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Vomiting It All Up

Screenshot

I'm really looking forward to the day when the only thing I to post about Trump is notice of his death in prison.

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Oops, I Did It Again

The Yamaha amplifier I acquired last year sounds amazing. I fall in love with it all over again every time I power it on and put on some music.

But it has a secret. It's a ticking time bomb. It's not the age; it's generally accepted that Yamaha equipment will outlive all of us if it's properly maintained. The dirty secret is that after being soldered to the main circuit board, several critical components in the power amplifier stage were glued to the board with adhesive that over the years has broken down and become quite corrosive and is known to eat through metal. If left unaddressed this will eventually cause an expensive, catastrophic failure of the unit.

I only learned about this a few months ago, and sadly, the A700 I bought last year is showing this same dreaded corrosion.

Corrosion

That black goo at the base of those two big capacitors is the corrosive glue. As you can see it's already eaten away at several of the resistors immediately below. And who knows what it's done to the underside of those caps? Might explain why the left channel was occasionally dropping out. The joys of owning vintage HiFi gear, right?

When I first noticed this, I contacted my repair guy up north as well as the local tech I took my Kenwood to last summer, and they both quoted an estimate "in the neighborhood" of $200-300 to clear away the glue, replace all the affected components, and do the general maintenance this unit undoubtedly requires after being in service for the last 40 years.

Shortly after getting this news (and at least in the case of my guy up north, facing the possibility of being without the amp for the better part of a year), I was perusing eBay and ran across an auction for an identical unit that already had this servicing done.

Serviced unit. No corrosion, no glue, and new components

Since I'm on a self-imposed budget I did not immediately smash the "Buy It Now" button. Amazing self-restrait, huh?

Actually, the seller was asking more than I was willing to pay, but I still filed the posting away on my watchlist. Just in case things changed.

About a month ago I got an in-app email from the seller offering a significant discount, bringing the price down into the $200-300 range I'd been quoted for the repair of my unit.

Damn.

But hey, Mercury was retrograde and already chewing me up into a million pieces, and I didn't want to tempt the astrological gods, so once again I fought the urge to hit that button.

Over the past few days, the left channel on the amp has been dropping out with increasing regularity, requiring a bit of volume-knob jiggling to bring it back to life.

Tick tock. Tick Tock. Tick tock.

By now I figured the seller had either sold the unit or removed it from the site, but I went to my watchlist today and amazingly it was still available. Mercury's finally out of retrograde, timing blessed me with an "extra" paycheck this month, so fuck the budget. It's gonna cost the same whether I buy an already-repaired unit or send mine out to get fixed. And I can justify the expense by telling myself I can sell my original unit and probably recoup most of the money spent on the new one.

Happy Early Birthday to Me! I did say it was a sickness…

Cosmetically, it's not quite as nice as my existing unit, but those parts can easily be swapped. The important thing—the guts—are what's important.

What's sad is that this repair isn't that difficult; if I had a modicum of electronics knowledge and didn't have the soldering skills of a six-year-old, it would be something I could easily do myself. But I know that as it stands right now I'd end up making a bigger mess of things than what exists now, so…nope. Leave it to the experts who know what the fuck they're doing.

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VOTE!

Listen, friends.

Someone is going to be elected president in November. There are going to be two options. There is no world in which someone who is not Biden or the GOP nominee — presumably, somehow, Trump — win the election.

Is Biden my favorite politician? No.

Has he accomplished a ton of good things in the last three years? Absolutely yes.

Pretending otherwise is disingenuous and dangerous.

If you do not vote, you are voting for fascism, full stop. Because you know who always shows up to vote? Your shitty racist neighbors, and the white nationalists trying to stop affirmative action, and the homophobic gun owners who want the party that's made dismantling marriage equality and civil protections for queer people a part of their platform, and religious fundamentalists who believe that women should be the subject of their husbands. They vote in drives, because they don't demand perfection from their candidates, just that they hate the same way they do, and do it loudly.

This left wing thing where people yell about how voting for a candidate that doesn't check every box is a valid political protest is deeply stupid and absolutely wrong. All this accomplishes is to discourage voting and make people stop trying to push for better from our politicians.

Not voting for a candidate that doesn't do everything you want them to is giving a point to the one that wants to bring out loud fascism to the US.

There will be a winner in November, and it's going to be A or B. The system sucks, but it's the one we have, and if we don't vote for the one who is actively working for at least some of the right things, we're going to end up with the one that's working for stripping rights away from the majority of Americans.

Just fucking vote.

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Writing Prompt

"We were still standing at the bar. He had been hitting on me and buying me drinks when his hand found his way down my pants and he started rubbing my boypussy and growling in my ear right there in public. He commanded me to moan like the little slut I was and beg him to fuck me right there."

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I Approve Of This, But It Will NEVER Happen

The only way to get rid of Thomas and his traitorous wife is to make sure Democrats are in charge of the White House, Senate, and House come November and then increase the size of the Supreme Court to the point he and the other insurrectionist-enablers become irrelevant.

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Vaccine Breakthrough Means No More Chasing Strains

Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  "What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad," said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. "It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for."

Continue Reading.

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I'm Such A Nerd

Where's my pocket protector?!

So as I mentioned in passing a month ago (has it only been a month?) I got this blinkie-light thingie (a power/line level LED meter) for my stereo. For some reason this particular unit is rarer than proverbial hens' teeth (could be the age, or the limited production run, or both), so when it showed up on eBay I immediately snagged it.

I bought one new back in 1979 (minus the oak end panels) when it first came out, but after a decade or so of use I grew weary of it, and somehow it ended up in the trunk (or boot for those in the UK) of my then-boyfriend's car, thinking it would get dropped off at Goodwill at some point. Unfortunately, this was while I was living in SF and because parking on the street is the norm,  when the inevitable car break-in happened, it was gone, along with whatever else happened to have been in there.

Anyway, after all these years I thought I knew everything it was capable of doing. What I didn't know—and just discovered today—was that it also had a peak-hold function that displays the highest signal level attained for a small period of time. I knew the silver button on the left side of the unit switched between line-level and RMS (power) display, but I started wondering why in addition to a switch it was also a potentiometer. So I turned it, and all of a sudden the peak levels were holding (the single LEDs that are separate from the  main readout in the photo above), similar to how the meters work in my Technics amp. How long they remain on is dependent on how far you turn the knob. Who knew? There is no mention of this whatsoever in the admittedly-sparse instruction booklet—and frankly I think my original unit simply had a standard pushbutton, so it may explain why I missed this all these years. (This unit may be a later production run than what I had originally.) Sadly it only seems to work on the line-level inputs, not the power level side of things, but it's still pretty damn interesting that it can do this.

I'm such a nerd.