Miscellany

The federal tax refund check finally showed up yesterday; a very welcome addition to my always-marginal bank balance.

The flower_cat is getting somewhat stir-crazy, but still isn't really in shape to sit up for long periods of time, or go too long without her drugs (though she's been sleeping through the night without them lately).

Audio plug-ins you can't buy in stores

At Sonic Finger.

I think my favorite is the Dead Quietenator:

When the level of a track drops below a certain point, Dead Quietenator kicks in, working its magic to produce the highest quality silence available. Not to be confused with traditional so-called "gates", the Dead Quietenator produces a sophisticated digital model of silence, at resolution beyond standard silence.

Not clear whether the $475 price includes prepaid royalties to John Cage.

I hate Windows

Windows is whacked out on the dual-boot machine in the office. Why am I not surprised? The current symptom is that it's stuck at 16-color, 640x480; not even rebooting fixes it. I'm now reinstalling Windows (on top of the existing setup) to see if that fixes it.

If it doesn't, I have three choices: nuke-and-reinstall (which will make a lot of people unhappy, since there are some programs on there that we no longer have install disks for, and will involve hours of unbelievable tedium reinstalling everything plus the kitchen sink), leave it alone and hope it persuades people to use Linux instead, or nuke it and make the machine Linux only. Guess what I'd prefer.

update: reinstalling the video driver (after reinstalling Windows, of course) seems to fix it.