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all uniformly terrible
Wednesday, February 10 2016
Ray called this morning with a question for me. He and Nancy had replaced their refrigerator and the kitchen range, and the latter would be powered by gas. The question was about how to power the new range. The old range had been electric and had been plugged into a massive 240 volt outlet. Was there a way, Ray wanted to know, to plug the dinky 120 volt plug for the gas range into that big plug. I said that there wasn't without bothering to explain the core of the problem: that the huge circuit breaker behind that 240 volt outlet makes anything plugged into it a potential fire hazard. I was on speakerphone at the time because I wasn't even out of bed yet, and Gretchen quickly volunteered me to install a new 120 volt plug in Ray and Nancy's kitchen so she could get some much-needed alone time. This was fine with me; I'd been planning on getting out of the house at some point today anyway.
So I gathered up my equipment, which included a power drill, a long spade bit, a couple electrical boxes, and about eight feet of 12-3 Romex wire (the only length of 12 gauge I had on hand) and drove down to Old Hurley. The job turned out to be easier than expected. I could install a new box on the outside of the wall next to the 240 volt outlet box, and just by drilling a hole through the floor, I could find an electrical junction box within the range of the scrap of Romex I'd brought. The only problem I ran into was cramming an additional wire into the modest-sized wire nuts in that junction box. I should have brought some bigger ones. Ray and Nancy were delighted with their new plug and would have showered me with gifts, but all that really mattered to me was a big package of chewy Korean rice cakes, the kind used in a soup served at the Little Bear. Later Gretchen would make a big pot of vegetable soup that included these, and it would be the highlight of the day.
While I was out, I made a big detour out to the Tibetan Center's thrift store, where I bought a 2 amp 12 volt switching (as opposed to linear) wall wart for a quarter. Tell me that's not a great deal. While I was in the neighborhood, I also went to Barnyard to get a bag of dry cat foot and 24 cans of cat wetfood for somewhat more than $80. That doesn't seem like as good of a deal as a twenty five cent wall wart.
Back at the house, I drank kratom tea and continued researching a solution to my small-screen Linux music player problem. I looked into how WinAmp skins are written, since they can be used in the modern Linux music player called Audacious. I certaintly didn't want to launch myself into the chore of writing such a skin from scratch. Instead I hoped to find one that I liked and then just tweak it. But after looking at dozens of skins, I realized that they were all uniformly terrible. What I wanted was simplicity and high contrast, and what I got instead was smeary colors, tiny features devoid of context, and many attempts to make music players that resemble organic alien artifacts. I stared at so many that my eyes came to feel like they were failing. It began to seem as though making a skin to display a music player in a large window is impossible, since evidently nobody had ever done it. And it's not like I'm the only one with this need; I saw posts in messageboards by others seeking precisely the same thing, mostly for dashboard-based audio systems.
Eventually I needed a way down from my kratom high, so I bought myself an indulgence by painting the following small image of a sea lion. I'd wanted to paint one from the Galapagos, but none I found were satisfactory, so this is based on an image I found in a Google image search.
[REDACTED]
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