Never been one to let the carrier drop

A micropay music video on demand site ($2.99 for all you can eat for a month, as far as I can tell – paypal handles the transaction, so it seems pretty safe) they have a preview function which lets you see 1 minute of each video before you’ve paid) http://www.singingfool.com

And they have roxette, and toad the wet sprocket, and information society, and REM, and Madonna, and a little bit of Billy Joel, and ..

I better get back to work. But this is cool – it’s what we should have built at onair..

Actually, yikes, how’d it get to be 4a? I better get to _sleep_

I have no idea what I just did. I now have a bunch of buttons for bold, underline, bullet points, links, etc. I’m not sure if I’ve gone into moron mode or what. I suspect my post is lost. It’s okay, it just detailed my 28th birthday. The highlights:

1) Rollerblading around greenlake with P.

2) New breaks beatmeister came over, made some tasty beats as me and Tory threw down some other assorted audio.

Apparently VA just passed a law banning not only gay marriage, but also civil unions. I’m sure my mom is happy. I guess that’s the good thing about state/local government is that it can ajust to however backwards, bigoted, and otherwise moronic the constituants are.

Except that occasionally the federal government steps in (thank you, Rosa Parks!) and says, ‘oh no, you don’t.’

Except that occasionally they do the opposite.

My text is not likely to make a lot of sense today. I’ve got quite the sunburn from sitting out in the sun debating/wrangling/whatnot over who was to represent Kucinich to our state. I ran, but they (wisely, considering that I couldn’t even talk coherently when asked to state why I should be sent) chose to send older and wiser heads. Which was fine with me… I’d written in all older and wiser heads on my ballot myself [I didn’t vote for myself] except for my neighbor and alternate delegate.

Anyway, so, yes, I did the democratic caucus thing. It had some very uplifting moments – Congressman McDermott, who is _my hero_ (or at least one of them) spoke, the group at large loudly passed a motion to add to the democratic party platform in WA legalizing gay marriage, and not endorsing or agreeing with any federal amendment attempting to do otherwise.. and the Kucinich supporters were just as nifty as I thought they’d be. I passed around my email address to a few, maybe I’ll meet them at future progressive/uberliberal events.

It’s really encouraging to me how many people show up for these things. Seattle is a very politically charged.. and very progressive.. town. I don’t think I could ever live in NoVA again.. except I feel kind of like I’m one of the sheep, now. Just another progressive in the herd.

Anyway, it was a good time and I met many people, some of which I hope will become some real life friends which I am a little short on.

Speaking of real life friends, Tory is coming over tomorrow night again and I am looking forward to some kick ass beats. I went and talked to my neighbors last time after he left and one couldn’t even hear me, and the other could hear but didn’t mind a bit, so I shall be having no fear 😉

I am getting less afraid.

P.s. it’s after midnight. Happy birthday to me.

S.

I have decided I am going to change the wiring of my studio rack to reflect a radically different philosiphy.

Thus far, I have been trying to maximize bandwidth to the MIDI modules. My current topology looks like a star, with two MOTU midi interfaces giving me 16 busses, and each bus talking to one module.

The problem with this is it requires computer console work every time I want to change routings, and it’s, frankly, very confusing. I have to remember which port reflects which module.

As I see it, a more sane topology would be to program all the rack-bound modules to each respond to some limited number of channels, with the number of channels assigned to them reflecting the amount I used those particular modules in my musical meanderings. Using the MIDI THRU jacks on the back of each module, this would enable me to construct a single MIDI bus which all traffic from controllers would be routed to. By determining the channel a comtroller was sending on, it could easily choose what instrument to play. Not only would this be much easier during live performance (jamming), it would also considerably simplify finding the right instrument during session work.

There are of course a few exceptions to this. My stage controller (KZ-9000) is not smart enough to not respond on all channels, while the lighting board is not smart enough to not respond on channel one. In addition, since the 505 and 307 are not really bright enough to cope with different MIDI channels, they would seem to need their own bus as well.

The resulting topology should look something like this:

BUS 1:

Channel 1 & 2 = P2K
Channel 3 & 4 = Audity
Channel 5 & 6 = QSR
Channel 7 & 8 = 4500 [if I ever get off my ass and put a new HDD in it]
Channel 11 = ?

BUS 2: Korg N1
BUS 3: Mixer
BUS 4: Lighting

BUS 8: KZ-9000

Okay, I’m going to wander downstairs and impliment this. Wish me luck.

Scooters all flat as pancakes except the one that needs tags and doesn’t have them. I could chance the cops, but I think I’ll just take my bike instead. Assuming I can find my bike lock keys, of course

Why is it I feel like I must be cool if there’s a scope screen displaying a sine wave in my office?

Well, Finally getting around to listening to the CDs I bought the other day. The Paul Okenfold sucks, which will teach me to buy CDs before downloading. The Yes is awesome. And the Bill Hicks turns out to be one I’d already downloaded under a different name. Oh well. 😉

[I’m still amused that the record store had Bill Hicks but not Andrew Dice Clay or Dennis Leary or any of the comics I’m used to thinking of as ‘big name’.]

Trading emails with lots of interesting people lately.

Am starting to aquire a bit of a fuck-it attitude towards everything. Not so much apathy as lack of concern. I’m working harder than I’ve worked for a long time, juggling many balls, tossing off emails, and unconcerned. It’s nice to not have to worry about embarrassing anyone. [Well, I could worry about embarrassing me, but I’m slowly developing a immunity towards being embarrassed. About fscking time.]

A little superglue and my e-bay tape robot is ready to back up stuff. at $5 for 20 gigs, it even beats hard disks. 😉

Apparently my 3dm guess turned out to be right for what was sick in SoCal. That’s good and makes me a happy camper.

I’m getting the itch to go somewhere. I mean, Seattle is beautiful and worthy of hanging out in, but..

I played a open mic on monday at the chai place on 45th between neptune and university. Seemed to go well. Who can tell?

Tory’s coming over tonight, so I better run downstairs and reconnect some of the things I’ve disconnected.

And, P.’s games night is tonight, so I need to run up to the ave and take her Clue and whatnot. I might take one of the scooters, it’s been far too long since any of them have seen cycles..

My digikey parts came today, so that’ll be something else to mess around with. And Bruce has a UCM-II in my hands, and autopark is still about a quarter written, and Radio Shack is asking where their latest patch is, and arrrrghhhhhhhh!

On the other hand, I met the !PERSON WHO FOUNDED E-MU! last night. (e-mu, for those of you who don’t keep track, made the first commercial sampling equipment, thusly beginning the electronic music revolution.

Brig informs me, via code I wrote, that my birthday is in five days. I’m not even sure how old I’m going to be, but I know it’s too old. gotta slow this train down, it keeps spinning faster and faster..

This Yes CD, on the other hand, is wonderful. Makes me wish I had a joint in my hand.. but alas, too much work, no time to slack.

No time to keep writing journal entries for that matter 😉

Hope you all are well, my LJ friends.

I wonder if google is indexing my journal?

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I wish there was some way to know if these links would even work in ten years, or even five..

The problem with web links is that they point to something that might not be there tomorrow. The librarians of the world are coming up with a archival web link system, which would permit me to create a link to that article and know that it will still work fifty years from now, but it’s taking them a while – which is hardly suprising, when you consider how large the web is.

[I bet there’s more than a hundred terabytes of porn out there for any one taste 😉 I don’t know why people are commenting on the adult entertainment industry’s shutdown, it’s not like we don’t already have enough porn.. ]

I want google to support a ‘whistle into the mic and we’ll find you the song’ search mode.

Bleh.

For any of you seattlites who still haven’t checked out United States Of Electronica, you really are missing out.

And they’re going to be playing out a bunch in the next few months, which I’m very much looking forward to.

In general, there are way too many good things to do and not enough time to do them in. I spent most of today puttering around, getting set up to do debugging on the duncan code again, etc..

My firewall is now 4-way – four ethernet interfaces. Dizzying.

I got the sound card in it working and hooked up to the mixer that drives my PC speakers [a pair of 12″ 3-ways driven by a 200W amp – I take my computer sound very seriously]. So now those of you with sheer.us accounts can make my life miserable.

I also bought a tape robot on ebay, which I plan on charging back to H. as a neccesary expense for our operation – because being not-backed-up was just getting too scary. The other day I power-cycled during a write operation [don’t ask why. It’s a long story involving drugs, alchohol, broken motherboards, and a lot of other less nice things] and the disk array had to do a rebuild.. which 3ware thoughtfully labelled as ‘initializing’.

Well, that’ll make you nervious. You pull up the web interface for your RAID array and you see ‘Initializing’. I figured it couldn’t possibly mean formatting, because I could still read it.. but still, you never know.

Anyone want a P-III motherboard and some RAM? Might tend to crash occasionally.. heh heh heh

Gateway’s failure was just weird anyway. The thing decided it could only see 393M of RAM. Okay, now I’ve seen a lot of weird numbers in my life, but how do you get 393 megs ?

Tory’s coming over soon..

spammers, please feed my baysian filter at spam@sheer.us