Done yesterday (20101008 Fr)

[mdlbear]

1008 Fr
  * awake 6am; snuggle
  * up 6:30; W=195.4; drugs, nose, teeth; coffee
  * Display didn't wake up; had to go to console, then back to X.  That
    worked.  The way to do it is obviously to switch to console before
    sleeping. 
  @ The Ferrett's Journal - The Good Lie?
  @ Cell phones bring spectroscopy to the classroom via wcg 
  @ Single Dad Laughing: Memoirs of a Bullied Kid 
  @ The Suck Fairy / Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts
  : sound dead in audacity after wake.  Works fine for pidgin.  WTF?
    And of course it also kills all my ssh sessions.  So maybe not.
  @ Killing pulseaudio fixes audacity.  WIN.  A. starts faster, too.
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/288652/comments/4
  * Lunchtime: Keen Brooklyn mid boots @ REI for $75.
    None in the store; had to special-order them.  15 left in the warehouse.
    Good thing I went at lunchtime.  Next time go in the morning.
  & phone conversations with N and C
  * October Country lyrics+chords to Callie and/or Naomi.
  @ So let it be written - Saving Themselves
  @ National Poetry Day: unlock the mathematical secrets of verse
    via The Wordsmith's Forge - Science and Poetry
  = (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t) ;from editing/killing cust. group
  @ CureTogether Stats - Depression Treatment Gap Some surprises, some
    probably just plain wrong due to sampling error at low popularity
  @ The Winning Treatments for Fibromyalgia Are... (Not Drugs)
    Does Masturbation Work For Insomnia? better than diphenhydramine!
    Infographics @ curetogether
  @ Red Onion May Reduce Heart Disease | Gather
  * Yes, a custom ear loop works on the jawbone headset
  @ The Wordsmith's Forge - Live Whale Songs
  @ Sounds Like Weird LJ - The Elements in Japanese impressive
  : apparently pulseaudio won't stay dead.  Forget about suspend. :(
  * calibrate latency correction in Audacity. -> -95ms
  @ 10 Live Recordings That Trump Their Studio Counterparts via autographedcat
  ~ tried to record scratch track for lullabye; something keeps throwing the
    guitar off.  gtick isn't working, probably because pulseaudio isn/t.  Foo.
  * 11ish bath; bed ~midnight

Good day? Darned if I know; I was too busy to notice, most of the time.

The morning was mostly spent working on a potentially show-stopping bug in one of the external trials, that eventually turned out to be the customer not following instructions. We knew that problem was there. We also knew how to set things up so that the problem couldn't happen. :P

The afternoon was mostly spent fixing real bugs of various sorts in my own code. The evening was spent trying to calibrate the latency correction in Audacity, and finding more things wrong with both it and Ubuntu's audio. Forget about suspend -- audacity gets very flaky afterwards. Grumpy bear.

I made myself a makeshift adjustable ear loop for my BT headset; as predicted, it worked much better than the stock one. So I'll be looking seriously into wire sculpture techniques and supplies for the next iteration.

I tried several times to record a scratch track for Filksong Lullabye; I'm damned if I know why I keep getting out of sync with the click track. It only seems to happen if I'm singing and playing guitar at the same time. Thinking about it now, it seems like my voice is about a half a beat ahead of the guitar. That's going to be tricky. But I do it a lot, so I'm just going to have to figure out how to handle it. Probably by syncing the guitar to the clicks, since pretty much everything has a guitar intro. Actually, the thumb goes on the downbeat, and the strum on the second beat. Idiot bear! I knew that.

I went out to REI at lunchtime hoping to buy two pairs of my favorite walking shoes, Keen Brooklin Mid, which were on sale for $75. The store was out (just hours after the sale started), so had to special-order them. But I got them. Last time I waited too long, and they were out of stock for two years.

Quite a few good links; it's easier now that I know what magic parameter to set to make emacs play nice with Chrome's "create link" extension (setq x-select-enable-clipboard t), it can also be set in the "killing" customization group, IIRC.

Lots of fascinating infographics at curetogether.com, though the data points at the low end of the "popularity" scale are probably very noisy due to small sample size. The idea of crowdsourcing medical statistics is a great one, though.