The word is derived from “Frigg’s Day” in the Anglo-Saxon and “Freya’s Day” in the Germanic, but Freya and Frigg were often associated with each other (maybe not quite as closely as, say, Venus and Aphrodite, but still). The start of most people’s weekend, and the start of my working week. Happy Frigging Friday (long way for a bad joke).

Casey’s home from NYC, tired, and at this moment not thirty feet from where I sit, getting a shower. I’m going to post this quickly and then make her tea, her only request on homecoming (other than a hug, as evidently no one in NYC does that as well as I do).

I did do a few other things this week, by the way, contrary to my last post (I knew I was forgetting something). I dismantled a lamp to identify the faulty part in the switch (the rotary pull mechanism tensioner has worn out, and despite attempts to repair it, it’s only reliable about 30% of the time, which means it isn’t reliable, so I’ll buy a new one sometime … in the future), and did my first soldering project since I stopped playing bass and guitar sometime in the last century.

I have a headset I use to listen to music and, uh, talk to my internet friends. Yes, very geeky, fuck you. Anyway, one headset went bad at the precise moment I installed a piece of software (alright, it was a game fuck you redux) published by a company known to publish games that do fucked up shit to your audio and video drivers (sometimes—but they’re great games!). So I spent my leisure time over the next few days installing and uninstalling drivers, fucking with settings, etc. On a whim, when I had about given up, I plugged in earbuds (always hated that word) and … it wasn’t the settings at all, it was the headset.

First rule of technical failure: always test on duplicate/similar hardware when possible.

So. Case found another headset lying around the apartment (we had bought two of them for friends when they started being geeks, but they snubbed their noses at them and so they languished in a closet). I used them, no problems, good music, the mic worked, hooray. Until Monday evening, when the mic stopped working.

This time, instead of blaming drivers, I tested the duplicate hardware (cf. rule one), and discovered that the condenser mic had gone bad. So. Two headsets, one with bad output, one with bad input.

Long, boring story short (too late) I took from one and gave to the other and through the ugliest soldering job since the bronze age, I have one working headset made from two not-working headsets.

And I watched some TV and did a lot of thinking about the shape of the world post-oil, if post-oil actually does happen. Maybe more on that later, as it’s more interesting than me blathering about headsets.

But I fucking soldered some shit, people! Hot iron! Toxic chemicals! Wires and shit!

Right. Work tomorrow, Sunday, recuperation Monday, then maybe that bit about the world post-oil.

Enjoy your weekend.