I’ve uploaded our photos from our trip to Nebraska. Don’t worry, I’ve limited it to 43 items.

In this fantastic collection, you will learn such immeasurably useful morsels of knowledge, such as:

• Why people think Nebraska has more trees than Kansas
• The shocking encroachment of nationwide department stores onto rural areas
• Traffic congestion in rural Kansas
• Nebraskan vowel usage
• Silo painting tips

Click here to start, and make sure to hit “next” so you see all the different photos.

Yesterday I had the frustrating experience of trying to configure a machine so I could use the internal soundcard while simultaneously recording sound from a USB iMic.

While ALSA appears to fully support this setup, I discovered quite a few annoyances about what should be trivial:

• There appear to be no GUI sound recording apps that support ALSA directly.
• KDE’s artsd normally provides good ALSA support, but it provides neither a systemwide nor an app-specific way to select either the recording or the playback source with ALSA.
• Some apps appear to use Jack, but configuration of it is extraordinarily complex and it seems to die in subtle and odd ways from time to time.
• ecawave segfaults on start, every time.
• audacity doesn’t even support anything other than OSS! (A shame from what’s otherwise a great program)
• The mechanics of OSS support in ALSA are anything but clear. There is the aoss LD_PRELOAD wrapper, and then there is also a kernel module, which appears to be rather under-documented. For whatever reason, ALSA is managing only one PCM device under /dev, despite having two PCM cards in the system.

Now this is probably no worse than the situation in Windows, but it is certainly not where we should be, and isn’t where MacOS X is either.

Note that most of these problems are with the apps not supporting the second audio source *at all*.

Kayray has been writing recently about librivox, a project to make public domain audio recordings of public domain material (much of it present in Project Gutenberg).

I’m interested in volunteering to read some material. But I don’t have any nice microphone. After doing some research, it looks like I’m down to a couple of different options.

The first option is described by The Roadhouse. It has a $60 MXL 990 mic and a Behringer Eurorack UB802 mixer at $50. I assume that he is running an output from that into a standard sound card. So the total cost of that setup would run around $110. I don’t really need to mix more than one source, but having something that can power condensor mics with XLR connectors looks good.

The second option is to get a dedicated USB mic. The mic of choice here seems to be the Blue Snowball at about $140.

I don’t know enough about this to know which setup would get me the best quality for voice recording that is going to be going to wind up digital on the PC in the end.

I guess the third option is something such as the m-audio mobilepre USB preamp at about $120. So if I used that with the MXL 990, I’d be talking about $180. That’s rather more than I’d like to spend, but it would give me more options down the road.

If any of you have suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

This was a nice quote from the British miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy:

“The true measure of a nation’s morality is how it operates its secret services.”

I think we’re not quite up to par in that department right now.

Halstead Hospital and Hertzler Clinic in Halstead, KS are both for sale on eBay for $1.9 million.

This was once a thriving hospital in central Kansas. It shut down abruptly a few years ago after it turned out that the management was engaging in their own mini-Enron with its finances.

My family doctor was in the clinic part of this building for several years. It’s still surprising to me that it’s closed.

There’s been a bit of a plot in the air at church this Christmas. Mystery. Intrigue. Conspiracy. Even some good-natured holiday ribbing.

And it’s my fault.

So let me explain. A little awhile ago, my dad and I pooled some money and purchased a nice Nikon Coolscan V negative and slide scanner. My first batch of slides to scan on this consists of 3 reels plus one box of slides from the church archives, some 600 images or so. I’ve got 350 scanned so far. We’ll be using these in the centennial book we’re working on, and I’ll burn some DVD-Rs for use by the church in the future.

There are some real treasures in this set. Some extremely rare color photos of the old church building (torn down in 1965), including its interior. All sorts of people in their younger days, plus photos of quite a few people that have since passed on. There were also many photos from 1983 for the church’s 75th anniversary celebration. It’s safe to say that few, if any, people have laid eyes on these photos in the last 25 years.

About two weeks ago, I was remembering how I surprised Aunt Viola by giving her a print of a photo of the choir she directed in 1946. It occured to me how many photos are in this slide set that people would love to see. I started thinking “Hmmm…..”

As I was sitting there scanning, I had lots of time to think. (Each slide takes about 3 minutes at 4000 DPI). I finally decided that I could make nice prints of these images by uploading them to a photo printing service. I’d surprise a few people with an anonymous gift of photos on Christmas.

Well, a “few” grew into “as many as possible”, and I wound up ordering 175 prints. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I ran into a problem early last week. I don’t know who many of these people are, or who their relatives are that still attend our church. I needed help. I had to enlist my dad in my conspiracy — he knows many of these people and who they’re related to.

With his help on Monday, we identified people in some 300 photos. I rushed to get them uploaded to Shutterfly and place an order with overnight shipping to make sure they’d arrive by Christmas. They finally did.

I had help stuffing envelopes while I sorted out the photos. Each envelope had the name of the recipients, plus “Merry Christmas!” written on it. Our names were nowhere to be found.

Saturday afternoon, before the big Christmas Eve program, my brothers and I (who had heard the conersation with my dad, but were good at keeping secrets) helped me stuff mailboxes at church. We escaped without tipping anyone off to what we were doing.

The Christmas Eve service came and went. I tried to listen for conversations about pictures, but didn’t hear any. I was a little concerned — hopefully people liked these photos.

I knew that the moment my aunt saw her photos, she would be able to figure out it was me behind it, and would spread that, but I figured I’d remain anonymous for awhile. It’s fun to keep people guessing.

Well, I accidentally blew my own cover this morning. I asked my aunt about her pictures, but she hadn’t opened the envelope yet. Oops. (In my defense, that’s not very like her!)

But it turns out that these photos have been a topic of many conversations over the past two days. Lots of 70- and 80-year-olds “blaming” each other for delivering surprise photos on Christmas. Wild speculation about who this anonymous Santa is. And where did these old pictures come from? Whose closets would still have such a thing? Plus, lots of checking to see exactly what photos each person got. (I tried to give people photos that would be meaningful to them — friends, relatives, etc.) There was even some amateur handwriting analysis going on. Apparently nobody even suspected me at all.

This was probably the most time I’ve put into a Christmas gift in a long time. But also the most fun and rewarding. I got to see somebody run out the church to show a picture of some high schoolers in 1965 to a friend before they drove off.

This is what makes Christmas such a fun time of year — touching someone’s heart. The sort of thing that can’t be found on any Walmart or mall shelf.

I’ve never been able to give a meaningful Christmas gift to so many people before, and it is a really wonderful feeling to have surprised so many this year.

You know, I really hate it when e-mail inquiries to customer support departments are second-class citizens. The same company that will have me on hold for less than 30 minutes, then resolve my question in 10, won’t even attempt to look at my e-mail inquiries to the same department for 1-2 business days.

Ugh.

What’s the deal here? Why should e-mailers be treated poorly?

Today’s company to shame: Shutterfly, which otherwise has been very good. I’m e-mailing them because my UPS next day air package was delayed by UPS. UPS said they’d issue a refund, but I have to ask for it through Shutterfly.