Pilot's Log

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of May 30, 2013

"I'd rather not sing than sing quiet," said the vivacious chanteuse Janis Joplin. Her attitude reminds me a little of Salvador Dali's. He said, "It is never difficult to paint. It is either easy or impossible." I suspect you Sagittarians may soon be in either-or states like those. You will want to give everything you've got, or else nothing at all. You will either be in the zone, flowing along in a smooth and natural groove, or else totally stuck. Luckily, I suspect that giving it all and being in the zone will predominate.

Really, if your amps don't have sufficient juice there isn't any point in cranking them to Eleven.

Alas, poor Emerson twenty-inch television set with integral DVD player, you shall function no longer. Thus Master Horner, technician of Morris Towne, doth declare, remarking that thine circuitry is irrepairable. And so, Rather Manor's forced transition from analog signal and ray of cathode to digital over air and screen of flat is complete.

The fate of Emerson's carcass is yet undetermined. My first thought is to donate it to the Tech School's electronics program, but I expect they have no lack of such material. Every January Knoxville holds an e-waste drive, so it will probably go there if no better alternative presents itself. I'll find out tomorrow.

If any among you still require a digital converter box, the one we used with the Emerson is still in fully operational condition, and I have re-set it, its cables and its remote, into the packaging in which it had come. Contact me privately if you want it.

FP

* It becomes a fad to get mini refrigerators, mini freezers and mini microwave ovens (all roughly the size of toaster ovens--originally designed for the Asian market) and have them in rooms other than the kitchen. One set for the living room, one for the den, one for the hallway between the bedrooms, one for the office. Of course, this doesn't do the problem of rampant obesity any good.

* Disney adds a new area to Walt Disney World devoted entirely to the studio's horror properties. The Haunted Mansion is moved out of Adventureland and updated to become the centerpiece of this park-let.

* A viral advertising campaign for a synthetic "incense" product gets a lot of notoriety when the people behind the campaign hack local TV stations to air commercials which are banned by the FCC. They ALMOST get away with it. But the phrase "Stoner Taxicab" enters the slang lexicon permanently.

Sample enclosures I received yesterday from TEKO, with standard-sized Poker cards for scale. The large white one is called a Domotek, and it's bigger than I expected it to be. The middle sized one is an Ovotek, and the last one is a TBT-B. I received another catalog along with the samples that is also inspiring me...they have an enclosure that I can mount my old laptop's screen into and use it for my flight sim project, or a tablet computer, or an e-book reader, or...

Took Mum to Knoxville and the Apple Store, Radio Shack and Best Buy for intel on e-book reader units.

The feelings so far:

*) iPad: Of course it's the best model out there, but it is also too advanced hardware-wise, demands a lot from our other systems and we aren't ready for it. And it's pretty darned dear.

*) Sony E-Reader: The Pocket is too small; the Touch and the Daily are more to Mum's liking but haven't impressed us as much as we hoped so far.

*) Nook: The most impressive but still little to choose from versus Sony's Touch and Daily.

I want to see the Sungale EB601 and the Aluratek Libre "in person" before making judgments on those, but the Sungale looks nice.

Mum's Mother's Day "gift" will be a new e-reader. She has iPad lust, but we aren't limiting ourselves to that model in our searches. We're also looking at the Sungale and the Libre, but if there are any other suggestions out there, I'd like to see them.

FP