SRHuston Dot Net

Welcome to the Grand Illusion, come on in and see what’s happening; pay the price, get your tickets for the show.

–Styx, “The Grand Illusion”

I’m going to ruin it. Maybe. I haven’t said it out loud, but I thought one way I could get better about writing things was to put something – anything, no matter how crappy – up once a day. If I could at least put one thing up a day, then at least it’s something. And maybe I could even start to do better things since I’d be doing it anyway, so what’s an extra few minutes writing something else. Or even writing ahead of schedule and having something post so I can get ahead of things. And there’s two reasons this is likely to ruin it. One, I’m mentioning it out loud. And two is that my goal was one week, and it’s only been a couple days. Oh well, we’ll see. I will say I’ve got some other ideas that keep popping up, so if I can keep those low-effort posts going then maybe I can use some “other time” to write the higher quality bits and ready them for publication.

(I came up with the post title at the end, and now wish I’d used Nine Inch Nails, “The Ruiner” as the quote. But The Grand Illusion still works I think. After all this is a grand illusion that I’ll actually be prolific here and put up something people would want to read 😀 )

I want to put more stuff here. Ideas, things that worked, etc. And I keep wanting to do that; even now there’s a handful of drafts that I started to some extent, sometimes just a line or two as the main idea to expand on and sometimes a chunk of a fleshed out post but not the whole thing. But I keep falling short, and I’m not sure why. After some reflection I think part of the problem is that I know how some of my posts were presenting when I was doing my best here, and I keep trying to aim for that. But that’s not who I am right now, so what I think I need to do is just write something to get it on here. And then maybe having the long-form “better” posts building in the background will work OK, because it won’t feel like such a shock. And eventually I’ll be back to that. Meanwhile, there’s at least something popping up more frequently than every two years.

It could happen!

I had good intentions, as I often do. I was gonna write more. And there they went, buggered off to somewhere else. Now and then I’d think about the drafts sitting here and how I should finish them, or something else, and then I wonder again.. why? Feels lonely sometimes not having people to listen – actually listen, not half listen while doing something else – but why would here be any different. That’s why I don’t look at the connection logs to see how many people are “reading” – the answer is probably zero anyway 😀

Anyway, rather than a huge recap of all kinds of things, here’s what’s on my mind right now. The IRC network, and my whole idea of having a place for people to learn more about IRC administration and such (so not so much just hanging out and talking, or how to be a channel operator, but how to set up the server, how to link them, etc) might have a new breath of life. An old friend stopped by and happened to mention a group he’s part of, and the more I looked at it I thought how my ideas about what I wanted to do in IRC fit with that model. So now I have more to think about, including how I could make it work well and maybe clean away some of the cobwebs.

More to come later. Maybe? Come join us and talk about it if you’re interested.

I’ll be Bach!

I’ve got a bunch of drafts written here I haven’t got to. Hopefully soon I’ll finish them out. Part of it is deciding what level of stuff I want to put here, both in terms of personal feelings and general blathering. And part of it is that I find that since I got my new glasses a couple months ago, if I spend more than an hour or so at the computer my neck hurts (unless I swap to my old ones) because of the progressive lenses. And if I’m going to sit here, either I’m doing work or I want to have fun, and writing hasn’t been fun lately. Hopefully I’ll get around that soon – at the very least I’d love to show off some of the Christmas and birthday presents I got.

Looking back on when I was a little nappy headed boy
Then my only worry was for Christmas, what would be my toy?

–Stevie Wonder, “I Wish”

Recently I operated the PA setup for a Girl Scout event, using borrowed equipment. It was nice gear, but it made me remember when I used to do that sort of thing – initially for friends of mine having parties, then the people in my dorm (heh… “my neighbors listen to good music – whether they want to or not”) and eventually for college events such as dances and end-of-year dinners. I never really sought out to do it professionally, but there were many times that I missed it. Some nights I do basically the same on Facebook, queueing up a bunch of songs for myself and then sharing Youtube links for all of them as they come up on rotation as well as a little blurb about the song or a line or two of the lyrics. And doing this, even though it wasn’t my music at all, reminded me that I do enjoy the science of doing the work and the fun of bringing that joy to others when they like what they hear. So not long after we got the equipment in my garage and I set it up to make sure everything was working right and I had no troubles getting connections right, Stephanie joked that I should look for stuff to do it on my own. Well after a lot of chin scratching (the beard can be itchy) and reading of spec sheets, I think I figured it out. And for just over a thousand dollars I have what would come together to be, I think, a respectable PA system with decent speakers, an amp that could drive them to their limits, cables, and a mixing board – which actually would replace the one I have in the shack and that one would move on to PA/DJ work. The only thing I didn’t plan on is a way to mix music and queue things from one song to another with proper fading and whatnot (unlike when you tell Apple Music to just play and it waits until one song is completely over before playing the next one). But that’s a matter of software.. or a second phone to play music from. I put it all in a wish list in case anyone is feeling generous. Who am I kidding, it’s so I can look at it and talk myself out of buying it.

When I first thought about taking my radios portable, I picked up some Pelican cases to store it safely. Those cases have taken my gear from Tampa Bay in Florida to Bangor, Maine and many points in between. I realized one of the latches on my large case (a Pelican 1600) was broken, so I ordered replacement latches. They arrived today and were the complete wrong size. How could that be I wondered… apparently, Pelican redesigned their cases at some point and kept the same model numbers. I have an old one. Who knows if I’d ever find a replacement latch at this point. But two things are keeping me from bothering too much now: first, I don’t use the case in marine environments where I’m concerned with water ingress, so the fact that the one side doesn’t seal as tight isn’t much of a concern for me. And secondly, that latch has been “off” since day one – it always required that you smash it just right to close – and taking the pin out of it I realize why. The holes from the left and right side don’t line up, so it was defective at purchase and I didn’t realize it, just thought that one was quite tight. No, it was stretching to reach the edge of the case because the one side is too far away. I guess if I found the right size latch I could straighten the hole on the one side, but I don’t think it’s worth worrying about too much anyway. I mostly utilize the case to carry the equipment safely from shocks and bumps, and be able to stack things nicely.

I wondered myself. Why do I feel the need to come back here and write again? I used to write on Facebook, though it was always shorter things. And then when Google Plus opened I wrote there quite a bit, and pretty much abandoned my website because the same content on G+ drew a lot more traffic. So why come back to here again? Well, even though I don’t pick up the microphone on the radios that often, I do like to talk. Especially when it’s things I’m passionate about. Tinkering, electronics, these are things that I enjoy a lot. And when I think of a new thing to explore, I like to talk about it to people. Sometimes when I talk about stuff it’s because I need to think it through, and having someone else to listen and especially ask questions is helpful for me to hash out the idea myself or gain a greater understanding. Other times it’s because I want to share my excitement with someone and maybe they’ll want to join in the fun. And sometimes it’s just to make a connection – I find a lot of geeky types are eager to share their geekiness in hopes of finding another geek who likes it, if only to have someone to work with and come up with new ideas. Unfortunately, and especially when the audience doesn’t share in the excitement, that kind of gushing about a new thing can be boring at best, or off-putting at the worst. So rather than subject my family to it all the time, I thought maybe writing about it would help me to still have that moment I feel like I need where I talk about something that has sparked in my head, without forcing others in the house to look for a way out of hearing range 😀 But first, I still need to do some housekeeping around here. The cobwebs are a bit thick, and there’s definitely a layer of dust everywhere. Only I have a couple things I’m working on that have prevented me from working here, so we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll start writing those things as drafts to share later, so I still get it down to publish without making it seem like I’m ignoring the mess everywhere…