Chaos Terminal

It's auto show season and I'm already lusting after a few of new concepts:


The new Saab interior is very Saabesque but gorgeous. This just goes to show how numerous, minor, incremental tweaks can improve a design from acceptable to breath-taking.


The press pictures are contrast-deprived and reduce the visual punch the CTS-V should have, but again, the interior! I would gleefully slip into the luxurious folds of those seats, caressed firmly yet gently as I forced my will upon the highway with 550 HP.

Posted by Mike at 1/09/2008 04:10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I think I've figured out the perfect automotive combination for performance-minded people in Seattle. Many of us spend upwards of 1.5 hours every day driving between Seattle and the Eastside, usually in stop-and-go traffic. The side streets of Seattle experience congestion as well and our hills are second only to San Francisco. Sounds like a terrible place to own a manual, eh? It is, to be honest. I've got 39k miles on it now and I'll be damned if my clutch makes it past 50k. You know those people that get 300k miles on a single clutch? Their daily commute takes them from Bumblenowhere, Ohio to Flatsville, Kansas. Clutch longevity isn't about miles, it's about clutch engagements and how rough the engagements are. I digress.

Though it is not available in many vehicles as of yet, the DualTronic transmission from Borg-Warner seems to offer the performance benefits of a manual with the ease of an automatic. The DualTronic, known to many as the DSG in various WV Group products, is a computer-controlled, dual-clutch transmission. Since it uses clutches instead of torque converters, you get none of the parasitic loss of an automatic transmission. The two clutches can independently engage different gears, the algorithm of which can be changed on the fly. If you're on a Sunday drive, gently accelerating while in third gear, fourth gear will be pre-selected. Well below red line, the first clutch will disengage and the second one will smoothly grab onto fourth gear. Looking for performance? The system can be put into full manual mode. The algorithms can be changed such that if a potential downshift situation is detected (sudden reduction of the throttle with concurrent application of brakes, for example), the second clutch could pre-select a lower gear instead and rapidly snap to it as decelleration is detected (8 milliseconds is the publicized shift time). Good compromise, eh?

Even better than just having the option of throwing your DualTronic into automatic mode would be the inclusion of Bosch's Adaptive Cruise Control. Available on various luxury makes such as BMW and MB, the latest version is capable of full stop-and-go control. I'd absolutely adore being set a maximum cruise speed of 65 MPH and then let the car get me across 520. I'd definitely be attentive and not place full trust in the technology, but this would allow me to relax my left foot and frustration after a hard day of work.

I bet that the 2009 BMW M3 will be the first vehicle available with this combination of technologies. BMW have announced they will offer a DSG-style transmission at some time for the M3 and sources say it is coming in the spring of 2008. BMW already offers adaptive cruise control as an option so they may incorporate the latest stop-and-go system by then as well. It'll be years before this combination is available at a reasonable price.

Posted by Mike at 12/21/2007 01:15:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

It only took a few months of calendar time and about twenty hours of actual time, but my photo gallery is finally available at bibik.org! It has been updated with numerous pictures from this year, as well.

Posted by Mike at 11/27/2007 11:25:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Home Theater Plans!

What I have now:

• Audio/Video
  
• Onkyo TX-SR504 7.1 110W A/V Receiver
• Onkyo Front / Centers : Dual 5" woofers and 1" tweeter
• Onkyo Surrounds: 3.1" woofer, 0.75" tweeter
• Onkyo Subwoofer: 230W 10" woofer
• Westinghouse 37" 1080p LCD
• Xbox 360 Premium (no HDMI)
• Composite-only set-top box
  
• Crappy speaker wires from the Onkyo HTIB
• Wooden speaker stands for fronts and surrounds
  

During the move to the condo, all of my surround speaker stands broke so I'm currently running 2.1 audio. Since I finally own a place, I figured I can finally do something decent with the surround speakers. Since I'm in a condo, I can't run the speaker wires completely hidden in the wall (no access to ceiling or floor and no desire to rip open the wall at every stud!). I looked into a few different ideas for hiding the wires:

1. Under the baseboard
2. Under the carpet
3. Using flat wire and painting over it
4. Run cable raceway along either the baseboard or crown molding
   

The only solution that seemed to work would be to use raceway so I picked up a few hundred feet of corner raceway from CableOrganizer. The room with the home theater has a bay window, a few hallways, et cetera so the only way to run the cable is as such:

1. From the receiver down to the baseboard
2. Over to the bay window wall
3. Up the wall to the ceiling
4. Across to the wall parallel to the TV
5. Along that wall to the wall parallel to the bay window
6. Part way along that final wall

The raceway was just delivered last night and I'm quite impressed. It's attractive, well-sized, durable and not too heavy. Installation shouldn't be a problem at all. Based on this fairly annoying Dolby site and the fact that I have to mount the right surround at a certain spot, I've found what I would consider the optimal positioning for the four surrounds. I'm going to get some cheap wall mounts that offer some adjustability.

Here is where I'm not quite so sure as to my plan. I know the speaker wires will be run along the ceiling and then will have to drop a few feet to the speakers. I could try to make it look extremely clean by running the wires behind the wall for that short stretch but that would require putting EIGHT holes in the wall. I could make very small holes; just enough to fish the wires. I could install keyhole plates but if I'm running the cables to the exact location of the speakers, why bother? I could also just run more cable raceway down the wall. I think I'm just going to run the wires bare for now while I contemplate these options.

I am going to toss the included speaker wire, get some bulk wire and do this right. I'm pricing wire out from Blue Jeans Cable, Parts Express and Monoprice; looks like PE is winning. I'll run bare wire at the speaker and use banana plugs for the receiver side. Using those plugs will alleviate the headache of trying to do side-entry screw posts for 18 connections of 12 gauge wire! Just getting these speakers finally mounted and using some quality wire should help immensely.

But what about after that? The TV is currently sitting on an ugly IKEA TV bench, the 360 is hiding behind that, the cable box on the other side and the receiver is the only thing in the bench. Unfortunately, the only place for the center channel is under the bench! Highly suboptimal. My desire would be to wall-mount the TV, wall-mount the center channel just beneath the TV and hide all the cables. Hiding the power for the TV would require something like a PowerBridge and right now, the TV itself is doing all the video switching. It has to deal with the 360, cable box and the PC I have just off to the side. Running all of those cables up the wall sounds terrible! The receiver I have now can do 3x component and 3x composite in and does composite out. That would cover everything but the VGA (or DVI) in from the computer, which I can deal with for now.

An HDMI-switching receiver would be a great investment as I could just have the single HDMI cable run up to the TV. I could even use a DVI-HDMI cable to connect the computer to the receiver. I'd also replace the TV bench with an open component rack, for better cooling. The receiver and 360 both get extremely hot! Since I would have space on the rack, I'd probably get either a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player to enjoy the setup. At that point, I might try to upgrade the speakers but they seem fine to me. I'm not an audiophile by any means.

Ah dreams, oh for the want of time and money to make them true.

Posted by Mike at 10/31/2007 01:19:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

Clare and I just found the cutest cat in the whole world and he's turning out to be quite the lover!

We had been scouring petfinder.com for the last few weeks, toying with the idea of getting a cat. I'm pretty much settled in to the condo, Clare is staying with me every night and we both wanted a pet. She's more of a dog lover but my little condo just couldn't support a dog lifestyle. We've sent each other tens of petfinder.com links but none of them seemed like "the one". Finally, Clare sent a link early one morning titled "HHHOOOOOOONNNEEEYYYYYYY!!!" and a wave of realization hit, here was the one!

I had a few criteria in mind when picking out a new cat. These criteria were not of the "must have" variety, but more of the "must not be" variety:

• Cannot be a kitten. Everyone wants a kitten. Kittens only temporarily end up in shelters; they get snatched up immediately.
• As a corollary: cannot be fairly young. No one wants an older cat, so the older, the better I would feel about adopting.
  
• Cannot be in perfect shape. A healthy, pretty kitty will be adopted over time. There is little chance a healthy, well-behaved cat would have issues being placed in a wonderful home.

The cat that Clare linked to was six years old, had a teratoma removed from his neck and needed a tooth removed. On the other hand, you could tell he was so sweet and once healed up, would be beautiful! He's a Siamese mix: mostly a domestic short-hair body but with blue-points and the cutest blue cross eyes! We ran through a few name ideas but since he's mostly a light cream color with blue points, I came up with the name Roquefort, or Ro for short. Here he is:

Posted by Mike at 10/15/2007 10:44:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

I'm a bad dork. For the first time since my parents bought a Tandy 1000 and then some Acer with a Pentium 60, I've purchased a computer instead of building my own from parts. I've been running my last homebuilt computer for over five years now and loading a simple video now takes five steps:

1) Shutdown all other programs
2) Fire up Task Manager
3) Kill any rogue process that is taking up more than 10% of the CPU (I'm looking at you, trustedinstaller.exe! Hey, svchost, pipe down!)
4) Fire up the video and pause it after it thrashes for 20 seconds like a fish outta water.
5) Promote the wmplayer.exe priority to High, but NOT real-time. High allows the player to suck up enough resources to play a video properly, real-time seems to override the scheduler causing... problems.

After watching the first four seasons of The Sopranos in this fashion, I decided enough was enough and started trolling for deals on new computers. After realizing that buying a pre-made system was cheaper than assembling one, I focused on Dell deals. Finally, I picked up this system for only $520:

• Core 2 Duo E6550 (2.33 GHz)
• 1 GB RAM
• 80 GB SATA drive
• DVD-ROM
• 20" LCD

That processor stuffed in a mini-tower with those other components sorta seems like stuffing an AMG 6.2L V8 into a Festiva (...if only engines were free, I'd have a great LeMons car there) but my old computer has a DVD burner and I'll upgrade the new computer over time. That processor retails for $200 on its own, same with the monitor!

I barely booted the computer before reformatting the drive and installing a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate. So far, I'm happy with the box and the 2 GB of RAM I have coming my way will only improve the situation.

Posted by Mike at 9/07/2007 10:14:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Last night, Kendra and Brendan invited me out to Bleu to meet a coworker, Aric and his wife, Cherie. He's a well-read, activity-focused editor for Amazon, she has rapier-sharp wit and a knack with words to the point where she's a highly-proclaimed author. She has a large following and I'm assuming he does as well, considering how engrossing his blogs are. It felt good just to be in their presence.

Posted by Mike at 8/31/2007 12:34:00 PM | Permalink | Comments

I do not understand how to live life for myself.

I'm so afraid of what other people think that I never challenge myself, I focus my energies into characteristics and abilities that come naturally and I spend too much money on trinkets (some of which costing hundreds of thousands of dollars) to bring more positive attention to myself.

I'm trying to get over this. Paying attention to the attention only causes anxiety, reducing my abilities and making me look worse to other people. 'Tis a silly cycle but it's a roundabout with an a single entrance that closes behind you. I've spent numerous years fearing failure to the point where I've been paralyzed into doing nothing certain nights but reading (and not posting to) internet forums. I'm going to beat this.

Posted by Mike at 8/31/2007 11:21:00 AM | Permalink | Comments