Everbody Loves a Wedding.....

...especially when two of your best friends decide to tie the knot. After nearly seven years of dating, Matt and Angie made it official last weekend.

The ceremony was lovely. Riz and I were given credit for introducing Matt and Ang to one another. Actually, the credit goes to Mom Ejaz who made it very clear that I was never to be alone with the likes of Rizwan Parvez. Smart lady. Matt soon grew tired of being our on-call chaperone. He asked for a lady friend and we got him one. For the record mom, I'm only good, rule-abiding daughter. Perhaps my favorite rule was the 11pm curfew that was imposed in 11th grade and was still going strong when I was 21 years of age and engaged. Mom, do you know where Sameena is right now?  

Some wedding night advice from an old pro. 

I have to say Riz, you do clean up rather nicely.

T and Brett post ceremony. 

Riz belts out his fav Celin Dion ballad "Power of Love" to get the groom's attention. Ang, assumely her wifely duties decides not to encourage him. Even a wedding singer would have been embarrassed.  

The happy couple poses for some pics at Elmira College. 

The afternoon sun is brutal and their smiles are strained. They have lost yet another brother. So young. Such a promising future. 

Cheers to the bride and groom! 

The geeks will appreciate this one.

OK, so I took a break from studying this morning to rearrange the speakers in the living room to optimize the sound stage. After a little reading, I learned that the optimal arrangement for the front speakers was have the width spaced apart 3/4 the length. (i.e. X=0.75Y) and to have their intersection point be some distance (~12-24") behind the listener's head.

I set about to arrange the speakers following this formula, and discovered that I had to move the speakers 1' forward from the television to maintain the optimal 3/4 ratio.

After having done so, I had speakers all sorts of odd distances from the center of the seating. Fortunately my receiver is programmable to correct for variations in distance for the center, front and surround speakers, so with a little fiddling around (and a bunch of measuring, and the Pythagorean theorem!) I was able to electronically correct for those aberrations and virtually optimize the space.

After having done all this, I've learned 2 important lessons:
1) When the speakers are arranged optimally, they really do disappear. Music seems to take on an airy, immersive quality that's exceptionally better. It didn't cost a cent and it made a huge difference.
2) Instead of using math and measure, would-be optimizers can achieve almost-as-good results by merely arranging their speakers in the most ugly and intrusive way possible. Showing a disregard for the physical comfort of listeners will also improve the audio quality considerably. As those who've studied the diagram carefully must have already noted, the sweet spot of the sound stage requires you to sit on the seam between the two sectional halves of the couch.

Philistines may ask, "Isn't that a strange spot to sit in?"

Yes.

They may even go on to query, "Is it really worth all the bother to achieve maximal listening enjoyment?"

The answer of course is yes. Yes, philistine; it definitely is.