hot chip

It’s Monday after a long weekend. I had a big take-out box of noodles. It’s very warm in my corner. I’m sleepy and don’t feel much like working.

The headphone amp is finally finished but not without some hair pulling, teeth gnashing and screaming like a little girl. Tuesday night I was testing the amp and everything seemed to be working properly, all except for the chip inside the amp. The chip got warmer and warmer to the point where it was actually hot to the touch. It said somewhere in the assembly guide that the chip should remain cool and if not there was a fault somewhere. Okay, for a not-really-electrical guy like myself it would be helpful to say where. So I was crouched over the amp late at night, making sure all the parts were in the right place and stuff that needed to be connected was connected and stuff that shouldn’t be connected was disconnected. Everything checked out and the amp sounded great but the chip was still hot. I spent the next day at work searching sites trying to figure out what went wrong. I even built some other little circuit to make sure that the chip was actually working. Yeah so to make a long story short, the chip was fine, made some adjustments to the power supply and the chip is only warm to the touch which I think is normal. And me being the audio geek am already thinking about building a third headphone amp. Okay shut up.

Thursday night SG and me went downtown to meet up with one of his buddies who just came back from Tokyo. I so have to go to Japan at least once in my lifetime. That is so on my top 10 list of places to visit. No, top 5. Japan rocks. After a tasty Canadian burger (cheddar and bacon) we headed over to Queen Video to rent some Japanese movies. I even had my List: my List of Japanese movies that I’ve been compiling since last year. And of course I was disappointed. No one ever carries whatever I’m looking for. Are my choices so far out that I can never find anything or have I always been looking in all the wrong places? After much searching and digging we only came up with five titles from my list. How sad is that? Yeah so I watched two of the movies Kourei (Séance) and Unagi (The Eel) and fast-forwarded through I.K.U., which was some cheesy, soft-core cyber-porn. I didn’t pick that one.

The first time is always the most painful. Friday, Good Friday, I went for my first run of the season. I only managed 2 miles, which is around 3.2 km. I had to stop twice to catch my breath. I was sore Friday night. Compare that with last summer when I was doing 4-mile runs 3 or 4 times a week. I so need to get my ass back in shape. I was planning to recupe on Saturday and go again Sunday. The keyword was “planning.” I’m still sore.