Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   cachunk to electromechanical whine
Tuesday, September 14 2010
It's easy to get obsessed about the noise a computer makes. I don't usually think about my main computer, which normally sounds like a failing air conditioning unit, a sound usually lost beneath the sound of music or podcasts. But the other day I took delivery of replacement to the card-mounted fan that had been cooling the video cards. These cards have massive heatsinks but no fans of their own, which is the way I prefer things, since the tiny fans on graphics cards are notoriously noisy and short-lived. By making the fan a separate device, I modularize and make a system with greater fault-tolerance (much like an entertainment system whose long-dead VCR is not built into the television).
I've been more obsessed about the noise of other computers around the house, starting with the one in the first floor office and now Coyote, the media computer out in the teevee room. All my newest computers are low-power Atom-based machines, but even those can have as many as three constantly-spinning motors in them, and those motors make noise. Some of this can minimized by the selection of slower-spinning "green" hard drives and larger, slower-spinning fans. It was the latter method I tried today on Coyote. I found that the case was just wide enough to get a 80 mm fan directly beside the hard drive and directly over the two motherboard heat producers: the CPU and the Northbridge. Happily, there were holes in the case lid for the fan to blow its air out into the room. With such a large fan, I could remove the loud little fan inside the power supply and also the tiny one on the Northbridge (though I didn't dig in deep enough to get to that today). As I worked, I had Tosh.0 on my computer and was listening to him give a hilarious synopsis of the gross-out horror movie The Human Centipede.

It was primary day, so after Gretchen got back from the prison, we drove down to Old Hurley and parked at the Hurley Mountain Inn. Gretchen wasn't excited about voting and was willing to do it if we would have a beer and french fries afterwards as HMI. Gretchen doesn't often suggest going to places to drink beer, so I agreed even though Tuesday is my alcohol-abstienance day and it would mean I would have to juggle my drinking schedule for the week.
Supposedly New York was the last state to implement computerized voting, and so, for the first time in my life, I'd be casting a vote using something other than the traditional curtain-and-lever device that dates back to the 1920s (I've never voted anywhere but in Virginia and New York, and both places used these machines). To vote with the new machines (which are basically scanners that record the vote and then save the thing they scanned in a box), you go sit at a desk and sit behind a privacy screen and fill out your votes with a blue pen. The ballot is a large sheet of cardstock and voting consists of filling in a little oval. There were only two ovals to fill in for the Democratic primary, which seemed like a terrible waste of cardstock. The machine scanned the vote without difficulty, and that was that. I missed the satisfying visceral cachunk of the old levers. Increasingly that cachunk is being replaced with a electromechanical whine. Call me an old fogey, but this isn't good. I told the poll workers my feelings about this and they said I wasn't the first to make this observation.
The Hurley Mountain Inn is a very different sort of place from the restaurants Gretchen and I prefer. It's not hip, it's not a dive, and in trying to look like a hunting lodge, it's utterly inauthentic. With its walls crowded with video screens playing athletic events, the atmosphere is garish and unsettling. The only people who thrive in such an environment are douchebag date rapists and what they become when they're older: fat Republicans.
As always for an election day, even one as inconsequential as primary for a mid-term, there was interesting news. The most interesting of all was the success of a fundamentalist Tea Bagger in the Delaware Republican primary for Senate (taking Joe Biden's old seat). With plenty of video clips of her railing against the practice of masturbation, it's difficult to imagine she can win the general election. The moderate Republican she won against, Mike Castle, was considered a certain victor in the general.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100914

feedback
previous | next