When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · January
· · · · 01 (3 entries)
Social · Our third annual “Lauren and Tim’s New Year’s Day Social” is history. Forty or so people, plus as many as nine simultaneous kids, went through some pretty good champagne, juices, gazpacho, lentil soup, dips, and so on, and did a whole lot of talking. Marlowe, who’s now six months old, astounded us by sticking around and chilling with the crowd, apparently enjoying the buzz. Thanks all for coming, and for those who brought bottles of wine and other bonuses, that’s really totally unnecessary but thanks anyhow. I enclose a photo of the aftermath ...
TELawrence.net · As a member of the T. E. Lawrence Society and a participant in the TEL studies mailing list, I’m happy to announce the arrival of telawrence.net. Lawrence died in 1935 and UK copyright survives its author by 70 years, so his writing is now out of copyright. This is the work of Jeremy Wilson, biographer and student of TEL, and a fine thing it is; thanks Jeremy! We look forward, in the near future, to the arrival of large volumes of TEL’s writings; he was prolific. I’m pondering the possibility, once things get going, of a TEL periodical along the lines of the Pepys Diary; Lawrence was not a diarist but he was a prolific correspondent; I suspect that the entry density would be plentiful enough to support a blog format.
Velodyne MiniVee · A year ago last fall, we got a plasma TV for high-def; 90% of the time it’s on, it’s tuned to a sports event. So sound quality, even for a confirmed audio weenie like me, just wasn’t a big deal, and I plugged in a pair of excellent little PSB Alpha speakers, $299 or so if I recall correctly, and they were plenty good enough. The only problem was, where the TV’s sitting there’s hardly any room to spare either side of the screen, and the PSBs stuck out in an ugly and awkward way. So I dropped by the Boxing Day sale at Sound Plus, my friendly local high-end salon, and picked up a couple of decent little KEF mini-speakers that fit in beside the screen and sound perfectly decent if you don’t ask them to play any low notes, which I left to a MiniVee subwoofer from Velodyne and I have to say, it’s a honey. Rather than using the specialized subwoofer feed, I ran the preamp-out line-level signals from the nice old NAD integrated amp through the Velodyne and back to the power-in, which has the useful side-effect of rolling off the signal at 80Hz, so the little KEFs don’t have to waste energy trying to go where they can’t. The Velodyne has a clever circuit where it powers down and wakes up when it sees an input signal. It sounds good; not close to the Totem Forests on the big music-only system; but for the price, remarkable. I’m sitting here typing this listening to the Ambient channel from Galaxie (that’d be channel 904 if you’re on the Star Choice satellite), and while admittedly it’s brain goo not music, it’s very silky-sounding goo that’s also giving me a friendly kidney massage on the low notes.
