chaoswolf take note:

Transforming werewolf plushie (by Toy Vault, of course; link from BoingBoing, which isn't surprising either).

The state of things so far

Attempted to lay down a track on "Demon Lover" this morning, but discovered horrible irregular ticking noise that, on investigation, turned out to be due to dropped samples in the recording. The likely culprit seems to be the shared-memory video. Unfortunately, that's not easy to fix on that particular hardware; it only has one slot, and the soundcard is filling it. So it's either the present soundcard plus an X terminal, or a USB sound "card" plus a video card. Or a new box altogether, which would be money I wasn't planning to spend this year. Or a command-line recording program, which would mean a major change in the workflow but might not be a bad idea.

Forgot to mention that we had crab for dinner Saturday, as the flower_cat's cousin and uncle came over. A little experimentation over Thanksgiving indicated that the Cat can go back to eating shellfish (both molluscs and crustaceans), though possibly not fish (vertebrates) yet. The bad reaction appears to be mostly to fish oil at this point. (Unfortunate, because it's good for you.)

On the health front, I have an exam scheduled for tomorrow morning with my regular doctor, and a carotid ultrasound next week. (And I'm giving blood on Wednesday.)

Work on putting the office back together continues at a *cough*measured*cough* pace. I'm rather enjoying having lots of desk space clear, though there isn't nearly as much as there was a week ago.

W00t

OK, I'd call that an unqualified success. Put down a test track using a laptop (Argo) as an X terminal, talking to the recording machine (Harmony) running as a pure server. (Harmony actually had an X login screen showing, but nothing was happening on it so X wasn't stealing cycles.) Clean as a whistle, even though the laptop with its mildly annoying fan was just a foot or so below the guitar mic.

My other home computing accomplishment over the weekend was that I finally figured out what was wrong with my mail server -- people who reply to, e.g., steve at nova.thestarport.org should now get through. The winning trick seems to be adding *.thestarport.org to the relay_domains config variable on the gateway's copy of exim4. Possibly in combination with a wildcard MX record on the internal DNS server -- it's there, I just don't know whether it's necessary. Maybe a mail expert could chime in with an opinion. Unfortunately Debian's favorite mail server doesn't seem to be particularly well-documented.