Today, I received a package form Amazon.ca. It contained The Final Frontier by Iron Maiden, as well as two other Iron Maiden albums. I now have all their studio albums. I have to say that it’s a good album, although none of the songs have really stood out and grabbed my attention yet, other than the first one. I didn’t expect it to start quite the way it did, with its very unique drums and rhythm, but it fits the theme of the album quite well. I’m glad I have all the albums now. 
There was a power outage today at 2:39PM. I was getting a snack in the kitchen, just before taking a nap, when I heard everything shutting down around me. According to my APC UPS, the power outage lasted for 1 hour and 16 minutes. There were some mild thundershowers for the past couple of days, but I don’t think those were responsible for it. Actually, I wished that they would be a little stronger, because they can be interesting. 
Before the power outage, I received a package that contained 4 Iron Maiden CDs. Amazon.ca put them all on sale because the new album will be released in a couple of weeks. So I decided to take advantage of that. I’ll have all the Iron Maiden studio albums soon.
I received a couple of packages yesterday. They contained some videos of trains, and another WD Elements portable hard drive. I decided to get another drive, because I liked the first one so much. This time I went with the 640GB version, since I got a good deal on it.
I’ve been working on my model train layout quite a lot again. This time, I’ve been hunting down and eliminating all the problems.
One of those problems was that some sections of track had some dead spots. I would have solved that easily, but the hobby shop didn’t have any terminal joiners in stock for a while now. Terminal joiners are like a regular rail joiner, but they have a wire attached to them to send power to the rails. So I decided that it was time for me to learn to solder and make my own terminal joiners. It actually went pretty well, except I was a bit sloppy with the solder. My hands are just not good for working with very small things, but I still managed to get it done. Now the soldering iron’s tip is all black. I’ll need to clean it up somehow.
Another problem I had was that the couplers on the locomotives were not at the right height. Some couplers even got so low that they would catch on turnout points and cause derailments. So I bought some more couplers, some special tools, and a gauge to make sure they’re set to the proper height.
There was also a section of track that caused derailments because of the radius of the curve. Apparently, I tried fitting a larger radius curve than I should have in the limited space, and it caused some parts of it to be a bit too sharp. Flex-track doesn’t always want to keep the desired shape, even when it’s nailed down, either. Replacing that track with a slightly smaller radius curve made from sectional track actually solved that problem. That’s fine, since I had a bunch of old sectional track that I wasn’t using anyway, and I got to put it to use. I also used some of those sections around the turntable, since they make it easier to line up with it than flex-track.
On Tuesday, I received a package from Amazon.ca. It contained a 320GB WD Elements portable external hard drive. Amazon.ca has been selling electronics for a little while now, but I had not really thought about getting anything like that from them, because I feared shipping damage. Sometimes my DVDs arrived with cracked cases, and once with damage to the disc itself. The CDs and DVDs that I bought from Amazon.com were always packaged better. I don’t know why Amazon.ca don’t package things as well as they do in the USA, but in this case, it was acceptable for a retail boxed drive. For an OEM drive, on the other hand… the little bags of air would not help it so much.
Anyway, the drive itself is nice. It’s small, light, quiet, and stays cool. It probably has a notebook drive inside its case, so it allows it to be powered by the USB cable that connects it to the computer. That’s convenient. What is not convenient is that the cable that comes with it works fine for plugging it into a notebook, but it’s a bit short for a desktop. Using a longer cable will work, but you need to use a USB cable that has an adequate wire gauge or else there will be power sag and the drive won’t spin up. Other than that, the drive performs quite well. It’s not quite as fast as a desktop hard drive, but it beats my NAS by about 3x when copying files over a network. So in all, I’m pretty happy with it. I would buy it again.
WD Elements
Today, I received the latest Danko Jones album; Below the Belt. It’s great, as usual. They seem to have gone back a little with a more aggressive sound more like some earlier albums, like We Sweat Blood, and added more guitar. 
I also went downtown to the music shop this afternoon, and despite seeing lots of tempting Gibson SGs, I kept my hands away from them… but looked at them for a while in admiration. So, keeping my promise I made to someone, I ended up just buying some guitar strings and a Hohner Blues Harp. I was always fascinated by the harmonica, but never dared get one until today. They’re not expensive at all, so I decided to give it a try. So it gives me something new and interesting, and at the same time my new savings account will be safe. 
My new monitor finally arrived today. After waiting for a month, I decided that I had to contact Dell about it, so I used the form on their website. The next day, I got an email apologizing for the delay, and they arranged to have it shipped by Friday. It took a little longer to arrive because of the Easter holiday, but it’s here now. So I’m happy.
Now about the monitor. It’s an ST2410, the screen is 24″ widescreen, and “true HD”, but the funny thing about it is that it’s no higher than my old 19″ was. But that’s why I got this one. I wanted the same height as before, because a higher screen is better for writing, and with widescreen monitors, it takes a bigger monitor to achieve this. I kept the second monitor I had, an 18″ LCD, for my notebooks, since my desk had enough room to keep it even with the new monitor beside it. That way, I can watch a movie or something and still see what my notebooks are up to with their lids closed.
I got some new guitar effects pedals yesterday. I ordered them online. Since I couldn’t get any BOSS pedals online, I bought something different. I got a couple of Behringer pedals, the “Slow Motion” and “Ultra Vibrato”, which are copies of a couple of old BOSS pedals that were discontinued long ago and are very rare and expensive now. These Behringer pedals are cheap plastic pedals, but not bad. They’re certainly better than paying hundreds of dollars for a used pedal. Roland could make a lot of money by making limited edition reissues of their older discontinued BOSS pedals, but they don’t. I like their products, but I really don’t understand what the company management is thinking. Maybe it’s something like: “Oh, we have too much money! Let’s make pedals that are not as good as our old ones, and we’ll make it difficult to buy our pedals, because we sell too many of them.”
But anyway, the real gem from this order is the Visual Sound Comp 66 pedal. It’s a great compressor, I’m so glad I got it. I had thought about getting a BOSS compressor, but their latest one doesn’t seem to be too well reviewed. It seems that their old one was better. I also got the Visual Sound “1 Spot” power supply, which is quite good. They say it can “power all your pedals”, but since mine are not all in the same place, I will keep using my other power supplies for some of the pedals. It does have much better daisy chain cables than what I had before, though. So if I were to go back in time, I would have bought this for all of them, I suppose. Or maybe two.
I received a couple more CDs from Amazon.ca today. I had also ordered a couple of Saxon albums that have been recently re-released, but they seem to have been delayed for some reason.
Here’s what I got:
Other than that, everything has been pretty much the same as usual. I did have a bit more trouble with Colossus, but it seems to work fine if I turn off the monitor while it boots up for some reason.
I got a couple of Scythe Bay Rafters to mount the SSD drive. They hold two SSD drives and one 3.5″ hard drive in a 5″ bay. I won’t be using them for anything other than SSDs, though. Now I’ll have the capacity to add one more SSD to Colossus, and 2 more in another later.
Yesterday, I received a box of stuff from Amazon.ca. I got up pretty late, so I didn’t post about it. My energy has been terrible for the past few days. And to make that even worse, I had insomnia, too!
Anyway, I got some more Iron Maiden CDs and a few movies. Here’s what I got:
CDs:
DVDs:
I received another package from Amazon.ca today. I had preordered Pin Points and Gin Joints by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones the other day, I think it was even before I ordered Public Enemies, but it took a day longer for some reason. I decided to get a couple more albums by The Real McKenzies since they were in stock, and that’s something that rarely happens.
CDs:
As is often a problem with new albums, Windows Media Player didn’t have the album information for Pin Points and Gin Joints. I don’t understand why they cannot get that information ready by the album release date – the song names are no secret. They are often announced well in advance, as is the album art.
Also, the album info for Pissed Tae Th’ Gills was incomplete by one track and that pushed a few tracks off into the wrong positions, plus one song was quite obviously misspelled. However, I looked out of curiosity and found that the track information for the DVD version of it was fine.
