OK I know OSU played a game last weekend but really, the season starts this weekend. Here is my prereading:

* The Columbus Dispatch site of course. Most of their stuff is posted daily first thing in the morning. * Tressel’s World. M-rated, definitely not for the kiddies, and may piss off some OSU fans, but I find it freaking hilarious. * Austin American-Statesman for the Texas view. * Longhorn blogs - bevosports, Burnt Orange Nation * Every Day Should Be Saturday for general college football goodness * And M Go Blog to get just generally pissed off at Michigan, because it doesn’t matter who we are playing, “F@$% Michigan” is still a good sentiment.

I have lots of desires and dreams for how to expand my dual cylinder/single blower pneumatic setup for halloween. But I don’t have the time. Looking for a Seattle-area contract pneumatics person – someone who can do all the pneumatic hosing, valving, reservoirs, and the low power electrical work. If you have ideas…

Brett on Stuff – great collection of ultralight backpacking and general outdoors stuff. Thanks Brett.

MachineDesign.com: Right-sizing pneumatic motion systems – good breakdown of how to analyze pneumatic circuits, pointed out to me by the author.

Because I previously posted about a good experience with Sound Effects, Production Music, Royalty Free Music, MP3 AIF WAV Sound Effects, they very nicely sent me a bunch more high quality sfx for free – nice guys, they have earned my loyalty. They’ve got a nice myspace site too

Feld Thoughts: The 80-19-1 Rule – “That leaves 19%. This is the golden segment. If you can figure out how to engage these folks, you win. If you don’t, you’ll have a site driven merely by the 1%, which ultimately won’t scale.” Good stuff.

We had a great weekend. Some people that made it possible:

* Paraclete Charter Service - Your charter and ferry service to the San Juan Islands, Washington * Everyone at Greene Partners – great job on our place. Just a great design at every level that really worked for us, and super people who helped us with so much more. * Jennifer Randall & Associates – also a great job on our place. Everything from broad schemes to little details were just awesome, and again great people. * Ravenhill Construction – also a great job on our place. The workmanship, fit and finish were all great. * On-Site Island Services – super job getting everything ready * Vita’s – awesome takeout and a nice wine recommendation * Alwyn at Rhythm Auto Repair – provided us with wheels, very appreciated.

Can’t wait to get back.

Circuit Specialists Inc. - PowerSupply1 Single Output Switching Power Supplies

* i-Zombie.com • Welcome! – high power color organs – 1200 watts!!! this is tremendous. * Unit 70 – great skeletons

thanks to kurt for the tips.

Remember, if you need bones in bulk. Anatomical Chart

Excellent analysis of the fair value of a college atthlete – The Sports Economist, the Merc. Basically, a bunch of adults and other athletes are benefitting from the value created by star football and basketball players on big programs. It is no wonder that we see a constant stream of rules violations given the market value of these players.

Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder – recommended by an online halloween buddy for sound editting. i’m currently using sony’s acidpro because i’m doing some mixing and surround panning as well, but this is probably worth trying out. acidpro is overkill for simple tweaking.

I exhausted myself driving around yesterday looking for connectors and other electronics parts for some halloween projects. Vetco, radio Shack, frys were all strike outs as were the local hobby stores.

Lynxmotion is the place to go, they have all the stuff I needed. Should have started there. I wanted instant gratification but just got frustrated.

I’m working on creating some surround sound effects for my halloween setup this year. I’ve been looking for software to do this cheaply but no such luck so far.

I am starting with regular stereo flac files from various sfx discs i’ve purchased over the years. I’m using the 5.1 panning features of Sony Acid Pro to create a static path for the sound thru my listening space – this is pretty easy once you understand the complexities of Acid Pro. This leaves with an AcidPro-proprietary format ffile which you can play with AcidPro. For my purposes this might be good enough.

However it would be nice to create AC3 files that could be played on arbitrary PCs, burnt to dvd, etc. AcidPro will render AC3 files but it is another $199 for the codec pak to do this. I haven’t found much on the web for a free way to render AC3 – one thought tho is to loop back the spdif output from the pc to another soundcard and capture the incoming spdif stream – this post suggests how to do that. But this is not going to be cheaper than just buying the codec pak.

I’d like to find some filter that could capture the spdif stream before it leaves the pc.

Another issue is playback. I am using winamp for playback (because i am playing with the discolitez plugin) and winamp doesn’t natively support ac3 playback. WinAmpAC3 looks like it may do the trick tho.

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