Never been one to let the carrier drop

For those of you who care about these things and haven’t already heard them, the rough (uncut, unmixed, right off the PA feed during jam session) mp3s of me with Ron Miller are found at these URLs:

10.8.03
8.28.02

remember, this is rough stuff. I’m working on editing it for future consumption, but that will take a while.. [it takes a while to mix down 74 minutes of audio – not to mention paring 160 minutes down to 74. I’ve enlisted OMCN’s help, since that’s really more his forte than mine..]

S.

Had a good afternoon.. did a quick isomedia run, then went and stuffed more hard disks in a friend’s computer and talked with her for a while about life, the universe, and everything. Learned the answers to a few things that had been bothering me, tried to share some Reason knowledge, and in general socially interacted.

So that’s a record 3 friends in a 24 hour period I’ve seen. Things are definately improving on the friends score. 😉 And Danial Marsh (SWN guy) sent me a invite to the next hack night I can attend.. And Kent called me just to say hi..

Okay, so I don’t have no friends – and likely I’d have more if I didn’t hide in my office all day and never talk to anyone.. so it’s no one’s fault but mine that I don’t see other humans very often..

[Note to sheer: You want to see someone? Try stepping outside. There’s lots of people out there. Really. Most of them are even interesting. You live in, from a social standpoint, one of the coolest places in the U.S. – if you can’t make friends here, you can’t make them anywhere]

I’m sure that right-wing pundits and peoples wince whenever they hear the name.

Rep. McDermott has a remarkable history of voting for the right thing [from my opinions anyway]. He consistantly votes the long view [not what is best for us right now, but what is best in 50 years], he consistantly votes against war and warmongering, and he consistantly votes against the removal of civil liberties. On social services he’s mixed – but I almost always agree with his choices.

It makes it kind of hard to send the guy letters, though. I mean, my best mode for writing to congresspeople is irate – but all I can ever say when writing a letter to McDermott is ‘You done good. Keep up the good work.’

Sometimes I wonder if I should just stop.. but it seems that a show of support is a nice thing to do.. and it’s so reassuring to have a representative that represents me.

Of course, that makes me wonder about my fellow constituants. Enough of them must agree with McDermott to vote him into office.

I’ve only heard him speak once – at an antiwar rally – and he said what needed to be said, and pulled no punches. He was a good public speaker – I suppose that’s hardly suprising – but he looked older than I expected. I guess not everyone turns warmongering and conservative as they age – well, I knew that already..

Mostly, I wish he were younger because I want him around and voting in the house for another 50 years. 😉

I registered www.sheersound.com, www.sheersoundstudios.com, and a few other varients. Look for ‘Sheer Sound Studios’, the alliteration kings, coming soon to a web browser near you. Features will include downloadable tracks and a attempt to sucker more electronica musicians into my lair by offering free recording time 😉

Beginning to make forward progress on the parking meter code again, after a long case of writer’s block.

[They never tell you writer’s block applies to programmers. Perhaps it doesn’t apply to *all* programmers. I wouldn’t know. I just know that sometimes I can spit out code as fast as I can type, and other times it takes me several minutes for each line. I call the second condition being ‘blocked’, and it’s really frustrating. ]

Ron is hopefully coming over tonight – he was supposed to come last night, but didn’t quite get out of some meeting in time. Looking forward to taht, no doubt.

Some anonymous person [and I hate to guess who] posted in my journal ‘oh, yeah, quitting is easy, I’ve done it dozens of times’. Well, obviously. I imagine in this case I will restart on purpose.. but I want to go a few months first, to make sure I’m not addicted. [This makes no sense, does it?]

Whoever said dance like no one’s watching didn’t really mean it? Or did they?

Sometimes I wonder about the significance of the fact that the english word ‘mean’ means both ‘average’ and ‘cruel’.

I talked to a really cool guy last night.. he was just standing, waiting for the bus.. I’m slowly getting used to the idea that most of the people wandering the streets are, in fact, friendly.

Is P. right? Do I still see rejection where none exists? Am I outcast by my own mind? How humerous..

Maybe I should see a counsoler.

[watches the hard drive lights blink for a second or three]

I can’t shake the feeling that my reality comes in frames, with frames of nonreality interleaving. Or something.

Right eye swirls the colors togeather. Left eye renders absolute fact. Who would think that left/right stereotypes could apply to vision? Perhaps we’re never supposed to learn how to switch.

Being on the right side is almost like a drug experience in and of itself.

Why does it matter if I’m crazy? I have to be crazy to do what I have to do. But I must start moving forward again.. I’ve spent a year standing still on everything except making money, and in ten years, a hundred years, it will matter not one bit how much money I’ve made.

Learn to have perspective.

I’ve decided, after experimentation, that it’s better to have lots of friends than lots of money. I’ve tried both ways, and it’s pretty clear which one is more fun and ultimately more productive.

Maybe I’ll go to SeattleWireless’s hack night. I want to try and get the baby laptop working anyway.. and, really, isn’t that kind of thing what hack night is all about? That, and it sounds like I could find several friends in the SW crew. Apparently one of the founders is also a musician who records technoesque stuff.. maybe he’d like to jam sometime?

It’s rediculous that I have almost no friends to hang with.

Ah well.

back to work

Clearing webs from a hovel
A blistered hand on the handle of a shovel
I’ve been digging too deep, I always do

Many of our artists may not last.. but people will be listening to the Indigo Girls 500 years from now, if we still have the technology to play back what has been recorded.

I think I’m going to give up smoking [as in inhaling burning anything] for a while.

It’s just not doing me any good, ultimately.

To quote a Robert Aspin novel (from memory and incorrectly I expect), ‘Skeeve, the problem isn’t that you’re drinking too much. It’s that you’re drinking at the wrong time. And I don’t mean like the wrong time of day.’

This isn’t a point in my life where I need to have anything but clarity. I have a complex maze of decisions, and I have to make them all right.

S.

P.s. message to the universe: I don’t want to be an asshole. But I don’t want to conform, either. How does one balance these two conflicting desires?

Have you ever been listening to a song, and suddenly started crying, and not known why?

Anyway, this is what did it.

Some will strut and some will fret
See this an hour on the stage
Others will not but they’ll sweat
In their hopelessness in their rage
We’re all the same the men of anger and the women of the page

Emily:
So we know we’re alright
Though life will come and life will go
Still you’ll feel it’s alright
Someone’ll get a letter to your soul
Then you know you’re alright
Then you feel you’re alright
And you hear dry your eyes
And you know it’s alright
And you hear dry your eyes
And you know it’s alright
And it’s alright
Amy:
Alright
Though life will come and life will go
Alright
Someone gets your soul
When my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
Empty pages for the no longer young
You said
Each life has it’s place
You said
Each life has it’s place
It’ll be alright

I’ve noticed something odd – all my female friends always have like 10 or 15 comments on journal entries, whereas all my male friends always have like 1 or 2.

I’m pondering if there’s any actual meaning to this, or if it’s just one of those things.

Comment with your opinion. 😉

S.

1) I’ve been deciding that I’m taking this whole ‘never believe anything good anyone says about me’ thing a little too far. Today I was actually contemplating whether a friend of mine actually didn’t like me at all, and merely pretended to. And then I had to ask myself, why would anyone bother? I’ve seriously contemplated whether everything I’ve ever recorded sucks, and people are just telling me it’s good to keep from hurting my feelings. This has _got_ to stop. I mean, it’s striking _me_ as pathetic. Come on, sheer, get a grip here..

2) So I got my mac back yesterday.. and today I hooked everything back up to try a few test recordings with the VoicePrizm. Foolishly, while I was just messing around on the keys getting warmed up, I let it update the operating system. The last step was a reboot, and when it finished that, ‘Your computer has crashed and needs to be reset’ in six languages, upon reboot.

Reboot three times. Same result. Hmm. This is not good. At this point I’m starting to seriously consider going back to the PC.. this was supposed to be painless!

Well, actually, it more or less was.. I pulled down the handy copy of “OSX for unix geeks” (actual title) that P. bought me for my birthday, and looked up ‘single user mode’ in the index. A few seconds later I was watching the console and noted that the reason for the Big Nasty Reset Message was that the firewire.audio.motu.896 module had done something bad and awful and terrible.

So i rebooted without the 896es plugged in, downloaded the latest drivers from MOTU’s web site, rebooted again, and plugged the firewire interfaces back in. All was again happy, and I resolved not to sob into my mouse.

Note to apple: might not be a horrible idea to let us SEE TEH CONSOLE MESSAGES! Yes, I know, you want to be all user friendly and all, but how the fsck are people going to figure out what’s wrong when things break if you don’t let them see the kernel panics when they happen.

Ah well. At least it wasn’t that hard to figure out. I wondre if anyone has compiled a list of all the ‘magic keystrokes at boot’ for OSX. There sure seem to be a lot of them.

And I can’t sing today worth anything, probably as a result of spending a hour singing yesterday in the music store trying out the voiceprizm to decide if it was worthy of spending medium-large chunks of money on. (my final decision: it is. I jokingly call it the ‘Brittney Spears Box’ – because it can make even me sound good. For that matter, it can make me sound like Brittney, which leaves me with the urge to look inside my jeans to make sure nothing funny happened overnight involving hedge clippers..

Once my voice comes back, I will have great fun with this thing.

Still no musicians to jam with. E-mailed mike, he said we should get togeather but didn’t include date, time, or other thoughts of that sort. Left voicemail for Ron again.. maybe he’ll call back, I hope. E-mailed some random people on musician finter services. Maybe I should drive down to guitar center and see if they have one of those ‘musician-finder’ corkboards. Called Lara (mostly to get details of computer stuff) and think maybe I’ve talked her into helping debug my rhythm. Left a e-mail for Patti, no answer.

Am I like really obnoxious or something? Would someone please tell me if so?

Actually, I doubt if I’ll get a answer to that, since by dent of my texas ‘ten page journal entries’ you’ve all probably put me on friend-ignore filters.

At least my mac still loves me. (To quote Hackers, ‘You and me, Lisa!’)

Maybe it wouldn’t be so tempermental if I named it. Lisa strikes me as kind of a good name, actually. Hmm.