It Shouldn't Be That Hard To Connect Speakers To A Computer

Friday was Cinco de Mayo and, as per usual, it went past me largely unnoticed.
This is hardly surprising, in that 1. I’m not Mexican 2. I no longer drink (and even when I did, I didn’t drink tequila, Corona, or Dos Equis, nor did I need any sort of excuse to drink:  I would typically get just as drunk on July 3rd and 5th as I did on the 4th).
Still, there is some significance for me in that it was on Cinco de Mayo in 2004 that I quit smoking.
So I’ve got two years in.  Yay me, I guess.
I was supposed to do some work on the Heroic Portraits site today but so far I haven’t managed it.
For one thing, I actually slept in until almost 10:30 and it took me over an hour to get motivated to take a shower and get dressed, at which time I decided to head out into the world for a bit.
The speakers I had for my computer have had some sort of crossed wire for a while that can often lead it do things like turn the volume all the way up when, in fact, I’ve turned the volume all the way down.  I’ve been meaning to replace them for a while, but this morning was kind of the last straw, as I just hit the limit of the number of time I could put up with the volume mix up.
So I headed to Super Target and checked out their selection.
I don’t really have any way to set up surround speakers, so all I really needed was a half-way decent 2.1 (two speakers and a sub-woofer) set up.
I already have an okay 2.1 set up on Munin, my secondary computer, which is honestly more than I need, so I considered just buying a cheap set of two speakers, and swiping Munin’s speaker set up for Hugin.
Ultimately I decided that I might as well have 2.1 on both, so I bought a nice little Altec Lansing set for Hugin.
I got home and started to hook it up.  As is pretty standard for computer speakers, the controls are on the right speaker and the left speaker is actually connected to the right.
The set up was a little odd in that the sub-woofer didn’t plug into the computer’s sound card, the right speaker did.
But whatever, I thought, and got things set up.
Eventually.
The cable connecting the right and left speakers wasn’t really long enough for me to position the speakers where I had the old ones, so it took me a while to position them.
Once I did I ran into another problem, namely that I have about a billion devices plugged into Hugin, so there are wires and cables all over the place (I really need to either go through and organize them or, better yet, hire someone to come and untangle that mess) which, in addition to simply increasing the difficulty of setting up the speakers, what with having to thread them through the tangled mess, was actually causing some interference.
Basically, the left speaker kept emitting static whenever I did anything on the computer.
With the shortness of the cable connecting it to its twin, there was no way for me to reposition it to lessen the interference.
Ultimately I ended up having to swap speakers between Hugin and Munin, as those speakers have a much longer connection between the two speakers, allowing for interference-free positioning.
I would have been better off just saving $30 and buying the cheap speakers like I’d considered doing.
Oh well.  I do have most of my mp3s on Munin’s drive anyway, and rather than bothering with streaming them to Hugin I usually play them through Munin’s speakers.  The acoustics in here are such that the sound travels pretty well from the kitchen to the bedroom, so I suppose it’s just as well that I have decent speakers on Munin now.
Once I got all that sorted out I decided to take advantage of the weather and go for a walk, though just as I was putting my shoes on my phone rang.
After getting off the phone (it was my mom), I went for a walk for about an hour, then came home and decided to go out on the hammock and do my daily crossword puzzle.
And now here I am.
So yeah, putting together a Heroic Portraits Web site today?  Not so much.
I’m not sure when I’ll get around to making one.
Tomorrow I’ll be in a class all day.  Thursdays are always short, and most of next week will be spent taking a Red Hat class.
I guess I could crank out a quick, no-frills site that has prices, a gallery, and my contact info, then just fix it up later.
I was thinking about taking a Flash class anyway, so I guess I could just wait until after that to jazz things up.
We’ll see, I guess.