Guess what everybody? It's time for Bitscape to type another mindless piece of "content".

A few minutes ago, I succumbed to temptation, and ordered a cd from mp3.com. (Yes, I know mp3.com has been owned by one of the big evil conglomerates for a while now, but unlike some people, I still find it useful. There's still a ton of indie artists there, and good music to be found for those willing to look a little. Just ignore all the ads and other crap.)

Abney Park = good.

Oh yeah, and when you order a cd, they also provide instant gratification in the form of a high quality mp3 download of the whole thing, which is why I'm listening to it right now. :)

...

My dad has recently acquired a second computer, in addition to his iMac. It's a Windows XP box. Succumbing to the dark side. His reason: His "business partners" apparently make heavy use of M$-specific crap, for file formats, online media, etc. For a long time, he tried using VirtualPC for windows emulation, but apparently, it wasn't good enough, especially when it came to streaming audio performance.

So anyway, now that he's got this Windows box, guess who he comes to ask first whenever there's a problem? :)

Now, don't get me wrong. Given that I am getting free bandwidth and a place to stash my PC, I have no problem with troubleshooting problems whenever I happen to be around. However, this entire experience is making me realize just how far I have (willingly) drifted from the so-called "standard" world of Windows.

"How do you do $x in Windows XP?"

"How the bleep should I know? I've never really used it."

(Fortunately, the vast majority of his queries happen to be about things that are either pitifully easy, or can be guessed by clicking around for a while. Hmmmm... did I just inadvertantly make a positive remark about the ease of use in design of M$ interfaces? Nah. ;)

Tonight's tech support query of the evening: "How can I get that movie to play right on Windows?"

(He had just sent me an mpeg file via email, which I played with no trouble using mplayer.)

Where to even begin? "Do you have any software installed to play movie files? If so, what software are you trying to use?"

He the said it worked fine on his iMac, but in Windows, the picture came up with no sound.

Hmmmm.... Sounds fishy. I asked if sound had worked in any other applications on his PC.

He said it hadn't. (Ahah! Using patent pending detective skills, we might derive that there is no problem specific to video playing at all. Sound card driver problem?)

At this point, I wandered over to his PC, scanned the control panel, and checked that the sound card drivers appeared to be in order.

"Is the volume on the speakers turned up, and are they plugged in?" (Now we get down to the "well duh" issues.)

Well, it turned out that the volume control on his speakers was turned up, and they were plugged into the PC, but the speakers themselves had no power! (He thought the speakers didn't need a separate power source, since that's how his iMac speakers work. Another apparent oddity of the iMac world.)

A cursory glance at the cheapo Wal Mart speakers might lead one to believe there is no place to plugin a DC power source. (The awful documentation that came with the speakers didn't help much.) Eventually, we found the power connection jack on the bottom of one of the speakers. Doh!

Supposably, the speakers were supposed to come with AC adapter, but my dad couldn't remember for sure if it had been there when he opened the box last week. We looked around, but didn't see any AC adaptor. Eventually, my dad decided it was his bedtime, which marked the end of tonight's episode. Almost.

During the attempt to figure out what was wrong, I had unplugged my headphones from Argo and brought them over to test on my dad's soundcard. When I plugged them back into Argo, an old problem which I thought had been a gremlin of the past (or a figment of my insanity) returned again: Argo's sound card refused to output any sound!

Consistent with what I had seen last August, when I did a hard reboot, the problem went away.

My conclusion: Argo's soundcard is very sensitive to static electricity in the output jack. Plugging and unplugging devices appears to trigger the outages, which fix themselves with a simple power cycling. This would be consistent with what I saw months ago. Strange stuff.

Anyway, here I am now, happily listening to more music as the night goes on.

...

Sleep now.