Half-brogue Oxfords, if you want to get all technical about it.



Had the Electromyograph today. That's where they stick a bunch of needles attached to electrical cables down into the muscle tissue of your legs, send electric currents through you to establish the "normal" response curve of the muscles, then have you voluntarily contract the muscles to read out how they're responding to nerve impulses.

The report summary begins "Abnormal study" and then goes on in detail about how I have moderate nerve damage on the left side at the S1 level, atrophy in the muscles of the left foot (I'd never noticed, but could see it clearly in the skin-bulge when the doc had me look at both feet while trying to press down on the toes of each against his hand), etc.

So, basically, some shit is seriously fucked up with my spinal column and the nerves extending thereof, which steroids ain't gonna fix. I've not noticed any numbness or weakness on the left side, but it was clear as day when I was actually looking at the muscles in the left foot/leg as compared to the right during the same routine.

I don't have time to deal with this shit. Flying to NC on Thursday for a job interview, and moving at a hundred miles a second getting [redacted] whipped into shape here in Chicago. Got two crews working two shifts, from 5a to 9p. I'd post pictures, except that there's a strict moratorium on taking / posting pictures of [redacted] until the debut. Long story short, [redacted] is doing some new stuff, which you'll see on-air sometime over the next month or two. I've written about $4 million worth of purchase orders over the past six months, and I'm pretty sure my whole career is on the line with this one.

At first I was like
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...ac6958094f.png



Then I was like
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...49b615c352.png



And finally, I was like
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...5a1ff4ddcc.png

Yep, I had the same thought. I'm still in to see what 12 (count them- FUCKING 12 !!) TB's and an MS3 will be able to produce in the end. :dunno:

A 1997 5.0L V12 making 312hp doesn't seem that off when you look at the 5.7L V8s from GM of the same era.
LT4 (1996) - 330hp
LS1 (1997) - 345hp
The wiki page also says it had to meet strict fuel economy and emissions standards.
Modern engines make so much more power. You can get over 300hp out of your garden variety V6 now.

I'd wear them with a light gray or blue suit.. but it'd be on the more casual side of business.

But I don't wear suits so I'd wear them with jeans.

How bout a quad turboed one, in an FRS?

https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net...05&oe=599AEC7E

Meh. Octoturbo or bust.

http://cdn.chevyhardcore.com/wp-cont...engine-022.jpg

There is a lot more that just a hp number to a v12 though. The torque is typically sublime in both its delivery and early availability.

In a past life, my wife bought a used E38 BMW 750IL with the M73 V12 motor in it. The motor was a 5.4L rated at 320hp and 360 lb-ft., and yet it still motivated that 4200ish lb car quite admirably. The car was a complete nightmare to maintain, couldn't wait to get rid of it, but I always look back fondly to the silky effortless torque which that car had.

Fun fact: the M73 engine management in that car was accomplished by two Bosch 6-cylinder ECUs, each controlling a bank, but apparently with neither being aware of a Siamese twin attached to the other side of their crankshaft.

.

^That's because it was basically two M20s mashed together. M20 being the engine in the E30.

Fun fact:

Assume you're a former radio DJ, and have the "gravelly big voice" thing down (albeit you used to rely on heavy audio processing to really achieve "the sound" back when you were doing on-air work.)

And assume you're now sorting through a cabling database containing about two hundred thousand entries, migrating it from FoxPro to Excel.

And assume you're already drinking at 7:30am on a Sunday.

You may find yourself reading cable numbers aloud in the bumper-voice, and then appending "FM!" onto the end of them.

"One twenty seven fifty five hundred dash one oh five FM!"


Yeah, I'm a silly drunk... And also a child of the 70s... And also bored out of my mind...

--ian

I used to love that station when I lived in San Diego. It, and KPBS, were the only two presets on my radio. There are a surprising number of radio stations located just across the border which broadcast in English for 59 minutes and 40 seconds out of every hour, switching to Spanish only for the :10 legal IDs. (They do them at the top and bottom of the clock in Mexico, whereas in the US they're only at the top.)




Ciento Cinco punto Tres - LA ZETA!

Yes, I recorded a bunch of liners for a reggaetón (pointy-boots) station in the late 90s, despite the fact that I do not speak fluent Spanish. The station was specifically looking for a neutral American-english accent for the branding, for reasons which confound me. Contrast against the announcers, plus my name making it politically-acceptable with station management, maybe? I dunno.

For all I know, my voice could still be on the air at a podunk little station in Arcadia, FL. It was a flat-rate job, not a needle-drop.

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...572a1adfa8.png

This is right up there with the EAS Zombie Alert a few years ago.

Someone hacked every tornado siren in Dallas. It was loud.

By Avi Selk April 9 at 11:59 AM

Last year, someone kept hacking into traffic signs in Dallas — corrupting bland electronic messages into jokey missives such as: “Work is Canceled — Go Back Home” and “Donald Trump Is A Shapeshifting Lizard!!”

Funny? Dumb? Vandalism? Whatever your opinion of the pranks, the big Dallas hack of 2016 had one quality totally lacking in this year’s sequel: It was silent.

On Friday night, 18 minutes before midnight, every single one of Dallas’s 156 emergency weather sirens started doing this:



The sirens, whose purpose is to be heard by anyone caught outdoors in a tornado or dangerous storm, screamed from the southern reaches of Oak Cliff to newspaper columnist Robert Wilonsky’s house in the north. They blared for an hour and a half, to the annoyance, terror or amusement of 1.3 million residents.


The sirens are something of a spring feature in that part of Texas, which occasionally sees twisters roam past officer towers, and where three tornadoes touched down just days earlier, as the Dallas Morning News reported.

But not so much in clear weather, at midnight. So awoken Dallasites could only guess what was happening until city workers tried to figure out the same.


Not everyone cracked jokes. “We had people asking if we were being attacked because of what’s going on overseas,” a city spokeswoman said the next day. And thousands of people flooded the Dallas 911 system (which has had its own technical problems), she said, leaving people with real emergencies waiting on the line for long minutes.

After nearly an hour of wee-ooo, the city said it was trying to fix the problem, which it initially called a malfunction.

So, more jokes.


By 1:20 a.m., flummoxed officials had decided the only way to stop the noise was “to unplug the radio systems and the repeater, and pretty much turn the siren system completely off,” as emergency management director Rocky Vaz explained to reporters the next day.

At that same news conference (ironically drowned out at one point by ambulance sirens) city spokeswoman Sana Syed announced that the 95 minutes of howling had not been a glitch after all.

“It does appear at this time it was a hack,” she said. “And we do believe it came from the Dallas area.”

Officials have ruled out a remote hack — telling reporters someone gained physical access to a hub connecting all the sirens, which may not be turned on again until Monday as the city tries to figure out who, how and why.

“Talking to all the experts in the siren industry in the field, this is a very, very rare event,” Vaz said. He’d said he’d heard of a city having a few individual sirens tampered with the early 1990s — but nothing like a citywide hack.

The city has asked the Federal Communications Commission to track down the culprit and is looking for alternative alert systems in case the sirens aren’t back up before expected storms roll in early next week.

And whatever was said on Twitter that night, officials aren’t laughing.

“You can put me down as terrified,” a city council member told the Morning News.

Mayor Mike Rawlings called the hack “an attack on our emergency notification system.” He urged upgrades to Dallas’s chronically and sometimes dangerously wonky electronic infrastructure and promised the city would “identify and prosecute those responsible.”

Still, though, the jokes.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...as-it-was-loud



Edit: there are a bunch of photos in there. You can't see them, because IB doesn't know how to parse Twitter hotlinks.

Edit II: And now they're working.

Ran into this one a few years ago... :D

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...0d36de2c75.png

The original, and still a classic:

An open letter to people who post recordings of musical performances on Youtube:

Dear person,

The built-in mic on your phone sucks. Yes, I realize that the camera can record 1080p at 60 FPS, the recordings produced by that built-in mic are comparable in quality to the very first wax-cylinder recording of Thomas Edison reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

Look, we all want to see and hear cool stuff. But the whole point of music is for it to sound good. If you're using that built-in mic, then it doesn't really matter if John Lennon, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix have all risen from the grave and are performing at Royal Albert Hall, with The Second Coming of Christ as the opening act. Your band still sounds as intolerable as a 13 year old with cerebral palsy attempting to play Skinny Puppy's Greatest Hits in its parents' bathroom.

Stop cluttering up my searches with this intolerable shit.

Thank you.

Related:
NPR's audio engineer > every human*.



* I did not assume audio person's gender.

They do good work.

Happened to run across this morning:



Also excellently done. I assume the audio was recorded close-up in a booth and then replayed for the video shoots, but still, very listenable.

That would be as compared to this:



For all know, the live performance may have been awesome. But I'll never find out, because I can't friggin' hear it.

RE: Dallas sirens, that's hysterical.

However, as someone who has lived in tornado alley all his life, that really is a truly gut-wrenching sound to hear the sirens go off.

A minute or two might have been funny. Over an hour, the person should be shot.