David Ernst Chats with the World

PHEW!

Well I mean, I thought that last hiatus was bad, huh? This one was even longer, I think. But, wow, the reason was big. On July 20, one week after my previous post, I wrote [an email](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/emailfarewell.txt) to everyone with an account on [HoosierNet](http://www.bloomington.in.us/) explaining that we were ceasing to offer Internet services effective September 1, 2006. This has been brewing for quite a while, and it was covered in the local news media. I wondered if I should write in my blog about it, but I figured it’d be better to speak about work through my work channels, and not mix my personal blog up in that. It sounded messy.

So I didn’t. But, that was so much of what was going on with me, and i wasn’t driven to spend much extra time in front of the computer, and… ok, look, I certainly could have kept blogging, but I just didn’t.

Anyway, with HoosierNet going away, the old URL for this blog will be going with it, so I’ve got it set up with a new provider at http://davidernst.net/blog. If you somehow got here using the old address and didn’t realize it’d changed, you should probably change any bookmarks/RSS feeds/etc. that you might have.

Thanks for checking in! I’m excited to have the blog up and running on a new site, maybe it will give me a new boost of energy to write in it. I should have more time on my hands in the near future…

There are lessons to be learned from keeping a blog. One that I’m in
the process of learning is that my blog serves as some kind of a
barometer of what’s going on in my life. There’s obvious sense to
this, I write about things going on in my life. But what I’m finding
interesting is when I am not writing in the blog. I think it’s an
indicator that I’m feeling at least mildly overwhelmed with something.
This can be as simple as being busy with other things, but it can also
be more complicated, and both simple and complicated factors have
contributed to the 1.5 month hiatus that I’m ending now.

It all started with a bike ride. After the disturbing feeling of
being interrupted that I described in my previous post, I decided to
set off in the same direction again the following Saturday, which was
the beginning of Memorial Day weekend. This ride felt much better to
me. Adventurous, in control of the experience, several unexpected
experiences (from the rite of passage of repairing a flat on the road
to a surprising number of animal encounters). I had a great time, and
I came home excited to make [my map](
http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/gmaps/20060527-paragon.html) of
the experience, share [my
pictures](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/200605-paragon-brief/),
and write about it.

I got to work on that, including play with some new options of the
[GPS Visualizer](http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/), but then a most
unusual thing happened. I got a phone call the next morning from the
roommate of a co-worker of mine, Jim Hurd. He called to tell me that
Jim had died. That morning. In his sleep. Seemingly peacefully.
But without much warning.

The rest of the weekend felt totally bizarre to me. I got off the
phone and thought “I was going to make an omelet. Do I still make an
omelet even though Jim is dead?” I decided that, yes, I do still make
the omelet, but … yeah, it was really weird. We all spend so much
time thinking about living long and healthy lives, the simple finality
of Jim being dead seemed bizarre, not to mention very sad.

Making the omelet was one thing, but writing in my blog about a bike
ride suddenly seemed too inane to put effort in to. I did continue
about the weekend with several other activities, notably taking many
of my Informatics friends out for their newly earned Masters’ Drink.
Like everything else, though, this had a surreal tint to it for me.

Getting back to work was actually very therapeutic in this situation.
I was around other people who felt weird in the same way I was, and
that was ironically helpful to my sense of feeling weird. Things
started to settle down a bit as the week progressed. Looking back at
it, it would have made good sense to write something in the blog the
weekend after Memorial Day. But, I didn’t. I did have a wonderful
Ethiopian meal with Amy and Kathleen on Saturday night, followed by a
fun festival of short films. And, on Sunday, Priscilla and I spent a
delightful afternoon, a bike ride followed by a few hours of eating
and talking.

At the same time, I knew I was gearing up for a full month of busy
schedule. My garden/yard was yelling for attention, and I needed to
deal with this before I left town on the following weekend. I did get
a fair amount done that weekend which was good. But this busy-ness
definitely made it hard to imagine sitting down to the blog,
especially since I still didn’t know what to say about everything.

Well, another week rolled by, and it was time to leave town. I stayed
later than I expected so that I could attend Jim’s memorial service on
Saturday June 10. I drove straight from there to Dance Trance in
Lexington, KY, which was good fun. Tom put me up in his home in
nearby Berea that night, and I left the next morning on the *long*
drive to Emerald Isle, NC.

I had geared up for a long drive. I had *Harry Potter and the Order
of the Phoenix* on tape, the fifth in the series that I am slowly but
methodically making my way through. As usual, it succeeded
wonderfully in keeping me company on the long drive. And, being as it
lasts 27 hours, I was in no danger of running out of material before I
got there (I *was* wondering if it would last me for the whole ride
home (which it almost, but not quite, did)).

The drive started off nice enough, my plan to drive through Cumberland
Gap seemed to be a perfectly reasonable way to enjoy the trip without
adding much time. However, the definitive moment of the experience
was when I learned that I-40 near Great Smoky Mountains National Park
and just west of Asheville, NC, was *closed*. Totally closed. No
detour. Three highway workers were handing out slips of paper with
the official “detour” (I am not normally one to complain about highway
workers, but… three workers to hand out slips of paper??!?) which
was to drive most of the way back to Knoxville, TN, and take I-81 and
squiggle back down south for a while. Seeing little alternative, this
is what I did, now keeping myself company with a loud stream of
profanity.

I estimate that this problem added 2-3 hours to my already
ridiculously long trip. I am very upset that the signage was not
better. But, I do not want to relive that rage, so I’ll just leave it
at that.

Harry was starting to study occlumency by the time I was nearing the
coast of NC. I had an enjoyable but confusing conversation with my
brother Steven on my cell phone, trying to figure out the last 4 miles
of my drive. But, once I was there, I was surrounded by food, drink,
and my loving and fun-loving family.

I liked the way my cousin-in-law (?) Josh described it… something
like: “People at work said things like ‘wow, that sounds like a great
vacation! So relaxing!’. I tried to explain… ‘it will be fun,
low-stress, a nice change of pace from normal responsibilities, but I
don’t think that I’ll be coming back to work feeling at all rested.'”
Basically, my family members and I just can’t resist having fun when
we’re together. So, every day for a week was a bunch of swimming and
beach games during the day, eating, drinking, and strategy/chance
games by night. I’m pretty accustomed to that pattern, we’ve done
this kind of thing together all my life. What’s newer is that many of
those in my generation now have young children. So, the party still
ends at 2am or later, but now it starts up again around 7am. For me,
this definitely gave the impression that the party was really going on
the whole time. Grand fun. But not exactly restful.

The drive home was thankfully more boring than the drive there. I
left on Saturday, slept a good long while in a rest area, and arrived
home early Sunday afternoon, plenty of time for a nap and then an
evening at home. This was good, because it was time to start the
annual ritual of the week-long preparation for my Decadent Garden
Party. This I did, thus spending most of my free time that week
cleaning, cooking, researching recipes, and grocery shopping.

Sue and Michael arrived from Portland on Friday morning, and all in
all the party went very well. The weather was nearly perfect, we were
able to eat outside and there were only a few small unexpected
problems… This was the tenth party, and a number of the guests
conspired to get me wonderful place setting and other adornments.
Very very nice. And, the party, the surrounding activities, and the
presence of Sue and Michael provided good instigation for spending
quality time with some long-time friends who I don’t see very often,
and to introduce them to some of my newer friends and vice-versa. So,
that was all very fun…

But, to return to the theme of this post, having all that going on was
not conducive to sitting down to write a blog post, which by this
point had felt like it had grown hugely in significance since it had
been so long since the previous one…

Before I knew it, we were on our way to Sue’s sister’s house, (well)
outside of Indy, to spend the July 4th holiday weekend with Sue’s
family. This was also good fun. Sue’s brother in law is a brilliant
carpenter and the house that he built his family is amazing. So, we
spent a few days playing games, notably a highly spirited game of
basketball the first day that left me moving a bit more slowly the
rest of the weekend.

Michael left on the 4th, and Sue and I both flew out on Saturday
morning. She returned home, I headed off to Philadelphia for the
wedding of my friends Dan and Reena. I started this post on the way,
and now I have just arrived home. The wedding was fantastic, Reena and
Dan showed off their remarkable creativity and organizational skills,
and created a fun, meaningful, and beautiful ceremony, not to mention
the associated parties. Perhaps the best thing about weddings,
though, is meeting your loved ones’ other loved ones, and this was
also very fun and satisfying.

Today I toured around Philly a bit, which I hope to write about in a
separate post! Because I hope that *this* post represents my return
to more regular blogging! Because, for as much fun I’ve had in the
past month, traveling, entertaining, and visiting some of the most
important players in the history of my life, I do love my more normal
daily routine, my local friends, and my home. So, an irony of the
information age, I’ll stay home more, but perhaps be in better touch.
We’ll see….

Even after Saturday’s trip to King’s Island with Priscilla, I woke up on Sunday feeling well rested and motivated to go for a bike ride. It seems like something one shouldn’t fight when it happens, so I started looking at my maps. I didn’t want to go back to the route that I’d [failed on last time](http://davidernst.net/blog/2006/05/07/unsuccessful-bike-ride/), I wanted something new. I’d been wondering recently if I’m just used to all of the reasonable ways to exit Bloomington on a bike. Then I remembered that the collection of trips that I bought from the Bloomington Bicycle Club includes a sheet called “The ins and outs of Bloomington”. So, I studied that. The answer is yes, I am pretty used to all of them, but it’s nice to have a list before you so that you can remember ones you haven’t done in a while and think about where they might go that’s different than places you’ve been before. And so it was that I decided to head north on the West side of Highway 37 (which is sort of the great divide of biking around Bloomington). It looked like I might be able to make it to the White River if I was feeling good, and that sounded like a fun adventure.

Read on for more of the adventure, and more [unbelievably cool stuff one can do with GPS data in this day and age](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~drernst/gmaps/20060521-maple-bottom.html).

(more…)

The 2004 movie [*Kinsey*](http://imdb.com/title/tt0362269/) brought an understandable renewed interest in
the work of Alfred Kinsey. But anyone who lives in Bloomington for a
while knows the basics about him: That he usually sported a bowtie; that
he became famous as a sex researcher (in many ways the first sex
researcher); that he did his work on the Bloomington campus of Indiana
University; and that the institute for for sex research that he
founded and which now bears his name lives on to this day — a tribute
to his determination and that of then IU President Herman Wells. Oh, and that the Institute houses one of the largest
collections of “pornography” in the world (more on that below).

I was vaguely aware of the IU/sex research relationship when I moved
to Bloomington in 1992, but by the following year I was very well
aware of the basic details described above. However, here in 2006 I
had never been to the Institute, nor did I even know where it was
located, even though I am amicably acquainted with its Director and
her husband (it’s certainly an exaggeration to say that everyone in
Bloomington knows everyone else… but it’s not a ridiculous
exaggeration).

Well, leave it to the highly motivated and highly effective founder of
the new polyamory group in Bloomington to blaze me a path to the
Institute’s door after fourteen years. Much to the delight of me and
many of my fellow members, she just called them up and asked if we
could take a tour. Sure! And, so it was that some of the mystery of
The Kinsey Institute was unveiled.

(more…)

It’s spring! You’d think I’d be doing lots of weekend bike trips! Well, April saw a lot of special events on the weekends, so I didn’t really have time. Last weekend would have been a possibility, but it seemed like it was just about to rain the entire weekend, and besides, I was hosting that after dance party, so I had to get ready for that. So, ironically, my bike computer tells me that I biked substantially more in both January and February than in either March or April. Weird, huh? Two contributing factors: I’d rather bike in cold than in rain, and in each of Jan and Feb there was at least one nice weekend one which I biked (I even [wrote about the January ride](http://davidernst.net/blog/2006/01/09/bike-ride-with-presents/)).

Well, yesterday (Saturday) the weather was very nice, and I had very little planned, so… the beginning of the Summer riding season! Yahoo!

Well, not quite. I got out my gear, cleared the data on the GPS, and got on the bike. I needed air in my tires, which I prefer to get from gas stations because I don’t like my own pump. So I started out towards the gas station on 2nd street a mile or so west of my house. I knew they used to have free air, but they’ve changed brands since then, so I wasn’t sure (it’s now a Sunoco).

Well, I got there, and saw the air hose right where it used to be. But when I went to use it… there was no tip on the end to connect to my Schrader Valves (a term that I’d heard on Car Talk just a few hours previous so it was already swimming around in my mind). Shoot.

I took a roundabout route to the next gas station on 2nd St., a Citgo near the Sportsplex. I rode all around before I finally found the air hose hear the carwash. It was free too! And it worked! Man, having enough air in the tires makes a huge difference…

So, I was off! I biked down Clear Creek Trail, all the way to the end. Trying to work my way west of highway 37, I got onto a road called Church Lane. I realized that I’d been there before (it’s getting harder for me to find good bike routes outside of town that I haven’t been on). There was a decent hill on it, and I think I remember hearing a popping sound of some sort as I was fumbling with my gears. But, whatever the case, only a few difficult strokes into the climb, I knew something was wrong. I was in a much higher gear than my shifters indicated.

Sure enough, the cable that controls my rear derailleur was no longer attached to my gear shifter. Ugh. I didn’t know if it could be fixed or not, but a small investigations suggested that there was at least enough (or not obviously insuffucient) cable to attach. I set myself down right in front of a house there (there were no sidewalks or anything on this road) and investigated.

I am happy to say that with the possible exception of a wire cutter, my unbelievably cool bike tool did have every tool I wished for during the investigation. I used three or four different allen wrenches to loosen up a variety of things and investigate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure it out. Members of the family that lived in the home I was in front of walked by a couple of times, and I felt a little bad for installing myself right there. There weren’t a whole lot of options, though…

Anyway, I eventually gave up and just rode back in perma-high-gear on the rear derailleur. Once I was moving it was fine, but starting was definitely more annoying, and climbing hills was a real chore. *sigh* I did ride into town to Bikesmiths, but they told me that I’d need a new cable and they couldn’t fit me in in the last 1.5 hours of the day. *shrug* Ok. So, Monday…

And, when I got home, I figured I’d at least make sure I remembered how to get data out of my GPS, and after a little investigation I realized I hadn’t turned “tracking” on, so I had no data to retrieve!!

So, the first day of the summer biking season was kind of a bust. I still biked about 13 miles, actually, so I got a bit of exercise, but I had thought I’d bike about twice that… and I thought I’d have more fun…

Saturday night, I called the 5th Saturday dance here in Bloomington.

Tuesday night, I called the dance in Indianapolis.

Wednesday night, I thought I’d get to actually dance. And, technically, I did, but only one dance.

The first Wednesday of the month is always open mic night at the [Bloomington contradance](http://www.bloomington.in.us/~botmdg/), and we frequently don’t have very many callers. But we usually have plenty of musicians. As I exited my car (being unusually punctual for the dance) I thought “maybe I should have brought my banjo… Oh, there’ve been plenty of musicians at open mic nights lately, and besides, you want to dance.”

Foreshadowing…

I saw a caller signup sheet when I showed up, and it said that Patsy was going to call (which, I correctly guessed, was her first time calling at open mic. Great!). Bill and Bob were both signed up too, leaving only one open slot. “Cool! I might be able to dance the whole time”..

Yeah….

I did dance the first dance with Cisa. Patsy did a great job calling. The music was great… But it was pretty much only John playing his fiddle. I felt for him. Plus there were too many male dancers. Plus there was a beautiful guitar (a Silvertone f-hole, kind of like [this](http://www.ratemyaxe.com/details.php?image_id=136)), sitting on the stage. Instead of dancing the second dance, I went up on stage and asked John if he knew whose guitar that was. “Yours!” he said. It was his actually, but he brought it in case he found himself playing fiddle alone and there just happened to be someone who knew how to play the guitar but who didn’t bring one to the dance.

Oh, I guess that would be me!

So, for the 2nd-8th dances of the evening, I played guitar. Wow. So, I used to play the guitar a lot in high school, and I still “get it”. But, I’m out of shape and tend to find my hands getting tired when I play the guitar vs. the banjo these days… plus, I never have really played old-time guitar. I’ve often marvelled at how those old time guitarists can keep up that “boom-chang” so steadily and for so long.

I’m still marvelling…

Yeah, wow, I felt very exposed, and very underprepared for playing the guitar for a contra dance. A thought I had was “[compared with other instruments] it’s easy to know what to do, but it’s very difficult to do it… or at least to do it well”. I’m hoping that I helped to round out the sound of the band, but from where I sat, I was not at all certain that I was.

I actually felt like I got better at it as the evening wore on. I joked to John afterwards that it was a bit like an intensive work session on old time guitar. I just had to **keep playing**. After a while I noticed that the middle finger of my left hand was tingling. I said “I think I’m doing nerve damage to my finger…. Oh wait, it’s just a blister.” It was just a blister. Then a song or two later, the blister popped, which I realized because there was only one possible source for the droplets of clear liquid that had suddenly appeared on my fingers. It’s remarkable how much more pressure is applied to ones fingers on the guitar vs. the banjo.

But, actually, it didn’t hurt much. And, really, it was my right (strumming) hand where I felt like I was really getting the lesson. The chords I was playing were all simple standard stuff, and although I made plenty of mistakes, fingering the chords for old time music is not that hard. But, keeping your right hand going with the “boom-changs”, being creative with the “Booms” and still getting a clear ring on the “changs”… it ain’t easy. My hat’s off to all of you old time guitarists that make us melody instruments sound so good.

In any event, no one asked me to leave, so I at least played that well. And had a good time at Max’s place afterwards. So, good…

A couple posts ago I talked about shopping for a new couch with my parents. I had narrowed it down to two while they were here, but ended up leaning towards one. My fashion consultant Sue agreed with with my reasoning, and so it was ordered! Among the implications of my distaste for shopping is that once I’ve got something that seems ok, I just like to buy it and be done with it.

In any event, on Wednesday, I picked it up. I enlisted my neighbor Miki to help me move it inside. It was more difficult than we had expected, but, still not a super big deal (it was nice to chat with Miki, too… you’d think we’d see each other more often since she lives right around the corner). I did have an issue that this couch is substantially larger than the previous one was, so I had to do some rearranging of other things. But it ended up to be a good reason to move the end table that is the nicest piece of furntiture I inherited from my grandmother (and quite possibly the nicest piece that I own) into my main room instead of in the sunny front porch where it’d been hiding under a tablecloth for years (the sun was very noticeably making it fade, which scared me).

And, last night, it survived an after-dance party in style. Fellow contradancer Anna took to it strongly and immediately, and gave it rave reviews as she lay on it chatting with others and listening to the music we were playing.. and what music it was! Besides the typical old-time and “New England” dance music, Igor (from Russia) led us in a rousing rendition of “Oh, Suzanna!”, Priscilla (from Brazil, presently an IU School of Music student studying voice/early music) sang a few Samba’s for us (backed up by Igor on guitar and me on piano), and Anna (who is also from Russia) led a big group sing-along of “Let it Be”. Quite a party experience!

Whatever the case, the couch was enjoyed by many at its first party. So, good.

I’m always telling myself that I shouldn’t wait until something monumental to be writing in my blog. I mean, the main point is to just talk about what’s going on with me, what I’m thinking about, etc, right?

So, in that spirit, I’ll write simply to say that my parents just headed home from a visit with me. We didn’t do nearly as much work on this visit as we sometimes do (for reasons I don’t fully understand, they are extremely generous with helping me with house projects, I’ve learned a lot from them and they’ve just plain done a lot to make my house look nice and function well, and to keep it that way. Thanks be to them!). We mostly had fun. Friday night we had ice cream (my mom loves butter pecan sundaes from the Chocolate Moose) and talked for a couple of hours before going to bed. Saturday we played disc golf (my dad is really in to playing these days, but rarely goes by himself) and then went shopping. I bought a new weed wacker, that was easy. whew, the story of the old one is probably deserving of its own blog post. But, that’s not this one.

Then we shopped for a new couch. Funny story, the couch I’m sitting on as I type this belonged to my grandmother, and it was the couch that my great aunt Esther was always sitting on when we went to visit. I find the couch comfortable and I also appreciate the familial connection, but it is undeniably old and worn, and I can understand why I get a bit of pressure from some people close to me (mostly my mom and Sue (who I gather have done a bit of conspiring on the matter)) to get a new one. Shopping for furniture, though, is not an activity I’m prone to enjoy. So, it was very helpful to have my parents along for moral support. I didn’t buy one, but I think we narrowed it down to two possibilities, both at the same store. Cool.

Saturday night we went to the wonderful Esan Thai for dinner. We ordered three dishes, with ratings of 3, 4, and 5 on their spiciness scale. The “3” was not very spicy, the “4” was about as spicy as I can handle, and the “5”… well, my dad certainly ate it and enjoyed it, but it was the first time I can ever remember him saying “I would enjoy this more if it were less spicy”. Wow. In any event, we all sat there with noses running and really feeling a little high on [Capsaicin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin) (Hey, look! Here I was kind of joking about that, but that wikipedia article even talks about a capsaicin “high”. All I know is, I felt pretty loopy, and they don’t even serve alcohol at this restaurant.)

We got another Chocolate Moose on the way home, and then played our standard game of three handed pinnochle. Definitely not the best games of pinnochle we’ve played… my dad won everything handly. After a while, we switched to the card game we call “golf”, and that was fun, as usual.

The weather was nice this morning, so after our Easter donuts (from Cresent Donut) my dad convinced us to go out for another round of disc golf. Sure! For some reason, I was playing a little less seriously today, as evidenced by my many bogeys and my frequent practice “rolling drives”, which frequently made us all giggle. Still, considering how much less often I play than I used to, my skill level remains about the same, I think. That’s nice.

We came back home, ate lunch, and my mom and I played Perquackey. We also played with some of my perl-coded Perquackey tools, the first time that I’ve run them on this laptop (I think), and that was fun but also distracting to my game. That being said, my mom was totally on her game, and I think she would have beaten me even if I hadn’t been distracted.

And now, they’re driving home. It’s fun to have them visit. They are good people, thoughtful people, and as I say, very generous with their help. But most of all, they are fun to be around. I’m lucky to be able to say that about my parents.

Ever since getting a laptop, I’ve pretty much stopped sitting at my desktop. It acts more like a home server these days, and not a very busy one at that. One thing that it has been doing for me, though, is music. It’s right next to my stereo, so I can play music on my computer through my stereo just by short cables running between them.

But, this is now inconvenient. Since I use my laptop much more frequently — including right now! — it’d be nicer to play music from here than climbing up to my desktop. I thought “someone should make a sound transmission system that works like WiFi or cordless telephones.” I could plug a little transmitter into my laptop, and then send the sound signal to a receiver connected to my stereo.

Well, not surprisingly, such things do exist. In fact, they can do audio and video! I don’t have need for the video, but I couldn’t find an audio only version, so I ended up ordering [this one that does audio and video](http://www.x10.com/products4/google/wireless_video_sender.html). Only $50, and that includes free shipping!

So, I was pretty excited when it came last week. I hooked it all up and…. it sounded terrible. :( I was able to deal with many of the sound quality issues, but the one that I couldn’t get past was a fast clicking sound. Naturally, I was disappointed. As I frequently do in such situations, I decided to set it aside, and call the company about it another day.

So, a couple of days later, I called X10. I was on hold for a long time (about 30 minutes, after their phone queue had predicted 10 minutes…). It was long enough to do some more troubleshooting. I found that if I turned off both my computer and my wireless access point (WAP) then the clicking would stop. I actually think the clicking might have been caused by the wireless “beacon”, because that was set on my WAP to go every 100ms = 1/10th of a second, and that seemd to be about the frequency that the clicking was happening. It also makes sense that that would have been sending out a signal on lots of frequencies (changing “channels” on either the WAP or the VideoSender(TM) did not solve the problem).

Whatever the case, I eventually talked with a very nice support provider, and he said that some people had problems with this. He suggested moving the receiver further away from the WAP. My house isn’t that big, and basically, I just didn’t want to do this. He thought that switching to 802.11g might help, but couldn’t answer whether I would have to get both an 802.11g WAP AND a card for my laptop. Whatever the case, I was considering the experiment a failure, and was ready to give up. I scheduled an RMA for the product.

But! It was easy to be willing to give up, because while I was on hold, I had had another idea! Couldn’t I somehow rig something up where I could send the sound over my IP network? I figured I could probably at least set up an X Windows session such that the laptop was running a sound player on the server. I started running google searches for advice, and ended up learning that the [Enlightened Sound Daemon](http://freshmeat.net/projects/esound/) (which I was already running) can be set up to accept sound streams over an TCP/IP port! (16001 is the default port number, for anyone who cares). It turned out to be very easy to do, too. I’m not sure how far I got, but by the time I was done being on hold, I was pretty sure I was going to be able to get it working.

Well, it’s working. Not all sound players support it, unfortunately, but on XMMS it was very easy. So, I’m sitting here now, typing this post on my laptop, watching the activity light on my WiFi card glow warmly as it sends Dvořák (played by The Cleveland Orchestra (conducted by Dohnányi)) to my stereo via my desktop upstairs. Although the technology of it makes perfect sense to me, it still feels pretty much like magic. If I opened a hole in my firewall, I guess I could send music through my stereo from any correctly configured computer on the Internet! Not sure what the use of that would be, although I guess it could be used as a ramshackle VoIP phone. :)

But, yeah, sure am happy that I went this route. I’ll get my $50 back, and the sound quality is better than that other thing ever would have been. Plus I can just marvel at how cool it is! The one down side is that it won’t be as easy to have friends play music from their laptops through my sound system. But if they care enough, I think there’s esound support for windows. :)

Today is the first day that Indiana has been on Daylight Saving Time since 1970. And, as such, it’s the first time I’ve experienced the “setting of clocks” tradition since I moved here in 1992. That’s a long time, long enough for me to forget much about how it felt to “lose an hour”. My memory being a kid was just that TV shows and the like started at different times. But I remember feeling like the fact that the weekend was actually shorter was more about theory than practice. When you sleep through the time change like I did when I was little, I think it’s relatively easy to take.

Well, if that’s the case, then I’ve sure decided to take an abusive approach to this DST day. I went last night to an April Fools Day/Daylight Saving Time party. I stayed out well past the magic hour, and when I first woke up after not-very-much sleep, the time changes were confusing enough to my groggy brain that I couldn’t even figure out how much sleep I’d gotten. I knew it wasn’t very much though. So, after waking up and doing some things for a few hours, I decided that a nap was definitely in order. I slept from about 2-5pm. Wow!

So, now, here it is 11:45, only 24 hours after what was 10:45 last night, and I’m sure not feeling very tired. It sounds like a great deal of fun to be awake and do things right now, but I also know that I need to go to bed pretty soon to try to keep myself from getting thrown into a wicked sleep schedule. We’ll see what happens. I’m already looking forward to the longer weekend in October, though. :)