Is this kind of thing normal?

I was reading the latest issue of Atomic magazine today, #92. In it, there's a review of the latest-and-greatest sound card from Creative, the "Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium". It seems to have fairly respectable audio performance, with quite low distortion and good signal-to-noise.

The thing that really caught my eye, though, was this paragraph:

"Installation of the card caused several BSODs [Blue Screens of Death], with the Creative installer, dll and hardware detection engine still being quite messy. We also experienced a fairly serious OS level corruption problem when trying to run the X-Fi Titanium in the same host system as an Auzentech X-Fi."

They scored this card 8.5/10. For something that you can expect to crash your system several times on install, and may lead to operating system corruption.

Are they for real?

I guess Creative have dominated the sound card market for so long now that people just accept their buggy drivers as normal.

Me, I'll stick with my on-board audio for the time being. It works, and works well, with pretty good audio quality - and lets face it, I'm not exactly listening to sounds that *need* high quality THD & SNR figures. If I'm after high-fidelity audio, I'll play uncompressed audio through the Yamaha Amp & Peerless speakers in the loungeroom. In the meantime, I save myself several hundred $$, and avoid the general crappiness of Creative's software.

I think XKCD has the right of it...

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!

You know, it's probably fortunate that I work in a modern(ish) office building. Plasterboard walls are far less damaging to your forehead...

Consider this scenario:
Client has a site being developed. It has noise issues, we prepare a report, say "you need to do X to fix it", submit it to council. All good. So we thought.

We find out later that, actually, client wasn't intending to put in any noise mitigation measures at all, due to potential for neighbouring residences to be redeveloped as commercial in the near future.

Not good. Council unhappy. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues, during which our response is, essentially, "well, we already told you what to do to fix it".

Today, client sends email to say by the way, we're also going to do BLAH with the noise-producing plant. I'll spare you the details, but BLAH represents a non-favourable outcome for the control of noise emissions.

But it's not the end of the world - we've seen similar things before, so we say, "that's fine, just do ABC to make sure it doesn't become a problem". To which client says, "Oh, we need to have a meeting to sort this out before it becomes a major issue, please meet on site Thursday morning".

Did I mention that a site meeting involves three hours of driving?

And that when we get there, we'll probably just be looking at drawings that we could have looked at in the air conditioned comfort of the client's office on the south side of Brisbane?

Brick wall, meet forehead...

Here's a thought.

A headline on the front of today's The Australian newspaper caught my eye - it was about the Rudd Labor government, and how they may use a tax system reform to try and 'prove' their economic credentials, to show the voting public they're the right people to lead Australia through a global recession, if it eventuates.

That led me to thinking about the usual voter response when a recession / depression strikes: blame the current government, and vote in a new one.

This tends to happen irrespective of who's actually responsible for said economic downturn, which, in the case of a global downturn, would almost certainly not be an Australian government...

So, given the warning signs last year that things were going pear-shaped in the US financial sector, and that this would drag everyone down, does this mean the Liberal party wonks decided to 'throw' the Nov 2007 election to Labor, with the idea that Labor would then take the blame for any negative impacts on the average voter?

A plausible scenario, if you assume there's some shadowy 'supreme council' pulling the strings in the background. I very much doubt the Liberal politicians would go along with it... you don't get to be a federal politician without the hunger for power & wealth, and such people rarely have the self-control to postpone their machiavellian gratification! :-)

Anyway, just a ramble.

Oh, my! Surely they're not serious...

10 points to the first person who finds the punchline on this site:

www.scalarwavelasers.com

Found via How to Spot a Psychopath.

Did you know...

...that one in seven pregnancies end in miscarriage?

I didn't, but that's the number the obstetrician gave us when telling us the bad news on Monday afternoon.

It's kinda weird, but many people seem to think that miscarriages are something to be ashamed of, and you should never let anybody know - and thus the "don't tell anyone you're pregnant until 12 weeks" meme, as the vast majority of miscarriages happen in that first trimester.

On the other hand, I know someone who did that, only to have a miscarriage at twelve and a half weeks.

On the gripping hand, the obst. said there is absolutely no impediment to a second attempt, which is likely to be successful rather than otherwise. In fact, he said he frequently has patients who fall pregnant within a few weeks.

It seems it's just a natural part of things - when everything isn't going *just* right, the mother's body recognises this and shuts down the pregnancy, to conserve resources and to allow a later, likely-to-be-successful pregnancy to happen as soon as possible.

Biology is amazing stuff, really.

I was reading an article while sitting in the waiting room in a New Scientist mag from a few weeks ago. The article was about micro-RNA, the role it serves in cells as messengers and the means of expression of genes in DNA. Fascinating stuff, apparently it has the potential to allow for extremely effective vaccines that can be precisely tailored to kill a particular virus. Or even cancerous cells - initial clinical trials have begun!

Ain't modern medicine marvellous?

A friend said to me a few years ago, that he fully expected life spans to be extended into the centuries range within 50 years. And he intended to be around long enough to see that happen - thus his careful attention to diet & exercise.

So, how was your weekend?

I got to go driving up to Noosa to measure some noise. On a Saturday evening.

Ah, well. It could have been one of those "must be measured between 1 and 4am on a Sunday morning" type jobbies, so 8-9pm on a Saturday isn't so bad.

But we stayed at Anf's mum's place Saturday night. After the noise measurements, I took some photos.

This is Jupiter, and three of it's moons. I have no idea which ones. A check of any decent ephemeris would tell you (or one of those funky diagrams that have sinusoidal lines that will tell you the relative positions of the moons on any given night). It's pretty over-exposed, so you can't see the cloud bands on ol' Jove, sorry.

I had hoped to take a bunch, and stack them to give a better view, but that requires taking underexposed images for each frame. Could be worse, it could have turned out like my pic of Omega Centauri (i.e. a big blurry mess). Maybe I should try that one when there isn't a first-quarter moon in the sky? :D (hint: moonlight washes out dim astronomical objects, such as the aforementioned Omega Centauri, which, as the name suggests, is the 24th-brightest object in the constellation Centaurus).

I'm sure you can figure out what this one is.



And here are some of the local birdlife, taken the next morning.

Starting with a plover & it's four chicks:



And a rainbow lorikeet perched in a gum tree, after it finished getting stuck into the grevillea flowers:



So, that was my weekend. Mostly.

Ah, well. At least I was able to measure the noise I went there to measure. Nothing more annoying than giving up your night/weekend/both to measure something, to have it pour rain, or the neighbours are having a rave, or both. In this instance, I was able to demonstrate that we reduced noise levels by close to 25dB for a noisy refrigeration compressor. That's a lot, in acoustic-speak. Normally, we're happy with a 10dB reduction, so to get 25 is very good.