Anyone coming from out of town and expecting to buy merchandise or tickets from official Olympic stores and venues will have the ‘choice’ of using a Visa as their payment card – or going with cash.  I assume that this will apply to concessions at the venues as well, so make sure you’re prepared ahead of time if you want to buy the $7 fries.  If you have neither, you might not be entirely out of luck.  With RBC being a National Sponsor of the 2010 Games, I would expect to see plenty of their wonderful ATMs there, with plenty of wonderful transaction fees for non-RBC members.

I’m sorry, that sarcasm is unwarranted.  RBC’s ATMs actually are quite good, with high-quality screens and card protectors that seem well-designed to prevent skimmers.

Olympia Pizza at 998 Denman; Image credit Kim Ho, ImOnlyHereForTheFood.com

This is just another example of the nonsense brought to you by Olympic sponsorship dollars;  dollars which have brought you such controversies as McDonald’s being the only place that can serve ‘burgers’, and VANOC going after a pizzeria that has been operating since 1993.  I want to enjoy these Olympics, I really do!  I even understand that VANOC is just protecting their sponsors, but this anti-consumer behaviour threatens to cast the whole thing in a negative light.  We’ll just have to wait and see if this is a problem for visitors to our fair city.

Hooray for Vancouver?

Note : everything on this site is my own personal opinion and does not represent my employer.

Community speakers for the motion:

• Christie Lagally, Richmond Animal Protection Society
• Geoff Urton, BC SPCA
• Lisa Hutcheon, Small Animal Rescue Society of BC

Community speakers against the motion:

• owners of two local pet stores

The opposing view was, “Kids need a place to go where they can see and pet real live animals.”  Right.  Good thing we don’t have shelters crammed full of them already, with volunteers who are happy to educate individuals or classrooms!

Fortunately the City Council had already been well educated on the issue and decided to vote in favour of the motion.  Unanimously so, in fact!  I would like to commend the city council on their wise decision, and hope that this will at least help eliminate the input to their feral rabbit problem.  It was also good to meet up with a number of other supporters:  Dawn from SARS BC;  Jelena, Eric and Carol from RAPS; and one member of VRRA whose name I totally forgot (sorry!).

In the middle of this great news, I was saddened to hear news that one unnamed pet food company – a supporter of RAPS – decided that they would no longer be able to donate food to help animals at their shelter.  Apparently PIJAC has put the thumbscrews on their members in order to try to cause some punitive damage to RAPS for helping the City of Richmond develop the revised bylaw.  I guess it only stands to reason;  PIJAC is “the voice of the Canadian pet industry”, not the voice of Canadian pets.

To PIJAC, and the company who has decided to pull their support from RAPS:  Why are you punishing the animals here?  Go and play politics, that’s all well and good, but don’t take it out on the animals.

Opened the packaging, put DVD disc 1 into my drive.  For some reason, my computer refused to read it.  The drive light just blinked slowly without actually reading the disk.  To verify drive operation, I put in another DVD which spun up normally, and Windows Explorer read it happily.  I tried disc 2, which also loaded fine in Windows Explorer.  My hypothesis is Securom, which has caused many headaches for people.  Several of the other games I have on my computer do use Securom protection, so perhaps the already-installed Securom driver was interfering with reading of the DVD.

Whatever, maybe I can install this anyways.  I put disc 1 into my wife’s laptop.  Of course, it worked just fine over there.  I shared her drive across the network and went back to my PC.  From there, I was able to run the installer and suffered through the pain of installing it from a shared drive over wifi.  But hey – at least I had it installed!  Time to install the DLC now, since at least I knew that DVD worked.

Tried to run the installer off the disc, at which point it seemed to be loading but never brought up the application.  Waited a few minutes, nothing.  Tried rerunning it, still nothing.  Went to check online, and it seemed that most people recommended copying the contents of the DVD to the HD first before installing – and even then it took a while.  Fine, I copied them and went to install.  After waiting a minute or two, finally it seemed to be running.

Aaaaand another snag.  It complained that it couldn’t install without being an Administrator, but it didn’t actually bring up the UAC prompt.  Tried to right-click and run as Admin, and it still didn’t work?  More Googling seemed to indicate that I actually had to disable UAC.  FINE.  I disabled it, rebooted, and tried to install.  Still the same message, you have to be Administrator.  Oh yeah – right-clicked, Run As Administrator… and it still didn’t work.  WTF?  This was rapidly becoming frustrating.  I switched users to the actual Admin user, and then went to install the DLC.  Finally it actually worked.  Now I just had to patch the game, and it was go time!

Installing the patch went really well, up until it gave me a failure message.  Searching for the source of it, it turned out that I needed to have Windows Live 3.0 installed.  Yes, I needed to install MicroSoft’s web-enabled achivements/whatever thing – and the patcher couldn’t do that itself.  What kind of crappy patch is this?  Every other patcher I have used that requires some other MS-specific framework (.NET for example) automatically can download and install it.  At any rate I went and downloaded and installed Live 3.0 myself, even though I didn’t care about any of its capabilities.

Okay, now I’m getting excited.  It’s only taken me a few hours, but the game and DLC are installed and patched.  Time to run it!

BZZZZZT.  Oh right, that whole DVD issue that I had in the first place.  Due to their buggy copy-protection with Securom, the disc wasn’t readable by my computer, and of course it needed local-system access to the DVD.  Having it mounted across the network was insufficient.  At least that was logical – but that doesn’t help me actually play the game that I bought!  I wasn’t about to go out and spend another $30 on a new DVD drive for my PC when the existing one works fine with everything else I have ever thrown at it.

Screw you Bethesda, the gloves were coming off at this point.  Three hours to install a game was already ridiculous, but requiring another $30 purchase to make it work was out of the question.  A quick trip to a copy-protection-removal site, a simple download later, and I had a replacement EXE.  Did a virus/trojan/malware scan, everything checked out OK.  Replaced the original EXE file, and tried to fire up the game.  It works!

A month later and I have had a lot of quality gaming time with Fallout 3.  Sure there were some small glitches and bugs, and a few crashes.  Overall, however, the game itself was indeed a winner, and was well worth the money I spent.  If you add up the time I spent fighting to install it, it’s a minimal amount of overhead.  But you would think that it should be possible to come home, install a game from a DVD, and play it within at least an hour, if not substantially less.  To have to troubleshoot issues with not only the installation of the game, but also the DLC and even the patch?!?

This is why people pirate games on PC.  Had I simply gone to a torrent site, I could have downloaded a pre-cracked and pre-patched version of the game without any difficulty.  Bethesda, next time please don’t penalize the honest gamers in your vainglorious quest to stamp out piracy.  You’ll never be able to kill off piracy, and your efforts only serve to drive away paying customers.

Apparently this is Mikey from DreamHost

One nice aspect of my plan at DreamHost is that I also have the ability to drop other domains onto my plan without incurring any additional costs.  They also give free hosting to registered charities – but alas that’s only in the United States (probably for tax deduction reasons).  Still, given the amount of flexibility here I will most likely move the Small Animal Rescue Society of BC’s site over to my plan, so that they can finally have a website with a bit of interactivity.  Not to mention a site that actually lets people post to it without me having to run a formatting script to generate the static HTML!

Finally, I would like to take this time to thank my pal RT for hosting my crappy site (which is a reflection on my posting, not his hosting) for many years.  I hope he has a fun time down in California!

Most of the assembly was rather straightforward, provided that one is familiar with soldering and general DIY electronics work. I ran into a few snags along the way, which I will share with you here.

Snag 1: many 8-pin headers are too big for the holes. This is a known issue with the boards, in that the headers used for the original prototype fit into a smaller diameter hole than those in the parts list. A few light twists of a scalpel is enough to enlarge each hole, though. If you do scrape off the pads on any of the holes, you can still solder to the adjacent traces easily enough if you’re careful.

Snag 2: The wires connecting the two 8-pin headers from the keyboard to the Juno’s voice board are misleading. Roland used the proper rainbow colouring of wires, running from brown through grey for pins 1-8. The trick is that this is pins 1-8 of the plug (you can see a small 1 on it) – but when you look at the “1..8″ and “9..16″ markings on the voice board, the brown wire (pin 1 of the plug) is actually pin 8 on the voice board, and the grey wire (pin 8 of the plug) is pin 1 on the voice board.

I mistakenly assumed that pin 1 of the voice board would be pin 1 on the retrofit’s Board B – this is not the case. The trick is to connect up pin 1 of each plug to the square pad on the board B layout diagram. Then have your jumper wires match up directly to the voice board of the Juno. The picture gallery for this project explains this much better.  In particular, look at the final installation picture.  Fortunately, John was both helpful and prompt with his email responses to my inquiries, and this issue was sorted out very quickly.  I really appreciated the time that he took to answer my questions so that we could solve the problem.

Snag 3: While I was debugging my original “why isn’t it triggering notes over MIDI?” problem, John suggested that I switch both sets of cables. The Juno then played notes via MIDI, except that high MIDI notes played low on the keyboard, and low MIDI notes played high! This was what pointed out that I had mis-wired the headers on board B for Snag 2. Once I had solved that and hooked everything back up – which involved separating boards A & B, swapping both 8-wire cables and reversing the headers, and putting it all back together – I still wasn’t getting any sound over MIDI.

Following the “something must be backwards” school of thought, reversing the cables again as per John’s suggestion fixed everything up – and it’s now working great. This runs contrary to Step 3 of the installation notes, which suggests that “the connector on the retrofit closest to the diodes connects to the 10-17 pins.” On my Juno 6, the connector on the retrofit closest to the diodes connects to the 1-8 pins.

Snag 4: This one isn’t really a snag, just something to make your life a bit easier when connecting up the arpeggiator clock switch. The Juno 6 has a 3-pin header (brown, red, orange) that carries arp signals to/from the plugs on the back of the synth. The far-left wire (orange) is connected to the hold circuit. The far-right wire (brown) is connected to the tip of the Arpeggio Clock In jack. The middle wire (red) comes from the arpeggiator circuit. When no plug is inserted, the signal is connected to the brown wire; when a plug is inserted, the red wire is disconnected. To ensure that the MIDI clock is also disconnected when a plug is inserted into the jack, the switch that you install will need to switch between that red wire (coming from the panel PCB of the Juno) and the clock signal from the retrofit. The selected signal from the switch should be connected to the middle pin of that plug.  Edit: You know, I’m not sure if I actually tested to see if this is working correctly.

This did take me probably about 6 hours or so, spread across a few weekends, but overall this was quite an easy to build and easy to install kit. It’s a fantastic value, and I recommend it for anyone who is confident with their soldering abilities, and who wants to add MIDI capabilities to their old Juno 6.

In the previous several weeks, I had started building a new rack for my audio equipment.  This one was designed to be portable, much like a Gator or Anvil case.  Unlike them, it didn’t cost much.  I also wouldn’t trust it to be shipped anywhere, but if it ever needs to be transported, it will be local and I’ll be the one lugging it.  19″ rack, 8U rails in the front.  6U rack up top for the mixer.  Not a lot of space, but it’s limited for a purpose – to keep myself from filling the rack with unnecessary items.

I also decided to build my own rack-mounting rails for my mixer;  typical prices are about $50 for two small metal brackets.  I spent less than $20 on a 6U rack filler panel, and an hour or so with a dremel, vise and drill were enough to complete it.  It’s much less elegant than the commercial option, but it’s definitely functional and sturdy enough.

The MIDI/power supply box means I don’t need to daisy-chain my MIDI devices, and saves me from using a pile of wall-warts.  The schematic for the MIDI Thru portion of the device is a pretty standard affair I found online that uses a 6N138 optoisolator and a 74HC14 as the driver.  In retrospect, I should have used a larger box for this module.

My set of musical gear has changed dramatically since I last revised my music page, so I will have to also update that one of these days.  There’s still a few DIY projects left to complete, but it’s great having everything hooked up and ready to be switched on.  Current equipment:

• Mackie 1202VLZ mixer
• Line6 Verbzilla and Echo Park pedals
• Yamaha RM1x on the side shelf
• Korg 707 keyboard on the wall
• power filter
• Waldorf Microwave II
• Digitech Valve FX
• E-Mu Systems ESI-2000 sampler
• Roland Juno 6

I’m really looking forward to making more music with this setup.  The RM1x sequencer is giving me a lot of flexibility and options that the Alesis MMT-8 just couldn’t provide.  Don’t get me wrong – the MMT-8 is a classic box that has really stood the test of time – but it just wasn’t fitting into the workflow that I wanted to use.  As a result, I have been writing very little music in the past several years.  Perhaps this new setup will help me change that.