Dave's Thoughts of the Day: February 13th and 14th

Well I am overdue on blog entries, so here's another one.

I have tickets to go see the Northern Trust Open this weekend.  One for Saturday and one for Sunday.  This is going to be a most fun time.  The Saturday round I'll probably see on my own.  For Sunday, my Dad and his friend will be joining me.   By then I can show them the ropes and point out the best  locations for the course to watch the competition.

Ever have one of those gym bags with the rubber feet on the bottom of it?  Those things are like shoes! When I put it down it sounds like the gym bag is walking.   A gym bag with shoes on it, I get a kick out of it!

Some sobering news regarding the rBlink bluetooth sound device I set up.  I've been struggling w/ latency all week with this thing.  It was to be expected.  Bluetooth isn't usually streaming audio to headset or to stereo at very high rates.  Thus, the forums and Arcam itself recommended me to make some tweaks in Apple Terminal within OS X to fix the latency, or at least improve it.

I'll tell you what, it improved a good deal… quite a bit… but it's not perfect.   So I made yet ANOTHER tweak once I saw the official response from ARCAM.   Long story but basically, Mac OS X has a comically low setting for "bitpool" streaming rate which feeds the audio to the rBlink DAC across the office.  So setting the minimum and maximum bitpool rates to higher amounts allows for smoother audio.

The other half of it is that this only is a problem with my MacBook Pro!  If I change the device to my Galaxy S4 the sound has zero latency or stuttering issues whatsoever.  The bottleneck is clearly with the laptop.

One issue that will not be correctable is the slight lag between the sound on the computer vs the rBlink. It takes a split second for the audio to get from one to the other so when you watch videos on the MacBook Pro, it shows a pretty clear lag between what you hear and what you see.  So if someone were to hit a baseball on the screen you wouldn't hear the crack of the bat for about half a second longer.  Know what I mean?

I don't think that's a real problem because my primary uses of the computer are work and music listening.  If I want to do video and sync matters, I'll just switch to the laptop speakers instead of the rBlink.

Then again… I may find this to be a complete problem and I'll just switch to a USB headphone amp instead of the rBlink.  I haven't decided yet.  Onward.

Friday afternoon will be a short day for me.   Our department will close early for the 3 day weekend, do the dance!

but NOW… what will I do with that free time?  and it came to me -- I think I'll go to Hollywood.   I'd be interested to see the LEGO movie.

My friend Coach will be returning from his long trip to Israel w/ his family.  He returns Sunday.  and I bet you he will be *tired.*

I don't think I wrote my opinion of Derek Jeter's retirement… it's nice.   I think it's good timing all around.  I was going to rip Jeter for milking a whole season of farewell tours instead of just calling it quits, but I realized it was also the last year of his contract.  In that case, what the hell?  Might as well ride it out.

But the interesting part is - will he be able to make it that far??  Dude is struggling to even get *on* the field.   It would take a lot for him to last all year long without hurting something.

Not much else on my mind, suddenly.    Have a good 3 day weekend, everyone!