Not wanting to fry another graphics card, I decided a new case was in order. I really liked the case I had, a Lian-Li PC-V1200 — now replaced by the PC-V1100? Hard to tell because like all “high-end” products, their website is particularly awesome. Anyway, I remembered seeing another case that had a drilled front and back similar to the PowerMac/MacPro design.

Shopping around online, I found a PC-V600 case listed at NCIX.com in BC. For whatever reason, I had it in my head that this was an OK company to deal with online, and put in my order for a black V600. That was on a Sunday night. Monday rolled around and I checked the status page a few times. I believe it was on Tuesday night that the status was finally updated with a credit card validation error, asking me to call them. I had given them a different phone number than what the bank had, no biggie. The customer service guy assured me that the order would be processed the next day.

The day came and went, my order was shown as “verified” and payment was processed.

Days passed…

A week later and still no shipment. I used their online support form to write a “hurry up and ship my case or I’m walkin’” message. I watched the clock, waiting for 9:30am PDT to roll around then commenced a campaign of phone calls to their support staff which I eventually got a hold of. It went something like this:

<me> “Hi, where’s my case?”

<NCIX> “That case isn’t in stock. It’s back-ordered.”

<me> “That’s not what your ‘online availability’ says on your web catalog.”

<NCIX> “That doesn’t always get updated.”

<me> “Kind of useless then, isn’t it?”

<NCIX> “meh!”

<me> “Thanks for telling me!”

<NCIX> “. . .”

<me> (speaking slowly and loudly now despite the other’s excellent grasp of English) “DO. YOU. HAVE. ANY. IN. SILVER. ?”

<NCIX> “I don’t have a SKU for that.”

<me> “DO. YOU. NOT. HAVE. A. COMPUTER. IN. FRONT OF YOU??!!”

<NCIX> “It’s in a different system.” (I can hear him filing his nails or something, possibly chewing gum at the same time. I imagine him making a wanking gesture to his customer service pals and mouthing, “I’ll be able to go for a smoke in five”)

<me> “LET ME LOOK IT UP FOR YOU”

I proceeded to look up the SKU for the “Customer” “Service” “Rep” on HIS OWN WEBSITE and relayed it to him over the phone. He told me they had one. I asked him to prove it to me by shipping it. He said it would take a day or so for them to process the order change and it would be shipped shortly after that. That would be excellent, I gagged, and hung up as a droplet of hot oil begin seeping out of my forehead just like Zorg when he was talking to the sphere of infinite evil in The Fifth Element.

I waited.

I received a shipping notification a few days later. A week after that, my case arrived. Ordered June 22nd. Arrived July 11th, 20 business days later. Had I not asked them why I had no case, I would likely still be waiting for a back-ordered black case and taking the side panel off my PC to enjoy an exciting game of Never Winter Nights 2. I will not be ordering anything from them again.

In any case (har), the new box is very nice, a little loud with all the fans spinning, but it keeps my chips nice and cool. Also, it looks bitchin’.

THE END

Like the marketing copy says, it has surprisingly big stereo sound in a fairly small package. It comes with a rechargeable lithium ion battery making it a true portable. In case you don’t feel like listening to your iPod for some reason, it also has a built-in FM tuner and retractable antenna.

I tried the IM600 with my 5G iPod (video) and my iPod touch and it works great with both of those. I had an earlier iPod I plugged in that did not work. I was hoping to just leave the older 4G model docked all the time but it was not meant to be. The dock format changed from iPod generations 4G to 5G to accommodate video output and there is a composite video jack on the back of the Altec Lansing in case you wanted to plug it into a television which had a broken speaker or something. I can’t really figure out why I’d do that, but whatever! It’s there. Just in case. No S-Video output though, if we’re going to be picky.

Other connectors on the back of the unit are an auxiliary input jack in the form of a stereo mini plug and a subwoofer output jack for connecting to … a subwoofer! I couldn’t find a link on Altec Lansing’s site for their subwoofer, but they make the BB2001 which you can add to the IM600 to improve the low-end at the expense of portability. The compact design of the IM600 which folds up for travel make it a great portable speaker system you can move around the house or pack up and take with you on the road. The included remote works well and lets you play/pause and skip tunes on the iPod or tune to a radio station. It’ll also control your volume, so turn it up!

Note: The Altec Lansing IM600 is not waterproof, but it may float.

I’ve been an occasional user of Wacom’s Intuos 2 graphics tablets for a few years. I’ve always liked the idea of the tablet if not willing to commit to it for constant use. Last week, while I was visiting the left coast, I stopped into Fry’s and saw a Wacom Intuos 3 6×8″ tablet in an opened, slightly crumpled box for $30 off. This, I thought, was Just The Thing!

Since then I’ve been using it constantly as my Go-To mouse on my main machine. My troubles with various pointing devices have been well-documented over the years. If I were to describe myself based on how I think I must appear, I would probably call me “mercurial”. I am OK with this self-assessment. Others might not be so charitable.

But! I feel reasonably sure that my complaints were justified. The criticisms you level at a mouse are usually those annoyances you discover after using them for awhile. Take the Apple “Mighty” Mouse for example – its chief annoyances are: no real buttons, the “squeeze” button requires you to shift your whole hand. You can’t click and lift the mouse without a squeeze and some contortions. The ball doesn’t work with Windows… Logitech’s mice are decent but the drivers so flawed in OS X as to render them unusable. Also, after using the MX Revolution for a year plus, I began to find the huge lump quite uncomfortable for extended periods.

Enter the Wacom Intuos 3. The 5 button mouse is comfortable, light and the buttons are all well-placed. The scroll wheel only moves in one-axis, but the feeling is smooth and has a sort of rubbery quality. Most importantly, the positioning of the thing is very precise.

Now a word about using Wacoms as your standard mousing device: They take some getting used to. Not just because the mouse is different feeling, but because the tablet is the actual important device. That means the orientation of the tablet is important. If the angle’s wrong, you’ll find you’re mousing on a diagonal. I keep mine angled slightly so it’s perpendicular to the line of my arm when resting on it. Another point: if you slide off the sensor area as you are wont to do, your mouse stops working. You have to train yourself a little to use these things in an unretarded way. Do it wrong and you’ll look the fool! I’ve got the tracking speed boosted a bit from the default and acceleration turned up as well. This allows me to cover my screens in less space.

Those things aside, the thing works very neatly. The extra modifier buttons on the side of the tablet are more useful when using it as a pen device, though I do find myself using the touchstrips for scrolling from time-to-time. I wish they had a faster setting though. The drivers for the Wacoms have always been one of their strong points and they are no exception on this version. Virtually every function you can imagine can be mapped, remapped or configured. The pen is a device of alien origin sufficiently advanced to be considered magic. I don’t know how it works, and frankly, I don’t wanna know!

I woke up feeling a little creative this morning and didn’t feel compelled to put together shelves or unpack boxes. So I dug out my Korg EA-1, plugged it into my midi box (which finally has Leopard-compatible drivers) and whipped-up this little bit of synth noise.

Junk Drawer.mp3 (192kbps VBR MP3)

or

Junk Drawer.m4a (177kbps VBR AAC)

3’27″.

While in Toronto this weekend, we stopped into the Apple store to play with the new 32GB iPod touch. My feelings about the first edition was, they’re cool, but 16GB isn’t quite enough. Also, they lacked the web-browser, email and calendaring capabilities of the phone so I was, like, fuck that.

What a difference a few months can make.

The new touch is totally what I wanted it to be when it came out. It’s a web pad that can play video. The wifi support is outstanding, and able to connect to WPA secured hotspots with ease. It should drastically cut down on my need for data on my blackberry.

Video support is what you’d expect on an iPod. MPEG4 or H.264 only. I’ve been using Quicktime with Perian to do my transcoding, though beltzner keeps recommending iSquint so I may have to give that a try and ditch my clunky Automator workflow.

Playback is very smooth on the touch. You don’t get the somewhat clunky loadtimes as on the 5G iPods. Though I haven’t really done any critical listening, audio quality seemed very good on my Koss Portapros. I still expect to use my 5G ‘pod for listening to audio and podcasts and keeping the touch as more of a video player. *note that the iPod touch and iPhone didn’t suffer from the downgrade to Crystal Audio Digital Audio deCoder chips and are still using the more audiophile-friendly Wolfsons. See disassembly photos.

All in all I’m very happy with it and can’t wait for my next trip to spend some quality time using it.

current storage capacity: 386GB

boolean is listening to Calculation Theme by Metric from the album Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?

I made also decided to finally dump Gallery2 for my image-hosting and move everything to my flickr account. Having to maintain that somewhat horrific infrastructure along with WordPress compatibility which was never as seamless as I’d have liked was kind of a pain, and no doubt a security nightmare for those maintaining the machine this blog lives on. No more! Hopefully my Flickr contacts will bear with me while I gradually put up some older images to back-fill some of the earlier posts that included links to Gal2 images.

The Photos page can now die a slow death.

I have a couple of final changes and small additions I want to make to the already ridiculous bottom bar, and will probably continue tweaking CSS (embedded images need some padding, for example) but otherwise, I’m pretty pleased with the change. It beats the over-used Kubrick (with apologies to Michael Heileman who created it)

ReGen Podcast for November 5, 2007 from the album “ReGen Magazine (Industrial, EBM, Goth, Synthpop, Electronic)” by DJ Razorgrrl

Already, editing text in this is proving to be an exercise in patience. Deleting text does funny things. Positioning that picture is awkward and unintuitive. I don’t think I could replace ecto with this, but it does have a Firefox extension which I haven’t figured out how to access yet.

More reviews of Adobe CS3 Web Premium Addition to follow…