Over the summer, Jon built a little, cozy shed in the valley behind his home. We took the trail down there one afternoon and got some work in.

Though many of the highway’s trails were closed due to floods and mudslides, Jon and I found one that took us right down to the ocean. <a href="http://www.hikinginbigsur.com/hikes_partingtoncove.html">Partington Cove</a> was furious, relentless, and beautiful. No subwoofer can recreate that massive sound made by the waves as they crashed into the land.

There are Vista Points all along phenomenal Highway 1. We made plenty of stops.

I was in California last week, spending time with Jon Iverson and working on our “Recommended Components” feature for the April 2010 issue. Jon and Corrina made me feel very much at home, made me feel like a king, made me feel very spoiled and very fortunate. California made me feel very connected to the earth, surrounded me with beauty, reminded me that the most wonderful moments in life are made more beautiful when you’ve got someone to share them with.

With all the current fuss about getting audio data from a computer to a standalone D/A processor via S/PDIF, USB, FireWire, WiFi, or Ethernet (footnote 1), it has been overlooked that the oldest way to get audio from a PC is to use a high-performance soundcard plugged into the host machine's motherboard. I remember how excited I was when I installed a Sound Blaster Pro 16 board in the 486-based Dell running Windows 3.1 that I was using in the early Clinton era, plugged its analog output into my high-end rig, and played back 16-bit/44.1kHz files.