Geek Like Me, Too

Iron Crown Enterprises Middle Earth CCG Card Games for Trade (20 Jan 2012)

2012-01-20T11:57:00.000-05:00

I am not looking to complete my collection of Middle Earth cards, at least not at the moment, but I have the following cards I will consider for cross-game trades.From Middle Earth: The Wizards:

Denethor II
Eomer
Merry
Pippin
Abductor
Ambusher
Arouse Minions
Awaken Denizens
Awaken the Earth s Fire
Bert (Burat)
Call of Home
Choking Shadows
Despair of the Heart
Gloom
Hoarmurath of Dmr
Long Winter
Lure of Nature
Lure of the Senses
Muster Disperses
Orc-guard
Orc-patrol
Orc-raiders
Pick-pocket
River
Slayer
Tom (Tuma)
Wargs
Anfalas
Dagorlad
Dorwinion
Elven Shores
Eriadoran Coast
Forochel
Gorgoroth
Heart of Mirkwood
Lebennin
Lindon
Old Pukel Gap
Redhorn Gate
Rohan
Southern Rhovanion
The Shire
Udun
Western Mirkwood
Withered Heath
Wold & Foothills
Woodland Realm
Block
Dw. Ring of Thelor s Tribe
Dw. Ring of Thrar s Tribe
Elven Cloak 
Escape
Halfling Strength
Horn of Anor
Horses
Kindling of the Spirit
Leaflock
Lordly Presence
Magic Ring of Nature
Magic Ring of Words
Men of Lebennin
Miruvor
Misty Mountains
Muster
New Friendship
Old Road
Palantir of Elostirion
Red Book of Westmarch
Reforging
Sting
Sun
Tempering Friendship
White Mountains
Druadan Forest
Ettenmoors
Gladden Fields
Lake-town
Lond Galen
Lossadan Camp
Ost-in-Edhil
Rivendell
Shrel-Kain
The White Towers
Woodmen-town
Wose Passage-hold
Bifur
Dwalin
Ori
Voteli
Arouse Denizens
Awaken Minions
Giant Spider
New Moon
Orc-warband
Andrast
Andrast Coast
Anduin Vales
Dunland
Enedwaith
High Pass
Rhudaur
Southern Mirkwood
Ash Mountains
Fellowship
Goldberry
Great-road
Rescue Prisoners
Sword of Gondolin
Test of Lore
Vanishment
Wizard s Test
Blue Mountain Dwarf-hold
Edhellond
Lorien
Lossadan Cairn
Brigands
Orc-warriors
Weariness of the Heart
Gap of Isen 
Elf-stone
Fair Gold Ring
Shield of Iron-bound Ash
Test of Form
Cardolan
A Friend or Three

From Middle Earth: The Dragons:

Lesser Spiders
Light-drake
Thunder's Companion
Agburanar at Home
Dragon-sickness
Dragon's Curse
Incite Denizens
Incite Minions
Peril Returned
Scatha Ahunt
Scatha at Home
Stormcrow
Times Are Evil
Withered Lands
And Forth He Hastened
Fast Asleep
Lore of the Ages
Many Turns and Doublings
Pledge of Conduct
Riddling Talk
Secret News
Tales of the Hunt
Warm Now Be Heart and Limb
Washed and Refreshed
When I Know Anything
Adamant Helmet
Habergeon of Silver
Necklace of Silver and Pearls
Buhr Widu
Gold Hill
Isle of the Ulond
Carrion Birds
True Fire-drake
Wolf-riders
Icy Touch
A Short Rest
Bounty of the Hoard
Flatter a Foe
Forod
Houses of Healing
Marvels Told
Master of Esgaroth
Master of Wood, Water, or Hill
More Sense Than You
Not at Home
Refuge
Sated Beast
Three Golden Hairs
Scabbard of Chalcedony
Hobgoblins
Land-drake
Noose of the Sea

From Middle Earth: Dark Minions:

An Article Missing
An Unexpected Outpost
Angmar Arises
Cunning Foes
Dâsakûn
Enduring Tales
Fireworks
Gisulf
Haudh-in-Gwanûr
Hundreds of Butterflies
I Know Much about You
Inner Cunning
Jûoma
Leaf Brooch
Little Snuffler
Lost Tome
Nobody's Friend
Rebuild the Town
Saw Further and Deeper
Seek without Success
The Way is Shut
The Windlord Found Me
Tribal Banner
Waylaid, Wounded, and Orc-dragged
Wisp of Pale Sheen
Withdrawn to Mordor
Dark Numbers
Exhalation of Decay
Faces of the Dead
Free to Choose
Gnaw with Words
Great Secrets Buried There
Herb-lore
In Darkness Bind Them
Mistress Lobelia
No Waiting to Wonder
Noble Hound
Pierced by Many Wounds
Reaching Shadow
Redoubled Force
Wound of Long Burden
Doubled Vigilance
Hall of Fire
Healing of Nimrodel
More Alert than Most
Never Seen Him
Which Might Be Lies
No Way Forward

Mythos Limited and Dreamlands Cards for Trade (20 Jan 2012)

2012-01-20T11:46:00.000-05:00

For Mythos Limited, I have no more "needs" (I have a complete set), however, I would still trade for any investigator cards in good condition, or the following wants:

Dendrophobia
The Lonely House in the Woods
An Unexpected Calamity
Mosque of Ibn Tulun

I have multiples of every other card available for trade. I will also consider cross-game trades if you can help me complete my New Aeon or Dark Age: Feudal Lords sets.For Mythos Dreamlands, I have no more needs, but will also trade for investigator cards in good condition, or the following wants:

Days of Wine and Roses
The Voynich Manuscript
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Carter's Quest
Battle Axe
Carter's Clock
Gate of Deeper Slumber
Great Library of the Dreamlands (Dylath-Leen)
The Causeway and Father Neptune
Dhole
Whirligig
Cultus Maleficarum

Mythos: New Aeon Cards for Trading (20 Jan 2012)

2012-01-20T11:36:00.001-05:00

Mythos: New Aeon cards are relatively rare, so I'm still missing many of them. Here is my need list. Unfortunately, it is pretty long:

Alex Cordry
An Unexpected Calamity
Area 51
Azathoth And Others
Bank Vault
Billington's Woods
Black Belt
Bless
Blink of an Eye
Brother of the Yellow Sign
Call the Unnamed One
Chainsaw
Chaosium
Chrysler Building
Cité Tatoue
Cloning Chamber
Colour Out Of Space
Crop Circles
Cthulhu For President
Cykranosh
Darkness of the Void
Day the Sun Stood Still
DBZ Spacelab
Deliverance
Delta Green, Alpha Squad
Diabolical Cultist/Obsequious Televangelist
Dr. Carl Jung
Eiffel Tower
Emergency Medical Equipment
Evoke Doppleganger
First National Grocery
Fish-Head Rock
Fractal Creatures
Fragmentation Grenade
Frivolous Lawsuit
G.G. D'Arn
Gilman House Hotel
Going Postal
Government Quarantine
Grasp Of Cthulhu
Halitosiphobia
Harbor Place Hotel
Haz-Mat Team
Helicopter
Henri Zann
High Priest of Elvis
Hitman from Medellin
INTERPOL Headquarters, Italy
IRS Auditor
Its Full Of Stars!
Joe Schienfeld
Johnny Booger
Ju-Ju House
Lefferts Corners
Look to the Future
Maison Nationale De Santé
Maple Hill
Mental Suggestion
Motion Sickness
Mugging
Nuclear Winter
Obed Marsh Memorial
One Small Step
Pallid Programmer/Deep-One Hybrid
Pentagon
Plastic Explosive
Police Investigation
Prophecies of Nostradamus
Radiation Suit
Regalia of the Outer Gods
Robert Bloch
Rue D'Auseil
Serial Killer
Shariil Sophast
Shoggoth Lord
Shuttle Icarus
Skeptical Pathologist/Grinning Ghoul
Smugglers Tunnels
Star Vampire
Stealth Fighter
Television
Temple to Aesathog
Temporal Lash
Terrorist Strike
Thaasophobia
Time Flux
Time Machine
Toodee-6
Tsathoggua
UFO
Unexpected Eclipse
With Neighbors Like These...
Wreck of the Hellene
Yithian Psychic Possession
Yog Sothoth
Yucca Mountain Project
Yuggoth
Yuggoth Attacks!
Zanthu Tablets
Zombies

These are the duplicates I have to trade, and unfortunately there aren't very many, and most of them are common. So if you want to consider a "cross-game" trade, I have a lot of Limited and Dreamlands cards available, as well as Dark Age: Feudal Lords and some Middle Earth: The Wizards, Dragons, and Dark Minions; inquire if you are interested.

B-Movie Script
Chakota Beast
Colosseum
Cthulhu Statuette
Enthrall Victims
Giovanni Angellis
Giulio Cesare Hotel
Hound of Tindalos
Howard Lovecraft
J. Edgar Hoover Building
Lascaux Caves
Mi-Go
Monatomic Translocation
Museo del Palazzo Venezia
Obsessed Federal Agent/Obsessed Agent in a Mi-Go Braincase
Porta Portese
Professor L.N. Isinwyll
Taser
United Nations
Zanthu Tablets: A Conjectural Translation
Acid Rain
Blackout 
Chronoportation
Disturbing Portrait
False Dawn
Hitch A Ride
Hydrophilia
Louvre
M16 Assault Rifle
Make Them Pay!
Massa Di Requiem Per Shuggay
Night at the Opera
Operation Nemesis
Reverend Baxter Lully
Serpent People
The Mall
Whispers Pulp Magazine Collection
Dawn Biozyme Research Lab
Daybreak
Men in Black
Mr. Shiny's Burger Palace
Ozzy Orne
Poltergeist
Camp Bright Star
European Space Agency
Mechanophobia
Portophilia

Dark Age: Feudal Lords Update 20 Jan 2012

2012-01-20T11:28:00.002-05:00

After acquiring some more cards, here is my current "need" list for Dark Age: Feudal Lords:

Leader: Bad Doc Leader
Leader: Clergy Ann
Sewage Plant/War Shelter/Killing Grounds
Location: Water Hole/Rooftops/Bar
Supply: Artifact: Brain Expander
Supply: Artifact: Efficiency Bot

If I got these, I would then have a complete set, which is my main goal for this collection.I also have only one each of the following cards, so I do not have copies of these available to trade; this is my "want" list, so I would also trade for these:

Character: Red
Instant: Blood Ritual
Instant: Frustrate Defense
Instant: Once More Into the Fray
Leader: Warhead Leader
Leader: Warknight Leader
Location: Great Hall / Sewers / Machine Core
Location: Safety Tunnels / Acrid Fields / Labyrinth
Skill: Hypnotism
Skill: Quick Shot
Artifact: Wise Leader (foil)
Supply: HooDoo Totem
Victory: I Hear Good Things
Weapon: Flash Grenades
Weapon: Hell Blade

CCG Update

2012-01-18T21:46:00.001-05:00

I've received a few more purchased cards for Mythos: New Aeon, Mythos Limited, Mythos Dreamlands, and Dark Age: Feudal Lords, and I'm in the process of cataloging them and updating my need/want/will trade lists. If you've left a comment or sent an e-mail message I'll try to get back to you as soon as this is done. Thanks!

Dark Age: Feudal Lords Want List (Update)

2011-12-23T12:55:00.003-05:00

Thanks to some very helpful replies I've gotten from people answering my posts, I've acquired a few more cardsand so my "want" list is smaller. Here's what I want to trade for most urgently (cards I don't have at all):

Leader: Bad Doc Leader
Leader: Clergy Ann
Sewage Plant/War Shelter/Killing Grounds
Location: Water Hole/Rooftops/Bar
Supply: Artifact: Brain Expander
Supply: Artifact: Efficiency Bot

If I got these, I would then have a complete set.I also have only one each of the following cards, so I do not have copies of these available to trade, and I'd be happy to trade for additional copies:

Character: Red
Instant: Blood Ritual
Instant: Frustrate Defense
Instant: Nope
Instant: Once More Into the Fray
Leader: Mercenary Leader
Leader: Warhead Leader
Leader: Warknight Leader
Location: Great Hall / Sewers / Machine Core
Location: Safety Tunnels / Acrid Fields / Labyrinth
Skill: Field Medic
Skill: Hypnotism
Skill: Quick Shot
Artifact: Digger Bot (foil)
Artifact: Wise Leader (foil)
Supply: HooDoo Totem
Supply: Terrorist Bot
Supply: Weaponsmith
Victory: I Hear Good Things
Weapon: Flash Grenades
Weapon: Heavy Armor
Weapon: Hell Blade

I have duplicates of every other card available for trade. Let me know what you are looking for. You can leave a comment with an e-mail address, and I will not publish it (comments on this blog are moderated). I am considering whether it might possibly be useful to put up cards for sale on eBay, perhaps a generic buy-it-now for any common, another for uncommon, and a third for rares. If you have an interest in that, let me know.

Good Morning, Big Brother

2011-12-16T09:46:00.001-05:00

Mythos Dreamlands Cards to Trade

2011-12-15T16:45:00.002-05:00

I'm looking to trade for the following Mythos: Dreamlands cards:

Days of Wine and Roses
Great Library of the Dreamlands: Dylath-Leen
Dhole
Whirligig
The Voynich Manuscript

I have all the rest available in multiples to trade. Get in touch by leaving a comment with an e-mail address; comments are moderated, so I won't publish your address, but I'll send you a message.

Mythos Limited Cards to Trade

2011-12-15T16:40:00.000-05:00

I have all the Mythos Limited cards but would like to trade for additional copies of some rares. I'd rather trade than buy more boosters from eBay sellers at this point since I have so many cards. I'm looking for the following cards:

The Lonely House in the Woods
Dendrophobia
Iatrophobia
The House on Olney Court
The Innsmouth Look
The Outsider
Wave of Oblivion

Get in touch if you would like to trade these cards for any other Mythos Limited cards. I also have Dreamlands cards to trade. I'm looking for New Aeon cards. Leave a comment with an e-mail address; replies are moderated, and I won't post your address publicly.

Dark Age: Feudal Lords Cards to Trade

2011-12-15T16:16:00.000-05:00

I have collected a nearly-complete set of the out-of-print Dark Age: Feudal Lords cards. I am still missing the following rare cards:

Once More Into the Fray
Bad Doc Leader
Clergy Ann
Sewage Plant
Water Hole
Field Medic
Hypnotism
Quick Shot
Artifact: Brain Expander
Artifact: Efficiency Bot
Artifact: Wise Leader
Hoodoo Totem
I Hear Good Things
Glue Cannon

I'd like to trade for these, but would consider trades for other rare cards that I have one of. Get in touch if you'd like to trade Dark Age: Feudal Lords cards.To trade, I have multiples of all common (C1 or C2) cards available to trade, as well as all uncommon (U1 or U2) cards. Among the different types of rare cards(R1 or R2 or extremely rare foil, fixed, or limited) I have the following duplicates:

Any Character cards except Red
Most Instant cards except Nope, Razor Wire Spring Trap, Once More Into the Fray, Imposter, Frustrate Defense, Blood Rival
The following Leader cards only: HooDoo Leader, Survivalist Leader, Witness Leader
The following Location cards only: Forest, Grav Field, Magnetic Core, Mega Mall
All Victory cards except I Hear Good Things
The following rare Weapon cards only: Reactive Shield, Holy Symbol, Light Armor, Spinning Spear, Viz Noise Generator

Get in touch if you would like to trade cards. You can leave a comment with an e-mail address, and I will not publish it (comments on this blog are moderated). I am considering whether it might possibly be useful to put up cards for sale on eBay, perhaps a generic buy-it-now for any common, another for uncommon, and a third for rares. If you have an interest in that let me know.

One of My Many Weaknesses: Collecting Card Games

2011-11-15T11:05:00.001-05:00

I've played a few collectible card games over the years. No, not Magic, but a few others. But you know the drill with these games: you can play them, although the gameplay is often slow, complex, and not much fun. But that's not the ultimate point of them. The ultimate point is to get you to buy as many cards as possible. Some publishers are apparently realizing that this eventually drives the player/collector to resent the system; Chaosium's newer Cthulhu card games are billed as "...a Living Card Game: A Living Card Game (LCG) breaks away from the traditional Collectible Card Game (CCG) model by offering a fixed card distribution method. It offers the same dynamic customizable, expanding, and constantly evolving game play that makes CCG’s fun, but without the blind buy purchase model that can burn out players. The end result is an innovative mix that gives you the best of both worlds!"

And in fact I am burned out; having become engaged with three CCGs, I would be extremely hesitant to buy another that follows the collectible model (although Chaosium's fixed-rarity products do intrigue me -- but with at least 20 expansion sets currently in print, at $15 a pop... I think I'll wait on that).

It's because the cards are produced and collated into the packages following specific card rarity schedules, and you purchase sealed package. They are, as Chaosium calls them, "blind buy" -- you don't know exactly which cards will be in the packages. Often there are three, four, five, or even more rarity levels. A typical card set might comprise 400 cards, divided up into 200 common cards, with the same distribution level, 100 uncommon cards, and another 100 rare cards, sometimes with subdivisions of rarity, like rarity level 1, rarity level 2, and extremely rare. Magic has produced over twelve thousand unique cards to date in English, according to Wikipedia. Ratios might go approximately like 100 commons to 30 uncommons to 10 rares to 1 extremely rare card.

So if you want all the cards, you could trade, or find a retailer who sells individual cards, or you could buy lots of cards and wind up with hundreds or thousands of redundant common cards. And of course there are limited editions, some cards appear only in certain sets, and games go out of print. Acquiring all of the Magic cards would cost so much money that I prefer not even to attempt to estimate it.

Bizarrely, Magic even established a patent on its gameplay system. Some of the claims seem like petty modest innovations, such as manna and the equivalent of hit points. But amazingly the patent also claims innovation in that "players construct their own library of cards, preferably from trading cards, and play their library or deck of cards against the deck of cards of an opposing player. Cards may be obtained from retail outlets, trading with other players or collectors, and winning cards at games and tournaments." I'm unclear on how many card games might thus be claimed to infringe Magic's patents.

Anyway, the games I've decided to collect are not the best-known; they are Chaosium's Mythos, Dark Age: Feudal Lords, and some of the earlier releases in the Middle Earth: The Wizards series.

Mythos

Note that I'm talking about Chaosium's original Mythos card game. There is a modern Cthulhu card game that has an entirely different fixed rarity scheme.

Mythos didn't have great gameplay, but it had very cool artwork, and was based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, which pretty much guaranteed that I would be a fan of this work. It was first released as limited starter decks, unlimited "Standard" two-deck sets with a fixed set of cards, and three types of booster/expanders packs. Oddly, I had a "standard" deck that was scrambled, consisting of one complete steadfast deck and one screwed-up steadfast deck missing some cards and containing some duplicates.

According to Chaosium, "The Mythos starter decks are created from an array of 200 cards and the nine Investigator Cards. In each starter deck is found 6 rare cards, 12 uncommon cards, and 42 common cards, plus one Investigator Card and a 32-page rulebook. Each booster contains 67 new cards plus a blend of the cards that appear in the Mythos starter decks, at the ratio of 2 rare cards, 3 uncommon, and 8 common cards for a total of 13 cards per pack. The rarity level of the cards is identical across the Mythos starters and the boosters. A rare card found in the starter decks is printed in the same frequency as a rare card found only in a booster. Otherwise, a "rare" card from a booster would be more rare (there are fewer of them) than a "rare" card in the starters."

Anyway, that might be a bit confusing but trust me, it is not nearly as confusing as some of these games get. Basically, it means that if you acquire starter decks or booster packs, you get about 10% rare cards. There are no extremely rare cards.If you want everything in the original Mythos group of cards, you're looking at a 104-card standard set, and then you have to collect 400 cards from the combination starter and booster limited card distribution; you've also got to track down 9 investigator cards which were distributed in the limited decks. This is somewhat daunting now that everything is out of print, but there were apparently a lot of Mythos cards printed, and the game didn't really become a big seller. I now have just about all the cards; I bought most of them back when they were released, and I've recently been fleshing out my collection with a few individual cards and sets purchased on eBay recently. I'm not a real purist; I don't keep the boxes or the booster packs sealed. They aren't in protective sleeves or binders, but just stored in card boxes, and I don't wear white cotton gloves when I handle them! Really, I just want to see all the cards in a set, and have some usable decks on hand for playing. If they are one day valuable enough to consider selling, I might do that, but I'm not going to go to great lengths to keep them in mint or sealed condition.

Currently from Mythos Limited I've tracked down one of my last three missing cards, Eusapia Paladino. In any case I'm now lacking only two rare cards, which I think also occurred only in limited starter decks -- Olaus Wormius and The Lonely House in the Woods -- and I'm bidding on a 4,000 card lot that has a good chance of containing my last two rares. I've seen The Lonely House in the Woods come up as a single card on eBay, but Olaus Wormius seems to be MIA; perhaps it was rarer than I think?

As a result I have a big surplus of Mythos Limited cards; hundreds of duplicate common and uncommon cards and quite a few duplicate rares. Most of them have not been played, just handled a little, sorted, and stored in boxes. Quite honestly, I'm just a bit obsessive, and especially like to see all the artwork. If you are looking for specific cards to trade, get in touch with me. But what does one do with twenty duplicates of a common card that every Mythos collector has on hand? I'm considering some kind of art project.

Anway, there is another set of Mythos cards that I also find interesting: Mythos: Dreamlands. These are rarer (in terms of numbers of cards printed and sold, not in terms of card rarity ratios). I found a number of Dreamlands boosters via eBay but my set is far from complete, and it seems that it might be quite difficult to track down the rest. The eBay lot of cards I'm bidding on does contain some Dreamlands cards, but probably not enough to fill out my collection. I don't have very many Dreamlands cards to trade but get in touch if you have something in specific you're looking for.

There is one last Mythos set. Chaosium released Mythos: New Aeon, and then these products were promptly discontinued. All are now out of print. New Aeon cards now seem to be quite rare. I would love a complete set, since these have particularly fascinating artwork, blending Lovecraft's stories with modern day settings and artififacts. Single starter decks are going for several times the original price, single cards are quite expensive, and I haven't seen any boosters for sale in some time. So a complete set of New Aeon might not be, err, in the cards.

Dark Age: Feudal Lords

This game has some of the best artwork I've ever seen in a card game. I'm collecting it pretty much just to see all the artwork. This game was distributed as starter decks packaged with dice and stickers. The ratio is about 10:1 commons to rares in starter decks and boosters. Each starter deck got one leader and 1 location card, but the booster packs also contain, very rarely, leader and location cards. There is a small set of very rare foil cards that appear in the boosters. I've got a handful of these, but no duplicates to trade.

I'm currently missing one rare character, Red; five rare instant cards, Blood Ritual, Get Out There You Big Lug, Goliath Syndrome, Imposter, and Once More Into the Fray; the rare skills Field Medic, Hypnotism, and Quick Shot; the rare supply HooDoo Totem; three rare weapons, Glue Cannon, Flash Grenades, and Flame Thrower; and two rare victories, I Hear Good Things and Get the Goodies. I'm also missing a few leaders, locations, and a few of the very rare supply cards. I have a number of duplicate rares I'd be happy to trade.

Middle Earth

Finally, I have a pile of cards from the Iron Crown Enterprises Middle Earth games. This game I find excessively complex to play, and because it has such a large number of cards, with some extreme rarities, I gave up attempting to acquire a complete set. I've got quite a few from Middle Earth: The Wizards, including a number of starter decks; fewer from the Middle Earth: the Dragons set, and a few from Middle Earth: Dark Minions set. I don't have any cards from the later Lidless Eye, Against the Shadow, White Hand, or Balrog sets, or any of the reprinted-card challenge decks. If there's something in particular you want to trade from the sets I mentioned, please ask. I could also be convinced fairly easily to part with the whole collection.

The Linux Destop: Still Not Ready

2011-08-17T14:24:00.009-04:00

So, for work reasons I've migrated my daily computer environment to GNU/Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my ThinkPad. This isn't the first time I've tried to live in Linux. I've tried many times, since Red Hat... what, 2.0? I'd have to check my old notes.

It's getting better, but it's not there yet. One of the most maddening things is that a lot of fundamentals still seem to be changing rapidly, such that it isn't enough to, say, look up how to mount a USB flash drive on Ubuntu, because it has varied so much between versions. Does your system use UUIDs to identify volumes? Does your system use the new "service" commands for managing servers? And it's all over the map; sometimes a tool will tell you to use a newer command that doesn't exist on your system.

Booting

Over the course of changing some partitions, I've had to become fairly familiar with Grub 2. Now, I like Grub a lot better than I liked LILO. When I broke LILO systems I was often scrambling for a boot sector I had archived onto a floppy disk or some such. So far when I've broken Grub I've been able to fix it without having to boot from a live CD. That's a big improvement. Still, having to type a series of commands at the grub rescue&amp;gt; prompt is a little nerve-racking. In general, what I've needed to do is set prefix=(hd0,5)/boot/grub, set root=(hd0,5), insmod normal, normal, boot the system, then under Ubuntu do sudo grub install /dev/sda, sudo update-grub.

Of course your requirements may differ depending on your drives and partitions, but this has worked a couple of times for me and at least I didn't have to do any manual dd.

Partitioning

Gparted will apparently happily reconfigure your partition table into a state that doesn't seem to be corrupt per se, but which the Gnome Disk Utility, aka palimpsest, doesn't like. By "doesn't like" I mean palimpsest throws an assert on startup. I found the solution here. Apparently adding and removing partitions can cause your partition table entries to be in an order that doesn't match the order of the sectors on the disk, and palimpsest doesn't like that. It seems to have a pretty non-robust way of examining partitions that involves recursion.

This seems ill-advised and ill-tested on real-world systems and not very robust, but at least there was an assert in there, so I suppose it could have been worse; I didn't actually lose any data.

It doesn't seem to cause problems per se but I'll just note in passing that gparted seems to be ugly and inconsistent in how it displays partitions; sometimes I get a 1.00 or 2.00 MiB "unallocated" block listed before and after given partitions, and sometimes I don't. I don't know if this is round-off error in display code per se, or there is some default alignment going on, but it is maddening to see these things come and go depending on whether I'm using a live CD, running on my live system, or looking at the same hard disk with Paragon Partition Manager.

USB Sticks

Access to files on a USB stick was working perfectly for me; I could put the stick in and edit and add files, and then eject it, and stick it back in, at it all worked just fine. At some point my Unbuntu setup stopped recognizing the sticks. Some help I found online suggested that the "usbmount" package needed to be removed using the Synaptic package manager, but it wasn't there. So I added it, and the USB sticks started showing up again. Except that they are read-only.

There's a manual mount procedure I could go through involving editing mount tables but I think in modern Ubuntu versions you aren't supposed to have to do that, and as I mentioned it was working before. This remains unresolved. It could be this bug but I haven't confirmed it yet. This is pretty basic stuff that ought to just work -- and indeed, recently seemed to.

MP3s and Flash

Flash video on Chrome (say, YouTube video) has been a disaster for me. The help I've found claims that Chrome comes with Flash built-in and I don't need to install a plug-in but just to enable it, but that doesn't seem to be true.

The 64-bit plugin seems to crash constantly. I still can't play MP3 files. I have to install libraries and Ubuntu wants me to assert that I have the legal right to do so. The players suggest I install packages with names like gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly. To install them I have to click through a dialog that says:

Confirm installation of restricted software

The use of this software may be restricted in some countries. You must verify that one of the following is true:

* These restrictions do not apply in your country of legal residence

* You have permission to use this software (for example, a patent license)

* You are using this software for research purposes only

I'm not using the software for research purposes only; what the hell does that even mean? I was hoping to play some podcasts while I worked. I'm not a goddamned lawyer and I'm not about to pay one to determine whether I can legally play some audio files.

I realize this is not the fault of the legions of (largely unpaid) developers, who are diligently trying to cover their butts... but wow, is this really where we still are with Ubuntu on the desktop, that in 2011 I can't play an MP3 file without resorting to quasi-legal means?

Thunderbird

By far my biggest painful time sink has been working with Thunderbird. For work I connect to an Outlook server via IMAP. Thunderbird on Windows does a quite credible job interacting with the server. I tried to import my mailboxes into my Linux world and archive them.

Big mistake. Dragging a few thousand messages from an IMAP server folder to a local folder ought to be no big deal; maybe it will take a while, but eventually it should finish copying.

No such luck. Instead, the Activity Manager pane will display nothing happening, but I'll get a few updates as the first few hundred messages are copied and then... nothing.

Sometimes it starts using 99%, or 101%, of a CPU, eating a whole core. The GUI grays out the app. Sometimes it shows nothing happening but clicking on the destination folder shows a spinning cursor. It stays like that indefinitely (I even left it to run overnight once, to no avail).

So, what I finally had to do was move 25,000 mail messages manually in small batches of 300 or fewer.

Still, sometimes even these small batches triggered the hang, and I'd have to quit the application and start over. When I did I found a corrupted message. Don't get me started on the JavaScript/XML errors on the console that didn't tend to correlate with this problem.

Worse, I found that occasionally during these batch copies messages would just get dropped, so I had to manually skim through 25,000 e-mail messages to find the odd dozen that had been lost.

I manually updated Thunderbird using dist-upgrade to version 5, which gave me fewer errors on the console but still exhibited this problem. Color me incredibly unimpressed.

Do you want to know how a good mail client behaves? Look at Mail.app. It just works. Seriously. I've seen a few cosmetic bugs but they are pretty insignificant and I trust it not to just hang or lose messages.

Let's not get started today on jEdit and the state of Java. As I have time I'm reporting bugs and attempting to help diagnose issues. Freakin' fonts won't even display correctly with the default install of what ought to be some pretty basic tools. At least Wi-Fi mostly works on my ThinkPad... which is more than I can say about 8.04 LTS.

Laptop Followup

I'm trying to use 10.04 "untethered" on my ThinkPad T500, running on battery power. My first observation is that the battery life is terrible.

My second is that the little flashing light indicating WiFi activity is constantly flickering, which is driving me batty. I'm not sure what this indicates -- any network activity? A dropped connection that it is trying to re-establish? I'll have to compare how it behaves under Ubuntu compared to under Windows. But there is no denying that network connectivity is maddeningly inconsistent: sometimes when I put in my WPA2 Personal password, which I can't seem to get the system to store and manage automatically, it connects instantly, and the signal strength indicator shows maximum; sometimes when I try to connect, the signal strength indicator animates indefinitely and seems that it will never either connect or give up trying. The Airport base station it is trying to connect to is directly upstairs, perhaps 25 feet away, and it probably bears mentioning that our Macs have always worked with it flawlessly.

When the battery went dead -- after only two hours, compared to the usual four or five i get under Windows -- I brought the sleeping laptop back upstairs and plugged it in to let it charge up. This morning I woke it up, plugged in the Ethernet cable -- the network changeover worked flawlessly -- turned off the wireless radio, and plugged in the second monitor, which is always plugged in when I'm working in the office. It is an old 20" HP monitor that does 1200x1600 and rotates, and I use it in "portrait mode," as part of a continuous desktop.

Ubuntu seemed to forget all this and would not light up the monitor until I brought up the Monitors preference application. I had to tell it all over again where the monitor belonged in the virtual desktop and that it needed to have its image rotated, which is a tedious task given that you have to fly the cursor around on an sideways image. It is working again but I am unimpressed.

By comparison, setting up services on Ubuntu as a server, using command-line tools, has been easy-peasy, practically a cakewalk. The tools in general seem to quite well-evolved, robust, and mature and if they are complex -- well, that's the nature of modern software stacks. Quite honestly, I'd rather configure server tools on any recent Ubuntu or other member of the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS family tree than on my Mac Pro, given that on the Mac, since I'm not running MacOS X Server, I don't have the (allegedly quite refined) GUI tools to configure it. I've had considerable pain building some standard software tools on MacOS X: issues with arbitrary bugs and limitations on the ld library tool, the unusual default Apache2 configuration, and the lack of a "blessed" and de facto-standard way of installing and managing dependencies between open-source tools.

Without this I'm flying blind a bit on the Mac when using it as an open-source server, and it feels like a step backwards, although it is still my Mac Pro I use for iPhoto, for Aperture, for iMovie, for Logic Pro, and plug-ins and assorted audio tools, even for managing my music library in iTunes. And for writing code I'll still stack the XCode toolchain up against anything the competition can offer at any price.

Ext4 Corruption and Alternative Partition Backup Solutions

2011-08-04T13:16:00.003-04:00

After my utter failure restoring partitions with Paragon's toolset, I've been looking into alternatives. Unfortunately, the damage I apparently did to my Ubuntu ext4 file system with the Paragon tools was deeper and longer-lasting than I expected.

Apparently during the failed restore, it wrote a number of files and directories that are deeply corrupted, and now I can't delete them. Booting from a live CD and running a disk checkrepair reveals no errors. The drive's SMART status is just fine. Writing and reading large amounts of data elsewhere in the file system has worked just fine.

Some of the restored files were generated in a hierarchy that starts HardDisk0/Volume1. Trying to remove that directory (with sudo) produces the following:

rm: cannot remove `HardDisk0/Volume1/home/potts/.gksu.lock': Input/output error
rm: cannot remove `HardDisk0/Volume1/home/potts/.sudo_as_admin_successful': Input/output error
rm: cannot remove `HardDisk0/Volume1/etc/apt/secring.gpg': Input/output error
rm: cannot remove `HardDisk0/Volume1/etc/.pwd.lock': Input/output error

(and a few more similar errors). When I try to examine the file stats, I get something like this:

potts@potts-xeon-1:/sandboxes/HardDisk0/Volume1/home/potts$ ls -la
ls: cannot access .gksu.lock: Input/output error
ls: cannot access .sudo_as_admin_successful: Input/output error
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-08-03 19:05 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2010-09-01 16:44 ..
-????????? ? ? ? ? ? .gksu.lock
-????????? ? ? ? ? ? .sudo_as_admin_successful

(When ls can't even tell you anything about a file, that's generally considered a bad sign). It looks like Paragon's tools really screwed the pooch, but I can't put the blame entirely on them, as it shouldn't even be possible to do this to an ext4 file system.

It appears that a number of hidden files or files with special permissions were turned into corrupt inodes or some such; I'm not really an expert on Linux file systems. The troubling part is that e2fsck finds no issues to fix, even when run from a live CD.

This suggests that perhaps I am putting more faith in ext4 than is warranted at present. A robust filesystem ought to be able to recover from anything up to and including bad sectors that cause data loss, isolating that data loss so that it is as minimal as possible. It looks like I may need to wipe this partition yet again if I'm to trust it. Should I drop back to ext3? If ext4 has known problems like this, and I see from some Googling that it does, why is it the default file system for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS?

Anyway, on to other backup tools. I'm still looking for some combination of tools that will allow me to reliably back up the file systems on whole partitions and reliably shuffle and restore them. This does not seem like it is too much to ask for.

The following started out as a comment on the previous blog entry but I'm promoting it to a post here.

I wanted to look into some tools that would support ext 4. Partclone looked like it would do the right thing, but the docs were a little too short on examples for me to understand easily. Clonezilla seems to be a curses-based interface to drive these tools, so I decided to try that.

Clonezilla from the PartedMagic 6.5 ISO seems to work to do the backup of a partition, and it is really fast (under 20 minutes as opposed to seven hours with Paragon), albeit awkward (it seems like it keeps trying to mount my backup USB drive, after which I can't unmount it and the program won't allow me to use it as a destination. I"m sure there must be a way, but I haven't figured it out yet).

However, I just ran an experiment to try to restore a partition and the results were ugly. If you want to restore to a partition with a different number, for example sda2 instead of sda5, you can't do it directly. It fails without an error per se, but does point you at the FAQ. There is a workaround where you can change the partition number as it is encoded in multiple filenames inside the actual backup, which makes me want to scream. There's a workaround involving creating multiple symbolic links, but when I read it, my monocle fell out in horror and I can't bring myself to describe how stupid and ugly it is.

But there is a bigger problem: you can't restore to a smaller partition. So I backed up a 450-GiB partition, and only 60 GiB were used by the file system. The compressed image was about 18 GiB. I wanted to restore this to a 125 GiB partition, which ought to have plenty of room to hold the contents of the file system I'm copying, but apparently that's not allowed. In this case I want to do this as a test, but it seems like migrating to a smaller hard drive is a pretty ordinary real-world scenario. For example, wouldn't it be nice if I could use a partition image to take a file system from a hard drive to an SSD?

But the partclone format seems to store only used blocks, and it seems to be unable to rearrange them into an unfragmented file system upon restore, so it insists on having the same 450-GiB partition (or larger) on the destination drive.

And finally, apparently you can't dig into a backup image to view the hierarchy or pull out one file or directory. This is something Paragon's tools give you (although that was pretty much the only part of performing a restore that I could get working). I could perhaps live with that although it does make it very inconvenient and time-consuming to rescue a single file, something I could easily do with Retrospect on the Mac almost 20 years ago. Meanwhile, we have sparse image support and a better disk utility that comes standard with Mac OS X, one which makes all this seem pretty horrifically primitive.

Maybe I'll have to stick to grsync, but I was hoping to use this tool not just on this server, but on my Windows laptop which is multiple-boot, with Windows 7 and two versions of Ubuntu, and which I would like to rearrange to recover some disk space (hence the desire to restore to a partition that isn't the same number I backed up from). Why is this so hard?

Your Backup is Not A Backup if You Can't Restore It

2011-08-01T13:51:00.005-04:00

Or at least, it may as well not be.

In the process of tweaking an Ubuntu system, I decided to modify some partitions, secure in a couple of facts:

1. I had only a small set of recent local changes that comprised important data I wasn't willing to live without.

2. I had a complete backup created with a commercial tool, Paragon's Hard Disk Manager Suite 2011.

Well, apparently although I've been doing this sort of thing for a number of years, I apparently forgot some of my own rules about backups: first, one backup is not enough. And second, if you haven't tested the restoration process, your backup very well could be completely useless in a pinch. I ought to add a third rule: don't break a working configuration just to tweak it -- but I know myself well enough to know that I'm unlikely to live by that rule. It's often how I learn. So I'll propose a limited version of that rule: don't break a working configuration just to tweak it without carefully considering expense, time, and effort required to reconstruct it. This was my own system and I estimated that the time and effort would be minimal. Of course, I was hopelessly optimistic about that. But on the other hand, if I wasn't generally optimistic about this sort of thing I'd grow to hate this sort of thing and once that happens, work becomes misery.

So, I generally have been very satisified with Paragon's partition manager, and when I had the chance to upgrade to their whole Hard Disk Manager Suite 2011 for $30, it sounded like a pretty good deal. I did this and then spent some time making partition backups. That all seemed to go well, although it can be quite slow. It took about seven hours to write 70 GiB or so to an uncompressed backup.

The problem came when I wanted to use one of these backups.

The backup in question lived on a Seagate external USB hard drive. It was in Paragon's proprietary archive format, which is in the form of a directory, arc_270711011814809, with a series of files inside with the same name and different extensions: .PBF, .pfm, .001, .002, etc. The idea (I think) is that no physical file is larger than 4 GiB. My entire backup set here is about 70 GiB. It represents a set of sandboxes of code trees checked out from a Subversion repository, with a few uncommitted local changes.

The restore process gives you a GUI that lets you find one of these backups and do something with it. Unfortunately Paragon does not seem to be very good at responsive GUIs. To wit, it's the type of "wizard" GUI that tries to drive you through a basic process, steering you through each step and then allowing you to move foward with a familiar "Next" button. But sometimes that "Next" button is dim, and nothing else in the GUI will respond, and there is no busy cursor or animation or "please wait" or what-have-you at all, for several minutes; the only indication I had that the processes behind the GUI are not actually dead or in an endless loop was that my external hard drive light was flickering, and I could place my hand on the case and feel the heads moving.

It wouldn't bug me much if this was the case for five or ten seconds. But when it takes ten minutes, that's pretty bad user interface implementation. But let's set aside that for now; eventually the GUI let me choose the .PBF file for my backup set and proceed.

The first thing I wanted to do is tell it where to put the restored data. I had created a new set of partitions on the original drive and there was a partition all set up and and waiting. But apparently I had only two options: restore the backed-up partition contents (the file system) to its original partition, as recorded by the backup process originally, or restore it directory-and-file-wise.

That's really a head-scratcher. If I'm resorting to a backup, there's a very good chance that I've lost a hard drive. In that case, the original partition doesn't exist any more. I may have recreated the partition table of the original drive to the letter, using a printout of the partition table or something, but I think it's quite likely that I might have made some changes, and all I really want is to get those files back at the same mount point, so I want to restore the file system to whatever partition I specify, as long as it has enough room for the file system. I'm baffled that I can't do that. So I was unable to test that particular feature.

The next-best-thing is, I suppose, to look inside the backup and restore chunks of it. You have a hierarchical check-box interface that (slowly) churns through the backup file system tree and allows you to select what you'd like to restore.

The problem is that it doesn't work. Or, at least, I was not able to get it to work. Not with either of two separate backup images; not from two separate backup drives; not to a second external drive; not to the same external drive; not to a partition formatted with the same file system; not to a partition formatted with a different file system.

Let me amend that; I eventually was able to get two restore operations to work, when the restore operations were of a very small subset of my actual backup, consisting of only a few files, or a few hundred files, a few tends of mibibytes. These were (I think) where my critical uncommitted change set lived. I hope there wasn't anything else that was important.

The first thing I tried to do was just restore about 70 GiB. I started a restore in the morning. The visual progress indicator made it up to about 5% of the way across its bar by about four hours later. The estimate for the remainder bounced around wildly, between 30 seconds and 25 hours. As a result, I had no useful estimate at all how long the restore would take -- but the visual progress bar was not at all encouraging. On another attempt to restore a relatively small subset of the data, the display showed no visual progress bar at all but a spinning circle, with reassuring text that kept changing, with a generally apologetic tone but reassuring me that the operation would take only a few more seconds. Three hours later I had to kill it.

My computer is a Xeon with a Seagate server-class internal hard drive. It's a year old and it's not slow. I use it to do large software builds.

I killed this restore, and did an experiment -- it took well under an hour to copy 70 GiB from the external hard drive to the internal hard drive using cp on the command line. Neither file system was corrupt. The USB connection worked normally.

I had a four-day weekend coming up, so I tried again. After three full days of checking on the restore operation periodically, the visual progress bar was still far short of the halfway mark. When I checked on it on day 4, the Windows system it runs on top of was crashed with a black screen of death reporting a non-specific I/O error; the options to retry didn't do anything.

Now, I wasn't watching, so I'm not sure what happened when it actually crashed. But I do know that the longer a process takes, the more likely it seems that something in the real world will interfere with it -- for example, it is summer in Saginaw and we get occasional severe thunderstorms. When that happens I want to shut down my computers and turn off their various power strips, which range from cheap ones to rack-mount Furman strips with voltage monitors. If a restore operation is going to take 72 hours or more to complete I can't do that. It also makes a mockery of the idea of having a spare drive on hand so I can bring the server back up quickly.

My work often has real deadlines with real paying clients. My time is, in fact, money under those circumstances -- or at least if enough of it is lost, real money is at risk of being lost too. All I can say is that I got the message that this backup solution is not reliable in a time when I wasn't cranking on an urgent deadline and the stakes were not high.

I've tried various permutations: copying the backup files to a partition on the same drive, and attempting the restore again; the result was the same. I had two backup images to work with; my 70 GiB backup and a much smaller one of about 5 GiB. I had similar results with both of them, although as I mentioned by selecting a very small subset of the small backup, I was able to complete extraction of a single directory containing a few files.

I don't know if the backup is corrupt in some way; I never saw any kind of message indicating that it was, and the original backup processes seemed to complete without any problem. But right now,while I still like Paragon's partition manager, I very strongly advise you against trying to use their backup solution, and I'll be extremely hesitant to experiment again with my Windows system.

I'm going to make a concerted trial of some other backup solutions. Partimage seems to be out of the question now, as it does not support ext4, which is the default for recent versions of Ubuntu. I'll be testing partclone. And quite likely I'll be working something up with good old rsync as well. But right now, I've unfortunately got several days to spend babysitting checkouts from a subversion repository and manual merging of the few files I did manage to salvage from this slow-motion disaster.

Grubbing About in Ubuntu

2011-07-26T16:34:00.004-04:00

I've gotten a little time to do some maintenance and backup tasks on several PCs and have had to try to get up to speed with recent developments in Ubuntu.

First, my main work laptop is triple-boot: Windows 7, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It wasn't sufficient to just upgrade my Ubuntu, because I needed to work with some build tools for work that had not been successfully ported to the newer Ubuntu yet. However, everything is now migrated so I've been meaning to do some cleanup in order to remove some partitions and reclaim some drive space.

My build server is in a similar situation with the exception that it never had any version of Windows installed, so it has only the Ubuntu versions to contend with.

My tool of choice for backing up my laptop is the Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2011 Suite. It's been good to me and since I had purchased an early version of Partition Manager standalone program, I got it for $29.95. I like the Paragon tool because it will make a bootable rescue CD, and you can also create a bootable image on a USB stick. I used it to make backups of my partitions so when this laptop drive fails, I shouldn't need to try to reconstruct my whole Windows 7 world from scratch.

I fell down a rabbit hole a bit when trying to clean up my boot menu. Between 8.04 and 10.04 Ubuntu apparently switched to Grub 2, which is a big change. When I added 10.04 to my server, the install CD seems to have updated the MBR (boot record) to use the new Grub. When I'm booted into 10.04 I see a different root file system from a different partition. It isn't so easy anymore to clean up unwanted boot options, since the boot menu is actually generated via script every time the the update-grub script is run. The current set of boot options is listed in your /boot/grub/grub.cfg file.

I removed some uwanted 10.04 kernels by manually deleting files in my /boot directory (this is a touchy operation, so be careful; you can disable your system). I deleted all but a couple of the most recent kernels, and ran update-grub. I also tried using Synaptic package manager to remove kernels, and the useful Ubuntu-tweak tool that will remove kernels. I'll talk about these tools a little more in a bit. To make a long story even longer, I was hoping one of these options would get rid of the extra kernels I kept seeing in the boot menu.

It turned out that the update-grub script was discovering 8.04 kernels and adding them to the menu even though they existed only on my old unmounted sda1 partition. It is possible to manually edit the generated file but this is not advisable as your changes will be overwritten. It is also possible to disable the script that does this search for additional kernels but that seemed ugly as well. Some details for those interested: the script that searches for a variety of other OSes, on unmounted partitions, including Windows partitions, can be found under /etc/grub.d/30_os_prober. I'm not really a big bash guy, and it seems kind of obfuscated to boot (so to speak), so for now I'll just say I don't really understand how it works. But you can easily see what it does: just run it. If you're in the grub.d directory, I think you can just type ./30_os_prober. It will just generate some output; it won't overwrite any files.

Anyway, after I figured out where this script was finding 8.04, which took me a painfully long time, I settled on actually booting from a gparted live CD and completely removing my first partition, as there was nothing valuable I wanted in my 8.04 installation, then expanding my 10.04 partition to use this available space. (Please make sure your data is backed up before attempting an operation like this). In previous versions of Linux this might very well have completely disabled the boot; LILO and even the previous versions of Grub were notoriously fragile and I managed to break my systems frequently when messing with dual-boot configurations (fortunately I never broke a system so badly that could not eventually get it working again or lost critical data).

After removing a whole partition, the Grub 2 boot still worked flawlessly. In fact I'm quite impressed with it, although it makes me a bit nervous because my approach, which might be considered "old school," is that I want to always know what the GUI tools and automatic scripts and installers are doing under the hood. This is because based on experience, I know there is a very good chance I might need to manually fix any magical "it just works" configuration at some point. I felt compelled to study the new Grub enough to reassure myself that I could figure out more-or-less how it worked. Still, I can't claim to understand all the details - for example, the partition numbers now start at sda2, and there are "holes" in the partition numbers that showed up when the Ubuntu installer added partitions for 10.04. They seem to be of no real significance, but it would be interesting to confirm where the partition numbers are stored (presumably in the partition map) and whether they can be changed without actually modifying the partition contents. I suspect they can be but perhaps only with the older non-visual parted tool, and this may also be a risky change; for one thing, it might break my mount points -- although perhaps that fact that Ubuntu now seems to use UUIDs to identify partitions might ensure that everything still worked. Obviously there are still limits to my understanding.

There is a bit of an oddity with gparted. When I booted from the live CD in order to change my partitions, gparted initially showed free space after my last partition, which is a swap, but would not allow me to expand the swap partition to use this space. But after I adjusted the other partitions, without touching the swap partition, and booted up into my 10.04 system and ran gparted again, it showed a 1 MiB unused block next to each of my other partitions, but not my swap partition. Then when rebooting using the gparted live CD, it showed none of these free space blocks at all. Booting from the Paragon live rescue CD and running the partition manager, it also didn't show any of these unused blocks. Tides go in, tides go out, and you can't explain that. Hmmm.
I'm not sure if it these 1 MiB blocks are actually there, or apparently there due to round-off error, or padding that is normally hidden. I'm going to pretend it's not actually there since otherwise my generally obsessive-compulsive personality would compel me to try to fix it.

Anyway, if you're having a similar problem or just want to learn more about a boot issue, look for the Ubuntu "Boot Info Script," which you can find on SourceForge. (I'm running on Ubuntu 10.04; by the time you read this, things are likely to have changed, so poke around and make sure it's compatible with your distribution and version). If you want to manage a backlog of too many old kernel versions without having to use the command line and possibly deleting the wrong file, you can use Synaptic, but you might have to hunt through a long list of packages looking for the ones that are actually installed and the ones you want to remove, including headers. If you do a search on, in my case, "2.6.32," you'll see packages like linux-headers-2.6.32-24-generic and linux-image-2.6.32-24-generic. Use the "Mark for Complete Removal" option and then apply your changes. Synaptic will actually re-run the Grub update script for you. If you sort by "Installed version," it will be easier to find the ones that are installed. Make sure you don't remove your current kernel! (Identify your current kernel with a terminal window, using the "uname -r" command). You might want to keep one or two older kernels on hand in case you come across an issue with your current one.

You might also look for Ubuntu Tweaker which has the advantage of not allowing you to accidentally remove your active kernel (and it also gives you lots of other options to experiment with, although please be sure you know what you are doing, since I'm not sure what a lot of them actually do). I think you can set up Ubuntu Tweaker by executing sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa, then just running sudo sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak. That was all it took to get it into my system menu. Once it is installed, you'll want to "unlock" and then look for the menu item to clean up kernels. I'm not sure if it removes the associated headers or not.

Finally, there is a "Grub Customizer" tool that looks quite elaborate, but I have not gone down the rabbit hole quite that far (for example, it will let you supply a background image). Probably best not to start playing with it if my actual goal is to get work done...

Hey, Hey, RIAA, How Many Folks Did You Threaten Today?

2011-04-15T17:12:00.004-04:00

So, this came in my e-mail yesterday:

Subject: [4.14.2011 5884907] Notice of Copyright Infringement
From: abuse@charter.net
Date: Thu, April 14, 2011 10:06 am
To: (me)

Dear Charter Internet Subscriber:

Charter Communications ("Charter") has been notified by a copyright owner, or its
authorized agent, that your Internet account may have been involved in the exchange
of unauthorized copies of copyrighted material (e.g., music, movies, or software).
We are enclosing a copy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice that
Charter received from the copyright holder which includes the specific allegation.

Under the DMCA, copyright owners have the right to notify Charter’s register agent
if they believe that a Charter customer has infringed on their work(s). When
Charter receives a complaint notice from a copyright owner, Charter will notify the
identifiable customer of the alleged infringement by providing them a copy of the
submitted DMCA notice. As required by law, Charter may determine that the customer
is a repeat copyright infringer and reserves the right to suspend or terminate the
accounts of repeat copyright infringers.

It is possible that this activity has occurred without your permission or knowledge
by an unauthorized user, a minor who may not fully understand the copyright laws, or
even as a result of a computer virus. However, as the named subscriber on the
account, you may be held responsible for any misuse of your account. Please be
aware that using Charter’s service to engage in any form of copyright infringement
is expressly prohibited by Charter's Acceptable Use Policy and that repeat copyright
infringement, or violations of any other Charter policy, may result in the
suspension or termination of your service. You may view Charter's rules and
policies, including Charter’s Acceptable Use Policy, under the policies section of
charter.com.

We ask that you take immediate action to stop the exchange of any infringing
material. For additional information regarding copyright infringement and for a list
of frequently asked questions, please visit charter.com/dmca.

If you have questions about this letter, you may contact us at 1-866-229-7286.
Representatives will be available to take your call Monday through Friday 8am - 8pm,
Saturday and Sunday 8am - 5pm (CST).

Sincerely,

Charter Communications Security Resolution Team
http://www.charter.com/security

--- The following material was provided to us as evidence ---

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

04-08-2011
Charter Communications
Sir or Madam:

I am contacting you on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of A=
merica (RIAA) -- the trade association whose member music companies crea=
te, manufacture, and distribute approximately 85% of all legitimate musi=
c sold in the United States. =20

If you are an Internet Service Provider (ISP), you have received this le=
tter because we have identified a user on your network reproducing or di=
stributing an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted sound recording. This =
letter constitutes notice to you that this user may be liable for infrin=
ging activity occurring on your network.=20

If you are an Internet subscriber (user), you have received this letter =
because your Internet account was used to illegally copy and/or distribu=
te copyrighted music over the Internet through a peer to peer applicatio=
n. =20

Distributing copyrighted works on a peer to peer system is a public acti=
vity visible by other users on that network, including the RIAA. An his=
toric 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirmed that uploading and downl=
oading copyrighted works without the copyright owner's permission is cle=
arly illegal. You may be liable for the illegal activity occurring on y=
our computer.

To avoid legal consequences, a user should immediately delete and disabl=
e access to the unauthorized music on your computer. Learn how at the "=
About Music Copyright Notices" section of www.riaa.com. That section al=
so contains practical information about:=20

- How you were identified and why illegal downloading is not anonymous
- What next steps to take
- Where to get legal music online

We encourage Internet subscribers to visit the website www.musicunited.o=
rg, which contains valuable information about what is legal and what is =
not when it comes to copying music. It also links to some of the more p=
opular online music services where fans can go to listen to and/or purch=
ase their favorite songs.

We have attached below the details of the illegal file-sharing, includin=
g the time, date, and a sampling of the music shared. We assert that th=
e information in this notice is accurate, based upon the data available =
to us. We have a good faith belief that this activity is not authorized=
by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. Under penalty of perjur=
y, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member =
companies in matters involving the infringement of their sound recording=
s, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Int=
ernet. This letter does not constitute a waiver of any of our member's =
rights, and all such rights are expressly reserved.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation. If you have any questions, p=
lease visit the "About Music Copyright Notices" section of www.riaa.com.

Sincerely,
Jeremy Landis=20
Recording Industry Association of America
1025 F Street, NW, 10th Floor
Washington, D.C., 20004
Email: ispnoticefaq@riaa.com
Ph: 1-800-838-9775

List of infringing content
- ------------------------------
Lil Wayne IM NOT A HUMAN BEING

- ------------------------------
INFRINGEMENT DETAIL =20
- ------------------------------
Infringing Work : IM NOT A HUMAN BEING
Filename : Lil.Wayne-Im.Not.A.Human.Being.EP-(Retail)-2010-[NoFS]=20
First found (UTC): 2011-04-06T23:04:16.53Z
Last found (UTC): 2011-04-06T23:04:16.53Z
Filesize : 124871909 bytes=20
IP Address: (MY IP ADDRESS AT THE TIME, allegedly)
IP Port: 50665
Network: BitTorrent
Protocol: BitTorrent =20

(I'll spare you the XML that was included here, but it basically had a case ID, status, severity, etc; apparently there's a schema for these).

I can't tell you how much joy it gives me to finally be on the receiving end of one of these actual RIAA notices I've heard so many good things about!

Can you verify the signed section?

It appears it may have been somewhat mangled on Charter's end and does not pass GPG verification (GPG says "authentication failed: no data"). But I don't think this would tell me anything except whether the contents of the enclosure had been altered since it was signed. That might rule out certain types of copy-and-paste fraudulent notices, but it doesn't tell me if it is really from the RIAA. I would include the full text of the message inline above, but parts of it break Blogger, and I'm not expert enough at all the various escaping and armoring schemes to know how to make it work in there. The raw message with my e-mail address removed can be found here. If you have the expertise, can you help me verify the signed section?

Did you download this music?

No. (Unless I have a very weird unknown and undetected virus, I suppose).

Did your son?

No. He has a little something I like to call "taste in music," for which I am proud to take partial responsibility.

But you're one of those computer geeks - surely you must pirate a lot of music?

Yes, I am a computer geek. But I don't pirate music; my iTunes library has almost 10,000 songs, but they are all either ripped from my own CDs, purchased from the iTunes store, or were made available under a license that allows me to copy, such as the Creative Commons license I use for my own work.

Do you have a BitTorrent client on your computer?

Yes.

Aha! I knew you were a pirate

Not so fast; there is a lot of legal material one can download using the BitTorrent protocol. For example, concert audio by bands that do not object to the free sharing of concert recordings. Public-domain files. Linux distributions...

Did you forget to secure your network?

No, I didn't forget.

Then it must have been you!

No, I deliberately configured my Airport to provide a separate public guest network. I even named it "The Potts House Guest Network" to make this clear.

Why would anyone do that?

To be neighborly. I've often been in the position where I needed to bop onto someone else's wi-fi to borrow a cup of bandwidth. I've tried not to abuse it. For example, when I was configuring my mother's computer. I had to install a huge number of software updates. Have you ever tried to download a full load of updates over a modem, when the next-door neighbor has a wireless network just yards away? I had to stay up all night to get that done for her. What a pain.

I did this in our old apartment building in Ann Arbor. Some of the broke college students that used it occasionally would thank me.

In this case, one of my neighbors is apparently an asshole. But in general, I would not let that dissuade me.

Did someone really download a torrent while parked outside your house or something?

Apparently; I don't think our connection would reach much father than that, since the Airport signal barely reaches from one side of the house to the other. I suppose one of the neighbors across the street might have been able to connect, but they are mostly elderly people, and I don't think they listen to Lil' Wayne.

I don't know for certain, but I have no real reason to disbelieve the notice.

Surely it must be illegal, to make your network open to the public?

I don't believe so; if it was, why would it be a configuration option?

However, in considering my options, I did discover that leaving my network open to anyone violates Charter's terms of service, so I have reluctantly made it password-protected. If you're actually visiting our home, ask me and I'll give you the password.

It is interesting, though; if it is not illegal, but every available ISP in your area bars the practice, then it is effectively illegal, is it not? That seems like the kind of thing that one might be able to successfully challenge in a democracy that values free speech and treats media neutrally. It's a shame we don't have one.

Does the RIAA really have stateful packet monitoring going on right on Charter's servers, or upstream from them?

Apparently.

Doesn't that constitute some kind of entrapment, or at least unreasonable search and seizure?

IANAL (I am not a lawyer), but yes, in my opinion.

Are you liable for some kind of infringement committed on your openly shared internet connection?

Not in my book. Think of it this way: let's suppose I do secure my connections, but my own security is inadequate, or the Airport firmware has an exploitable security flaw. Am I liable because I'm not a whiz at implementing network security? Is Apple liable for anything illegal done with the stolen bandwidth? Bruce Schneier runs an open wireless network, for similar reasons, and that's good enough for me.

So why didn't you just say screw it, and leave it open?

Because if Charter Communications decides to cancel my service, I have no other good options for high-speed internet in this area. If I were using it only for entertainment, I would not care that much. But I'm using the same connection for my wired work network, upon which I run the VPN connection to my office, and I can't endanger that; relying heavily on svn and large file transfers, I really have no good alternative. Can you say "monopoly?"

You weren't actually sued, though?

Technically true. I just changed the title to "threatened." It was not worded as a threat per se, but the implicit threat is there, and I'm not very pleased about that.

The Short Story Collections of Greg Egan

2011-03-04T14:05:00.002-05:00

Here's the calculus of Greg Egan short story collections. Pay close attention!

Axiomatic is... well, axiomatic. It does not overlap with any later collections, and it is essential, since it contains some truly excellent stories.

Luminous = (Our Lady of Chernobyl - "Beyond the Whistle Test") + 6 more stories including the story "Luminous."

Oceanic = (Dark Integers and Other Stories - "Luminous") + (Crystal Nights and Other Stories - "TAP")

So, if you must buy only one Greg Egan short story collection, start with Axiomatic. If you want to get most of his best recent stories, buy Oceanic. Honestly, those two will get you most of his best work. If you want pretty much all of his stories in print, go with Axiomatic, Luminous, Dark Integers and Crystal Nights. If you own Dark Integers and Crystal Nights, Oceanic is completely redundant, unless of course you're collecting the different editions themselves. Our Lady of Chernobyl still contains one story not collected elsewhere -- "Beyond the Whistle Test." If I recall correctly, I have not read this story.

Note that many of Egan's stories are available online from various sources, as documented on Egan's Bibliography page.

Sean Hurley and Sherwin Sleeves

2011-01-27T11:20:00.005-05:00

Want to hear a fascinating moment of creation? Listen to the emergence of Sean Hurley's alter-ego, Sherwin Sleeves.

Hurley is a stay-at-home dad and freelance radio producer; here's a recent piece he did for New Hampshire Public Radio.

And here is a recent chat with both Sean and Sherwin. (Fair warning: that link will start making noise as soon as the page loads).

I'll be writing more about Hurley/Sleeves later. Meanwhile, if you like the work of his on Atoms, Motion and the Void (personally I think you might enjoy starting with this episode), and Mr. Hurley has suggested starting with this one, consider becoming a Stalwart. There's an interesting community of creatives forming and talking in the Stalwarts forum, and a lot of potential for some very cool storytelling and spin-off projects, but it hasn't reached critical mass yet!

This is Most Irregular

2011-01-17T16:55:00.013-05:00

GOOD EVENING.

Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBE, sprawled in his armchair, squinted up at the fuligin figure who stood, resting a bony elbow on his mantelpiece. His eyes gradually focused.

"Oh. Yes." He managed a wry grin. "How appropriate."

YES, ISN'T IT. HYDROGEN AND IRONY, YOU KNOW. AHEM. YOU'VE TAKEN A LETHAL DOSE OF MEDICATION.

"Yes." His voice, though quiet, did not waver. "I'm ready to go."

UM. WELL.

Death unshouldered his scythe.

IT'S AN ODD THING, YOU KNOW, TO MEET ONE'S MAKER.

"So I imagine. You're an anthromorphic personi... personi..."

YES.

"But you're also a character I wrote."

YES.

Sir Pratchett shook his head slowly, chuckling to himself. "And now my own creation is here to..."

YES. IT IS FUNNY, IS IT NOT? I SLAY THEM.

Sir Pratchett waited. He glanced at his watch.

HA. HA. THAT IS A PUNE OR PLAY ON...

"Yes. Get on with it, please."

Death hesitated, his eye sockets swinging left and right slowly.

YOU'RE REALLY READY?

"Yes." Again, the voice did not waver. "I want to leave while I can still make my own decisions."

YOUR ILLNESS.

"Yes. An... embuggerance. Bloody inconvenient. I always imagined going without so much... advance notice. Through the windshield, perhaps. Or down the steps, cracked skull sort of thing. But on balance I've had a wonderful time."

INDEED.

Death raised his scythe.

There was a soundless pop, and a lightless flash. Three auditors hovered, twittering silently and having a an animated argument while remaining completely unmoving. Death turned his skull towards them quizzically.

THIS IS MOST IRREGULAR.

A bony finger scratched his lack of nose.

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

Two more auditors silently had always been there. Death tilted his skull first left, then right, then shook his head slowly, then squeezed the bridge of his lack of nose. He waved a bony finger. He turned back to Pratchett.

IF I HAD NERVES, I WOULD NOW HAVE A MIGRAINE.

His distal phalanx rasped against his bony skull as he scratched in futility at his skull-ache.

I'LL ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN.

Death turned towards Sir Pratchett. He reached into nowhere and pulled out a black hourglass, peering at it. The top part of the glass was empty. Two or three grains of sand glittered, frozen, as they hung over the heap of sand in the bottom.

YOU'VE BEEN GIVEN A GIFT.

"A gift? What do you mean?"

YOU ARE AWARE THAT AS AN... ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONALIZATION... I AM NOT LITERALLY AS I APPEAR BEFORE YOU?

"Yes, I imagine that it's a bit like Santa Claus. I mean, logistics, reindeer attempting to exceed the speed of sound, width of a typical chimney, all that."

SANTA WHO?

"The Hogfather."

AH. YES. A SINGLE ME WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO ATTEND EVERY DEATH, EITHER IN MY WORLD OR YOURS. SO I EXIST IN RATHER MORE DIMENSIONS. I'M TOLD IT HAS TO DO WITH QUANTUM...

The voice trailed off. Death spread his bony fingers.

FANS. YOU HAVE SOLD RATHER A LOT OF BOOKS, YOU KNOW.

"Yes, of course."

YOU HAVE MANY FANS.

"So I've been told." A wry grin.

FANS WHO, INEVITABLY, DIE. AND, OCCASIONALLY, NEARLY DIE.

"Go on."

THE FORM IN WHICH DEATH APPEARS TO A DYING PERSON HAS A LOT TO DO WITH THE DYING PERSON'S VIEW OF THE WORLD WHILE ALIVE. IN OTHER WORDS, I'VE BEEN MEETING MANY OF YOUR FANS. I KNOW THIS BECAUSE WHEN A FAN WHO, IT TURNS OUT, IS NOT YET ACTUALLY READY TO DIE, MEETS ME, HE OR SHE, INEVITABLY, AFTER A FEW MINUTES OF HIGHLY INAPPROPRIATE LAUGHTER, BRING YOUR CONDITION TO MY ATTENTION.

"My goodness!"

YES. TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT, PERHAPS YOU COULD SEE IT AS I SEE IT FOR A MOMENT.

Death waved his skeletal hand. In a direction you can't look, in a place you can't see, a nonexistent curtain in reality parted and Sir Pratchett found himself looking in several impossible directions at once. A multiplicity of Death, dimensions of Death. Deaths standing in front of racks and racks of row upon row of hourglasses. Auditors were swarming in and around the figures of Death. Cliboards were examined. Mechanical pencil leads were extended. Tally marks were made. In each hourglass, a mark on a clipboard, a "plink" as one extra grain of sand percolated downwards. A helpful gold-ish label tacked to a shelf read "TERRY PR TCHETT F NS."

MY APOLOGIES. I WAS UNABLE TO FIND THE STENCIL FOR THE A.

"That's quite all right."

The view faded. Death stared at the single hourglass in his hand. There was an audible "plink." Auditors were and weren't there in an electron cloud around the hourglass. Equations were balanced, sums completed. A grain of sand went rocketing back up the spout and ricocheted off the top of the glass. "Plink. Plink. Plinkplink. Plinkplinkplink" gradually became "hiss."

YOUR FANS HAVE DECIDED, AND THERE ARE RATHER A LOT OF THEM, THAT YOU HAVE GIVEN THEM A GREAT DEAL OF ENJOYMENT. THEY DO NOT BEGRUDGE YOU THE HOURS SPENT READING YOUR BOOKS. IN FACT, MANY OF THEM REGARD THEM AS TIME...

He tapped a bony finger on the glass.

WELL SPENT.

Death paused.

THAT'S QUITE A LOT OF BOOKS AND QUITE A LOT OF HOURS.

Death cocked his skull, apparently listening.

FROM A FEW FANS WHO MET ME BUT RETURNED TO LIVE FOR A WHILE LONGER, WORD HAS SPREAD. WISHES ARE INFLUENTIAL THINGS. THE UNIVERSE IS OCCASIONALLY WILLING TO NEGOTIATE.

"They want to trade -- time?"

THERE ARE A FEW COMPLAINTS ABOUT PYRAMIDS AND HOGFATHER, I TAKE IT, BUT YOU CAN'T PLEASE ALL THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME. I SHOULD KNOW.

Pratchett was grinning broadly now.

MANY OF YOUR FANS HAVE OFFERED TO GIVE YOU ONE OF THEIR HOURS IN EXCHANGE FOR THE MANY HOURS OF ENJOYMENT YOU HAVE GIVEN EACH OF THEM. AND THERE ARE RATHER A LOT OF THEM, AS I MENTIONED.

The neck of the hourglass was spraying sand in a continuous stream. Several inches of sand were piling up. Indeed, it soon appeared that the top and bottom contained equal measures of sand.

With a popless sound the auditors suddenly had never been there. The sand in the hourglass hung unmoving.

Pratchett's brow furrowed.

"But won't I be -- you know -- just going to back get sicker and sicker? It's extremely generous, but it's no kind of life."

NO. YOUR... UMMM... FANS ARE RELATIVELY INTELLIGENT PEOPLE. THEY THOUGHT OF THAT. THEY CANNOT HEAL YOU, THEY CANNOT GIVE YOU BACK WHAT YOU HAVE LOST, BUT THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER DECLINE, AND THE DETERIORATION MAY HEAL TO SOME EXTENT. I HAD TO CALL IN A FEW... FAVORS.

Pratchett was beaming. "I can live with that!"

INDEED.

"Will you send me back now?"

YES.

Death paused.

UMMM.

"Yes?"

THERE'S JUST ONE THING.

Death paused again.

"I'm eager to get back to work, you know."

I'M SURE YOU ARE. WOULD YOU MIND... UMMM... WELL, I ALSO AM A FAN.

Death extended a quill which appeared in his fingers. The tip glittered. He lowered his scythe, laying the blade across the fuzzy blanket on Pratchett's lap.

DO YOU THINK YOU MIGHT AUTOGRAPH THIS FOR ME, PLEASE, SIR PRATCHETT?

Life Complicated

2011-01-17T15:08:00.002-05:00

Fill hot water bottle to warm feet. Put bottle on chair while use bathroom and freeze rear end. Get back from bathroom, sit on warm chair cushion, put bottle by feet. Wrapped feet and legs in blanket. Feel burning on feet. Jump up. Bottle cracked spraying boiling water on feet. Feet burned. Feet wet. Feet cold. Feel rear end wet. Rear end cold. Feel like cry. Life complicated.

The Talented Mister Assange (Warning: Adult Content)

2010-12-20T22:40:00.009-05:00

So, I've got to talk about Julian Assange and the rape allegations against him.

I've got to get some sarcasm out of the way first. Are you consenting? I'm not going to use protection in this article. You are free to stop at any time, but I'm going to keep going.

I once had a woman tell me that she kind of liked waking up to sex. In other words, she gave me "permission in advance," telling me that if I woke up and felt the urge, and could manage to get something going while she was still asleep, she thought that was hot and thought that she'd love to wake up to... well, you get the idea. This woman enjoyed sex and was not shy about that fact. She once climbed on me and initiated sex while she was still asleep. In other words, she acquaintance-raped me in her sleep. She then woke up, realized what she was doing, and started screaming and grabbed the phone to call the police to report herself. I'm lying. Of course she didn't do that. She woke up, realized what was going on, and rode me like a god-damned circus pony until we both fell back asleep in a sweaty heap. Fuck, that was hot. Excuse me. I'll be in my bunk.

Technical question: if she tells me the night before that she likes this, and I wake up before she does and manage to stick it in her while she's still asleep, and she seems to be getting into it in her sleep, but she's actually having a dream in which the two of us are having sex, and she asked me to use a condom in the dream, but the condom breaks, and she asks me to stop in her dream, but I don't stop in real life, am I guilty of real life dream rape? Or is she guilty of real dream coitus interruptus, which is a crime in Sweden? I'm just asking. They're just questions. In answer to your query, Leon, they're written down for me. It's a test designed to provoke an emotional response. Shall we continue?

Have you seen that wild movie... what's it called, Intromission? It's about multiple levels of reality. Interruptus? Intercession? Well, I'm sure it'll come to me.

What if she doesn't remember her dream the next morning and cooks me a bitchin' breakfast of deep-fried blintzes with applesauce and herring? I'm just trying to clarify things so I know what to expect during the trial.

Like, when she texted her friend and said "guess who I did last night," what she really meant to type was "HELP ME I WAS HORRIBLY ASSAULTED AND I AM A SOBBING WRECK." Or we find out that she texted "guess who got off last night but didn't seem to care that I didn't," she'll be able to bring me up on charges under the very progressive "failure to bring your partner to orgasm first" law.

Yes, I'm being flippant. Rape is an extremely serious subject. That's why I'm being so god-damned flippant at this god-damned circus.

Also, who breaks condoms? Are they using silicon abrasive carbide for lube? Are they buying expired condoms at the dollar store? They can slip off, yes, but break? You know you can blow these things up to the size of a refrigerator, right? You can stretch them down a broom handle to the bristles, and that's a real test the manufacturers do. Someone's doing it wrong, I think, and it isn't me. I mean, there's lube, right? And if it's so rough that you're going to tear the thing, perhaps a little more foreplay is in order? I need less caffeine. Maybe it had something to do with those crayfish at the party. Those claws are sharp.

But seriously. What the hell am I getting at?

There is bad faith all around in this matter. There are agendas all around in this matter. I wasn't in the room and wasn't in the heads of the people involved, but what I'm hearing makes me very unhappy. Let me just throw out a few points.

1. If your consent revolves around your faith in, or the integrity of, a piece of latex, you're not actually taking responsibility for your sexual behavior.

Lots of people would love to live in a utopia where we could all screw each other at will without risk of disease, without risk of pregnancy, and without messy things like jealousy and bad sex. When we're young and our bodies are lithe and sexy and no one has indigestion or a headache, this all seems possible. It's an illusion. You can't eliminate risk entirely. Condoms aren't magical. You should not trust your life to them. That's idiocy. If avoiding pregnancy is really of paramount importance to you, as opposed to maybe something you'd just prefer, well, you know what to do. And sleeping with International Man of Mystery there isn't it.

I'm not saying that anyone who consents to sex with a condom has then consented to sex without a condom, or consented to having the man continue after a condom breaks or slips off, or consented to getting poked in the middle of the night without one after he agreed to use one -- if in fact he did, or if it was really discussed in detail.

But condoms are not magical, and a lot of feminist critics are speaking as if the condom somehow magically enabled her consent and the consent somehow vanished when plan A didn't work out, and suddenly it became rape, and I think that's maybe a little silly.

2. Screwing two groupies who are already friends, and who are likely to compare notes, is not really advised, unless you manage to nail both of them at once.

In other words, jealousy exists. Also, revenge is a powerful motive. That ought to be self-evident.

3. Rape victims don't generally cook their assailants breakfast, throw him a party the next day, invite all their friends, and then host him for a few more days.

Or maybe they do. Who understands kids these days?

4. Decent human beings don't generally take advantage of their momentary fame to bang hot chicks.

Or, to put it another way,

5. You can't spell Assange without first spelling Ass.

He's 39. He ought to be over the wild oats stage. I admire his work, I admire his contributions to the open source community, but let's face it, he's no role model. He's Eurotrash. Usually, we get to admire our heroes for a while before we find out about their Achilles heel. In this case his rise to momentary fame and the rape allegations are emerging, in the overall scheme of things, almost simultaneously.

Which brings us to:

6. Wikileaks should consider investing in a new spokesmodel.

Seriously -- if he considers himself a journalist, he should be aware that most of the great investigative journalists and whistleblowers I admire from years past generally took at least some care not to allow themselves to become the story. I mean, the media always tries to make them the story, but it helps if you don't give anyone obvious blackmailable activities to work with, right?

And, I'm sure the slutty Assange knows this, but his slutty playmates apparently did not:

7. Attempting to rewrite your history by deleting blog entires, or tweets, or whatever, is impossible in the age of Google.

This is almost all I have to say on the matter. I'm not defending Assange per se. What he did or didn't do is almost irrelevant at this point. I suspect it did not rise to the level of what most of us would consider rape, even those of us who consider ourselves to be enlightened and feminist to one degree or another. Unsatisfying sex is not rape. Awkward sex is not rape. Confusion or miscommunication during sex is not rape. Failure to set clear guidelines is not necessarily rape. Failure to follow someone's unclear guidelines is not necessarily rape. It's what we used to consider in my wild oats days an evening to regret, especially since alcohol was involved all around, and not a way to join the media circus and get paid to do interviews. Just because a guy is what used to be called a cad, and sleeps with your best friend, that doesn't mean you were suddenly retroactively raped. When you're playing around at this, acting at 39 the way I might expect more reasonable people to get out of their systems 20 years earlier, you're playing with getting hurt. The stakes may be a lot higher, especially if you've come to believe that you're entitled to be 19 forever. Mixing slutty behavior and regret and entitlement and confidence and anger and jealousy and desire for revenge and dishonesty and hungry lawyers and bad law and bad feminist legal theory is not going to end well for anyone. Except for the media earning money on page views.

Seriously, no one looks good here. His accusers have already shown their willingness to change their stories by deleting evidence. I suspect I will never have confidence that we know what actually happened. The political and financial incentives for his accusers to lie are simply overwhelming. So all we can do is stick to our principles and watch what unfolds -- but keep these points in mind, and watch with a very, very skeptical, even jaundiced, eye.

References:

http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/02/when-it-comes-to-assange-r-pe-case-the-swedes-are-making-it-up-as-they-go-along/

http://takimag.com/article/julian_assanges_honey_trap_thats_rape_in_sweden

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B669H20101207

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Swedish_sex_allegations

Cornered, Blessed, and Stressed

2010-12-20T17:22:00.008-05:00

So, ummm. Hello. What was I talking about again?

Tomorrow is the darkest day of the year, so as usual I'm spacey, teary, and easily overloaded by just about any stimulus more stimulating than sitting quietly with one child on my lap, practicing guitar, or reading in a corner. Naturally what I get is three of them having a screaming contest, or taking turns slamming doors.

This year has seen the Potts family go through a lot of stressful transitions.

We've moved from Ann Arbor to Saginaw. We bought a huge old house with good fundamentals (a sturdy foundation and roof) but lots of issues. Expensive issues. The initial round of home improvements went far over budget, but it was one of those situations where the damage was not all visible until everything was torn out.

We were blindsided with some emergency issues we had to dump money into, in order to avoid having our homeowner's policy cancelled (and mortgage jeopardized).

I don't have a figure for our December gas and electric bill, but I'm anticipating that it will be upwards of $750. We have most of our windows and one fireplace covered in plastic sheeting but we were really late in getting everything weatherized. We're new to this. Maybe the January bill will be lower. Or maybe it won't. Anyway, it's freezing in here. We have the thermostats set at 56. I'm wearing layers and layers and fingerless gloves to keep my hands warm enough to type as I write this in my home office.

Speaking of home office, transitioning to working at home has been more difficult than I anticipated as well. In some ways it is great. In others it just feeds into my tendency to feel isolated, and the natural tendency towards isolation that comes when an introvert does programming work to begin with. Do it for enough days, and fail to leave the house in the evenings, and soon I become afraid to leave the house, almost paralyzed.

I know what major depression and anxiety and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder feel like; I've been on medications -- several of them, a whole series and litany of them, years of them, with a whole checklist of disturbing side effects -- in the past. Anxiety and depression have been pretty much my lifelong companions. A psychiatrist I worked with briefly said something that I will always remember: that in his experience, people don't actually suffer from episodes of depression (unless they are actually bipolar, I suppose). Depressives are depressive. It's just better or worse.

I know how it feels when it gets truly debilitating. I know what it's like to spend nearly entire weekends sleeping, and what few hours I spent awake, crying. I'm not there anymore, for which I am grateful. Nor am I hitting the whisky too hard; I want a glass of whisky now and then. Perhaps three nights a week, I'll have one. Perhaps one night a week, I'll have two. It takes the edge off a houseful of screaming kids and a to-do list I will die before finishing. If I start wanting one too badly I decide that I'd better not have one, and so I've managed to avoid actually "needing" a scotch. I've emptied three bottles since I moved up here the last day of May. Only three bottles.

I know what helps: quiet socializing. Writing. Playing music. Reading. Socializing. Usually it's the thing I feel least like doing. Exercising. Which I also don't feel like doing. But I've gradually learned to make myself do the things I don't want to do. Because it helps.

None of my friends have come to visit us in our new home. Actually, that's not quite true. One did, but then he decided he was angry at me because I didn't get a message that he had called, and told me I was never to speak to him again.

Grace has been going to school to get her Montessori certification. I'm happy and excited about that. It means he's gone every other weekend, but I can do the Mister Mom thing and even enjoy it, at least with Isaac's help. But what I don't enjoy is when the checks go through, especially if she wrote some that she didn't tell me about. I was blindsided this morning by $350 in checks that I had not planned for.

It's the Monday before Christmas and our bank balance is a big negative. I get paid again in a few days. I've dumped every bit of our savings into our checking account but we'll still hit our line of credit for almost the last remaining available balance. Our credit cards are in the freezer. They are both quite small as credit cards go, and we've been paying down modest balances of perhaps $2500 in total. There's a loan against my 401K. We have to finish paying off the no-interest loan on the flooring. And we have a line of credit against our checking account that has crept up to about $3,000.

There's really nothing else. So we're going to be starting 2011 without a net. I'll be suspending all retirement contributions. We don't want to take out a home equity line, not six months after moving, but if we want to get on top of some issues like a refrigerator that is failing, we may have to.

My mother-in-law's furnace broke and she was without heat. Her prescription health care policy was cancelled and she had to start rationing her heart medication while they scrambled to find some other kind of drug coverage. She had another heart attack and wound up in the hospital, and had to come home to a cold apartment. She asked us if we could help her pay for a new furnace. We couldn't. I'm expecting at some point she will also need help for this latest round of medical bills what haven't even been billed yet. They will be astronomical. I think we're already helping pay down, very slowly, some of her bills from a previous hospital visit. I don't think we'll be able to help any more than we are.

My paycheck deduction to my work-provided health care plan is going up, at the same time that they are migrating to a cheaper plan. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan announced that premiums on our old plan are going up 41%. Five years ago, when I started this job, there was no paycheck deduction; it was fully covered by my employer. Now, we will be paying more, our co-pays are going up, and fewer services will be covered. Welcome to health care reform. It sure is great that we got that bill passed. Thank God we don't have a single payer system, like all those other countries where it doesn't work.

Everything is going up, except I haven't had a cost-of-living increase or raise of any kind in five years.

Our food expenses have gone up, and we can't find decent meat that we feel comfortable feeding our children. We have to drive farther and pay more. We've been buying meat from sources we trust on our trips down to Ann Arbor. That's not really sustainable.

The school we decided was acceptable for our oldest son is 16 miles away, so we're driving an extra 64 miles a day. It now costs over $40 to fill the gas tank on the van. Between this and Grace's twice-a-week travel, we're spending at least $400 a month on gas. I could add it all up and figure it out, but I can't bring myself to do it. When we put all the basic budget numbers together, based on what seems to me to be a not-terribly-luxurious lifestyle, it's a little more than I take home.

I took the kids movies twice this fall; that felt like a luxury. Searching out eggs and meat that we feel we can safely eat does not feel like a luxury. We mostly cook at home from raw materials. When we do eat out, which is infrequently these days, it's been the Chinese buffet lunch (four kids plus dad for under $25; the teenager can put away several plates, which at least slows him down).

We've had to put Sam on a gluten-free diet. A lot of are old standby dishes (pasta salads, for example) are now verboten and we are confused a bit about that. On the plus side, the reduction in carbs has been good. I've lost at least fifteen pounds since I moved up here. On the minus side, I've replaced some of the carbs with fats. My cholesterol probably isn't up to any good.

We still have a Netflix subscription, but we never get time to watch our DVDs, so I'll be cancelling that. We could do the streaming thing, but I'm afraid of having a computer anywhere near where the kids can reach it. We don't have cable TV. We bought a small handful of DVDs on sale last month. I finally saw Star Wars Episode 3. Wow, was it ever horrible.

The DVDs feel like a luxury. Being able to give the kids a video to watch doesn't; it feels like a way to have a few minutes of sanity. We don't have cable, or want it, except for Internet, and sprung for high-speed; that's so I can keep my build servers and code checkouts with work without taking days to bring down files. So: not a luxury, but part of the cost of working from home. Which was supposed to save us money.

I have bought one or two books a month that I probably shouldn't have. I'm feeling really, really guilty about those Alastair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks hardcovers I bought a few months ago, and even the Stephen King Dark Tower paperbacks look like a bad idea from my perspective today. Especially since Joshua climbed the bookcases, pulled them down, and half-destroyed them.

We do have two cars. They are seven and fifteen years old. Is that a luxury? Having a second car is part of the cost of working from home; on a given day, I might have to drive to one of the other offices, and can't leave Grace unable to get the kids to and from school.

I have a home studio and a bunch of guitars. I'd consider selling some of them, but most of them I bought at very low prices, choosing somewhat rare instruments which have no real cash value now, in the hopes that they will eventually go for more than I paid for them. The market for used instruments is not good now. I'd wind up taking a big loss on them -- if I was able to sell them at all. It would be heartbreaking to have to sell the ones that I play regularly. I wouldn't be able to get much for them, but they have a lot of value to me. No one has any money. That's what a recession is. That's the biggest reason I was able to get most of them so cheap in the first place.

We're going to have a new baby in April or so. I'll probably have to pay quite a bit more out of pocket than I did for the previous two children. Out of the same take-home.

We had a big pile of cash on hand. We dumped almost all of it into the house. We knew it would be a money pit, and we'd thought we were pretty well-prepared. We weren't quite well-prepared enough. I guess it's a case of not quite believing it until you've experienced it.

I was saving up money to help an online friend come out from Scotland so we could collaborate on some music in person. I think we just blew that money. Maybe I can return some of it to savings and we can still make it happen somehow, but it is looking pretty doubtful.

I was saving up some money to finish putting up acoustic panels and foam in the studio room.

I was saving up some money to get the brakes fixed on the van. They aren't dangerous yet but they need some major work in early 2011.

I'm blessed in many ways; we have food on the table; we have a marvelous place to live. I have a job. I earn a good living. Or what used to be a good living. It's complicated. Inflation and increased expenses have made it barely a middle-class living, now. I don't think there is much of a middle class anymore, is there? The "social contract" that I grew up with has had most of the air let out of it, it seems. Basic things, like being able to send your child on a bus to his or her school.

Our water bill is almost $90 a month, which I think is at least four or five times what we'd be paying per month in Ann Arbor. Most of that isn't measured usage, it's the regular monthly fees.

When we were planning this, we determined that our mortgage payments plus insurance and taxes, which are all rolled together, would be less than our monthly rent in Ann Arbor. That seemed promising. We were even talking about being able to pay extra principal-only payments to get our house paid off faster. Maybe we can get there, but we're not talking about it right now. Not until we can get our burn rate way down.

I have a wonderful wife and four terrific children. We're not buying them any Christmas presents, getting a tree, or decorating the house. I spent $25 on a whole bunch of candles, and we put them in the fireplace we can't afford to buy wood for, or have inspected for safety. They are very pretty.

They burn out really, really fast.

Some friends were going to come over for dinner with their kids, and we made a bunch of fancy dishes from the food in our fridge and freezer. We were going to turn out the lights and watch the candles and let their kids play with our kids. They cancelled on us.

I have 232 friends on Facebook.

So why do I feel like such a lonely failure?

Come Visit the Dungeon

2010-06-02T17:12:00.001-04:00

Because I've been writing so many whisky reviews, and the URL "geeklikemetoo.blogspot.com" doesn't exactly inspire anyone to remember it, or associate it with whisky, I'm launching yet another blog:

The Whisky Dungeon

The name is taken from the basement of my new house, where I'm storing all this delightful nectar.

This blog, which will probably continue to be pretty low-volume, will be more focused on random personal observations. I'll leave the existing whisky reviews here, but the text of many of them will probably find its way to the new blog, where it will be revised yet again. Note that I'm using a new scoring system (basically, assigning letter grades!)

Thanks for reading and I hope you will follow the new blog!

Scotch Whisky Review: Bunnahabhain 18

2010-05-16T23:23:00.011-04:00

My regular readers, both of them, will recall that I have a soft spot (on my skull) for the whisky of the Bunnahabhain distillery on Islay. It does not seem to be one of the blockbuster big-name distilleries -- most of its output seems to go into blends -- but this distiller's whiskies are among my personal favorites, in part because their distinctiveness seems to lie in their subtlety, rather than boldness.

The Bunnahabhain 12 is an Islay whisky, and very unlike the other Islay whisky that I've tasted -- so different, in fact, that it seems to make quite a dent in the "terroir" theory. Oh, it does have some similarities -- it has a very light peat and smoke, and a light saltiness, and a slight oiliness, but the flavors tend more towards sweet nuts, toffee, and apple. I wrote: "there's a wonderful almond flavor, reminiscent of marzipan, and toasted coconut, and vanilla." With water, the saltiness in the 12 comes forward; I described it as a "Pearson's Salted Nut Roll," a regional candy which, sadly, never seems to be on the shelves here in Michigan. About the finish, I commented that "the sip fades out on a little bit of oak, but the tart apple flavor stays with you. There's just the slightest fresh pepperiness, like Nasturtium, or ground white peppercorns."

So, Bunnahabhain also offers a standard 18-year-old, which offers an interesting opportunity to do a straight-up comparison. And of course it raises the question of whether those extra six years in the cask create a whisky that is worth about double the price of the 12 (at about $100, this is a fairly expensive whisky, at least on my price scale; I don't buy $100 bottles on a whim, and have only purchased two or three at this price).

So -- the color is a little darker gold, as one would expect. On the nose: apple again, but cider, not fresh green apple juice. A little pungent alcohol burn is still there on the nose, and a bit of smoke. There's just a bit of that peaty, Listerine note -- more than there is in the 12. There's a distinct smell of Hall's honey-flavored menthol throat lozenges along with a nice vanilla custard, stewed apples, banana, perhaps a little pear, and dried tobacco. This whisky benefits from breathing a little bit -- let the poured dram sit for a few minutes, and warm the glass in your hand to bring out some of the more subtle flavors.

On the tongue this one has a syrupy texture that reminds me of Irish whisky, particularly The Tyrconnell again. It seems to have some velvety substance to it, almost like tannins in wine. It's moderately warming, with a nice heat in the back of the throat. That extra aging has really brought up the vanilla notes, but the characteristic Bunnahabhain nutty notes are still there as well; they seem fainter than in the 12. The finish is actually peaty and smoky, more so than the 12 but still light, so that you feel like you're sharing a drink with a smoker, not having a cigarette yourself. And there's something else going on in the finish -- while the Glenmorangies always seem to remind me, literally, of oranges, and the Ardbeg of lime, this one is definitely lemon -- maybe a hint of lemon oil, or candied lemon peel. It reminds me a bit of the lemon oil I use to clean my guitar fretboards. The tail end is a little bit like dark-roasted coffee grounds, and a bit like burnt toast (it seems like there always have to be at least one slightly unpleasant note, doesn't there?)

So how does this compare to the 12? Well, it's interesting. The flavors are less assertive, and more subtle. The texture I like in the 12 is damped down a bit; it's less oily, but more syrupy. The soft fruit notes are very nice. The spices and nuts are fainter. This whisky is very refined, extremely smooth, and somewhat subtle. It's a dessert drink. After drinking a lot of big, explosive Islays, it's partly a relief, and partly a disappointment -- where did all that complexity go? So your reaction to it may depend, basically, on whether you want your whisky to talk back to you, or whether you want it to quietly do your bidding. The 12 will have a conversation with your taste buds; the 18 will serve them unobtrusively.

So -- my rating. The 18 gets an extra half-point for that marvelous smoothness; I'll call it a 9.0. That's probably making just a bit too much of the relatively subtle difference between the two.

I'm happy to have had the chance to taste this one. I'm thinking of this one as a preview, to get me ready to taste the very special bottle I purchased for my upcoming wedding anniversary next year -- a bottle of Bunnahabhain distilled in 1967, the year I was born. So, honestly, which one do I prefer? I could go either way, depending on my mood on any given evening. They're both very good. If I felt a little short of money, I'd happily stick to the 12 and not feel deprived!

Scotch Whisky Review: Ardbeg Airigh Nam Biest (1990/2008)

2010-05-11T22:52:00.011-04:00

"Ari Nam Baysht," or so I'm told.

My bottle, marked 2008, is apparently from the 3rd and final year of bottling of this expression. This contains fairly old whiskies; I was expecting flavors a bit more sedate than those in the Ardbeg Uigeadail. Every time I think that I am starting to understand something about whisky -- like the way in which aging tends to affect the spirit -- I'm proven wrong! Even though this is bottled at a lower ABV than the Uigeadail (46% vs. 54.2%), the flavors are in some ways more pungent and "untamed."

On the nose, it was evident that this is bourbon cask aged, with no sherry influence that I can detect. There is some peat smoke, to be sure, but the aroma is a bit different than the Uigeadail, and I get more yeasty, bready aromas -- a bit like the barley notes in the Arran Malt 10. There are some smoked meats here, particularly bacon; I don't nose the mackerel flavors that I get from the Uigeadail, but could that be -- smoked trout?

There is a lot of lime going on here, and the quinine tonic water notes are even stronger than they are in the Uigeadail. There is some of that juniper.

On the tongue, the dram is warming, the texture is lightly oily, and the finish is quite long The lime and pepper notes are what I'd call "fizzy" -- they practically burn the tongue, not in a hot way, but in a carbonated, acidic way. (Of course I don't mean the whisky is literally carbonated!)

Overall, I am reminded of several extremely specific sets of flavors, and the correspondence is so striking that I found them odd enough to mention.

One of my favorite lunch snacks from Eastern Accents is their bacon and onion bun: it's a slightly sweet, yeast bun wrapping bacon and chopped green onions, and flavored with little else except maybe an egg wash and possibly for black pepper. The Beast reminds me very strongly of this combination -- all the notes are there, including the onion!

I like a good vodka martini, but I don't have the patience, the space, the ice, or the gear to make them the traditional way at home, but as a shortcut I keep a bottle of Ketel One vodka in the freezer, and in the refrigerator a bottle of "Martini Olives" -- pimiento-stuffed olives in vermouth. Toss a couple of these into the very cold vodka, and add a little bit of the vermouth-infused olive juice, and you have a moderately convincing slightly "dirty" martini. Again, the Beast has pretty much all these flavors -- including the pungent green notes of the olive, the saltiness, and a little spice and sweetness from the pimiento.

The third food combination that popped into my head was the classic combination allegedly craved by pregnant women -- "pickles and ice cream" -- the combination of sweet and salty. That describes the Beast pretty well.

Now, the downside: while the flavors are intriguing, there just seem seem to be some things that I dislike: a little too much sour pickle and fizzy lime oil, like lime pickle of the type used to accompany hot and spicy Indian food, but spoiled. Where the Uigeadail finishes with a long draught of wood smoke, that oily bitterness is what sticks around longest here. Grace calls it "all campfire, no marshmallow."

There's probably a specific whisky term for it, but I haven't quite come across it in tasting charts I've seen, or if I've seen it, I haven't recognized it on my tongue. So, sadly, it gets knocked down another full point, to 8.0. It's a shame, because I was so impressed with the Uigeadail. I read some reviews of the "Beast," and they comment on the complex finish. But the one I'm tasting doesn't seem to have a complex finish -- it has a complex nose, and it's complex on the palate, but that bitter note on the finish drowns out the other notes, as that lime oil lasts and lasts. Am I just missing something, or were the 2006 or 2006 "Beast" bottlings a little better?

Just yesterday I received a nice little packet of Ardbeg marketing materials in the mail; I signed up on their web site to join "The Committee." The packet is some of the best swag I've ever gotten -- very tastefully produced, classy, and also laugh-out-loud funny. I'll have to take some photos. I usually don't save things that are basically advertising, but I will definitely save this one! Ardbeg really has figured out to push the buttons of slightly obsessive nerds like me -- they haven't just released, say, a 10, 12, 15, 18, 25, etc. I could probably resist that; I'd just taste one or two of them and feel able to let it rest at that. But they've given each of their bottlings a story and made them intriguing to both collect and compare -- I'm apparently condemned to having to buy and taste their whole line! (Lord help me if I get a hankering to buy the 25-year-old Lord of the Isles...)

If you are interested in tasting the Airigh Nam Biest, you'd better find a bottle soon -- I believe it is out of production. The Corryvreckan, which is bottled at a much higher ABV of 57.1%, is alleged to be its replacement. I'm curious to taste that one, but probably not curious enough to buy it, at least not just yet.

Default Shell in FreeBSD 8.0

2010-05-11T19:07:00.006-04:00

So, I've been setting up a FreeBSD machine to function as a firewall/router. So far it has gone very smoothly and very quickly, but there has been one hiccup that drove me up a wall: the shell.

Apparently, if you use the installer to configure a user account with csh, you don't actually get csh. I found this out because I wanted command-line completion. I don't even need anything fancier than that for configuring this box, but I can't live without command-line completion -- it's ingrained in my muscle memory!

If you edit /etc/passwd to set your shell to csh, you don't actually get csh. Your environment will tell you that you are using csh, but it isn't actually csh. Therefore, adding options like "set autolist" to your .cshrc file won't do anything.

To make it work, I had to do "chsh -s /bin/csh," and I magically had command functioning again, without modifying any dot files.

I'm not accustomed to FreeBSD, but apparently this has something to do with the file etc/master.passwd which is used to generate /etc/passwd, so modifying your shell via /etc/passwd doesn't work, even if it appears to change.

Apparently, per some Google searches, I'm not the only one to find this very confusing!

Rescuing a Mac Mini G4

2010-05-04T23:32:00.005-04:00

Today's project is getting a Mac Mini G4 working again. The hard drive was apparently going bad, and while I was at it, I dismantled it as thoroughly as I could in order to clean out dust. I even washed out the fan (don't try this at home, or if you do, make sure to use very hot water and let it dry for a week before attempting to power it up).

I've had this thing for at least five years, I think, and I got it used on eBay, so it's not like it hasn't had a good run. Finding 2.5-inch IDE drives can a little tricky these days, but Newegg had a 5400 RPM 2.5" Western Digital Scorpio Blue 160 GiB for $64.99, which seemed reasonable. It's a little noisier than the original 80 GiB Seagate drive was, but I'm hoping it will settle down after a while.

Mac Mini systems are basically laptops, as far as the components they are built with and the way they are assembled, but they are a little more rugged than laptops, because they aren't usually banged around quite so much and don't have parts like screen hinges that are prone to breakage. They are put together with some of that same yellow Kapton (Polyimide) tape as laptops, so in order to reassemble the original correctly I ordered some. You can get it on Amazon from Techni-Tool -- search for "Kapton Tape." Check your desired width. Black electrical tape probably would have worked, but it is really gummy and the adhesive melts under heat, and collects a lot of dust.

Mac Mini cases are a little fiddly to disassemble and reassemble; you're supposed to use a putty knife with the edges sanded down slightly, but if you're not that concerned about scratching or gouging a bit, and I'm not at this point, given the age of this computer, you can use a flat-bladed screwdriver. I found very effective instructions here.

They are a little fiddly to work on, but despite this I really, really like Mac Mini systems. They aren't the fastest available, but they are extremely quiet. Quiet is very important to me, especially since I use computers for recording. They are also low-power; Apple calls the most recent version "the world's most energy efficient desktop computer." I don't know if that's literally true when compared to some of these very low-end tiny form-factor PCs, but at under 14 watts idle it's certainly plausible.

Anyway, I ran into one hiccup, which was that the original G4 Mac Mini install disc would not instal MacOS X on the new drive. Running Disk Utility from the install disc and formatting the disk would not help; no matter what I did, the installer said it could not install MacOS X on the selected volume.

Fortunately, it turns out that this is just a bug. It had nothing to do with the type of boot record or partition map; that version of Disk Utility doesn't let you choose GUID anyway. I just had to reboot and let the installer take another look at the driver.

The version of MacOS X that gets installed by the original install disk is 10.3.7. There are then a ton of software updates to install -- then a reboot -- then another ton of software updates to install.

Apparently my Leopard install DVD is no longer readable either on this system's drive, or on my Mac Pro's drive. I can't see any visible damage. We've had a severe problem with white humidifier dust in this apartment -- during the winter, we have to run humidifiers constantly. The particulates from these wound up clogging up basically every optical drive in the house, including our DVD player. That I was able to take apart and clean out, but I'm not too keen on having to also replace the DVD drive in the Mac Mini and Mac Pro; they have both scarcely been used. Sigh!

After that I will attempt to bring it up to Leopard, and then after _that_ I need to see if I can get some files (not the whole system, just documents) off of the time machine backup. If that works I will have a separate little box I can use specifically for scanning, which was the goal all along -- before I started having hard drive problems. I'm just grateful that I don't need to buy a whole new machine -- at least not today. I just bought a ThinkPad and built a Xeon-based server for my home office and I'm a little tapped out at this point!

Scotch Whisky Review: Ardbeg Uigeadail

2010-04-30T22:40:00.025-04:00

"Oog-a-dal." It is named for the Loch that is one of the sources of the Ardbeg Distillery's water. I've packed up most of my whisky and put it into our climate-controlled storage unit in an attempt to make some room in the apartment while we pack to move. The only ones I left out were a couple of sample-sized bottles from Glenmorangie, and the dreaded McClelland's Islay, which I left out in an attempt to convince myself to finish it before I can taste anything else. That effort isn't really working, and so today I just had to pick up something else. Stadium Market just happened to have the whole Ardbeg line in stock!

This one is a little tricky to review. Jim Murray named it World Whisky of the Year. Here's a video clip showing Murray with Rachel Barrie of Ardbeg. After an introduction like that, how can I be objective? Or honestly subjective about my own impression?

Well, I'll try. Interestingly, if I had tried this whisky a year ago, I probably would not have been quite ready to appreciate it. I needed to experience whiskies from the various distilling regions of Scotland, as well as several distilleries from Islay. I'm glad I had the opportunity this past Monday night to taste the standard Ardbeg 10, which I found very good. This allows me to put the "oogie" in perspective.

The "benchmark" Islay whisky for many folks is the Laphroaig 10. Laphroaig is highly peated, and provides a big blast of peat, with its phenolic and smoky flavors. If that is all it offered, though, the whisky would not be very good. But it also offers a very flavorful set of sweet, fruity, and malty flavors. These coexist in a way that is hard to describe, but lovely to drink. Laphroaig's notes describe the finish as coming in "alternating waves," and that's accurate -- the peaty flavors and sweet flavors literally take turns on your palate. The Laphroaig that I bought a bottle of is the Quarter Cask, which is cask strength, with a great deal of development of cask flavors.

The Ardbeg 10 is also peated, although the overall smoke and peat is not quite as pungent as the Laphroaig 10. I did not get to give it a long and full tasting in its own right, but it is warming and wonderful, with sweet and dry rich fruit notes, especially dates and prunes; the Ardbeg 10 is definitely on my short list to purchase in the near future.

The Uigeadail is, like the Talisker and Lagavulin Distiller's Editions, finished in sherry casks. After tasting those two bottlings, and comparing them to the Talisker 10 and Lagavulin 16, I would expect the Oogie to have undergone similar changes -- for the sherry to add a layer of complexity and winey notes, and for some of the more pungent notes to be damped down. But what do my eyes, nose, and tongue say?

The Oogie looks like an extra-aged expression -- the color is red-gold and extremely pretty. It forms legs very slowly, but they are well-defined. At 54.2%, this is a very high-alcohol whisky; exercise caution appropriately (I am tasting a smaller-than-normal serving).

On the nose, there is some of that phenolic Listerine aroma, smoke, and some vanilla sweetness. It is not as malty-smelling as the Laphroaig -- I'm not reminded of a sandwich cookie. There are sherry notes but they seem somehow less sweet and more dry. Overall, the effect of the sherry is fairly subtle. There is a seashore saltiness -- I'm reminded of saltine crackers, actually. There is citrus -- in the case of the oogie, it isn't orange, but lime.

One of the hallmarks of a good whisky is that the flavor evolves as you drink it, holding your interest. The oogie has a nose alone that evolves as I continue to sniff it. None of the notes on the nose are overwhelming. They blend and shift, and with the high ABV, the smell quickly begins to permeate the room.

On the tongue, the whisky is extremely warming -- hot all the way down to the belly. The texture is enormously silky and smooth, almost like unset gelatin. It is not as sweet as one might expect with the sherry cask aging -- I'm reminded of quinine in tonic water -- it somehow makes me think of a gin and tonic. That must be some aromatic compound in there that is reminiscent of juniper.

The finish is very long and there are some meaty notes -- Michael Jackson is very accurate when he says it is "like standing downwind of the barbecue while steaks are char-grilled on the beach." But there is more to it than that -- I'm also strongly reminded of a combination of fishy and salty flavors, such as the tins of smoked kippers, packed in oil, that Grace and I sometimes put on crackers. The fish notes are there, as well as the cracked pepper and fruity olive oil. It's quite an unusual and extremely flavorful note to end on.

There are just so many notes here -- a little licorice, a little pepper, a little butter. There are hints of some things a little less savory, like sweaty armpit, lighter fluid, pine solvent, charcoal, and a used ashtray. One writer noted that it is a bit like licking someone's sweaty skin, and I think that's accurate; the flavors are a bit erotic, actually. There are some spices, particularly caraway seeds. The smokiness is not a simple thing, but hides all kinds of complexity -- burning sea grass, driftwood, and pine needles. That extremely smooth texture, and light but not cloying sweetness, ensure that you will come back for another sip.

It might be a near-criminal act to water this, but let's give it just a bit and see what happens. On the nose, the citrus aromas come down a bit, and it's more prominently tobacco smoke and iodine. On the tongue, it's a little sweeter and more conventional, although it doesn't seem to lose any complexity -- all those sea flavors are still there on the finish. I get a new, definite note of hot, candied ginger. The finish does become slightly less pleasant, though -- we're left with a little more of the pine solvent flavors at the end. So -- it is more intense straight, and you should taste it that way. But if it is too hot going down, don't feel too bad about watering it just a touch. 54.2% -- almost 110 proof -- is a lot of alcohol, even more than the Knob Creek bourbon which is at 100 proof, and notably stronger than most vodkas, gins, bourbons, and whiskies, which tend to be diluted to a standard 80 proof or 40% alcohol.

So -- subjectively -- how do I like this one?

I really, really enjoy that complexity. It evolves sip by sip, and that's fascinating. In fact, if you taste it again tomorrow, or at a slightly different temperature, or having eaten a different meal first, you will probably discover something new. It's so complex that I feel like I have only really just begun to tease out flavors.

I like the maritime notes. I'm a big fan of mackerel, smoked salmon, and barbecue. But where did the sweeter notes from sherry aging go? It's a little hard to say. And where are the spices and the nuts that I love in other whiskies? Where are the floral notes? Where is the butterscotch and malt?

The answer is that they are not present in this style, or present in limited quantities. (That's not a bad thing; they would clash with the basic Islay flavors). This is probably the ultimate, or near-ultimate, Islay whisky, insofar as it embodies the terroir of Islay. (The Supernova may take this a little farther, but I haven't tasted it yet).

It is certainly one of the best whiskies I've ever tasted. But is it my absolute favorite? Actually, at the moment I prefer the Laphroaig Quarter Cask just slightly. I prefer Bunnahabhain by a nose. I'm still exploring the Lagavulin and Talisker Distiller's Editions, which also have very complex flavors to explore.

I give the Oogie a 9.5, for its phenomenal complexity and wonderfully evolving maritime flavors -- this is the highest rating I've yet given out. If you like Islay whiskies, you simply must try this one. (If you aren't already an Islay fan, this is not a good one to start with; try Bunnahabhain 12 or Caol Ila 12). But despite the fact that I really appreciate that complexity, it is not quite my personal favorite. But then again, I've only been tasting Islay whiskies for a few months, and my tastes are still evolving. There is so much more out there to taste. Check back in a year!

Music Review: BT: These Hopeful Machines

2010-04-30T13:40:00.005-04:00

People write reviews for many reasons. Sometimes they've got a bone to pick; sometimes they want to share a particular discovery. The best criticism, in my opinion, usually stems from a desire to share something the critic has discovered, and the best critical reviews often are interesting to read because provide some insight into the work discussed, the genre, and the mind of the critic too.

So, with that in mind, I can't claim that I'll succeed at this game, but I'd like to point you at BT's newest album of electronic music, _These Hopeful Machines_, and tell you why I think it's fantastic.

Back in 2000 I was an amateur DJ, and co-hosted some great parties at which a lot of guests made us very happy by dancing and celebrating some great music and a great time. Things kind of crashed after the tech bubble collapse and I think there has been a bit of a hangover in dance and electronica that has lasted for the better part of a decade. That isn't to say that nothing great has been recorded, and no one is dancing, but that's how it has felt to me.

BT's newest represents to me the culmination of many strands of influence, many of which date back to 2000 and before. The styles of many other electronica producers are evident. One that keeps coming back to me is Aphex Twin, aka Richard James, particularly sounds of the "Come to Daddy" and "Windowlicker" era. I also hear Squarepusher and Autechre all over the place in the polyrhythmic, glitchy, bursty electro sounds BT uses. In BT's hands, though, they are not aggressive and scary, but upbeat, nostalgic and soothing. The synthesizer swells and gorgeously layered vocals remind me of another highly regarded producer, William Orbit.

One of the difficulties with electronic music has been its tendency to be ghettoized into sub-genres and sub-sub-genres: house, hard house, electro, downtempo, and ambient. These styles have partisan fans and followers, but with the exception of some crossover artists, not much airplay and not much audience outside of clubbing fans. This album changes that. This is the one that blends and mixes the genres -- showing an impressive array of influence -- and brings it all home with a large and tasty dose of slightly vacuous but hugely enjoyable bubblegum pop. It even gets a little dark and occasionally moving and touching -- like the artier bits of Madonna's _Ray of Light_ (produced by William Orbit). Several of the tracks will very likely get pop radio airplay, although like most people my age, I left commercial radio behind in disgust at least fifteen years ago, so I doubt that I'll hear them.

BT seems to produce music primarily out of his home studio, and he's famed for his in-depth and inventive approach to editing (his "stutter edit" and his use of granular synthesis). These techniques feature prominently in this album, but as a listener I don't feel abused by them. Because BT is not just good at this kind of editing, but he's also incredible at EQ and mixing. The attention to detail evident on every part on every track is astounding. If there's a vocal glitch or mouth sound, or a little buzz on an acoustic guitar, you can bet that BT wanted it that way and compressed and EQ'ed and reverb'ed it just to bring out the precisely desired effect. He's an absolute lunatic and a control freak, but I mean that in the best possible way. As an amateur producer myself, I can hear the degree of effort that went into it, and it is nothing less than astonishing.

If I tell you that this album is not truly innovative, would you think that I mean something negative by that? I don't. It's the culmination of influence, and crosses and remixes genres joyously. It doesn't break new ground, but it doesn't need to. It's a beautiful thing. I haven't heard anything this good in a long, long time.

Kilchoman is Still Not the Newest Distillery!

2010-04-27T19:06:00.003-04:00

The Abhainn Dearg site says "It has been nearly one hundred and seventy years since the last legal bottle of whisky was produced in the Outer Hebrides." Wow! I think they distilled their first spirit in 2009, and because it is so new, none of it can legally be called "whisky" yet. They are apparently selling some of this "new make," briefly aged in sherry casks, as "The Spirit of Lewis," but it is not available outside Europe or the U.K. yet.

Arran is Not the Newest!

2010-04-27T00:42:00.011-04:00

I was wrong -- apparently Kilchoman is a newer distillery than Isle of Arran Distillery, having started distilling Islay whisky in 2005!

Apparently they've already released some 3-year-old. It appears I may have missed the possibility of getting my hands on a bottle of their very first release; apparently it was not sold in the U.S. A bottle of their second release in Fall of 2009 is available on eBay, but at $150, I'm probably going to have to let that one go by. There does seem to be a Spring 2010 3rd release -- but is anyone importing it? The distillery itself does not list an American distributor. The Whisky Vault wants 48.95 pounds sterling to deliver a bottle to the US -- that's more than the whisky itself, which is 48 pounds!

There is apparently also some "new spirt" available -- although that may be more a novelty or collector's item than something to sip and enjoy.

Why didn't anyone tell me? It's the first new distillery on Islay in 125 years. I am eagerly awaiting a taste!

Stadium Market Spring 2010 Scotch Tasting

2010-04-26T23:30:00.009-04:00

Tonight Grace and I, along with my former College of Wooster classmate Ken, who is also the podcaster known as the Wandering Knight, attended the Stadium Market Spring 2010 Scotch Tasting, hosted at Bab's Underground Lounge. For $20 each we got a buffet of appetizers, including shrimp, sushi, miniature croissant sandwiches, stuffed mushrooms, deviled eggs, cheeses, a platter of fruit, and other dainties -- and a huge variety of beverages to taste!

There was a structured slideshow and tasting, led by a Master of Whisky from Diageo (I finally heard this pronounced: I think it's "Dee-AH-zhee-oh"). Diageo is the company that now apparently owns a wide variety of distilleries, which now fall under the "Classic Malt" designation. We got to taste peated and unpeated barley, and examine chunks of peat and barrel wood. We got to rub and smell (but not taste) some very bready, malty, yeasty "new make spirit," or un-aged whisky, at 126 proof.

The whiskies that were part of the guided tasting were the Glenkinchie 12, Dalwhinnie 15, Singleton of Glendullan 12, Oban 14, Lagavulin 16, and Crown Royal Black. (One of these things is not like the other, but they are all owned by the same company now.) I had tasted several of these -- the Singleton is a great bargain and I own a bottle. The Lagavulin 16 is an iconic Islay whisky.

The Glenkinchie is a young and dry whisky, hot and peppery with a little malt, citrus, and vanilla, and no peat. It is pretty good stuff, but a little too sweet and hot for my taste. Ken noted that this one mellows out considerably with a little water.

I've had Dalwhinnie before, but not for many years -- the floral notes are very nice, but again, it is not my preferred style.

The Oban, which I had never tasted, was very good, with a cluster of fresh stone fruit notes. Grace enjoyed the Oban as well. (We've recently been debating what constitutes masculine and feminine whisky -- that is, which ones apparently appeal more to the different genders and why. We haven't gotten it all figured out yet, but the Oban 14 is a little on the feminine side).

The Crown Royal Black was interesting enough to get a paragraph to itself. It is aged in charred barrels, and the result was very unusual -- an extremely sweet nose, with a very notable aroma of black licorice, and some fruits I've never tasted in a whisky before, particularly rasberry. It was sweet and extremely smooth. It was too sweet for my taste, but that maturation regimen seems interesting and I'd be curious to see what else could be done with it.

In addition to the drinks that were part of the guided tasting, Stadium Market had a number of others on hand: The Macallan 12, Fine Oak 10, and Fine Oak 15; The Glenlivet 12, Nadurra 16, and 18; Laphroaig 10; Ardbeg 10; Highland Park 12, 15, and 18; and a rum called Ron Zacapa. There were a few others available. I decided that after having tasted so many already, I could not do justice to fairly comparing the nuances of the different bottlings The Glenlivet and The Macallan, so I skipped those and focused on tasting just a few more. I'd love to give them a try sometime -- it would be especially nice if those distilleries had sample-size gift sets available, like the Glenmorangie collection and The Balvenie collection.

We already own a bottle of Highland Park 18, which I have previously reviewed. The 12 and 15 were very interesting in that context. Grace and I both agreed that we prefer the 15, just as I prefer the 15-year-old Glenfiddich. The 15 is very nice -- a little more buttery and bready than the 18, with light smoke and peat, and some distinct dried fruit flavors (prunes, raisins, figs). The 18 has these same flavors, for the most part, but by comparison they seem a bit muted and indistinct. The 12 was a little hotter and more sugary, with light honey notes, and while good, just couldn't quite compare. So, when we finish up the 18, we will probably buy a bottle of Highland Park 15. It was a good illustration of the way in which age and price don't necessarily produce a result you will automatically prefer.

I also took my first taste of Ardbeg (the 10), and found it to be very good stuff -- not quite as pungent as Laphroaig, but very well-balanced, with very appealing sweet flavors offset by the smoke. It answered the question I had in the back of my mind about Ardbeg, which was "is it different enough than Laphroaig to justify buying a separate bottle?" The answer is that if you are an Islay fan, yes, it definitely is. Although the Lagavulin, Caol Ila, Laphroaig, and Ardbeg all seem to me to cluster fairly tightly together, while the Bunnahabhain is more notably different in character. The Bunnahabhain is still my favorite Islay, perhaps largely for sentimental reasons. I'm not sure which of that "cluster" of Islay distilleries I prefer, although the Ardbeg 10 is now a serious competitor. I will have to taste it again, and write it up more formally, very soon!

I decided that in order to avoid exceeding my alcohol limit, I would skip the Bulleit bourbon, although I was tempted by the wonderfully rich color. I also skipped the Bushmills 10, a peated Irish whisky, although I was also curious about that. I did taste the Ron Zacapa rum, which I found to be unlike any rum I've ever tasted -- wonderfully smooth and sweet, with buttery caramel flavors. It would be a crime to use it as a mixer. I have a friend who I think might enjoy it, so I'll have to recommend it to him. I think for now I'll stick primarily to scotch, though. If I start sampling bourbons, rums, tequilas, where would it end? (Bankruptcy, possibly, and maybe rehab...)

Thanks to the Stadium Market and Bab's Underground Lounge crew for putting on such a great event. I look forward to the next one!

Two Special Malts: Arran Malt 10 and Lagavulin Distiller's Edition (1993/2009)

2010-04-22T22:20:00.015-04:00

I'm not going to formally review these tonight or give them numbers, but I wanted to type up a few notes on a couple of special bottles I picked up today. We are closing on a house tomorrow. I will probably shortly have to put a moratorium on any new whisky purchases, or at least drastically curtail them. I'm going to have to put my dollars towards things like a new furnace. Fortunately, though, I go through these bottles very slowly, and so the bottles already on hand could probably last me upwards of a year!

The Lagavulin 16 was the whisky that inspired me to start writing reviews. My original review's permalink is here. I was pretty new to Islay whisky, and my palate was fascinated, but also a little bit overwhelmed, by the amazing "peat bomb" that is the Lagavulin 16 -- it is even smokier and richer than the Laphroaig Quarter Cask, and so occupies a position by itself on the Classic Malts flavor map.

Because I enjoyed the Talisker Distiller's Edition so much, I was very eager to taste the Lagavulin version. I did not pour myself a full dram, but just a few sips to taste and nose. The buzz is that it is 16-year-old Lagavulin, given a little extra aging in Pedro Ximenez sherry casks (sadly, I don't know very much about sherry, but I do know that the types of sherry vary a great deal: I've had Amontillado as a very nice dessert wine; we use Marsala, another fortified wine, for making Spanish Torta crusts; and I used a Manzanilla in my French Onion Soup, but it tastes pretty nasty by itself. According to Wikipedia, Pedro Ximenez is a dark and "intensely sweet" dessert wine).

The color of the finished whisky is quite dark, and it has a very waxy cling to the glass, leaving a sort of ridge, with hardly any noticeable legs.

Unlike some other sherry-finished malts, this one does not remind me of maple or honey; it is not extremely sweet. The notes are more of dried fruits, such as raisins and apricots and even papaya, fig newton cookies, and blood oranges. It also has perhaps the faintest hint of sulfur. The flavor is very rich, and has a bit of mellowing biscuit maltiness that is very pleasant.

It seems to me that a lot of those big, beautiful Lagavulin medicinal and seashore notes have been muted more than I would have expected, so at least initially I am just a bit disappointed. I'd be a little frightened of the prospect of a cask-strength standard Lagavulin 16, but maybe a cast-strength version of this one would be more exciting in the mouth?

I'll do a fuller review in the near future, but for the moment I will just say that the complexity and richness here is amazing, and I am especially impressed by the finish; five minutes after finishing my last sip, I'm still tasting kumquat peels, a dry lingering driftwood smoke, tamarind, and peppered beef jerky. In fact, my impression of this whisky keeps going up as I experience the finish, and sniff the empty glass!

And now for something completely different -- ever since reading about Arran Malt in Jim Murray's Whisky Bible, I've been looking forward to tasting something from the young upstart, the Isle of Arran Distillery. Stadium Market had only one bottle from this distillery, stashed up on their top shelf, and the box was very dusty, which tells me that this one is not selling like hotcakes.

Arran Malt 10 is entirely unpeated, and as a result on the nose it immediately reminds me of an Irish whisky, such as the Knappogue Castle. This one is very different, and so my nose is initially a little confounded, and I find myself thinking "wow, that smells good, and vaguely familiar -- but what is it?" So far I've got: nilla wafers, toasted coconut, lemon peel, honey, cinnamon-topped sweet bread pudding and something like creamy peanut butter fudge. (Really? yes, really!)

In the glass the Arran Malt 10 is a beautiful, rich gold, and has short legs. On the tongue the flavor startled me -- remember that peanut butter fudge? It's hot and lemony in the back of the throat, but on the front of the tongue there's a whole complex set of raw or lightly cooked barley flavors -- like steel-cut oats, couscous, buckwheat (kasha), and cracked bulghur wheat. (These seem to be what produces that nutty nose). These barley flavors are not unique, but in most other distiller's bottlings they seem to be very faint, and they lean more towards malted, baked flavors: sweet shortbread or wholemeal digestives. This difference may have something to do with the distiller using a wide "cut" -- that is, using more of the original distillate, and the lack of chill filtering. At 46% ABV it is a fairly hot whisky, and my wife Grace finds it a little bit unpleasantly raw in the throat, but yet those barley flavors are so smooth. It wouldn't be a crime to cut this one with a little water.

This is very good stuff. The Isle of Arran Distillery is producing a number of special finishes, but the 10 is proof that you don't need a long aging and fancy woods to get very fine flavor out of barley and water!

Stadium Market Scotch Tasting FYI

2010-04-21T13:42:00.004-04:00

(Click for a larger image)

Grace and I will be there -- and plan to get a cab home! Stadium Market is my scotch whisky pusher. I'm itching to pick up a bottle of the new Lagavulin Distiller's Edition, and maybe an Arran, and maybe a Balvenie Portwood 21... but these all cost money, some of them quite a bit of it, and I go through these bottles so slowly that I'm going to need to have a tasting party of my own to clear out some room first!

Just a reminder that our *Spring Scotch Tasting* will take place ONE WEEK FROM TONIGHT (Monday, April 26) at *Bab's Underground Lounge *from *7-9pm*.

Over a dozen scotches from 4 different regions

4 special bottles from Diageo including a NEW CROWN ROYAL

A seminar hosted by a Master of Whisky

Appetizers from our kitchen

Discussions with Brand Managers, our staff, and each other

Tickets are on sale at Stadium Market for $20.

Bab's is located on 213 S. Ashley, across from the Home and Garden Center downtown. There are parking lots in blocks adjacent to it.

Any questions, comments, or concerns do not hesitate to contact us. And please, if you know anybody who might be interested, do not hesitate to forward this email.

See you soon!

Stadium Market
1423 E. Stadium Blvd.
Ann Arbor, Mi, 48104
734.761.9650

The WikiLeaks Video

2010-04-06T11:03:00.022-04:00

The eagerness of the Apache helicopter crew to open fire is clear, and disturbing. But the contention that the journalists were with a group of non-combatant civilians may be incorrect. Take a look at this animated GIF:

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Is that a camera? It doesn't look like a camera to me. I suppose it could be a tripod, but I think there is reasonable suspcion that it may be an RPG launcher. WikiLeaks has claimed on their resources page that a a camera was mistaken for an RPG launcher, and they've got a photo of said camera:

But even with a long lens, it doesn't look nearly as long as the the 3-foot to 4-foot thing in the picture.

I got this from a comment in this thread on hotair.com.

Note the characteristic diamond-shaped head that seems like a pretty close match to an RPG: RPG (Wikipedia Entry)

I'd also expect a tripod to swing a little differently, with most of the weight in the head, not the legs.

Here's another image:

It looks a lot like one of these (again, from WikiLeaks), doesn't it?

Notice the position of the strap, and thus the way it would swing if you were walking around with it hanging from your hand.

These seem to be from the original video at right around 3 minutes 40 seconds.

Here's a full-frame still (click to magnify).

Do you see an RPG, or not?

Here is a series of photos arguing that there was an RPG, and that the American convoy on the scene was at risk from it.

Here is an argument that it wasn't an RPG.

What do you think? It's a bit of a Rorschach test, isn't it?

Reports from the aftermath seem to claim that at least one RPG was found at the scene. But they do not seem to be from an independent source, and given the military's history of withholding information, and allegations of planting weapons at scenes like this, I'd like to see independent verification.

If the group was carrying at least one loaded RPG launcher, then we still have a tragedy, but the scenario looks a little different. An RPG is not a defensive weapon. A man carrying one wouldn't be a bodyguard to a journalist; he'd likely be an insurgent. The judgment of the journalists in choosing to "embed" with armed insurgents may legitimately be questioned. Ground troops in the area reported coming under RPG fire, and while the Apache helicopter was much too far away to be at risk from an RPG launcher, it was on the scene to support the ground troops.

I have not seen any evidence that I feel can justify the later shooting of the van, however.

Scotch Whisky Review: Highland Park 18

2010-03-31T21:40:00.008-04:00

Highland Park is an icon among distilleries and frequently wins awards. They cut their own peat, and apparently mix in heather, which might account for the honey notes. Where Bunnahabhain holds a special place in my heart for its particular style of oily, nutty, mildly peaty flavors, Highland Park's bottlings are my wife's personal favorites.

In the glass this dram is quite dark and reddish, an attractive jewel-like amber color. The texture is oily.

On the nose, there are some peaty phenols, a damped-down Listerine flavor, blended with muted vanilla and toffee, but not overwhelming caramel, and a very light toasted bread -- it isn't very malty. The chocolate in this one is a light milk chocolate. There's a complex set of floral notes that I'm not sure I can fully unpack: rose, lavender, carnation? Warm the glass and there are some intriguing fruits: pear, banana, raisin. Nutty notes: almond. There's a light honey, or maybe golden syrup? Spices: nutmeg, cinnamon.

On the tongue, the immediate impressions are creamy sweetness and a full-bodied smokiness. The fruits and nuts and flowers maintain a wonderful balance. The whisky is warm, but extremely smooth. The mouth feel reminds me of the wonderful smoothness of The Tyrconnell. This finish is long and the sweetness and smoke remain wonderfully matched, with neither predominating.

Whisky writers have a tendency to gush about this whisky, and can't disagree with them. It's extremely fine stuff! And yet, I can't help but feel that the flavors and aromas are all just slightly damped-down -- perhaps the aging has taken a little too much off the "edge" of this whisky? Or perhaps it just covers too many bases? Therefore, I rate it a 9, not 9.5. After exploring a lot of Islay bottlings, and some younger beverages, I seem to have developed a tasted for slightly rougher, odder stuff. So while I would certainly never pass it up, my quest to find the ultimate malt for my own personal tastes continues.

Scotch Whisky Review: Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban

2010-03-30T22:14:00.009-04:00

The Quinta Ruban is an "expression" of Glenmorangie, given a little extra aging in casks that formerly held ruby port.

In the glass, the color is a little ruddy, a little tawny -- a bit darker red and brown than the standard Glenmorangie 12. The legs are short and it has a slightly waxy appearance.

The nose suggests immediately that this is an after-dinner drink: the usual Glenmorangie vanilla sandwich cookie and candied orange peel aromas are supplemented by a very rich blast of port wine smells, redolent of dark chocolate and peppermint, and a little bit of smooth tobacco smoke to cut the sweetness. There are a few other notes: cinnamon, candied fruits, and dark rum. A reviewer notes "maraschino cherries" and I think that flavor description is definitely applicable.

On the tongue, the texture is tannic and dry. There's an immediate hit of something tart, like green apple, and as the fruits roll through and the malt and chocolate notes linger the, subtle smokiness hangs on, so that the long finish is bittersweet chocolate and dark, almost bitter, burnt toast, yielding a net effect something like having just sucked up the last strawful of a hot fudge malt milkshake and following up the milkshake with a cigarette. (Yes, if you hadn't guessed, I'd advocate drinking this as a dessert drink, although I don't find that sweetness to be overly cloying). That slight oily/waxy quality also lingers, and is not entirely pleasant, but it isn't a deal-breaker by any means.

Overall, this whisky gets extra points for the very well-balanced blend of bourbon oak and ruby port oak flavors. The flavors seem slightly muted, and it pales a little bit in comparison to The Balvenie PortWood 21, but those dark chocolate and malt flavors together are really delicious, and at $40-$50 it costs a fraction of what the PortWood 21 costs. It would be a good introduction to the "extra matured" expressions; if you have the Original (12 year), the Quinta Ruban (Port), the Nectar D'or (Sauternes), and the La Santa (Sherry), even in sample size, you've pretty much got the material for a nice little tasting party all centered around one distillery.

I give this one an 8.0. Maybe at some point I'll get to taste the 18 and 25!

Scotch Whisky Review: Talisker Distiller's Edition 1998

2010-03-25T22:19:00.008-04:00

This one has been kicking around the kitchen for a month or so -- I've tasted it a couple of times, but didn't get around to reviewing it. It's about time!

The Distiller's Edition is finished in an Amoroso Sherry cask. I previously reviewed a standard 10-year-old Talisker here. That Talisker I didn't review very highly -- I gave it only a 7.5. Let's see how it compares to this special (and considerably more expensive) Distiller's Edition. This one was distilled in 1998, and bottled in 2009, making it (roughly) an 11-year-old whisky.

In the glass this is a rich orange-straw in color, with a bit of that oily cling and short legs. The nose is big, robust, and complex: dried orange peel, potpourri, wood smoke, that Talisker iodine, a lot of vanilla-inflected oak, and some dried fruit notes, like dates.

In the mouth the texture is soft and very lush -- not oily but velvety, reminding me a bit of a red wine with soft tannins. The heat is thrilling but not overhwelming. On the tongue this whisky is spicy, with pepper, cloves, and nutmeg, and is, intriguingly, both dry and quite sweet simultaneously. The extra sweetness seems to have come from the sherry, and is reminiscent of maple or brown sugar. There are some wonderful rich cocoa notes, hazelnuts, and a hint of spearmint. The nutty elements remind me just a bit of Bunnahabhain, one of my favorites. The smoke and peat remain in the background, deepening the flavor, while the sweeter flavors are up front. It's a very appealing and rich combination. This is seriously good stuff!

With water, the cocoa comes forward a bit, and the sherry notes become slightly more prominent, reminding me of apricot jam on toasted bread. That fantastic tannic texture is still present. Personally I like it better neat; it's not meant to be drunk quickly. But if you find the heat and sweetness too strong, try it with a little water.

This is 9.0 material -- highly recommended. And it's "more-ish" -- this bottle will not last us long!

Scotch Whisky Review: McClelland's Single Malt Islay

2010-03-24T22:11:00.020-04:00

Tonight's dram is another of the McClelland's lineup of budget-priced malts -- this time, the Islay version. This leaves only the Lowland version to taste.

In the glass, this is a dark orange-gold, and clearly young -- the legs are short and brisk, but it lacks that oily, waxy texture.

On the nose, there is a goodly blast of peat smoke -- very medicinal, like Listerine, and just a little bit of sweet vanilla and malt, with a little iodine and salt -- it is hard to detect much else. The McClelland's site says "citrus," and I guess I can conjure a little orange peel.

In the mouth it is more promising. There's an initial caramel, maple (that is, Sherry-like) sweetness, with a little vanilla and honey. It's drying, but not exceedingly hot, with a lingering phenolic finish. The finish doesn't have the complexity and the "waves" of sweetness and peat that Laphroaig or Lagavulin has. It is pleasant, but doesn't really tantalize the tongue. It makes me crave a Caol Ila 12. There is something just slightly off-putting in the finish -- an undertone of bitterness, maybe, like a 90% dark chocolate -- that does not harmonize, and is not enjoyable. A reviewer I found called it "astringent," "green," and "raw." Another called it "grappa," and although I like grappa, a scotch whisky should not be reminiscent of a pungent liquor made of grape skins. My wife made similar comments -- that it tastes too much like moonshine.

With a little water, it sweetens slightly -- the smoke flavors become a little bit more subtle, and the vanilla (from oak aging) becomes more predominant. I'd say it is a little better wet, although not dramatically so.

It appears I may have mistakenly thought that the McClelland's Speyside was a 5-year old Bowmore. It seems that this one may be the Bowmore. The word is that the 8-year-old Bowmore "Legend" is better. Maybe I'll get the chance to compare them at some point.

Overall, where the Speyside was intriguing and complex, this one is too basic to really qualify as excellent. A few more years in the cask would probably make a world of difference. I rate this one only a 6, which is the lowest rating I've given out so far. As my wife says "there are things I like about it, but the things I like the most about scotch whisky aren't in it."

We're both unenthusiastic about finishing our glasses. This is the first whisky where I've actually poured the last of my glass into the sink, and so I can't really recommend it, even at the budget price point. Grace is going to try to figure out if it will work to soak some kind of cake. It's also the first single malt scotch I'd be willing to mix into a cocktail (McClelland's provides a recipe for a drink they call an Islay Smokestack that sounds tasty). I'd review that but we are missing some of the ingredients. Perhaps another time!

UPDATE: having tasted this a couple more times, I'm removing my rating altogether and just putting it in the category of "Avoid." Although the initial nose and flavor is still pleasant, that bitter, metallic after-taste follows you around, like chewing on foil, and it actually upsets my stomach. It almost seems similar to Pine Mouth. I'd almost believe that this was contaminated with something, but a more likely explanation is just that too much of the "tail" from the still was used and it contains some of the nasty compounds known as Fusel Alcohols.

Beating the High Price of Scotch Whisky, Part 2: Bargain Bottlings

2010-03-11T23:57:00.002-05:00

In a previous post I talked about using sample sets to give yourself an opportunity to taste a variety of whiskies, and train your palate, without having to lay out a huge amount of cash.

But let's say you want to buy a few bottles to keep on hand. Bottles don't have to be hugely expensive to be quite good! I'd like to be able to buy a bottle of The Balvenie PortWood 21, but they go for about $150. I'll do it at some point, but meanwhile, you could buy bottles of all of these for less than that one bottle:

1. Glenfiddich 15 is a very round, well-balanced, and enticing, "more-ish" dram that should appeal to both novices and more advanced tasters who just want something that isn't a peat or spice bomb. Its primary notes are butterscotch and citrus, and it has a great mouth feel and long, appealing finish.

2. McLelland's Single Malt Speyside is a great malt as well, with a number of fruity, creamy notes, like banana and dried fruit, on top of mint, menthol, dark chocolate, and pine -- very light and elegant, more like an Irish whiskey than a Scotch whisky in some ways! (You might try the McLelland's Highland while you're at it, although I rated the Speyside slightly higher).

3. The Tyrconnell, which is an Irish whisky, can be had at nice low price as well. This one is really intriguing, with flavors of shortbread, lime, green apple, and American cheese. It has an amazingly pleasing mouth feel as well.

4. The Singleton of Glendullan goes here for about $36, and it's a well-balanced dram with a lot going on, so I'll include it -- you'll find nice notes of orange, honey, vanilla, sandalwood, and dried fruits.

5. Finally, I enjoyed the Glenfiddich 12 quite a bit, although I did not find it quite as appealing as the 15. It's got butter pecan ice cream going on, and baked apples, as well as interesting floral notes that remind me of baclava made with rosewater.

Scotch Whisky Review: Glenfiddich 15

2010-03-11T23:14:00.003-05:00

I've been meaning to finish this one for some time -- I have only half the sample-sized bottle of Glenfiddich 15 left, so I'd better review it before it is gone!

If you have been reading my reviews, you know that I enjoyed the flavor of the Glenfiddich 12 quite a bit, while I found the 18 to be disappointing. I had hoped that I might find the 15 to be just right. Let's see how it fits between the two.

In the glass, the color is very pretty -- a somewhat unusual orange-gold, with a hint of dried clover green. It clings well, with luxurious legs.

So what's on the nose? Right off the bat, there is a potent butterscotch aroma, taking me back to hard candies at my grandmother's house. There are some nice toasted nut aromas, particularly candied pecans. There's a definite toasted coconut note, and marzipan. It's got some peaty phenols in the background, too, that definite Listerine antiseptic note, and some pine forest. Perhaps a little dark chocolate and marshmallow, like a pinwheel mashmallow cookie? Give this one some time to warm and evolve -- there's a lot going on in the nose!

On the tongue, it is quite syrupy; the dry sweetness and butterscotch notes are very pronounced. It is hot and drying, like a brandy, but gently so. There's a little salt and smoke; there's a little bit of lemon, but it's in the background, like lemon oil. There's a bit of cinammon. The finish is quite long, with evidence of all kinds of nuts; I taste those pecans, but also hazelnuts and Brazil nuts. The up front butterscotch is quite different and quite distinctive. The lack of fruit and floral aromas is also distinctive -- I wouldn't use either "honey" or "heather" to describe this whisky. Maybe "treacle," but not maple.

I'm told that the 15-year-old is matured using an unusual scheme in which whisky from 3 different types of casks are used: ex-bourbon, ex-sherry, and new oak. The blend is then aged in a vat made of pine! I'm surprised that I can't taste the sherry much -- I've found whiskies aged in ex-sherry casks to be quite distinctive, sometimes losing some of the other whisky characteristics as they absorb that sweetish, maple sherry note. I usually equate young oak with vanilla, as in a young Glenmorangie, but in this whisky the vanilla is very light. There is a little of that oaky dryness though, and this scheme explains that pine forest note that is always there.

Overall, this is a wonderfully complex balance of flavors. It's sweet, but never cloying; dry, but not burning; peaty, but not overwhelming. The long, buttery, lemony finish is very enjoyable. It would make an excellent dessert drink. I rate it a 9.0 and will probably buy myself a bottle to share with friends.

Scotch Whisky Review: McClelland's Single Malt Highland

2010-03-10T16:53:00.010-05:00

My subject for today's review is another in the McLelland's series of low-priced bottlings (here in Michigan, it goes for under $25 a bottle).

These whiskies are blends that don't list a distillery and don't have an age statement, but as soon as I nosed this one I realized that it had a familiar aroma. After a sip, I'd almost bet cash money that it contains a very young Glenmorangie. Speculation is rampant online; some have suggested that it may be a 5-year-old Glen Garioch. Since I've never tasted a Glen Garioch, I can't comment, but I'll keep an eye out for a bottle in order to compare the two.

It's got a whiff of peat smoke on the initial nose, an attractive light amber color and a very round and slightly oily mouth feel. On the tongue, there's that nice sweet cookie note, some fresh apple (a crisp, sweet, soft champagne-like Braeburn, Gala, or Pink Lady), some banana, and an unusual, hot, spicy cinnamon flavor that reminds me of cinnamon toast. That note is a little odd but still quite delicious. I'm curious where it came from!

There are some nice nuts in the background, particularly hazelnut. This whisky is hasn't developed a lot of the more complex oxidized flavors that sometimes show up in older whiskies, like dried fruits, leather, tobacco, or dates. It doesn't seem to have been aged in anything else other than the usual bourbon cask.

The finish is long and satisfying and this whisky is "more-ish" -- I just finished a small taste and I'm going to refill my glass.

Because it is relatively light, I don't recommend watering this one. A little water actually brings down the fruit notes, makes it taste much hotter on the tongue, and brings that cinnamon flavor forward so much that it is like drinking an atomic fireball candy; it isn't very enjoyable that way.

It doesn't have the weight and complexity of some of the heavy-duty bottlings, but this is a tremendous bargain, and would make a very good introduction to scotch whisky in general for a newcomer. I'd give it an 8.5, but that intense cinnamon when watered is overpowering, so I'll knock it down half a point to 8.0.

Scotch Whisky Review: The Balvenie DoubleWood 12

2010-02-21T22:36:00.007-05:00

The Balvenie PortWood 21 is one of my absolute favorite scotch whiskies, so I had high hopes for this much less expensive bottling. Unfortunately it did not live up to them; it's certainly not bad, but it just doesn't have a lot of virtues. I noted some cigar magazines and blogs that reviewed it favorably and pointed out that it would go very well with certain cigars. I don't doubt that, but on its own it just isn't exciting.

This whisky is aged in the usual ex-bourbon cask. I couldn't find details on The Balvenie site, but some reviews I came across claim that it spends ten years in the ex-bourbon cask and then another two years in a Oloroso sherry casks. In the glass, it has a slightly dark maple syrup or burnt orange hue. It clings well, with short legs.

To evaluate the nose, I tried for some minutes to snort up anything really complex or subtle, but there wasn't a lot there. There is some oak, possibly a hint of cedar chest, the usual malt and vanilla, a little bit of tobacco smoke, and maybe a very faint lemon peel or fresh fruit note; I was reminded just a little bit, oddly, of blueberries.

In the mouth, there is a big wave of sherry flavors; it is reminiscent of maple, and of tawny port. It's quite sweet, with a long, warm, drying finish. I prefer this one with a little water; it takes down some of the sweetness. But on the whole, this one just isn't impressive enough to really savor. I'm sure I could find a really blockbuster tawny port for the same price that would be much more complex and flavorful. So, this one only gets a 7.0, not because it has any particular vices, but because it lacks virtues.

Skimming some online reviews, I seem to be out of the mainstream in my rating of this one; other reviewers mention "walnuts" and "honeysuckle" which I could be convinced of, various flowers and spices (which I can't find at all). It's enough to make me wonder if we're really tasting the same whisky!

Scotch Whisky Review: McCelland's Single Malt Speyside

2010-02-08T01:44:00.012-05:00

So, tonight I'm tasting a single malt scotch that differs considerably from most of the single malts I've recently tasted. McClelland's apparently bottles a range of single malts representing regions: Lowland, Islay, Highland, and Speyside. It is also unusual in that it has no age statement, and goes here in Michigan for under $25 a bottle. That makes it a phenomenal deal in a field of beverages where the more famous bottlings usually go for more than twice that.

When I first took a taste of this, I could have sworn I was drinking an Irish whisky -- it's that different. The color in the glass is a pale, grassy gold, but with a slightly darker tinge, almost reddish. It makes me wonder if it was aged in a sherry cask. It clings to the glass like an Irish whisky, with a texture that is oily, thick, and almost resinous.

On the nose, there is a nice nice vanilla and maltiness, with a little bit of the oat flavor that I think Jim Murray calls "grist," but toasted, not raw as in some of the Irish whiskies. I detect some very light peat smoke. It has those "creamy" Irish notes: banana, and a dried fruit note: raisins, figs, and possibly dried cherry. Again, I suspect a possible sherry influence, but it would be brief.

In the mouth, there is a glutinous feel, a light burn in the back of the throat, and a custard-like creaminess that is very satisfying. Add a little water to this malt, which I recommend, and some of the drier flavors come forward. There is definitely a pronounced peppermint note, and also a medicinal menthol note; that might be part of what I'm imagining is a hint of peat. It's almost like a menthol cigarette without the tobacco. That makes it sound unpleasant, but the mint and menthol are actually quite enjoyable, like a mint julep or the mint leaves in a Mojito cocktail.

McClelland's web page suggests that the nose has "mint, menthol and freshly cut pine. Traces of fine dark chocolate and a lingering sweet malt aroma." I think that's fair. Pine? Maybe... but that makes me think of Pine-Sol cleaner, not this mild and refreshing whisky. The chocolate note is faint, not like it is in the Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban, but present. They describe the palate as having "nougat" -- sure, that's malty and sweet and nutty -- and "brazil and hazelnut." My palate is not quite trained enough to have picked those out of thin air, but yes, those oily tree nut notes really are there, both of them. They also call it "floral," which is also accurate -- maybe just a touch of carnation or rose, but not lavender?

If I've made it sound like this whisky has big robust flavors, I'm doing it a disservice -- the flavors and aromas are actually rather mild and delicate, and reward careful sipping.

I'm going to call this one 8.5. That places it neck and neck with the Tyrconnell, beating Knappogue Castle at 8.0. I'd say it is actually slightly more refined than the Tyrconnell, which has that unusual cheesy umami note, but I'm not giving out quarter-points. It is free of unpleasant notes and has quite a few intriguing flavors. This light and sweet style is not for everyone, but if you like Irish whisky, or you prefer the lighter Scotch whiskies, I'm guessing you'll enjoy this one quite a bit. I will be keeping an eye out for McClelland's other offerings.

Update: I've seen a lot of speculation online about the actual source of this whisky. Could it possibly be an 8-year-old Macallan? I'd have to do a direct comparison. Clearly, more research is called for!

Whisky as Old as I Am

2010-02-07T15:43:00.004-05:00

So, I have this very special bottle of scotch whisky -- a Bunnahabhain 36-year-old, distilled in 1967. That's the year I was born.

Technically, whisky is only considered as old as the time it spent aging in casks, not after it was bottled. So the whisky does not really continue to age. I wish the same could be said of people!

I got this from an online seller in Florida, through a family friend who shipped it to me. The plan is to taste it at my tenth wedding anniversary in 2011. I don't know whether this will be an excellent Bunna, or over-aged. I've read tasting notes on some bottlings from around the same time and they are mixed. Whisky can spend too long in the cask; the alcohol content starts to go down, and some of the flavors may become faded. This was, I think, aged in a sherry cask, and I'm not a huge fan of what sherry casks do for some of the Glenmorangie whiskies, but... we shall see!

Old Bunnahabhain is apparently not quite as expensive as old Highland Park. For my wife, I'm looking for a bottle of Highland Park from her birth year, which is 1973.

Whiskey Tasting Party

2009-12-04T13:00:00.005-05:00

So, how do people run whiskey tasting parties?

I'd like to host one -- a small one, with maybe three or four guests -- but also want to make sure everyone gets home safely! It would also be nice to record the event as a podcast.

I'd go in order of pungency of flavor and (approximate) expense. We'd have small servings with breaks in between.

The menu might consist of something like:

The Tyrconnell (an Irish whiskey, representing mild Irish single malts in general)

Glennfiddich 12 (representing the malty/vanilla/caramel flavors)

Bunnahabhain 12 (a very mild and uncharacteristic Islay whisky, a good example of that nutty/oily texture, apple, coconut, and some other elusive flavors)

Glenmorangie La Santa (representing sherry cask-aged whisky, with that maple-ish flavor)

The Balvenie Portwood 21 (representing port cask-aged whisky, and with the best nose of any whisky I've tasted to date, although the Glenmorangie Quinta Ruban is also very good, with elusive chocolate and mint notes, and costs a lot less)

Caol Ila 12 (representing Islay whiskies on the slightly milder side, with those great mandarin orange and dark chocolate notes)

Lagavulin 16 (representing the iconic peaty/phenolic Islay flavors, and a good place to stop because anything you won't be able to clearly taste anything else for quite some time afterwards!)

Dumb idea? Great idea?

Irish Whiskey Review: Knappogue Castle 1995

2009-12-02T23:54:00.010-05:00

While hunting for a bottle of Glenmorangie on a recent trip to Hartford, I came across this bottle and recalled that twitter peep Colleenky recommended Knappogue Castle along with The Tyrconnell. Since I enjoyed The Tyrconnell, I decided to give this one a try.

The 1995 Knappogue Castle is, like The Tyrconnell, a single malt. The dates are usually the year of distillation, and it was bottled in 2007, which makes it about 12 years old. It's also bottled at 40%. Oddly, Knappogue Castle seems to be a brand, and not a distillery per se, aging and bottling selected casks from other distilleries. This whiskey is chill filtered, something many scotch whisky distilleries seem to be moving away from, but has no color added.

Like The Tyrconnell, this whisky is also very pale in color -- an extremely light straw gold. It coats the glass with a waxy texture that runs very slowly. The nose is very slightly pungent, but mainly creamy and rich -- I get vanilla and a big, big note of ripe banana, like banana pudding served with Nilla wafer cookies. There's a bit of something winey, like chardonnay, although this whiskey is aged only in bourbon barrels. There's a yeasty note, and something like cream cheese -- Grace calls it "cheesecake." The nose seems slightly simpler to me than The Tyrconnell. I don't notice any of that lime or honey that I found so enjoyable in The Tyrconnell, and I don't even get the coconut notes. There is some of that chewy oat flavor, but very little malt.

On the tongue, the flavors match the nose pretty well, and it has much of The Tyrconnells's wonderfully smooth, slightly oily mouth feel. I'm reminded of a sweet French Toast batter, with a little bit of cinammon and the eggy custard flavor, or maybe a bread putting with apples baked into it. A review I came across mentioned "fresh wood" and "cigar box," and called it "spicy." Now, here's where this whiskey surprised me. I didn't really get those flavors; there did not seem to be any smoky, leathery, or tobacco flavors that I could detect. I was wondering if my palate just wasn't trained enough, or attuned to the mildness of the flavors that tend to be in these Irish whiskeys, when compared to some of the single-malt scotch whiskeys I've been drinking.

Then, I added a bit of water, and suddenly that chardonnay note was stronger, and -- on both the nose and tongue, there is tobacco! It's quite odd. Grace called it "Lucky Strikes." When you water it, the creamy banana custard flavor recedes and that cheesecake note is amplified; there's that vaseline note that The Tyrconnell has, and it's just a little bit bitter. The slight astringency that was present even without water comes forward a bit.

Although this whiskey is more expensive than The Tyrconnell, the flavors and aromas are not quite as enticing as they are in The Tyrconnell; it isn't as "moreish," at least to my palate. Therefore, I rate it a half-point lower, at 8.0. It would make a slightly better starting point for a first taste of single malt Irish whiskey, since it is milder. It would be interesting to compare the 1995 to a different Knappogue Castle release. Apparently there is a 1951, although this is scarce and, no doubt, very expensive.

It's quite amazing how different these two Irish single malts are from Scottish single malts, even though they are not terribly different from one another. While these Irish whiskeys are very fine, there's something -- possibly in my genes, since I'm part Scottish -- that draws me more to the Scottish drinks. So, I probably won't be buying any more Irish whiskeys for now. However, I would never turn down a free sample!

No, My Rear End is Not Growing Larger

2009-11-18T20:49:00.008-05:00

My pants don't fit any more. And this time, it isn't my fault for eating too much lasagna.

One of my favorite pairs of jeans is from Old Navy, their 34/32 "loose fit" jeans, purchased a few years ago.

As all well-loved jeans eventually wear out, recently I was looking for another pair of the same kind. Here's the modern equivalent.

The problem is, they don't fit me comfortably. They don't unzip as far. They're tight in the inseam. When I squat down, I have an immediate case of plumber butt. Here's why. Look at the length of the zipper in the old one (bottom) and the new one (top). It's pretty dramatic.

Look at the distance between the top of the garment and the inseam.

Here is the distance from the back (the top of the back of the pants to the inseam). This difference isn't so dramatic, but the tightness through the whole inseam pulls the whole rear of the pants much tighter. That's flattering to my buns of steel, I suppose, but it also means they ride down, and the boys don't have much room to swing free.

You know, it is easy to make fun of kids today with their pants falling down, or their low-riders that expose the butt crack. But maybe the kids aren't entirely to blame, if they can't buy pants that fit.

Anyway, it never really made sense for me, a middle-aged man, to shop at Old Navy; I always felt out of place there, even though I did like the way their jeans fit. This seals the deal, though. No more Old Navy for me.

Irish Whiskey Review: The Tyrconnell

2009-11-06T22:56:00.014-05:00

So, I never really intended for this blog to become a beverage review blog. But if it is going to be a beverage review blog, it doesn't have to be only about Scotch whisky, even though Scots might consider me a turncoat! One of my Twitter peeps and fellow Jonathan Coulton fan Colleenky has been reading my reviews and recommended Knappogue Castle and The Tyrconnell; she claims she is "more of an Irish whisky girl" and leans towards the lighter and sweeter drinks. The only Irish whisky I've tasted to date has been Jameson, which is a blend and which I found unimpressive. But Ireland makes more than Jameson, and The Tyrconnell is inexpensive, so I thought it would be reasonable to buy a bottle. Besides, I'm getting sick of dealing with those little sample bottles.

The Tyrconnell has no age statement, but it is a single malt, and bottled at 40%. That's a bit light on the alcohol when compared to many scotch whiskies. "Single malt" means that it is made from only malt (that is, barley) from one distillery. It doesn't mean "single cask" or "single batch." According to the distiller's information they use copper pot still with large necks. I'm not a sophisticated enough connoisseur of whisky to know exactly what that does for the flavor, but there it is. It is aged in oak for "many years" -- presumably they taste it to determine when a cask is done and blend casks of different ages to try to achieve consistency.

In the glass, The Tyrconnell is a light straw-gold, quite pale and pretty. On the nose there is a little pungent alcohol burn, and a definite malty aroma -- it has a biscuity, cake-like scent. There's some aromatic citrus like lime and a touch of honey. It's a very appealing, gentle nose. Grace claims she noses fennel or licorice in it, but I don't really smell that. She also says there is something that reminds her of "vaseline, but not in a bad way."

On the tongue, there's an immediate sweetness and roundness that is very pleasant. Shortbread or biscuits are definitely up front, but there is more to it than that -- the finish is light on burn but long on pleasant citrus notes, like lemon taffy. There's something like tart green apples; there's yeasty breadiness, like ripping open a fresh baguette. There are apricots (sulfured, but the sulfur is not pronounced or unpleasant). And that mouth feel is really exceptional -- it's not oily exactly, but syrupy. This has one of the best mouth feels of any whisky I've tasted.

With water, the nose opens up and that malt and yeast become more pronounced, and I get an Irish oats flavor, as if I were chewing on some rolled oats. That vaseline feel on the tongue is even more pronounced and it reminds me of... wait for it... processed American cheese singles! (That's the slight petroleum-like flavor combined with something umami, like pickled plums or a faint whiff of soy sauce or fermented black beans). Now that's strange, but not unpleasant. Grace says "grassy, and nougat candy." It sounds like quite a confusing set of flavors, but it all harmonizes quite well, and in fact the reason it is possible to explore so many flavors in this whisky is because none of them are overwhelming. I actually prefer it with water, so try it both ways.

I was prepared for this Irish whisky to seem very unimpressive after the scotch whiskies I've been sampling, but in fact I think it is a very fine drink indeed, definitely "moreish" and I will happily taste it again and share it with my friends. It is notably different than any of the scotch bottlings I've tasted; if I had to pick one that it came closest to, it would be Glenfiddich 12, which has a lot of sweet and nutty flavors, or the Scapa, which is very honey-tasting, or even the Bunnahabhain 12, but it isn't really that close to any of them.

Once again, it never ceases to amaze me that barley and water and yeast can turn into such a wild and fascinating range of aromas and tastes. I give this one an 8.5 because of its clean and intriguing flavors. Grace rates it the same.

Scotch Whisky Review: Glenfiddich 18

2009-11-05T22:00:00.009-05:00

Tonight's dram (well, half-dram; I'm splitting it with Grace) is the Glenfiddich 18. Earlier, I reviewed the Glenfiddich 12 and found it very tasty.

It's immediately obvious that this whisky is older -- it is a brownish amber, darker than the 12. The legs are not as pronounced. It's bottled at 43% alcohol. On the nose, I notice biscuits, yeast, tea, and an unusual and quite pronounced note of dark chocolate.

In the mouth, I get a little burnt orange, perhaps some walnuts, blackened toast, and coffee. It's only lightly warming, with a relatively short finish. The flavor seems slightly hollow to me: there's a little sweetness, that pronounced chocolate note, and then the burn on the back of the tongue, but it seems like it is missing something in the middle. I don't get any fruit out of this whisky, although reviews mention "dates" and I suppose they are there somewhere. None of the reviews I skimmed mentioned chocolate, oddly, and several mentioned peat; it's awfully light, if it is there, or maybe I just can't taste anything after last night's Laphroaig. The words I ran across most frequently included "subtle" and "mellow," and that it is. It seems to me that perhaps 18 years is too long for this whisky to stay in the cask, although that chocolate note is intriguing.

Water doesn't really improve this whisky, although it doesn't demolish the flavors either.

Grace gives this one an 8 -- she enjoys the bittersweet flavors and especially the finish. I give it only a 7; it's interesting, and doesn't have any off flavors, but just seems to be lacking a little something. It isn't "moreish" like the 12. I wish I liked it a little bit better. I'm looking forward to tasting the 15, which I expect to be somewhere in between the 12 and 18.

Scotch Whisky Review: Laphroaig Quarter Cask

2009-11-05T00:41:00.012-05:00

Per Laphroaig's propaganda, they mature all their scotch whisky in first-fill bourbon casks and don't go in for a lot of long-term aging; their "standard" bottling is 10 years old. The 10-year, though, is chill-filtered, which purists claim removes some of the flavor. The quarter cask bottling is an attempt to get back to a Laphroaig as it might have tasted a hundred years ago, when smaller casks were used to transport the whisky on the backs of mules or pack-horses, and maturation times were not standardized. It is also bottled at 48%, which is 20% stronger than the Laphroaig 10.

The Quarter Cask is a ruddy gold color, coating the glass well, with long, rippling legs. On the nose is a substantial peat smoke blast, and the phenol (Listerine) flavor, but interestingly, it does not give a a big hit of rubbing-alcohol burn on the nose like some other whiskies do. Even so, that peat is acrid enough to make my eyes water. It's hard to get much more out of the nose when the peat is so strong, but there is a bit of orange and vanilla there to entice me to take a sip. As the glass warms up in my hand the sweetness on the nose becomes much more pronounced.

On the tongue it's smoke and peat and seaweed, like a campfire on the beach. It's warming but not burning, and the finish is enormously long. The candied oranges are definitely there, with some dark chocolate and marzipan, and maybe some toasted marshmallows; I'm reminded of chocolate-covered marshmallow puff cookies, or even Oreos. Strangely, I don't get any of the promised saltiness. There's some of that toasted coconut that I enjoy. Interestingly, it is the wood that provides the whisky with its vanilla notes. The Laphroaig propaganda says "The finish is very long and alternates between the wood sweetness and the classic phenolic 'peat reek' like waves on our shore." Long is an understatement -- like the Lagavulin, I'll still be tasting this whisky when I wake up tomorrow morning!

Grace decided that one sip was all she needed, and while she was impressed by the pungent flavors, and reports enjoying hints of the medicinal flavors, she does not enjoy their "full frontal assault." She noted licorice as one of the sweeter notes, but I don't taste it; that doesn't mean it isn't there, as I've certainly detected this in other whiskies. She says she believes it would be "an oustanding tonic for anyone with a respiratory illness." (When you consider the cool and damp climate of Islay and the likely ailments of the people who live there, the style of the whisky, as it was developed historically, begins to make a lot of sense!) She declines to give it a numeric rating, saying that it would be unfairly low because she dislikes this heavily peated style of whisky, and thus would not acknowledge its strengths.

I tasted it with a little water. It immediately becomes less syrupy, and hotter, the peaty flavors broadening out to creep down the throat and across the back of the mouth. It actually seems to damp down some of the sweet notes a bit, except for a vanilla malted-milkshake flavor on the finish that seems to intensify a bit, but the dried orange and lemon zest notes remain. If you like the peat a whole lot, try it with a little water; it won't kill the flavor. In fact, you might even like to try it with a little more water than you would normally add to a scotch whisky, keeping in mind that this one is considerably stronger than the Laphroaig 10 (96 proof!)

The Laphroaig 10-year at cask strength has been named "the best scotch whisky in the world" by Whisky magazine, and Laphroaig been granted a Royal Warrant by Prince Charles. Their whisky certainly has a lot of character; I'm pretty sure I could pick it out of a blind tasting, even against Caol Ila and Lagavulin. So, now comes the part where I admit that I'm going to have to go against the consensus of the reviews that I've read, and say that while I appreciate the character of the Laphroaig Quarter Cask, like the Lagavulin, it is not entirely to my taste. I have to be in the right mood for all that smoke and peat; I don't gravitate to those flavors naturally, as some folks evidently do. But then again, I don't like only sweet flavors in a whisky; it's possible for a whisky to be too sweet and light for my taste. See my review of Scapa 14 for an example.

I like the smokey Islay whiskies more than I used to, but I doubt this style will ever be my favorite. I do have to compliment the Laphroaig people for making a whisky that I find to be more palatable if, still a bit challenging. It's interesting to me that in trying to create something that more accurately reflects their older whiskies, they're also (perhaps unintentionally) conceding a bit to my tastes. Perhaps it isn't just me, and they're finding the market for all-peat, all-the-time whiskies is not growing? Or maybe they've realized that in going for the peat explosion in recent years, they've unintentionally lost some of the other excellent qualities that used to make their whiskies more balanced? It's been some time since I've tasted the "standard" Laphroaig 10, and I probably won't be buying myself a bottle, but it would be interesting to compare it with the Quarter Cask.

I give the Laphroaig Quarter Cask an 8 out of 10, a half-point higher than the Lagavulin 16 since it is a little kinder to the palate. I'm told that the peaty whiskies are an acquired taste, and since I purchased a bottle, I'll definitely be tasting this one again, and sharing it with any adventurous friends who would like to try it. I may ultimately wind up with bottles of the Lagavulin 16 and Caol Ila 12 too, because of the intriguing similarities and differences between them, and my desire to share those two as well. But of these three peaty Islay whiskies the Caol Ila, which I gave an 8.0, remains my preference, and my favorite Islay malt of islay is still the Bunnahabhain 12, which I gave an 8.5, and which has no peat to speak of.

So, there you have it; it must be the Libra in me, that always strives for balance. I'm sorry this review came out a bit wishy-washy. I was hoping to either love it or bury it, but as it turns out, I merely drank it, and I'd drink it again, although perhaps not for a good long while. Maybe the next time I feel a sinus infection coming on...

This research, sadly, was not funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and the author has not yet received a MacArthur Genius Award.

Scotch Whisky Review: The Balvenie Single Barrel 15

2009-11-03T21:22:00.006-05:00

This is the second of three sample bottles of Balvenie bottlings that I got in a small boxed set. I've discovered that 50 milliliters isn't much when I split it with my wife! But it's enough to get a taste of a whisky.

The Balvenie Single Barrel 15 is a lovely gold in color, and sticks to the glass with an oily, almost waxy coating. There's a hint of oak on the nose, vanilla, caramel, cinnamon, and a bit of acrid smoke like burning leaves drifting in.

On the tongue the texture is thick and smooth; the whisky is hot and quite drying, but with a nice muscat sweetness, toasted coconut, and maybe even a touch of banana and licorice. There's quite a bit of honey. The sweetness lingers, with a long, yeasty, shortbread finish. There's no peat, but there is some smoke. It's a very nice dram. Grace rates it an 8.5 out of 10, and I concur. I'm especially impressed by the way the heat is moderated by the syrupy texture and the blend of honey and oak; that makes it especially well-balanced and satisfying.

With just a splash of water, the malt and vanilla become more forward, and the heat recedes. Like many whiskies, it paradoxically seems drier in the mouth with a little water. That elusive black licorice note becomes more pronounced. It's definitely worth trying it both ways to bring out that flavor. I actually prefer this one wet. I would definitely consider buying a bottle; this one is mid-priced, as single malts go. All in all, a very fine whisky!

Bourbon Review: Maker's Mark

2009-10-20T19:55:00.004-04:00

So, just for kicks, Grace and I decided to taste a sample-size bottle of an American-made bourbon, Maker's Mark, and see how it struck us after all these lovely single malt scotch whiskies. Bourbon is an American whisky made from corn instead of barley, and by law all bourbon that is labeled as such must come from Kentucky. And yes, they spell it "whisky," instead of the more common American spelling "whiskey."

In the glass, Maker's Mark is a pale caramel color, with long legs. On the nose, the first impression is a pungent alcohol burn, almost like moonshine or slivovitz ; this isn't a terribly smooth drink, despite their claims. The main flavor note is vanilla, although there is a little bit of a floral note -- maybe rose or carnation. Grace says "light Karo syrup." There's some oak, a little bit of char like burnt toast, and a bit of a licorice-like anise flavor. The finish is long and a little bit sour-tasting.

If you add a bit of water, the burn smooths out and the flavor opens up -- there is some apple and pear in evidence, although the flavor never gets complex.

Grace and I only give this a five on our ten-point scale. With water, it deserves a six. It would make a good mixer, and I wouldn't turn it down over ice and certainly not in certain mixed drinks, but there are much better things to savor after dinner.

Scotch Whisky Review: Glenfiddich 12

2009-10-18T01:19:00.011-04:00

Tonight we tasked a depressingly small sample bottle of Glenfiddich 12. The color of this one is a very pretty light gold; it's got a little less cling on the glass than some, and forms legs quickly. I had never tasted a Glenfiddich before and it was a treat.

On the nose, the first thing I notice is a big hit of toffee. It never ceases to amaze me that these are just made with malted barley, sometimes peat to smoke and dry it, and water, and the various types of casks, and that's about it. And suddenly you've got butter pecan ice cream. This has the most pronounced buttery aroma and flavor of any whisky I've tasted. Think baking homemade chocolate chip cookies, and pecan pie. There are some delicate floral notes hiding in there -- maybe a bit of rose; Grace suggested lavender. Think baclava flavored with rose water and made with a light, grassy and fruity olive oil.

On the tongue this whisky has a pleasant burn, with a little burnt toast and black pepper, a little drying but not unpleasantly hot. If I had some more I'd try it wet, but alas, I did not; I'd expect a little water to bring out a slight saltiness and emphasize some of the fruit and nut flavors. There's not a lot of oak to speak of.

The balance is excellent. It would be an excellent first scotch for beginners, while still providing a suite of very pleasant and rich flavors for more experienced tasters. Despite the sweetness, I don't think it need be reserved entirely as dessert drink; it would also make a nice aperitif.

Some of the other reviews I read of this whisky mentioned vanilla, apple, pear, coconut, and honey. I'll go along with the coconut, especially if it is toasted, but the fruit flavors are softened and sweetened -- not like the crisp and tart apples in the Bunnahabhain 12, but more like applesauce with a touch of cinnamon, or apple pie with a butter crust.

Grace gives this one an 8.5, while I give it an 8. Looking at prices, it appears that this one is quite inexpensive as these things go, which makes it a terrific bargain. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that since it is inexpensive, popular, and produced in large quantities, that it isn't also very good -- this one really is a very appealing and "moreish" whisky, if a little simple. I'm looking forward to comparing it to the Glenfiddich 15 and 18.

Scotch Whisky Review: Glenmorangie Nectar d'Or

2009-10-15T21:31:00.007-04:00

This "expression" of Glenmorangie is aged in Sauternes casks. Sauternes is a French dessert wine, made from white grapes, with a sweet and tart flavor. This bottling is a pale yellow-orange, with a syrupy consistency that clings to the glass.

On the nose, there's a lot of citrus and sweet flavors, primarily lemon custard, a hint of lime, caramel candy, and a malted vanilla milk shake. Instead of apple flavors like those that the Bunnahabhain 12 offers, on this one we get pear and coconut notes. It has a wonderful mouth feel, and a nice lingering heat on the palate, with a bit of of nutmeg but very light on the oak. On the finish it reminds me of a cinnamon and sugar donut, or an almond croissant.

Blended with a little water, it gets hotter and the creaminess backs off, revealing more orange, and the sweet notes become more like brown sugar and toffee. Try adding just a touch of water; I think it makes this one slightly better.

Overall, it's a very tasty beverage, but so oriented towards sweet flavors that it is pretty much exclusively a dessert drink. I wouldn't make it a regular dram for that reason and the flavors are enticing but not very deep or complex, and don't evolve on the mouth. I give it a 7.0.

Scotch Whisky Review: The Balvenie PortWood 21

2009-10-13T21:38:00.009-04:00

We have only a small 50 ml tasting bottle of this scotch, and I just poured it. Even letting the glasses breathe, I can already tell from the aroma wafting my way that this one is going to be interesting.

The color is a nice amber -- it's actually similar to a the color of tawny port, but perhaps with a little more red. It is thick and leaves nice legs on the glass. On the nose, there's a citrus sharpness, like lemon oil, honey, vanilla, and a rich perfume of oak and port. It's a gorgeous, thick aroma... I'm almost tempted to just keep smelling it and skip tasting it. (Well, almost, but not quite!)

On the tongue, it's quite a potent, "hot," drying flavor, but the burn is pleasant. I'm hoping it will help keep me free of viruses this flu season. There's a whole set of peppery, spicy flavors I'm having trouble unpacking -- cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg. I'm not getting much in the way of floral tastes, but that's OK. There is plenty to keep both the nose and tongue occupied as it is!

I'd explore the taste with a little water added, but I can't bring myself to do it! There's just not enough in that little 50 ml bottle, especially split with my wife, to risk ruining it.

Some of the professional reviews I skimmed noted toasted nuts, and I can agree with that, and also notes a flavor of armagnac. I agree -- a nice armagnac is filled with vanilla and caramel notes while also providing a little heat and spice, and this whisky does just that. They also mention "cedar," and I guess that's fair, although I'm not sure I can really distinguish my aromatic woods. Maybe I need to do some homework.

Grace gives this one an 8 -- she is somewhat turned off by the "burn." I think it's incredibly nicely balanced and I don't mind the burn -- because it isn't as overpowering and doesn't stick in the mouth as much as the Lagavulin 16, where the peat and iodine really stay with you. I give this one a nine. I probably wont' be tasting it again anytime soon, unfortunately -- full bottles of this whisky are expensive, ringing up at around $100. But still -- maybe someday!

Scotch Whisky Review: The Singleton of Glendullan

2009-10-12T21:54:00.011-04:00

This one is going to be brief. The Singleton is an inexpensive single malt scotch whisky, as these things go; it goes for about $36 here in Michigan. Can a lower-cost dram compete? The answer, as usual, is "it depends." Are you looking for an exciting drink that will shock or titillate or intrigue your tongue? Then look elsewhere. But if you're looking for a dram that is just plain very good, then my answer is yes, the Singleton is an excellent bargain and holds its own against some single malts that cost two or even three times as much.

This is a bottling from the Glendullan distillery in Speyside, a coastal region of Highland Scotland that is dense with distilleries. It's a 12 year old whisky. Even without reading the notes on this one, it's pretty obvious from the color and the nose that it was finished in sherry casks, but the literature on this one indicates that it also spent some time in bourbon casks.

On the nose: orange, honey, vanilla, malt, hazelnut, and oak. A professional review I consulted notes "sandalwood," and that helps clarify that faint floral, perfume-like note that I was unable to identify. In the mouth, the texture on the tongue is very smooth and oily. The burn in the mouth is warm and pleasant, not overbearing, and there are no big surprises -- there's nothing in the mouth that wasn't there in the nose. The finish is not overly drying.

This whisky holds up well to a little water, and it brings out some of the drier notes, especially the dry sherry, oak, and date flavors. (Grace says "pine nuts.") I found it pleasing either way.

While sweet, this whisky is not as sweet as the Scapa, which I found slightly cloying. The flavor is very nicely balanced and soothing, without any notes that seem out of place. Grace and I agree that this one would make an excellent regular dram after dinner or before bed. It gives a very warming, appealing blend of flavors. And because it doesn't "show off" like some of the other whiskies with big or very complex flavors, I don't have much more to say about it. Grace and I both give it an 8 out of 10.

Scotch Whisky Review: Glenmorangie La Santa

2009-10-11T21:10:00.007-04:00

The La Santa is an "expression" of Glenmorangie -- that seems to be the recent term of art for taking a mature whisky and putting it in a particular type of cask to age again for a short while, in order to impart some additional flavors. In this case, the casks are casks that previously held sherry (a style of Spanish wine made from white grapes and fortified with brandy). Therefore, it is comes as no surprise that this whisky has a reddish-gold color. On the nose, there is a bit of light alcohol burn -- surprisingly light for a whisky bottled at 46% alcohol -- and a strong sherry aroma, together with a bit of oak, lime, and vanilla. There is no smoke, peat, salt, or iodine that I could notice.

In the mouth, this scotch is smoothly textured, quite sweet, and creamy, with what Grace called an "agreeable" burn -- milder than some other whiskies. The flavors remind me of a malty sweet biscuit, or maybe a vanilla sandwich cookie. There's something reminiscent of a marshmallow held in the fire too long, and a citrus note -- is it lime? Or maybe Seville orange marmalade on burnt toast? There is a slightly bitter plastic or burnt flavor similar to the one I noted in the Scapa, and a professional taster would probably know what to call it, but I don't. There is something slightly inharmonious -- like drinking orange while tasting lime peel, as if two of the fruity notes were clashing. I wish I could describe it better than that, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

There is a mildly drying oak in the moderately long warm finish. Water does not improve this whisky, diluting pretty much all the flavors. Grace called the sherry flavor "maple syrup," and gave it an 8.5. I give it an 8. Altogether a very nice whisky, but that slight disharmony between flavors makes me downgrade it just slightly. It isn't quite as "moreish" as the Bunnahabhain, to my taste, but still a very nice dram.

We have two more "expressions" of Glenmorangie to taste: the Quinta Ruban (with a port finish) and Nectar D'Or (with a Sauternes finish). Of course, it wouldn't be fair to taste them without also comparing them to the original Glenmorangie. We'll be tasting all of them over the next few days.

Scotch Whisky Review: Scapa 14

2009-10-11T00:01:00.010-04:00

Scapa is from the Mainland (the biggest island) of the Orkney archipelago -- so it's an island malt, but not an Islay. This is not my first experience with Scapa -- I tasted a Scapa bottling years ago, and liked it enough to buy a bottle a few years back. I haven't pulled it out very often, though, and this is the first time I've tried to coherently rate and evaluate this whisky.

In color, this malt is a nice light gold; it's moderately syrupy, clinging slightly to the glass. On the nose, I first notice a fairly powerful alcohol burn, and a very noticeable sweet cake and vanilla icing flavor, with a touch of honey and oak. There is something faintly unpleasant underneath -- I wrote down "burnt plastic," and I saw another reviewer note "rubber tires." Fortunately it isn't very powerful.

On the tongue, this whisky is syrupy-sweet while very drying, with a hot burn and a short finish. I note something herbal, like sage, a flavor like Keemun (English breakfast) tea, a note of hazelnut, notes of dates, orange peel, and unsweetened chocolate. Scapa is often associated with the phrase "heather honey," and I get the honey, but am not sure I'd know what heather tastes like if it bit me. That's probably the herbal, floral note that I'm calling sage. Whatever you call it, it's somewhat subtle, like the other flavors. Some other reviews I found noted a definite pineapple flavor, and I can agree with that, but it reminds me of pineapple juice rather than the fruit itself.

I tasted it after adding a little water, and was disappointed -- the flavors weaken, and the burnt, bitter notes become more apparent. There's a salty-sweet meaty pickled plum note, which I'll just call "umami," that becomes more apparent -- another reviewer noted this as the dried seaweed used to wrap sushi, which I'd say is pretty accurate. In any case, it doesn't really get better with water added -- this whisky is better neat.

This dram is pleasant enough, but its flavors are rather mild, and while some of the flavors are interesting and it is well-balanced, it isn't layered with flavors like the Islay malts. I don't enjoy the sweet notes now, at 42, as much as I did when I was in my twenties. Note that this would be a great first single malt to taste, if you aren't sure if you'll like the peat and smoke characteristic of most of the Islay malts.

Because of the mildness of the flavors, and the predominance of sweetish flavors to the exclusion of most others, my overall rating is only a 7 out of 10. (Grace says 6.5). Scapa now sells a 16 year old bottling which I'm curious to taste. I'm also looking forward to comparing this with an Aberlour.

Scotch Whisky Review: Bunnahabhain 12

2009-10-07T23:20:00.008-04:00

About fifteen or sixteen years ago, I had a flight of scotch whiskies at Ashely's pub in Ann Arbor. It was one of my first experiences with single malts. I don't remember exactly which ones I tasted, but I'm pretty certain that there was a Scapa, an Aberlour, a Talisker, and a Bunnahabhain.

The Bunnahabhain, which I'm told is pronounced "Boona-hahvin," stood out from the rest because it was a milder whisky, with very little heat or harshness, and also because of its exceptionally smooth, oily mouth feel, almost like peanut oil, and nutty flavors. So I have a bottle, and now that I'm a few years older and, I hope, wiser, and I've tasted a few more whiskies, it's time to put this one in context.

Bunnahabhain is quite different from the other Islay malts we've just tasted. On the nose tonight my first impression was almond. There's a little tang of salt in the background, and no peat or smokiness to speak of. With a few more sniffs the flavor of green apples becomes evident, and that flavor stays in the finish -- not a cider, but more like a tart sparkling apple juice. There's a wonderful almond flavor, reminiscent of marzipan, and toasted coconut, and vanilla, but I don't pick up a lot of herbs or flowers. It's evocative of pumpkin pie spice. There's a nice warming heat, but it isn't overly drying. The sip fades out on a little bit of oak, but the tart apple flavor stays with you. There's just the slightest fresh pepperiness, like Nasturtium, or ground white peppercorns.

Adding a splash of water to this malt changes the character rather dramatically -- the apples recede into the background, but the sweetness is ramped up, reminding me of toffee, and suddenly it's a salty scotch. It's a bit like a Pearson's Salted Nut Roll! There's also a touch of peat that was almost absent before. Grace tells me that to her it gets some of that slightly unpleasant Islay assertiveness, what she calls "rubbing alcohol." The flavors don't collapse with a little water, but do become quite different, so try it both ways.

Grace rates this one a nine. I'll give it an 8.5. It's definitely "more-ish" -- it makes you want to taste it again. Despite having tasted many more whiskies since my first experiences with single malts, this remains one of my absolute favorites, and not merely for nostalgia value.

Update: tasting this again last night, with a clear head, it is evident that there is a little bit of peatiness to the Bunnahabhain 12. Also, The cork tore apart, and I had to remove it with a corkscrew, and replace it with a different one that doesn't fit quite so well. I'd better finish this bottle soon! It's a few years old; it would be useful to compare it to the latest Bunnahabhain 12 bottling, since despite the best efforts of the distilleries the bottlings do change over time, and sometimes even for the better.

Scotch Whisky Review: Talisker 10

2009-10-06T21:50:00.007-04:00

Talisker is not technically an Islay scotch; the distillery is on the Isle of Skye. However, it may as well be -- the style is quite similar to the Caol Ila and the Lagavulin. Grace and I tasted the ten-year-old bottling.

The color is a medium-pale amber. It coats the glass nicely, clinging in sheets and leaving a "high-water mark," and gradually forming thready legs. On the nose, I pick up a light smoke, a bit of iodine, a little spark of sour lemon candy, and a sweet something in the back of the throat -- maybe shortbread, and vanilla icing.

The first sip has a wonderfully smooth mouth feel, although not really oily like some of the oily and nutty malts. I get an initial impression of smoke, very warming and drying. On the second sip: nice butterscotch. Some of the less pleasant flavors are evident, too: there's a bit of lighter fluid and charcoal, but these are in the background. After the Caol Ila my tongue is hunting for more complex flavors, but not finding much else to report. I'm not getting much that is floral or fruity. The finish is a lingering driftwood fire, but not overpowering, with a little hint of leather and perhaps spearmint. The finish is quite long and this dram leaves your mouth dry; I might need a glass of water in a few minutes.

A little bit of water doesn't hurt the Talisker -- it smooths out the drink, reducing the burn and the dryness, but it doesn't seem to reveal anything new. Try it both ways and see what you think.

Grace didn't care for this scotch very much, noting rubbing alcohol, caramel, yeast, and toasted bread. She dislikes the extended burn of the Islay scotches, in particular criticizing the smoke and the iodine.

Grace rates this scotch a seven. I rate it a 7.5 -- I think it's quite approachable and pleasant and wouldn't pass up the opportunity to drink it again, but there are more appealing whiskies out there in the price range. If you are not brand new to Scotch but have never tasted the Islay malts, this would be a good introduction, followed by the Caol Ila and the Lagavulin (going in order of how "challenging" they are to the palate).

Some Other Scotch Geeks

2009-10-06T16:49:00.003-04:00

I found that the ScotchCast also reviewed the same two drams that I just completed -- the Lagavulin 16 and Caol Ila 12. I have not listened to their reviews yet, but I'm about to!

On Top of Old Smokey

Beating the High Price of Scotch Whisky

2009-10-06T10:34:00.009-04:00

You may have found yourself wondering how it is that I'm casually reviewing these scotches -- after all, the Lagavulin 16 goes for $45 to $70 a bottle, the Caol Ila from $35-60, and you'll be seeing several more reviews including Talisker, Bunnahabhain, Highland Park, four Glenmorangie bottlings, Scapa, and perhaps some others. Did I buy all those bottles for the reviews?

The answer is no. I do have some whole bottles -- some of them I've had for five years or more, and some I bought in the past year or so. I certainly wouldn't be able to buy more than a bottle or two in a typical month's budget. But here is is a tip -- you can often find smaller bottles in gift sets, and these sets are often heavily discounted. This is a great way to taste multiple kinds of whisky without paying out for a whole bottle. And if you do want to buy a whole bottle -- shop around! Prices vary widely.

The Lagavulin, the Caol Illa, and Talisker are all from this Isles of Scotland box set of 200 ml bottles, which will make three or four glasses each. It cost me only a fraction of the price the site listed, and I found it at Stadium Market. They also have a boxed set of Glenmorangie bottlings, in 100 ml bottles, and I'll be reviewing them together. 100 ml is only a couple of glasses, but it's enough to get a good taste, and costs less than a single bottle of any of the four varieties. In fact, if you find that you like all the bottles in a boxed set, there's nothing saying you can't come back and buy another set -- figure out how to get the most bang for the buck for what matters to you, whether that is variety or quantity.

I will be keeping my eye out for more tasting-size bottles. I wish more distilleries would release their malts in the 200 ml size. I'd happily buy a half-dozen of these at a pop in order to taste a variety, and probably buy then buy one full bottle of the one I liked best.

It's interesting how very individual tastes are. The saying goes "there's no accounting for taste." This phrase is sometimes used to insult someone's poor taste, but I think what it really means is that it is impossible to account for, or justify or explain your taste preferences in a way that someone else is likely to find convincing; you're entitled to like what you like, and dislike what you dislike, and it may be ultimately inexplicable.

I was considering this while I was deciding what number rating to give the Lagavulin 16. Do I think I know better than the critics who give this a much higher rating? No. Grace and I agree that it is an amazing drink, fascinating, savory, intriguing -- but we also agree that while we'd love to explore it at a tasting, it is not the one we'd prefer to drink with modest regularity for dessert or before bed. She was also expounding on pairings. The Lagavulin would stand up to pairing with a cigar -- but I don't smoke. If you're looking for something to accompany a cigar, the Lagavulin might do it for you. On the other hand, we love Maya Gold chocolate, and I think the Caol Ila would probably taste very fine with a square of that chocolate. So consider the ratings to be "to my palate," and not necessarily yours.

Did I mention that Stadium market also makes fantastic pizza and egg salad roll-up sandwiches, and stocks great chocolates? I have not had great luck with their featured wines -- they have uniformly been somewhat disappointing for the price -- but if they would stock Red Bull Cola, my life would be complete. But perhaps it is best that they don't!

UPDATE: I stopped by Stadium Market today, and they had small "trio" boxed sets of 50 ml sample bottles of 3 Balvenie bottlings, including a 21-year-old port cask aged whisky that I'm looking forward to tasting. They also had a nice little set of 3 different ages of Glenfiddich. So we we will be tasting those in the near future too! And what's that hiding in the photo? Could that be a blended Irish Whisky? Hmmm...

Scotch Whisky Review: Caol Ila 12

2009-10-05T22:39:00.006-04:00

I've asked my wife Grace to join in with me in reviewing another whisky from Islay. So, tonight we're enjoying Caol Ila (pronounced, I'm told, "Cull Eela.")

Caol Ila is a pale amber dram, considerably lighter in color than the Lagavulin 16 I reviewed yesterday. On the nose, Grace reports a citrus tang (as in Tang, the fruit drink; I'm calling it Mandarin orange, which Grace says is "grilled.") She commented on the legs and the syrupy texture (but this Scotch is not oily), and says it reminds her of a nice white wine.

There's a light and pleasant smokiness, but it's not overpowering. Grace reports charcoal and an anise (licorice-like) flavor. There are modest notes of caramel and vanilla. There isn't much iodine or sea salt to speak of. The burn is mild, and the oaky, peaty, smoky finish is long and dry, tempered by some bittersweet spices, like nutmeg (Grace says cinnamon, I say bittersweet chocolate -- Grace suggests that it reminds her of Maya Gold chocolate, produced by Green & Black's, which is flavored with nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, and orange -- and I concur! There's quite a strong resemblance.)

It's altogether very nicely integrated and pleasant. Grace gives it an 8. I'll agree with that -- it's flavors are milder and not as big and robust and showy as the Lagavulin, and that makes it more approachable and more suitable for regular sipping. It's not my go-to dram, the first one I think about when I contemplate having a glass of whisky, but it will definitely be on my short list.

Scotch Whisky Review: Lagavulin 16

2009-10-05T00:19:00.011-04:00

In the glass, it has a really lovely dark gold color. When I stick your nose in, the first thing I notice is a medicinal, rubbing-alcohol, maybe even pine resin or turpentine smell, with a hint of iodine. Warm it in my hand and breathe a little deeper, and it's a campfire of oak logs blowing across the beach, stinging my eyes a bit. This scotch has a big, big aroma.

What else can you get just from the nose? There's a little something like dry sherry. It's notably lacking in some of the sweeter aromas, like caramel, although there is a little bit of vanilla in there to sweeten it up just a touch; as I progress through the dram, slowly, there's a build-up of a sweetness on the back of the tongue that reminds me of sweetened condensed milk. I don't get anything floral from it. I can imagine a little orange, or maybe bergamot, or cherry, but maybe that's just my imagination. There's just a touch of saltiness, and the flavor they call "sea air" -- the iodine reek of seaweed. There's something like black peppercorns.

On the tongue, the texture is immediately striking -- this is an oily scotch, with a smooth feel across the tongue, almost like cream or honey, but dry, dry, dry, as if there were some bee venom in that honey, and it leaves a burn in my throat, cheeks, and tongue that warms and lasts. It's not that it is a terribly high-alcohol beverage; the 16-year-old is 43%, which isn't unusual, and I'm attached to a bourbon -- Knob Creek -- that is 50%, but feels much less punishing to the mouth.

The sensation of peat, and even charcoal briquets and lighter fluid, sticks with me, and I notice it even more as I exhale, taking my little breaks to make notes in between sips. In fact, this dram makes me wake up feeling like I've spent the night face-down in a bog. It will kill everything that used to live in my mouth, in a way that some of the gentler whiskies don't seem to do. And that's not really a good thing. The flavors stick with me so strongly that ten minutes after finishing my dram, I'm still studying the flavors.

This isn't my favorite scotch. It consistently gets high ratings, but while I love the oily smoothness and smoke, the sting and the long-lasting charcoal and peat are a little much. Adding a little water -- not too much -- reduces the burn a little, and I get a little more vanilla, but it doesn't really open up any hidden flavors or reveal anything the way it works in some scotch whiskies. Lagavulin 16 is better straight.

Going against the scotch whisky critic consensus, I give it only an 7.5 out of 10. If you're having a tasting, it's definitely an iconic and intense scotch and you must include it. It's very good at being big and intense and I do love that oily texture and smokiness, but the lingering burn and peaty dryness in the throat means it's probably not the one I will turn to often when I'm looking for a little something before bed; it's just too much.

Lagavulin is distilled on Islay. Next time, I'll taste Caol Ila, also from Islay, and then maybe Bunnahabhain, and compare the three different Islay whiskies. I don't have any Laphroaig on hand, but maybe I'll see if I can pick up a bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask.

Spoiler: Bunnahabhain is one of my all-time favorites, although it doesn't seem to get the press and high numbers that some of the better-known malts get. Maybe we can talk about why that is.

Soundflower Back from the Dead?

2009-09-09T23:34:00.002-04:00

I note that over on Google Code the maintainers of Soundflower seem to again be responding to bug reports and have released updates -- the latest .dmg is 1.5.1 as of this writing.

See the Google Code site.

I have downloaded 1.5.1 but have not yet tested it to determine if the particular issues I was having seem to be fixed. They were not explicitly addressed (that is, those issues were not touched in the bug tracking database), but at least I can hope.

Deejaying with Jack

2009-08-02T17:56:00.008-04:00

So, last night I did a deejay set over ustream and got to test out Jack for Mac. It performed very well -- so far, I'm glad that I dumped Soundflower and installed Jack.

It is a little more complicated to set up, and I had some hung applications until I figured out the sequencing that is required.

The short form of what I'm trying to do is as follows:

1. I have a Vestax VCI-300 DJ controller. It is a sound card; it has audio outputs, and I want to play music through those outputs.

2. Those audio outputs then have to go back into my Apogee Ensemble to feed a pair of inputs.

3. From those inputs, I want to send the digital audio to the Ustream web application for streaming.

First off, it would be nice if I could do this a little more directly -- route digital audio out from the ITCH software to the Ustream web app. The VCI-300 is a combination controller and sound card; basically, it is a big MIDI controller, with jog wheels and faders and knobs and lots of buttons. Rather than a 5-pin MIDI connector, though, it sends this data over USB along with audio data. It is also a sound card, primarily driving a stereo main output and a stereo cue output (normally sent to headphones), but also a microphone input and an extra input for a turntable or iPod.

The problem is, It is integrated tightly with Serato ITCH. This is kind of a blessing and a curse. The tight integration makes the package work really well, but it also means that when I use ITCH to play music from my library, the only audio routing option available to me is to send it it back into the analog realm, out the the 1/4" or phono outputs of the VCI-300.

That's great if what you want to do is a live show, but what if you want to do further processing on the audio in the digital domain? With no settings for an alternative audio output software in ITCH, what this means is that you need to send the signal back to another sound card -- in this case, my Ensemble's inputs 5/6.

The Ensemble does a great job with these inputs -- it realizes that I'm plugging in TS, not TRS, cables, and sets the input level to +4 dB, not -10 dB. The input level seems to be pretty well-calibrated: sending out full-scale audio from the VCI-300 seems to saturate the input level nicely, without clipping.

So, the next step is to route audio from the Ensemble input 5/6 to Ustream. That works if I feed audio into the Ensemble front-panel inputs 1 and 2, but it appears that I can't get the Ustream application to listen to any inputs other than 1 and 2. I Using inputs 1 and 2 is not a good solution because if I want to add live guitar or bass, I'll need those inputs; they are the only two that can accept a Hi-Z guitar signal. I'll keep an eye out for a way to get inputs 5/6 up to Ustream, but meanwhile, I can route the audio with Jack, and that's what I want to talk about.

The process is as follows: first, make sure everything else is in order and that the Ensemble inputs are showing the analog signal coming in. You'll need to have Jack installed. Then, run the JackPilot application. This provides a little GUI that allows starting, stopping, configuring, and changing routings on the Jack server. Before starting the Jack server, I choose the Preferences command. That brings up the preferences window:

Note that the Ensemble is set up with 8 inputs and 8 outputs, and Jack detects this automatically (other configurations are possible; use Maestro to set it up differently). There are two virtual inputs and two virtual outputs. Note that Jack is not a CoreAudio device itself, but it interfaces with a CoreAudio device, which shows up as JackRouter.

Now, I start the Jack server by pressing "Start." On my 8-core Mac Pro, Jack uses a tiny fraction of the available CPU:

Next, I configure the Ustream broadcast console and select, as the audio input, JackRouter. The JackPilot routing screen will now show send and receive ports for Safari. This interface is rather confusing, but the idea is that you want to send inputs 5 and 6 from "system," which seems to correspond to the Ensemble, to the Safari out1 and out2. (Why it also has inputs, I don't know). To do this, you select the output (the send port), and double-click the corresponding input to make it turn red:

Now that this connection is made, audio is routed from the VCI-300 to the Ustream web application. This is a bit convoluted, but I am pleased to report that once configured, everything worked perfectly for a number of hours -- no glitches, no degradation or stuttering.

Now, yesterday I was able to get this all working together with my iSight camera, but unfortunately today the camera wouldn't work, so something is not quite right. In this case I was able to just unplug it and plug it back in, and all seems to be well. But with two FireWire devices (the iSight and the Ensemble), plus the VCI-300 USB device, there are lots of possible points of failure and I've grown to expect a slight flakiness. You may find, for example, that you have to start up or connect your devices in a specific order. For example, if the Ustream broadcast console is not running before you open up the routing options, Safari will not appear as an output.

Next time I want to see if I can get the AudioUnit plug-ins to work to interface Logic and Jack. That offers some interesting options for live performance.

Jack for Mac

2009-07-26T18:07:00.004-04:00

So, in previous articles I've written about Soundflower and how I was able to use it to route audio between Mac applications. Well, it appears that Soundflower is, if not dead, at least on hiatus; the developers are not answering bug reports, and the preliminary reporting says that it is not compatible with Snow Leopard. So, the alternatives are to fix it, or find something else to use. I might still be able to scrape together enough time to see if I can get the thing compiling and dig into what is wrong with it, but with full-time work and four kids, that is far from guaranteed. So I did some spelunking and came across Jack.

Jack is a port of a Linux sound routing tool to Mac OS X. As such, it is a bit more command-line oriented. Instead of being a CoreAudio driver, it interfaces with a CoreAudio driver. Soundflower is a simple bus, of two or sixteen channels; Jack is much more configurable, allowing you to route audio in all kinds of ways, even generating feedback loops if you care to.

It's also a little more complicated to configure. The routing user interface is not polished at all; in fact it is pretty far from intuitive. The GUI for editing audio routing is in desperate need of a patch bay-like editor, that works the way Apple's Audio MIDI Setup editor lets you draw wires between MIDI devices. But after a little head-scratching I'm pleased to report that it worked, and it worked really well, using a very small amount of CPU time. And it seems to have more options: I have not tried them yet, but there are plug-in adapters to let you route audio from inside Logic or other tools.

Jack for MacOS X is here:

http://www.jackosx.com

I will in all likelihood be posting more about Jack in the very near future.

DVD Backup on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.7) with FairMount, VLC, and Apple's Disk Utility

2009-07-26T15:32:00.016-04:00

So, let's say you have a legally purchased DVD you want to back up to a DVD+R DL. What's the best way to do it?

You can do it with a commercial tool, but a little bird told me that the cool Mac kids are using VLC and FairMount, which smears cream cheese on your DVD, or something. Wot?

Well, actually what it does is mount the disc as another virtual volume, which is decrypted on the fly by VLC, so that you can back it up.

Note that this (the "backing up," no the decrypting on the fly) may be technically illegal. There is a "fair use" exemption to copyright that should, in some sense, apply here, but I've also heard that copying a protected DVD was made explicitly illegal as part of the DMCA. I feel it is ethical to back up a disc which I paid for, especially with a house full of small children who can destroy a DVD in seconds flat, but the legal arguments are far too complicated for me to fully compile -- or even parse -- so I'll leave that to you.

In this post I showed one technique I had worked out for creating a backup of an unprotected video DVD that would then play on a home DVD player.

The situation with commercial encrypted DVDs is more complicated, but VLC 1.0 and Fairmount 1.0.4 seem to make it a lot less complicated.

I don't need to run VLC -- I just need to have it installed. I put in my commercial (encrypted) DVD, and then run FairMount. FairMount will unmount the original disc and mount a "fair" virtual disc that decrypts itself on the fly as you read it. I think it uses a library from VLC to do this. If Apple's DVD Player program started automatically when I put the DVD in, I quit it.

To just back up the DVD to video files that will play on the computer, I could just drag-copy the Fairmount-mounted volume to a folder on my hard drive. But what I want instead is an image file that I can use to burn a DVD+R DL -- with a correctly laid out UDF file system -- that my appliance DVD player can play.

I have a fresh stack of Verbatim 2.4x, just ready and waiting to turn into coasters -- let's go!

In my previous article, I described how I was unable to do something similar, using unencrypted content, with Disk Utility. But that was with a previous version of MacOS X. Disk Utility is, largely, a GUI wrapper on top of several Apple-supplied command-line tools. If it won't drive the command-line tools the way I want it to, I ought to be able to drop down and do it directly. But first, let's see if I can do it from the GUI, which many users might find easier.

When I run Disk Utility, I can see the mounted DVD twice: the DVD in the drive, and the virtual file system provided by Fairmount and VLC. I can just select the virtual file system, and make a new image. The format I want is "DVD/CD master." This ripping will take a while. Even though this machine has 8 cores, the DVD drive can only pull data off the spinning disc so fast. The bottleneck is the drive, not the processors. So, I'll be back after a cup of coffee.

Well, there was no coffee made so I had a wee dram of Lagavulin instead, and watched part of a video on mathematicians who went insane. But now I've got a .cdr file created by Disk Utility. I can mount it in the Finder as if it were a read DVD.

If I select the mounted volume and chose "Get Info," I see that it is a UDF (not HFS) file system, which is a good sign. I ought to be able to eject the decrypted volume provided by Fairmount and VLC, and the original DVD, and still play the new image using Apple's DVD player, using the "Open DVD Media..." menu item.

That works. This normally requires encryption keys that are on the original DVD's lead-in area, and it isn't present anymore, so this tells me the video in the image file has been successfully decrypted, and the DVD's data stored not just to a set of files, but to a mountable image file.

So now let's see if I can burn it for my home DVD player. The burning process has to produce a contiguous file system on the DVD media, since home "appliance" players need the data to be optimized in this way. I quit DVD player, open up Disk Utility, hit the "Burn" button, and tell it where the .cdr file is. I put in one of my DVD-R DL discs. It reads the disc to figure out what it can do with it. For the sake of reliability, I tell it to burn at 2.4x, and ask it to verify and eject. This also will take a while; at least an hour, so I'll be back after an errand!

OK -- errand run, and I've got my burned DVD-R DL; it passed verification and it mounts on my Mac. "Get Info" shows it to be of file system type UDF, and the Apple DVD player application plays it. But will my Sony DVD player play it? (One moment please...)

The answer: yes, it appears to work fine. Navigation, chapters, special features: all there! That's a lot easier than it was last time; no need to mess with DarwinPorts or fink or extracting a binary tool from an application. It just works! [FOOTNOTE 1]

Note that this technique won't let you put a commercial double-layer DVD onto a single-layer DVD-R. That ought to be obvious, but I just thought I should mention it. There are commercial tools (DVDRemaster, for example) which can do this, but they require re-encoding the files into smaller files and so the result is not a perfect copy of the original.

[FOOTNOTE 1] I made backups of 3 commercial DVDs. All of them passed verification on my Mac. On the Sony appliance DVD player, though, one of them seems to work perfectly, one freezes after the menu, and one has a single glitch that causes the video to freeze for a moment and the playback to skip forward ten seconds (although if you carefully back up nine seconds, you can see most of what it skips).

A fresh copy of the disc with the minor glitch worked fine. It seems that the Mac's SuperDrive is better at reading DVD+R DL discs than the Sony appliance player is. That's no great surprise, especially given that the Sony is seven or eight years old. It also seems that DVD+R DL media is just a little bit tetchier than pressed commercial discs. It is after all quite a complex technology, and relatively new; I burned a lot of coasters on one of the first available consumer CD-R drives, back when they were new. DVD+R DL discs are semi-transparent: the laser has to be able to focus and write on two different planes of dye material -- in other words, it has to be able to shine through the first layer without writing it to focus on the second layer. I'm still slightly amazed that they work at all.

For the other disc, the one that wouldn't play at all, a new copy from the image file didn't work either. It seems I must have done something wrong -- perhaps I didn't specify the correct image type? So I ripped a fresh image file tried again, following my own instructions. It worked, which means I burned three usable discs and two coasters out of five tries. Not great, but it could have been worse!

The Dance Party Playlist, 11 July 2009

2009-07-18T18:35:00.004-04:00

During our recent the Julian Woods Community in Pennsylvania, I had the opportunity to deejay a little dance party, using my new Vestax VCI-300 and Yamaha STAGEPAS 300 PA system.

The party didn't go exactly as planned -- it was delayed due to a thunderstorm, which turned into violently blowing rain and lightning. We had to quickly shut down the power and pile everything into the center of the tent, and then try to dry it all out. I was nervous about wet equipment and the hundreds of feet of extension cords running into the tent; I was running around drying wet power strips and gear, and hanging the joints between extension cords off the ground to make drip loops, to try to make sure that no one would get electrocuted by a wet cord. But eventually we got it all looking reasonably safe, and I started the music. The STAGEPAS system performed admirably, with very clean sound and a decent amount of headroom in a portable system. A subwoofer would have been nice, but I could only fit so much gear in the van.

Crafting the playlist for this party was a bit of a challenge. I had a group with an extremely wide age range -- babies to elders. I had been handed a CD of mostly slower world-ish danceable stuff and asked to include some of it, and I had some general requests to play some "African stuff" and also some Motown, plus one guy who was a big, big Michael Jackson fan. Veronica was very adamant that I play the gummi bear song. (One of the funniest moments was mixing in that track, gritting my teeth a bit wondering how it was going to go over, and then looking up to see thirty people of all ages happily dancing along with my four-year-old girl). I had come up with what I thought were a couple of great sets, but then had to heavily revise the pre-planned set lists to accommodate the shortened schedule and some additional breaks for announcements, as well as last-second requests.

I was going to post my exact saved playlist, but apparently Serato ITCH has something I consider a rather severely broken feature. It saves what you've played in a "Review" window so you can keep track of what you've played. There is a "clear" button to let you empty the review window and start a new set. I was going to transcribe my set from the review window later, when I got a chance, but it appears the contents of the review window is not persistent between launches of the software. So I've lost the exact playlist. But here is my best recollection. The numbers in parentheses are the beats per minute, as calculated by ITCH. For the most part, the beats per minute gradually increase, except for the breaks for some slower songs. This allowed me to beat-match some of the transitions.

Joe Jackson: Steppin' Out (80)
Bob Marley and the Wailers: One Love/People Get Ready (Extended Version) (78)
The Police: One World (Not Three) (84)
Plan 9: Flaming Red Hair (from the Fellowship of the Ring Complete Score) (85)
Buckwheat Zydeco: Mardi Gras Mambo (84)
Lou Bega: Mambo No. 5 (87)
Boiled in Lead: Sher (95)
MC Yogi: Ganesh is Fresh (feat. Jal Uttal) (100)
Wyclef Jean: La Bamba (101)
Bee Gees: Stayin' Alive (Teddybears Remix) (102)
Baha Men: Dancing in the Moonlight (114)
Information Society: What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy) (118)
Michael Jackson: Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough (Single Version) (119)
The Archies: Sugar Sugar (Pistel Remix) (121)
Eddy Grant: Electric Avenue (122)
A:Xus: You Make Me Feel LIke (Peace and Love and Happiness) (124)

(BREAK)

Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes: Up Where We Belong (70)
Crowded House: Don't Dream It's Over (82)
Enigma: Return to Innocence (88)
Angelique Kidjo: Sedjedo (Featuring Ziggy Marley) (100)
Erasure: A Little Respect (113)
Michael Jackson: Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' (Single Version) (122)
Basement Jaxx: Rendez-Vu (125)
Les Rhythms Digitales: Jacques Your Body (Makes Me Sweat) (126)

(BREAK)

Spandau Ballet: True (97)
Johnny Clegg and Savuka: Dela (103)
Stevie Wonder: I Wish (106)
Lou Rawls: You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine (110)
Fatboy Slim: Praise You (110)
Sister Sledge: We Are Family (116)
Brainstorm: We're On Our Way Home (117)
Kool and the Gang: Celebration (Single Version) (121)
Gummibar: Ich Bin Ein Gummibar (German Version) (128)
Erick Morillo and Sacha Baron Cohen: I Like to Move It (from the Madagascar soundtrack album) (130)
Countdown Singers: Mamboleo (130)
Michael Jackson: Thriller (Single Version) (118)
Village People: Y.M.C.A. (Single Version) (126)
Basement Jaxx: Bing Bango (130)
Earth, Wind, and Fire: Boogie Wonderland (131)
Lou Rawls: Groovy People (134)
MC Yogi: Be the Change (Niraj Chag's Swara Mix) (95)
Roxy Music: Avalon (68)

I got a lot of compliments on the set. It was a lot of fun!

The Garden, or, Renters Can't be Choosers

2009-06-17T00:01:00.009-04:00

So, we have lived in our apartment home in Ann Arbor for eight years now. It's been a bit of an uneasy fit for our family. We've tried to maintain a garden. They throw weedkiller pellets in it. (On the days when we are told the lawn care company is coming to kill weeds, we put up signs begging them not to throw weed killer on our flowers and vegetables; they do so anyway). They throw rock salt in it. Just a week or so ago, they tore out a bunch of sunflowers and put down wood chips, apparently thinking our flowers were weeds.

Originally, it was getting torn up by the snowplow every winter, and because of the poor drainage it was literally being washed away in each heavy rain. Actually, our neighbor's garden was downhill, so it was the recipient of our soil improvements.

So, Grace built a wooden raised bed for the garden. They knocked that apart with the snowplow repeatedly and we eventually gave up trying to repair it.

So, Grace built this raised bed of concrete blocks. Last summer in addition to herbs and small flowers in the bed, we grew beans, using a bamboo teepee that Grace built. Naturally the children love to work in the garden. The bed has been here for over a year.

They even managed to knock the cinder blocks out of position with the snow plow, although it was repairable.

Now they're trying something different. We got a letter saying that our garden, where we grow our flowers and foods, and teach our kids about seeds and plants, does not meet the aesthetic standards of the new apartment complex owners, and so we have to remove our bean trellis and raised bed. Which effectively means we have to demolish our garden, with the flowers starting to bloom and the bean plants getting ready to start climbing the trellis.

There are a few things about the apartment complex and the way it has been managed and maintained that don't meet my aesthetic standards, such as the disintegrating balcony that is unsafe to use, the poor ventilation in the bathroom, the mold in the ceiling, the flooding in the basement, and the wiring that is prone to bursting into flames, not to mention the occasional psychotic neighbor and the leak in my son's bedroom roof that took six months to repair and eventually resulted in the ceiling coming down on top of him. But I guess we're renters, and renters can't be choosers. As long as the outside of the building looks uniform and recently painted, who cares that it is disintegrating? At least management can harass us for whatever minor infractions the neighbors are committing right along with us, and (per our straw poll) not being harassed for.

I'm sure management could get some nice, drunken undergrads in here, and they'd be much happier. Maybe they'd even last a little longer than the last batch who were, I think, evicted in under two months.

I Shot Veronica in Her Pajamas. How She Got in Her Pajamas, I'll Never Know

2009-06-16T19:50:00.003-04:00

She's as tall as an eight-year old. It's hard to believe she is only four. Until she throws a tantrum, that is.

Woonion '09, Part 2

2009-06-16T19:45:00.003-04:00

I took a lot of photos of people, but to be honest, I don't want to upload a whole bunch of shots of people I only knew a little bit. Also, a lot of my friends were actually class of '90 or '91. Here are three of my closer friends from college who were at Wooster with me for the reunion. David Lewellen:

Bill Louth:

And Diane, who carried the '89 banner along with Veronica, seen here in front of the rennovated Kauke Hall:

We stayed in Douglass 105:

Woonion '09, Part 1

2009-06-16T19:34:00.005-04:00

I attended the College of Wooster's reunion weekend; I graduated with the class of 1989, twenty years ago. This time I went back with 3 of the 4 kids. Grace had a business meeting she had to attend out of state, so she took Joshua. I brought Isaac, Sam, and Veronica, along with a sitter to help free up some of my time so that I could actually catch up with friends.

Despite the sitter -- I'm not used to working with a sitter -- having the young children with me the whole time was a bit difficult, particularly the long car ride and trying to get them to sleep in the evenings. Veronica loves to be the center of attention, whether you want her to be or not. Sam loves to wander off. It didn't help any that I had to stay up half the night on Thursday night to get ready and to help Grace get ready.

A little bit of alcohol and caffeine were de rigeur -- the caffeine helped me drive there and back safely, and the alcohol helped me get to sleep with 25 international students partying in the lounge next to my room.

Beall Avenue in Wooster is completely torn up and semi-closed to traffic. This is the view across to Lowry Center.

Lowry has not changed much:

The stairwell up to the dining hall looks just like it did 20 years ago.

The kids had a good time in spite of everything. Here are Veronica and Sam finally asleep in Douglass 105!

More photos to come.

The Kids in Saginaw

2009-06-16T19:33:00.002-04:00

At their grandmother's house.

I Love Windows (Not)

2009-06-16T19:27:00.005-04:00

This isn't really the operating system's fault: it's most likely a crashing driver for a USB device. On second thought, putting USB device drivers inside the kernel is the operating system's fault. Whose idea was _that_?

These crashes always seemed to happen when I was most desperate to finish a build of the DSP firmware I was debugging.

The corrupt iTunes library could be Apple's fault, or a side effect of Windows dying horribly right in the middle of some kind of library update. Well, come to think of it, if your program's data files can be totally demolished by a single crash, that doesn't speak well of your data design and error recovery.

The hard drive doesn't seem to be failing as such, although because Windows hides such errors very thoroughly, it can be hard to tell.

Joshua and the Pickle

2009-06-16T19:25:00.003-04:00

Joshua's first official solid food (what he chose to eat, and kept gnawing on) was a dill pickle spear, yesterday, 15 June 2009. We've tried him on bits of rice and bread and things like that before, but they usually came back out.

Work Hours and the Quest for an Even Keel

2009-06-16T18:51:00.004-04:00

So, for the last couple of months I've been working an enormous amount of overtime -- and for a while I was commuting to Lansing along with my 12-16 hour days. I haven't added it all up, but I'm pretty sure there were some 80 to 90 hour weeks in there. If I were able to take the overtime as straight comp time, I'd have a couple of weeks off. That won't happen, but I may be able to get a couple of days.

Thankfully, we have mostly shipped our product -- at least the test builds and the prototype hardware. We are getting away from our frantic scramble -- worried that the fate of the entire project might hinge on some intractable hardware or software bug -- and back to a more normal pace of development, which will mostly involve bug fixes and clarifications to the specs.

Yesterday I worked only eight hours. It was a remarkable feeling, driving home while it was still light out. I took baby Sam for a walk, and realized I'd almost forgotten how to interact with my children. The evening seemed really long, and that was only partly because it's almost midsummer. I'd gotten used to work being such a preponderance of my waking hours that I wasn't used to having any to use for much of anything else.

I'm not going to spend all that new-found time blogging, but I'll try to catch up a little.

Here's to the adjustment back to having a life!

Assholes of Michigan

2009-05-20T21:54:00.007-04:00

Michigan has some of the worst drivers in any state I've ever driven in. Here are some of the, failing to merge after the third "left lane closed ahead -- merge right" sign -- and causing traffic to back up for miles.

Some say the state flower of michigan is the traffic construction barrel. I say no, it's the asshole.

I was hoping that I'd be able to capture license plates, but my little Motorola cell phone camera is just too crappy. (Also, its color is _way_ off).

The little butt-munch in the small black car -- I think it was a matrix or something -- was particularly offensive. After backing traffic up to 5 miles an hour for miles, he finally cut over, then proceeded to refuse to let anyone else merge, aggressively tailgating and cutting people off and trying to pass on the right. At five miles an hour.

It is hard to believe that people can't understand that failing to merge will make them later, too. They seem to think that as long as they are in front -- even if they have bogged traffic down to a standstill and cost themselves an additional 30 minutes on their morning commute -- they've won.

If I were in charge, failure to merge in a timely manner would be a capital offense. There wouldn't be any other capital offenses at all -- just this one. It would be carried out on the spot by a beefy team of slaughterhouse workers who would just pull the drivers out of their cars, stun them with a shotgun with a captive bolt, reclaim the car, and compost the human waste of air and fuel driving it.

Interestingly enough, waving a cell phone camera out your window at these drivers caused them, pretty uniformly, to immediately merge, as if it suddenly reminded that, oh yeah, they aren't the only human in the world, and solipsism isn't actually a practicable world view on the freeway.

Soundflower is Borked

2009-05-17T18:44:00.004-04:00

In several previous posts I gave detailed instructions on how to use Soundflower with ustream.tv and other arcane audio mixing topics under MacOS X.

While these tricks sort of worked, I always had problems with audio after a while. I thought I'd be able to fix it with a change in buffer size or something similar, but I can't, and now I know why -- the problem seems to be isolated to Soundflower. Upgrading to the latest version, 1.4.3, doesn't fix the problems.

It seems that even running Soundflower on my wife's MacBook with no special hardware or audio applications -- just iTunes -- it is pretty easy to get Soundflower to go crazy. Set up the default audio output to be the two-channel Soundflower bus. Run Soundflowerbed and tell it to send the two-channel output to the built-in output. Now play some music. You'll probably have to play with some volumes using Audio MIDI Setup and iTunes.

On my wife's MacBook, plugging in a pair of headphones, which should just result in diverting the audio going through the speakers to the headphones, sends Soundflower into a tizzy -- I start hearing garbage through the headphones, the telltale "buzz" or stutter that tells me that it is playing one buffer of audio in a tight loop, and not getting any fresh audio streaming in. Setting the output to "None" and back to "Built-in Output" fixes the problem reliably.

On my Mac Pro, the problem is even worse -- I don't have to touch anything for the audio to become trash. Just letting iTunes run through my Apogee Ensemble via Soundflower results in the audio failing after a minute or two. Turning the Soundflower output off and back on seems to reliably fix the problem, but it's unusable when I have to fix it every couple of minutes; I can't do a live performance that way.

Interestingly enough, it seems to be just the monitoring of the Soundflower bus via Soundflowerbed that fails; ustream's meter shows the audio still going out.

There are some other issues but this one is a show-stopper. So unfortunately I can't recommend Soundflower for the time being, and I don't really have a workaround. If anyone knows of a similar tool that will give me an extra virtual audio bus that I can use to record or stream, I'd love to hear about it.

I've reported this issue to the developers, and I note that another user is also reporting trouble with the Ensemble. I don't think it is the Ensemble's fault, though, given the way the failure occurs on a stock MacBook. The developers do not seem to be responding to recent bug reports at present.

I'm about to install the 10.5.7 system update; we'll see if that improves the situation.

Soundflower is open source. About 8 years ago I worked on CoreAudio drivers for a commercial PCI-based audio interface, so in theory I should be able to dig into the Soundflower code base and, with luck, figure out what is happening and help fix it. In practice debugging this sort of thing could be a major time sink, and given that I'm already working more than full time and a parent, it seems unlikely that I can make any headway in that direction, but if I get some down time I'll see what I can do.

Ken Knight has been Found!

2009-05-02T19:56:00.003-04:00

Alive and healthy.

The latest update in the Ann Arbor News can be found here.

Like the article says, I'm extremely relieved!

Ken Knight is Missing

2009-05-01T21:11:00.006-04:00

My friend and college classmate and roommate Ken Knight, age 41, is missing in Virginia. Here is a very recent photograph (click on it for a larger version):

The device he is holding is his digital audio recorder. He also frequently traveled with a video camera.

He was hiking a stretch of the Appalachian Trail and was last heard from via Twitter on the morning of the April 26th (Sunday) when he posted a 12-second video clip.

His Twitter page is here.

There is an active search going on; the Chicago Tribune has reported the story, and the AP wire has picked it up.

Here is the story from a Lynchburg, VA newspaper.

Ken is legally blind and suffers from epilepsy, although the illness has been mostly controlled over the 24 years or so that I've known him. Despite his visual impairment, he has been a very avid backpacker and hiker and has hiked all over the world. He is a contributing editor for Backpacking Light magazine and a regular volunteer at The Ark. He lives on the Old West Side of Ann Arbor.

Ken has a home page here, a blog here and the latest episode of his podcast can be found here.

Ken is a good and longtime friend of mine and I am extremely concerned. My thoughts are also with his family; one of the news sources reports that his parents have joined the search effort.

Ustream, Soundflower, and iTunes

2009-04-22T23:59:00.007-04:00

So, it turns out the version of Soundflower I was using has been superseded, and the newest (1.4.3 as of this writing) has some nice new features. One of these is the ability to tap the output directly, from a supplied GUI program, without the need to set up an extra bus in Logic the way I did in my previous article.

Let's say, for example, you want to send audio from your iTunes library up to Ustream. This is now easier than it was.

1. Download and install Soundflower (I'm testing with 1.4.3; look for the latest release here. You'll need to reboot, so bookmark this blog entry and come back when you're done.

2. Open up your Applications folder and look under utilities. You're looking for Audio MIDI Setup. You'll probably want to drag it to your dock.

3. While you're in the Applications folder, look for a folder called Soundflower. Open it up and drag Soundflowerbed to the dock as well.

4. Run Audio MIDI Setup. Change the Default Output (upper right in the window) to Soundflower (2ch). Think of the two-channel (stereo, left and right) Soundflower bus as a virtual set of two wires you can tap into. This setting means that everything the computer sends to the default audio output will go into these wires. You can also take a look at the properties for Soundflower (2ch) but the defaults are really already what you want: 44.1 KHz sample rate, 2ch-32bit (the only option), and
volumes all the way up (for now, at least).

5. Now launch Soundflowerbed. It doesn't appear to do much, but you will notice a little flower icon in your menu bar. Make two settings. Choose the Soundflower (2ch) submenu, go under buffer size, and set it to 64. Then change the built in routing for Soundflower (2ch) from None (OFF) to Built-in Output. What this means is that you are hooking up those two virtual "wires" to your computer's built-in output (on this laptop, the built-in speaker or headphones). By setting the buffer size the the smallest available, you are ensuring that the audio doesn't lag too much. If you hear stuttering or dropouts you will want to increase that buffer size, but assuming your system is reasonably fast and not doing a lot of other work, that size should be fine.

6. Now launch iTunes and get some music playing. Turn the output from iTunes all the way up (if it is too loud, turn down the speaker using the volume control in your menu bar). The reason for this is that you don't want the audio going into the bus to be attenuated; you want it to be full-scale.

7. Now go to ustream.tv, log in, and hit the "Broadcast Now" button to bring up the broadcast console. Of course, I'm assuming you have a show set up already; if you don't, you'll have to do that first. Set the broadcast audio source to Soundflower (2ch) and do whatever you like with the video (I'm leaving it off and turning off local monitoring). I also set the volume level on the console to 50% and tell it that I am using a mixer. I set the audio quality all the way up, to 44.1KHz. The Ustream interface has a few quirks with the way it redraws the chat room and user list, or fails to, so experiment.

And now you've got an internet radio show! Well, sort of. It's up to you to get some listeners, and up to you to provide some content. I hope this helps you get started. Let me know if you're doing it like this yourself, or if you find a better way. Note that there are other little tricks you can do -- if you use Soundflowerbed a lot, you can make it a startup item. See the README file that comes with it for more information.

UPDATE: you will need to be careful with the volume controls. Now that you have set the default audio output to the two-channel Soundflower bus, this means that your Mac's volume pop-up, in the menu bar, and the volume keys on your keyboard, if you have them, now control the SoundFlower output volume. That makes a certain amount of sense -- normally, if you are playing through an audio interface of some sort, you would want these controls to affect what you were actually listening to, not just the built-in speakers or headphone output. But unfortunately that means if you turn the volume down, your stream will become quieter. This is probably not what you want. (For something conceptually pretty simple, there are sure a lot of quirks to this process! It would be nice if this were fully configurable somewhere.)

To work around this, you can bring down your speaker or headphone monitoringvolume by using the Audio MIDI Setup application again, selecting properties for Built-in Output, and adjusting the volume down to about -24 dB (or whatever monitoring level seems reasonable to you). Make sure the input and output volumes for Soundflower (2ch) are all the way up; if not, your stream volume will be attenuated. Better to leave the digital signal at full scale, as long as you avoid digital clipping, so that you maintain your source's dynamic range, and let your audience members choose how loud they want it. Again, I think this is at about a 50% volume level on the Ustream broadcast console. At least, that is the level that seems to work well for me. But please correct me if you think there is a better way to achieve full volume without clipping.

iTunes Plus Fail

2009-04-19T18:05:00.012-04:00

So, recently Apple has been gradually updating all its protected content to unprotected (though tagged) files. I've been buying the upgrades as new versions become available.

But the process has kind of petered out lately, and now a banner on the iTunes Store home claims "Music is Now 100% iTunes Plus."

So does this mean I have upgraded all my songs -- all ummm, wow, thousand-plus?

Well, not exactly. I have a "residue" of about 65 songs that I apparently can't upgrade. Let's look at the different situations here.

Some of them are from completed albums that just don't exist on iTunes anymore. Here are a few examples: Otis Taylor's album Below the Fold is just gone. The Orb's Bicycles and Tricycles, just gone, as well as the EP entitled Aftermath. Tommy Keene's album Crashing the Ether. So there's no "upgrade path" to these tracks.

For whatever reason, the DRM-free versions were not made available, and for the sake of -- what, DRMological purity? -- the old songs were not kept around as DRM files, but just... purged. Tossing out whole albums seems like a funny way to achieve the goal of 100% DRM-free music.

Should I expect iTunes Plus versions of these to reappear at some point in the future? I feel like it is incumbent on Apple to propose a solution here, especially if they have a goal of eventually decommissioning their DRM playback authorization service. That would be very uncool, because these tracks would then no longer play, unless I bypass the DRM in one of the various methods available.

Another case: the first big album by Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). The original is not available as iTunes Plus tracks because it's been replaced by the remastered album, which has a few extra tracks. I guess I shouldn't expect to get a low-cost upgrade to remastered tracks; the labels themselves push this kind of upgrade. But still, it might have been nice to see Apple upgrade the original non-remastered tracks. This was a very popular album; I wonder how many people who purchased it now find themselves in my position?

Some other cases are more confusing. I own a whole bunch of loose tracks purchased from compilations -- and those compilations albums are now gone. The songs themselves are most likely all still available on iTunes, but in their original albums, or in different compilations, so there's no inexpensive upgrade, because their system doesn't think they are the same song.

This seems to be the case even for some tracks that aren't from compilations. I have a single track from Michael Jackson's album Off the Wall. The album is there in the store, and it doesn't seem to be a remaster or contain any change to the track listing. There is no apparent way to upgrade it aside from buying the new track. Why?

I guess it isn't incumbent on Apple to provide me with an upgrade path, but it's annoying; I was able to buy upgrades for almost all of my material.

Then there are some cases that seem like mistakes. I own the DRM version of Rush's album Exit... Stage Left (the remastered edition). It's there in the iTunes catalog as iTunes Plus, but there isn't an upgrade option. And five or six of the tracks are missing. There's a similar situation with their album All the World's a Stage, except in that case only four tracks out of the ten or so are available. Following the link from the protected album in my library to the iTunes Store doesn't even take me to the album, or the band, just to "Rock." So maybe it's a database problem?

I can't complain too much -- it looks like I was able to upgrade more than 90% of my purchased iTunes music. The audio quality is better, and there's no DRM. But having it mostly work also serves to highlight the parts that didn't work. And having music just disappear from iTunes -- well, it makes me nervous, like seeing books disappear from the bookstore, for unclear reasons. Because they just didn't sell well enough to earn their keep? That's not what I'd expect for an entire online store that is 90% or more "long tail."

How about you -- if you owned any protected content from iTunes, have you upgraded it? How did the process go for you?

UPDATE 1: a few days later, I am still seeing new iTunes Plus ugrades to existing tracks become available. So, apparently Apple has indeed, at least in some cases, removed the DRM tracks before providing their iTunes Plus replacements. Also, I noticed that the example I showed of a "broken" album can't even be purchased as an album or partial album with one click, just track-by-track. Do albums appear piecemeal in the iTunes store as they are added, even if they are not complete?

UPDATE 2: it isn't just some old rock albums. Kate Bush's album Aerial -- a fantastic album, by the way -- is listed as a "partial album." Only 7 tracks are available, out of sixteen, and you have to buy them individually. I don't get it!

Hardware's Sense of Humor

2009-04-13T11:17:00.003-04:00

I just had to throw out a cheap USB keyboard because several keys on the bottom row had stopped working, including the "b" and "n" key.

Of course, I didn't find this out the easy way. After repeated failure to log in, I had pretty much decided that my system had been compromised and was ready to wake up our system administrator, and make him start digging through firewall logs looking for evidence of a network security breach...

Ubuntu Wastes My Time and Money

2009-04-13T10:53:00.002-04:00

So, in a previous post I described how I spent the better part of a day replacing a hard drive in my PC because Ubuntu reported persistent disk failures.

It turns out the drive wasn't bad. There was nothing at all wrong with the drive.

No -- what I was seeing was some kind of recently added diagnostic behavior in the FAT32 version of Ubuntu. When my system was booting, if the drive was marked dirty, Ubuntu would run its fsck, which is a script, which would launch the FAT32-appropriate binary. Apparently when that tool runs now, among the checks it does is a check to verify that my backed-up boot sector matches the real boot sector. The problem is that if it doesn't, which it didn't, it doesn't just produce a diagnostic to this effect, it dumps a list of non-matching inodes or block numbers or whatever the hell you call several pages of fsck's diagnostic numbers. Diagnostic numbers that look exactly like what you see when you have a persistently corrupt directory structure.

Naturally, since the file itself wasn't bad, repairing the file system repeatedly didn't fix this problem, so every time I'd boot, I'd see several pages of fsck garbage spew past.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what it looks like when your hard drive is going bad.

So I replaced it.

Yes, I could have found the actual error in the appropriate log. But after using Linux on and off going back to about, er, 1994? I thought I knew what the system was telling me.

Now I'm just pissed. The actual fix involved running the tool with sudo and allowing it to back up the boot sector.

It doesn't help that my machine also can't shut down without locking up; I get a hang about half the time after the line "running local boot scripts /etc/rc.local." And of course there was the time I had to waste to get the system, in 2009, to let me use my dispay's full resolution.

I might mention that this is about as generic a PC as they come; I built it myself, from an Antec Sonata case, an Intel motherboard with built-in video, an Intel CPU, Crucial RAM, and Seagate hard drives.

Except that now it has one Western Digital drive that I never wanted to buy at all, but it was the only EIDE drive the local Best Buy had in stock.

I could go on a rant about the user interfaces of command-line tools that overwhelm you with useless information while telling you almost nothing you need to know, but perhaps I should save that for another time.

Hard Drive Weekend

2009-04-05T23:36:00.005-04:00

Aside from being a weekend of UStream studio setup, it has also been a weekend of dealing with hard drives.

I have a PC I built for myself a few years ago, from parts chosen to maximize reliability (an Intel motherboard, Seagate drives, Crucial RAM). It is a dual-boot system with Windows 2000 and Ubuntu, which I've more-or-less continually upgraded. It's been in my closet, but last week at work I needed a Linux box quick for some testing and coding, so I dragged it in, and picked up a used HP flat panel at Affordable Computers on Industrial. Much to my delight I found that the 20" flat panel does 1600x1200 and can be rotated into the portrait aspect ratio, which is fantastic for programming; if the built-in video had a second output, I'd seriously consider a second one. But I'd have to add a video card, and disable the onboard video, and that sounded like too much money and work for the moment, so there it sits.

Anyway, the drive with Windows 2000 on it seems to be failing, although I'm reminded again just how badly operating systems are at letting you know this rather important bit of information. Ubuntu always found lots of problems on it when scanning the disk, and so did Windows, but it did not seem to be able to fix them despite its best efforts, so I decided to pull it and put in a different drive.

I finally figured out how to use partimage to save the whole partition onto an external drive. You have to segment it, so you don't hit the file size limit on FAT32 volumes. You apparently can't just use dd, which was my first thought. I had to re-learn how to use parted. Both these tools have somewhat cryptic error messages (the source drive for partimage has to be un-mounted, but you wouldn't know it from the error message). I used a Knoppix boot CD-R burned for the purpose. Knoppix has apparently gone all 3-D animated, which annoyed the crap out of me; I have no idea why a CD distribution designed for system administration needs to shatter your window into dozens of translucent pieces when you close it. That's just dumb. All this magic also probably contributed to the two hard lockups I experienced trying to get the backup and restore completed.

I had to do the MBR thing, and then the GRUB thing, and dredge up memories of how to fix a dual-boot when it comes up and just says GRUB. I have fixed them before, but I don't do it frequently enough to remember what to do when it goes south. I finally found some documentation from Red Hat and it involved a series of 3 GRUB commands. GRUB appears to have a reasonable parser, but it really isn't reasonable at all; if you type "setup(hda)" it isn't the same as typing "setup (hda)" or something like that; it doesn't handle whitespace in a reasonable way at all.

That shocked me a bit, as handling whitespace in text strings is not that hard; in fact, writing a program to break up a line of differently-formatted pieces of text with arbitrary whitespace is, or at least used to be, a very common assignment for a beginning programming class. And there are parsing libraries that make it a no-brainer. No, the author had to _work_ at making the tool intolerant of deviations in whitespace. I remember writing loops in VAX Pascal to skip whitespace circa 1985. But open-source command-line tools are rarely optimized towards making it easy for the end-user.

Anyway, after doing the dd trick for saving and restoring the MBR, the GRUB commands that fixed the boot were along these lines:

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

grub> root (hda,0)

grub> setup (hda)

GRUB is also monstrously complicated so don't expect the man page to be much assistance.

As usual, though, the hardest part of swapping out one hard drive and swapping in another was dealing with the physical cabling in the case. I have an Antec Sonata case, which is a very nice case, but even so, you can't get the drive cage fully free of the box; you have to twist and wrap and fold ribbon cables in a nightmare origami configuration; there isn't room behind the drive cage for the power and ribbon cables to actually fit neatly, so you have to smash them flat and hope that you haven't broken any conductors; and even the best PC case I've ever seen still has hiding in it somewhere razor-sharp sheet metal. I have yet to do any kind of a PC upgrade -- a CPU, memory, or drives -- that doesn't involve sacrificing a small amount of blood.

What would have been really helpful is a case where the _back side_ came off, to allow me to get my hands behind the drives. Barring that, if the entire drive cage came out, that would have been extremely helpful as well. But no, on my Sonata case it is welded in place.

It really, really makes me appreciate the thought Apple put into the Mac Pro (and prior to that, the G5) case!

I've never heard anyone take that into account when they talk about the "Apple Tax," have you?

I Stream, UStream, We All Stream

2009-04-05T21:50:00.008-04:00

So, this weekend I figured out how to do a live broadcast via ustream.tv that is a little bit more sophisticated than just turning on my webcam and playing my guitar in front of it.

What I wanted was to avoid relying on the single mono microphone built in to the iSight webcam I'm using, keeping in mind that even though it is sounds pretty decent, the ideal place to put a microphone is not necessarily the same as the ideal place to put a camera. What I wanted was the ability to fully mix live audio sources, and that's mostly what I got.

If you haven't seen UStream, it's a really cool site that allows you to follow live streaming audio and/or video from any of a bazillion live contributors at any given time, and makes it easy to set up you own streaming upload. It provides a very nice Java application which, on my Mac, worked very seamlessly with either my wife's laptop with built-in iSight camera (which it considers a USB camera) or one of the discontinued iSight cameras I picked up recently. The Java application looks like this:

Let me point out a few key features. First, there is the webcam image. You can view either the local image or the one coming back down from the server. The broadcast console has some amazing features: can set set the image quality along a whole range of values, which corresponds to the level of pixelation (how grainy the image is). You can set the frame rate down as low as one frame per second. If you have a slow connection, or if as in my case you want to crank up the audio quality and don't care much about the video quality, you can tweak it just the way you like it. The audio quality can be set from CD quality (44.1 KHz) down to phone quality or less (5 KHz).

Note also that you can choose to stream video, audio, or both. So, if you want to set up your own internet radio station, there you go.

There's only one minor problem: the console application is designed to work with a webcam. You can tell it what audio and video source to use, but if, for example, you want to send audio from iTunes into your stream, you can't, because iTunes, or the system audio, does not show up as a source. And what if you want to play DJ and mix the camera audio over the iTunes audio, or use a separate microphone, or, like me, play guitar into an audio interface and sing on another microphone into the audio interface? You can't.

(Note that the following instructions apply only to Macs; there are presumably similar situations for Windows or Linux on PC hardware, but I have not investigated them).

What you need to do is set up another audio bus -- a virtual bus. The ticket here is a free application from Cycling '74 called Soundflower (Google for it). This will give you two new audio devices, both of which are virtual (they have no hardware associated with them). One is a two-channel bus and one is 16-channel bus. This virtual device can be set up to 96KHz and uses 32-bit samples, so you won't lose audio quality needlessly by passing 16-bit or 24-bit audio through it.

Now, what I really wanted to do was to allow Logic Pro to work with one big audio device. I wanted to use the audio inputs on my Apogee Ensemble for guitar, microphone, and CD player, and the audio outputs for headphones and speakers for monitoring, but I _also_ wanted to use the SoundFlower two-channel device as a way to send exactly what I wanted, all mixed together, to my audio stream. Logic and CoreAudio only work with one device at a time, so this seems impossible.

Apple's solution is to create something called an Aggregate Device. If you run the Audio Midi Setup utility, in the Audio menu you'll see a command called "Open Aggregate Device Editor." You can then create a mash-up of audio devices. In this case, a real hardware device and a virtual device can all be combined. We're using 8 inputs and outputs on the Ensemble, which include four mic preamps, two of which can be used to plug in guitars directly. The two virtual channels from Soundflower are 9 and 10. The aggregate device looks like this in the editor:

So, there's my virtual device. Now Logic can use it; you have to do a little tweaking in Preferences/Audio, but wham, it was pretty simple. And now I can set up my devices.

The way I did it was to configure channel 1 as a guitar input, set up with virtual effects. Channel 4 is my vocal mic, configured with more virtual effects. Channels 7 and 8 are wired to the combo CD/tape player in my rack, so I wanted to be able to use that as an input source as well. Outputs 1 and 2 are the Apogee headphone outputs. Outputs 7 and 8 are the Apogee outputs to some monitor speakers, although to avoid feedback and strange delay issues I generally just listen to headphones.

Now things get a little stranger: inputs 9 and 10 correspond to the 2-channel virtual SoundFlower device, and outputs 9 and 10 represent the outgoing stream.

So, I have lots of options. In Logic, I created a virtual mixer to help me keep this all straight:

Let me try to give you a quick tour of that mixer. From left to right, channel 1 get input 1, which is my guitar, and the inserts are guitar effects. Instead of setting it up with a fixed output, I configured two aux busses, 1 and 2. Bus 1 represents my headphone monitoring. Bus 2 represents the outgoing stream. So the mixer is currently set up to feed the guitar, mic, and CD/tape deck into my headphones.

The fourth channel strip from the left is interesting. Its purpose in life is to allow me to feed the output of iTunes into Logic and mix it in to my headphones as well. For this purpose it has as its input channels 9 and 10, which is the Soundflower virtual bus. It has a send to the headphone bus, but no send to the Soundflower output. The reason for this is that I don't want iTunes audio to be going into the stream twice, with different latencies. I am not sure what might happen there but it looked like it could get ugly, so I thought it best to avoid that situation.

One last thing: iTunes does not have a configurable output; I can't tell it to play on a particular audio device and channel. Instead, it always plays on the default output. So if I want it to feed audio to SoundFlower, that means I have to set the default output to Soundflower, using the Audio MIDI Setup application. I left the system output to 1 and 2 on the Ensemble so that any beeps or what-not produced by my Mac did not wind up on the stream.

If you decide to play audio from iTunes into your UStream show, keep in mind that the 50% mark on the volume control on the Ustream console seems to be digital full scale or 0 dB, when the iTunes volume control is all the way up. This seems to give you the fullest range of volumes. If you go any higher than that you will likely get digital clipping, which sounds very nasty. Experiment with boosting the sources you feed into Soundflower up by adding gain or compression, rather than pushing the final volume past 50%.

Note that you don't have to use Logic; you could use MainStage, or if you want a lighter-weight setup, I think you could probably do most or all of what I'm doing using the wonderful Audio Hijack Pro. And you don't need an Apogee Ensemble; I have one for doing recording with its nice-sounding preamps and low noise, but for live use a much less expensive audio interface would be nearly indistinguishable. You could try the Duet, also by Apogee, or something like an Edirol FA-66, or something like a MOTU traveler. I can't recommend any USB audio interfaces, but this Firewire combination seems to work very well for me.

A word on processing power: I'm doing this all live on a Mac Mini with a G4 processor. However, when I turn on guitar and vocal effects, it starts to bog down. The effects use quite a bit of CPU time. Handling live video also makes the G4 work. If you have anything faster than this -- a G5 or something with an Intel processor -- it should be plenty fast enough to do what I'm doing. You may hear the fan ramp up. One way that I could save some processor power is by moving all the guitar effects to outboard pedals. I don't have an outboard compressor or voice channel strip so the voice processing will have to stay in the computer for now. It does make me want to trade in my G4 Mac Mini for a newer Intel version, which would be able to run MainStage and which would presumably have quite a bit more CPU horsepower to handle audio effects. Oh, and if you are using a laptop, make sure to set it so it doesn't go to sleep or try to cycle down the processor. This might make it get hot, so be sure you have adequate airflow and your studio environment is not too warm.

Here is a picture showing pretty much my entire live setup, minus the guitars and pedals;

Looks impressive, right? Well, except that everything on the rack shelf was very dusty from disuse, and I had not cleaned it all up yet. Also, when you see a shot from the other side, taken while I was setting it all up, and notice the dirty socks on the floor... and the beer... maybe not so much!

And, yes, I did play harmonica on my punk version of Jewel's song "I'm Sensitive." (If this were Twitter, I would then type LOLZ).

You might be saying "wow, this is very complicated," and you wouldn't be wrong. However, I am very impressed, and almost amazed, that it worked. Apple really has their system software together now, and these tools are incredibly flexible. It's particularly nice to be able to do all this mixing and routing right inside the box. And you don't need a setup this elaborate; I know folks using a cheap webcam and microphone and their live streams sound fine for casual listening. We aren't producing a professional-quality video for Blu-Ray here. If I were setting up something from scratch, I'd consider a laptop, an iSight, and an Edirol FA-66, and a mic; the FA-66 can be had for under $300, and a Shure SM-58 microphone for under $100. Add a few cables and spend some time on the setup and you have near-broadcast audio quality (although, of course, not video quality, but with the proper lighting the iSight can produce some impressive results).

Finally, if you would like to listen to one of my shows, my Ustream channel can be found here. I post notes on Twitter and Facebook, or on my chat, indicating when I expect to be on. So far I have done two kinds of shows -- live music with video, and canned playlists from iTunes. But as you can see, just about anything is possible!

A Big Day for Joshua

2008-12-14T22:50:00.004-05:00

Today Joshua was baptized, and he also played Baby Jesus in the St. Francis Living Nativity.

A photo album can be found on Facebook here.

I'll have to write more about the whole day later -- too tired now!

Baby Sam and the Broken Wrist

2008-11-24T21:59:00.011-05:00

We are all surviving the beginning of the end of 2008 reasonably well. Sam had a little accident and has a fractured wrist, and is now wearing a temporary splint which he is trying to eat, and in a day or two he will get a little cast he can use to bash his sister with. I say "fractured wrist" as if his hand were dangling at a funny angle or something, but really it is a tiny fracture hardly visible on the x-ray. It was hurting him, though. He took some kind of a spectacular spill off the bed and landed on a ukulele. It took us a while to figure out where he was hurting, since he is not quite verbal enough to just point and say "it hurts here!" and we could not find any bruises. We finally noticed that he was favoring his right hand where he is usually left-handed, and then if you squeezed the wrist in a certain spot it felt just a bit swollen, and he would complain. Anyway, he will heal quickly; apparently 2-year-olds heal broken bones in 3 weeks or less.

Veronica loves her new sibling. She was well-prepped. Sam -- it is hard to say. He had kind of a strange weaning. I think he was jealous of the baby before it even arrived and so started biting all the time when he nursed, and so he got negative feedback, and basically stopped nursing. Now he won't nurse even though he really is young enough to still nurse, and Grace has a milk surplus, so she is bottling it up to sell at Whole Foods. Just kidding. Sam is getting a little of the overflow from a cup. Joshua is quite overwhelmed, though. He is doing his best but sometimes just gets hosed down with milk and then he looks like a victim of some kind of dairy explosion.

Joshua is settling in although he is the fussiest baby we've had. For example, if he wets his diaper he insists that it be changed immediately, where Sam would go happily around for hours with his diaper sopping wet. Joshua wants to nurse every two hours pretty much to the minute, which makes it hard for Grace to get much sleep.

Are you an amateur radiologist? Did you spot the fracture? Click on the image to zoom in. The ER doctor showed me where it is. I've marked the approximate spot on this view, which was taken at a different angle, but I probably have the precise contour of the crack wrong; it is hard for me to tell since I haven't held real human bones in my hands like he has. The fracture is in the head of the bone where they often absorb impact and split slightly, which you could say might even be a design feature. It is interesting to note how few bones are visible in Sam's wrist. Most of the bones of the wrist have not calcified out of their cartilagenous precursors yet, which illustrates how flexible and shock-absorbing babies are!

One last shot: the bones on the right are in Sam's forearm. I was holding Sam on my lap, and holding his arm in position while they shot the x-rays, with my own lead apron on. I think the extra bones are some of my fingers at an odd angle since my hand was wrapped around his arm, and the stitching on my sleeve seems to be visible as well.