Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in dave_ifversen's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
6:22 pm	Mr. Fixit strikes again! It seems that, every time I fix one noise that the Jeep is making, it lets me hear another, quieter noise that also needs fixing.  For instance, a few months ago I finally got tired of the wind noise from the driver's door - the hinge bushings were worn out, and the door was sagging to the point that it would not close right.  This allowed air to rush in while driving.  I fixed that, and then (surprise, surprise), I noticed that the front wheel bearings were shot (to the point that the Jeep sounded like a rock crusher running down the road - the wind noise had been hiding that). So, today I fixed the wheel bearings.  Unfortunately, you can't just replace the bearings (at least, not without a hydraulic press and more tools than I currently have) - the hub and bearings come as a sealed unit, and must be replaced as such.  Needless to say, getting the hubs off a 14 year old truck can be 'interesting', to say the least.  Fortunately, things were not too badly corroded, so the whole job (replace both front hubs) took a little over 2 hours - not bad, as these things go.  (You have to remove the wheel, then remove the brake caliper, then the axle shaft nut.  Then (and this is the hard part) you need to remove the 3 bolts that hold the hub to the steering knuckle.  Of course, you trash the bolts while doing this, because you need to hit them with a hammer to drive the hub off the axle once you've loosened the bolts.  Assembly is the reverse, without the need of a hammer.  Repeat for the other side.)  The parts cost me a little over $200, and by doing the job myself I saved at least $600 in labor that a shop would have charged. Driving down the road is now *much* quieter (ooh!  Forest Lawn!).  Of course, now I hear a very quiet 'squeak-rattle' whenever I hit a bump in the road - yet another noise that I'll need to track down.  :-) Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2012
10:35 am	Another chapter in the continuing adventures of Mr. Fixit So the real-time analyzer I bought after last MuseCon turned out to have an awful hum in the output.  I finally got around to opening it up to see what was in there. Turns out that there are 4 small circuit boards inside the unit - one for the front panel that contains the buttons/controls and the display, one on the back panel with all the I/O connectors, a small board containing 9 or so chips that actually do all the 'work' with the signals (A/D and D/A conversion, applying all the effects and whatnot), and the power supply. One of the primary filter caps on the power supply looked 'a little off' - nothing really obvious, but just not really right (bulged out ever so slightly).  So I ordered new caps (I figured I might as well replace them all) and installed them yesterday.  This fixed the problem and the hum in now gone.  This unit will do real-time analysis and auto EQ to balance the room and the sound system.  It will also do audio delay (for a remote set of speakers in a large room, for instance - the signal to the far speakers is delayed a bit so the sound coming from them appears to match that which come from the main speakers by the stage). While I was at it, I also re-capped the power supply for the graphic equalizer on the home stereo, since it was also putting a slight hum in the signal.  New caps took care of that problem as well. Current Mood: accomplished (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
10:22 am	Not a patent but just as good, in its own way. I've always wanted to have a patent, but nothing I've ever made was worth the time/cost/effort.  However, an Intellectual Property Lawyer confirmed that copyright law works just the way it was explained to me several years ago, so I am officially the proud holder of several audio copyrights (and joint copyright holder with the artist in one case).  It's not a patent, but it's still very cool. Current Mood: artistic (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 19th, 2012
10:46 pm	The Further Adventures of Mr. Fixit Just finished fixing 5 more video projectors (2 at work and 3 for home/con use).  I ended up re-capping 3 power supplies, changing out 2 LCD/crystal units, and replacing a couple of diachroic filters that had gotten light-burned.  The 3 for home/con use are PROXIMA DP8200x units (matches one I already have and use for the cons) - this now gives me 4 machines (3200 lumens each) to use for programming.  When these machines were new, they cost ~$3600 each - the most I paid for one of them was $40 (and that was one that already worked and just needed a lamp), the other 3 I paid less than $20 each for. I also have a 6500 lumen machine, a 2500 lumen machine, and a 2200 lumen machine to use for the cons. That leaves me with 4 or 5 projectors (ranging in brightness from 1200 to 2000 lumens) that I no longer need and will be selling off as I can. (I should really consider teaching a class at MuseCon on how to take apart/fix/put back together video projectors - it's really quite easy.  I could take one of the 3200 lumen projectors that works, take it all apart and show people what's inside and how it works, then put it back together again and use it for the next panel - that might be fun!) Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
9:27 pm	Capricon Well, that was a con! Lots of work, but not much stress (and very little drama, thank Ghu!). I took over Equipment/AV this year (Burnadette, who used to do it, wanted a break, so they asked me if I would take it on).  I was busy, but not uncomfortably so.  tollers did a fantastic job as Filk Head - the performers were outstanding, the music was great, and the energy was high all weekend.  I spent most of my time (while not doing AV stuff) in the Cafe, which was very ably run by Xap and Ron. We went through lots of slushies, baked goods, and popcorn at the MuseCon party - the smell of fresh-popped popcorn wafted all the way down the hall! From what I could see, the con rocked hard!  Everyone seemed to have a good time.  Now we get to do it all over again next year - only better! Current Mood: accomplished (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
5:53 pm	It's all in the oil I tried some more popcorn for my crew at work, only this time I used the 'pre-measured' packets for the 8 oz. kettle. (Includes the proper amounts of red coconut oil (which is actually more of a hard paste at room temp), popcorn, and seasoned salt.) I was surprised at what a difference it makes - popcorn made this way looks, smells, and tastes exactly like what you get in the movie theater. And, best of all, I can get the pre-measured packets real cheap online. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
8:00 pm	Things learned during first real test of the popcorn machine Use about 30% to 50% more oil (if using liquid oil and not bars) than the machine instructions recommend. It makes the corn pop faster and more completely. Even using the extra oil, the popped corn was not greasy at all. If anything, it was about as non-greasy as most air-popped corn I have tried. 1 cup of kernels makes a lot of popped corn. The warming tray and light really do work well to keep the popped corn warm and fresh. When using the right oil and corn in the machine, it really does taste just like what you get in the movie theater. Cleaning the machine is relatively quick and painless - takes about 20 to 30 minutes to do a thorough job of it (my first time ever doing it - I can probably get that down quite a bit now that I know what I am doing), which is maybe a little less time than it takes to clean out the slushie machine. Current Mood: accomplished (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
10:32 pm	New (used) toy I'm now the proud owner of a movie-theater-style popcorn popper; a small commercial unit - 8 oz. kettle with motorized stirrer, warming deck and light, and even a removable cart. And, best of all, I got it for a fraction of what it would cost new. Add this to Dwayne's slushie machine and the MuseCon parties are gonna' rock bigtime as far as snacks go. Boo-yah! (Comment on this)
Monday, November 14th, 2011
11:35 am	Things learned at Windycon I need a bigger projection screen if I ever supply equipment for Christian Ready again. The projector was plenty bright (6000 lumens, for Ghu's sake), but the images would look a whole lot better on a much bigger screen than the portable ones I have. One of my homebuilt VotT speakers has a blown 12" driver. This would explain why we had so many problems getting the sound right for Sooj at MuseCon, and why I had to do a lot of fiddling around with the controls to get things sounding right at Windycon. I will be buying a new(er) laptop to run the recording software. The Pentium class machine I currently have (given to me by someone who was upgrading) works OK, but it starts getting taxed when recording more than 3 or 4 tracks at once, or when the recording goes for more than 40 minutes or so. The display ends up running about 5 minutes behind what is actually happening - everything's there, but you can't rely on the display to see what is going on right now (this was a bit disconcerting to me, and very disconcerting to Roper). This needs to be fixed ASAP, so that is what's next on the agenda. The Tomboat recording came out OK this year. (Thank Ghu!) It will need a lot of post-production work, but everything is there (all 15 tracks of it). Current Mood: awake (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
1:21 pm	Not my problem, not my fault, not my drama! Oy vey! What a mess. Thank Ghu I'm not involved - but it is interesting (in a trainwreck kind of way) watching it all unfold (and unfold pretty much the way I predicted it would when I first heard about it). I guess what's most fascinating about it is the fact that some of the people involved can see the light at the end of the tunnel - while, from where I'm sitting, I can see the train entering that end of the tunnel. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
2:36 pm	Final equipment checks before Windycon What I learned after MuseCon was that the Voice of the Theater speakers that I built were not balanced correctly. The problem was that the crossover I used had an 800Hz crossover point - which corresponded to the low frequency cutoff of the 811B VotT horns I used. This doesn't use the 12" low drivers to anywhere near full advantage, and makes the speakers sound very brassy and unnatural. We had to make a lot of adjustments to the equalizer in order for Sooj to sound right on stage. I bought some crossovers with a 3kHz crossover point. These make the speakers sound a *whole lot* better - much smoother response overall, and the 12" low frequency speakers are now doing their fair share. I suspect that we won't have to make nearly as many corrections with the equalizer now. I was also afraid that I would need to adjust the port size on the bottom of the cabinets, but the sound is so much better now that I don't think that will be necessary. I re-wired the patch panels on the amprack, since I discovered some broken wires there after MuseCon. I replaced the 3-way active crossover with a 2-way active crossover (since I probably won't ever tri-amp the system anyway). I now have two small rack boxes for next to the sound board - one that has the feedback suppression, spectrum analyzer, and equalizers in it, the other has all the effects and the compressor/limiters. I'm about as ready as I can be for the Windycon concerts. Current Mood: content (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
11:10 am	The fog machine in operation I put up some pictures of the dry ice fog machine on my photo gallery. Go to http://www.ifversen.org/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=488 to see how it all came out. Current Mood: accomplished (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 21st, 2011
9:01 pm	Construction complete I finished the construction of the fog machine that I'm going to use for the Tomboat concert at Windycon. It's built from a 20 gallon steel oil drum, with a 1kW 'bucket heater' to keep the water hot, and a squirrel cage blower to move the fog out through a 4" dryer vent hose. I added a lowerable cage to hold the dry ice (and get the ice in and out of the hot water as needed). The only thing I have left to do is coat the inside of the oil drum (it comes as bare steel with a light anti-corrosion coating on it) so it won't rust when exposed to slightly acidic hot water and dry ice/CO2. (I have some spray-on truck bed liner which should do the trick nicely.) Once the liner has set up, I'll give the machine a full-scale test to make sure everything works as it should - this design should produce copious amounts of fog on demand. (The last time I built one of these - about 35 years ago - I used a 55 gallon oil drum, with 3 2.5kW strip heaters welded on to the outside of the drum and powered from 208VAC 3-phase power. That one would boil the water in the drum if you didn't watch it carefully, and it would fill a large stage with 3-foot deep dry ice fog - and it ate through 50 pound blocks of dry ice like they were candy.) Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
12:39 pm	It's obviously been a while since we worked in the gardens... This past weekend was a "work outside" weekend (along with a "clean the garage" weekend). It's been a while since we've done anything in the gardens, because after we finished weeding, we had *6* large yard waste bags full of weeds. On the plus side, the gardens are all clean now (no weeds, you can actually see the plants that are supposed to be there, along with real dirt). The garage cleanout continues - my goal is to be able to actually put a car in there before the snow flies (and maybe even find the Ark of the Covenant, which is lurking in there somewhere :-). We'll see how far I get. I've got a 'bagster' (canvas dumpster from Waste Manglement) that I keep filling up during the day, and half of what I put in there disappears at night. (We have an active bunch of scroungers in this neighborhood who go around snagging anything they can recycle/sell for money. Not a problem, especially with a dumpster, since there is now more room for me to put more stuff in it.) Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 1st, 2011
1:32 am	New toy in time for Windycon Part of the setup for Sooj's concert at MuseCon was a panel on how all the sound equipment was set up. During this panel, we ended up going through a convoluted balancing of the room and sound system by ear alone. It worked, but it took a while to get things sounding right. I knew there was a better way, and I managed to acquire it. I picked up a fancy digital signal processor for a song. It has a gazillion functions, including graphic, parametric, and dynamic equalizers, along with doing compression/limiting, feedback destroying, and, most importantly, it has a real-time FFT audio spectrum analyzer with pink noise generator. I have a calibrated measurement microphone to go with it. I'll be able to set up the mic out in the house, give the system a shot of pink noise, and the analyzer will give me a response curve for the room and sound system. What's even better about this unit is that, with a push of a button, it will invert the response curve and automatically send it to the built in graphic equalizer. Should give me a good starting point in balancing the room acoustics with the sound system. Current Mood: nerdy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 28th, 2011
8:38 pm	Boom boom, out go the lights. (It was a double-dog dare.) LJ is finally up long enough for me to post this. So I go in to work a bit early last night, and when I get there, the Evening Shift crew is in the midst of yet another round of Epic Fail.  A power supply for the safety system burned up, dropping out the ESS (electrical safety system) permit for ALL the accelerators.  The enclosure interlocks were still up, but when the power supply died, the safety system thought that someone had taken all the enclosure keys out of the keytrees - so it shut everything down so nobody could get hurt if they tried to access an enclosure.  This very rudely shut off the power supplies and the RF acceleration systems, and dumped all of our stored anti-matter.  Bummer. I asked Darren (the Evening Shift Crew Chief) when (if ever) was he going to turn over a working complex to me for shift change (the last 2 weeks have just sucked dead toads through a straw when it comes to running the accelerators, for some reason).  He chuckled, then said "I double-dog dare you to come up with a worse failure on your shift."  I said "Fine, we'll have a site-wide power outage."  The general response was along the lines of "yeah - right". Fast forward to the shift-change briefing, where Darren was telling us all about what a sucky shift his crew had.  The storms that were threatening all night finally started rolling through.  At one point, there was a 'FLASH-BANG' as lightning hit somewhere really close (probably the Highrise, or maybe the Central Utility Building).  Everyone looked up, but nothing else happened.  For about 5 minutes.  Then all the lights went out, and we were left sitting there with no illumination except the glow of the laptop screen with the logbook scrolling by.  I laughed maniacally at Darren (my laugh is an evil laugh...) and said "I told you so." Then we went into the control room to try and pick up all the pieces.  Turns out that ComEd feeder 11120 (one of our private feeders, it supplies the Master Substation on site) faulted somewhere off-site, dropping us into darkness.  The Kautz Road Substation (the other big substation on site, which feeds the Main Injector accelerator and half the cryo systems for the Tevatron) dropped out at the same time for a couple of minutes, then came back up.  With the Central Helium Liquifier plant offline due to the power outage, we ended up giving most of our helium back to God as the Tevatron warmed up uncontrollably.  We'll need some more helium, and we'll have to purify what we had left that didn't go out the relief vents, before we can re-liquify helium and cool down the Tev.  That machine will probably be off for most of a week while we do all that. We back-fed Master Sub from Kautz Road Sub (gets the lights and AC on, and allows us to recover the support systems (cooling water, vacuum, RF, controls), but we can't ramp the magnet power supplies for the big machines with only one substation operational).  ComEd still has to find and fix the fault on 11120, then we have to switch Master Sub back over to that feeder, before we can resume normal running. What a night. Current Mood: exhausted (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
12:20 pm	Mr. Fixit strikes again So I picked up another video projector for a whopping $15 - a Toshiba TLP-770 (1800 lumens, so it's pretty bright).  The description said 'powers on and displays an image', so I figured I couldn't go wrong for $15.  When it arrived, it was easy to see why it was being sold as surplus -  the focus ring would not turn.  Everything else was just fine.  I took it apart (it's surprising how much needed to come out of the case in order to get to the screws holding the lens on) and found that someone had either dropped the machine on the lens or (more likely, considering the lack of any other damage) smacked the lens into something, causing the helical focusing screws in the lens barrel to 'jump the track' and get all jammed up.  I took the lens apart, freed up the focusing screws, lubricated everything and put it all back together. It works like a charm.  There's still at least 1000 hours left on the lamp, even, so I probably won't need to replace it for several years. So for $15 and 2 hours of my time I got a projector that originally cost close to $9000, and will work great for panel rooms at Windycon and MuseCon. Current Mood: satisfied (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 16th, 2011
10:49 pm	Qapla' I tested out the recording hardware and software at the MuseCon meeting today.  I had 4 condenser microphones spaced around the room, hooked up to the MOTU 8 Pre.  The firewire port from the MOTU fed into the old laptop that I refurbished for this project. The mains out from the MOTU also fed Liana's Mac laptop for a skype audio feed.  Both of these worked great!   I recorded 4 separate tracks almost 2 hours continuously, and it came out just fine - no clicks or pops (indicative of a firewire chipset not fully supported by the recording hardware/software).  Looks like this will work as I hoped it would for recording concerts at the various cons. Current Mood: accomplished (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 15th, 2011
1:04 am	More new (to me) toys Since I'm doing more live sound recording, along with CD/DVD mastering (mostly for Jan so far, but I'll be adding shows from MuseCon to the mix), the time has come to get my own system (instead of borrowing and kludging things together that don't work right for me anyway).  To that end, I've picked up a couple of MOTU (Mark Of The Unicorn) firewire interfaces - I got an 8-pre and an 896.  Both offer 8 channels of analog input that get routed to the firewire interface, ADAT ins/outs, and a host of other really neat features, along with some *really* good mic preamps.  The 896 also offers 8 analog outputs, if needed. Looking through my pile of old computers, I came across an older laptop that someone gave me when they upgraded (it's a Compaq V2030US) that has a built-in firewire interface and a fast enough processor to do multitrack recording.  I tested it out with the MOTU units and the software I'll probably use (Mixcraft 5), and it seems to work just fine so far.  I maxed out the memory to 2 GB, which should help when I attempt 16 tracks at once. I'll set up a bunch of microphones at the MuseCon meeting this weekend and test out multitrack recording for more than a few minutes at a time - if it passes that test, I think I have a working system!  Then, I'll just need to look for a control interface to use (I *really* like slidepot faders for my channel controls rather than fiddling with the mouse on a computer GUI). Current Mood: cheerful (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 8th, 2011
10:11 am	What I learned on my (one day) winter vacation... Holes in the roof for a year and a half are not good for things left in a house, like furniture and books. Also not good for slightly more important things, like walls, ceilings, and floors.  I hate raccoons. Especially when they chew holes in the roof and start having a party in the attic and dormer bedroom.  Raccoon sh!t sticks to carpet and turns interesting colors as it goes moldy. It also smells *really* bad, no matter how old it is.  Climbing the stairs (while avoiding said raccoon sh!t) can be an adventure.  I really hate raccoons.  Rehabbers are crazy. Real Estate agents are crazy. Especially when both say things like "This doesn't look so bad." If this isn't bad, I'd hate to see what they think is. There is a potential buyer for any house, no matter what condition it is in. I'm *really* glad my mother-in-law never saw the condition her house ended up in. It's really sad when someone's life can be summed up by a 5'x10' storage locker with 3 pieces of furniture, 2 sewing machines, and 3 boxes in it.  Jeep Cherokees skate well. Coming over a hill on I-94 in Indiana (during a lake-effect blizzard) we see brake lights and headlights - both on our side of the highway. There must have been at least 3 jack-knifed semis and 6 or more cars scattered across 4 lanes. Stepped on the brake (gently) and discovered why - the road was a sheet of black ice, and the back-end started to break loose - popped the transmission into neutral and began pumping the brakes to avoid a skid. Ended up sliding a bit anyway (it could have been much worse), but neatly skated around and between all the disabled vehicles (all while hearing "fsck fsck fsck" from the passenger seat). Continued on our way while coming down from a sudden adrenaline high.  I haven't had this much winter driving fun since I was going to school at Michigan Tech. (1 Comment |Comment on this)