 large graph-lined notebook
• 12 whiteboard markers (3 each black, blue, green, and red)
• 2 little packs of staples (no stapler)
• 2 pairs of scissors
• 2 large gluesticks
• 2 sizable bottles of glue
• pack of colored paper, roughly a meter square

Kind of a random collection of stuff. What should I do with the staples? Why do I need two pairs of scissors?