Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I went rollerblading in a rink on Saturday – and I’m here to report, no soreness that lasted more than a day.

It was insanely fun, even though I couldn’t coax Kayti out onto the floor. Most of my rollerblading skill is gone – I can’t dance on them, and I can’t reverse at any meaningful speed, and I feel really uncomfortable when I’m going backwards. But, the basics are still there, and the rest feels like it might come back, given some practice.

Today I’m in a unreasonably good mood, partially because I reviewed last night’s practice recording and I think it sounds really good (http://www.sheer.us/stuff/MischiefCommittee/MischiefCOmmittee-130806.mp3 for those of you who want to follow along) and partially because I got some cleaning and a lot of minor work tasks done.

I also paid my bills (well, I haven’t actually put them in the mail yet) and entered them all into a spreadsheet – I am determined to stop overdrawing my bank account – they always pay all my checks, but they charge me $27 per! I calculate I’ve spent about $500 in fees this year. This has got to stop.

(They’re taking shameless advantage of unorganized people everywhere)

I’m coming up on my goal for this year for my stocks, and it’s only Augest.. (of course, the market could tank at any moment). It’s looking like I might actually have all my debts paid off by january or febuary.. not quite december as I’d wanted, mostly because of my desire for sushi 😉

I did some more work on www.sheer.us – I think I’m done messing with it for a while.

I’m sure you’ve all got one of these, but here’s a fun web snow generator:

http://www.sheer.us/functions/colors.php

or for the constantly refreshing model

http://www.sheer.us/functions/colors-r.php

Still updating my web site – today I added a random link generator. Now I just need to inject some more interesting links into the table that controls it..

I’m really wondering what things like google are going to do for indexing my web site, which now changes every time you access it.. (it’s muuuutating.. muhahaha, muhahaha), and if it will increase or decrease traffic.

So, aside from buying a bass guitar, I seem to be making other attempts to regress to my teen years. Specifically, tonight I’m going rollerblading in a rink. I’m sure that tomorrow, considerably black and blue, I will be posting about how much I regret this decision. Hopefully there won’t be any broken bones to deal with.

In other news, yesterday I tried the drug Adderol, and I can safely say that this is NOT the drug for me, at least not at the 20mg dosage. This isn’t any big suprise – after all I’ve never used any recreational stimulants and don’t want to. There’s another flavor of drug they’re going to try me on on tuesday, hopefully it won’t have the same bizzare peaking-while-crashing that this drug did. Side effects for me included time dialation, a bizarre metallic feeling which I would compare to one of the unpleasent side effects of LSD (it’s that feeling you get BEFORE things start getting really fun), emotional swings – the tiniest thing would make me feel totally crushed – and rapid thinking/talking/etc.

If the other drug doesn’t work I might try Adderol at 5 mg to see how that works out, but my inclination is to stay away from it.

So, I recently purchased a Access Virus T1, and I thought I’d post a review of it for those of you who are curious about what I think. (Probably no one, but nonetheless I feel this need to compulsively blog my opinions of consumer electronics).

First of all, let me comment on the sound. It’s beautiful. It’s lush. It’s fat. It’s probably even phat. It makes me feel like ten times the musician I actually am. I’m tempted to get out my AX-7 just so I can do windmills. It’s that good. Really. Honestly.

Unfortunately, other bits of the synth are.. how we say.. not so good.

First of all, it is the pickiest synth about MIDI incoming signals I’ve ever seen! Only about half of the thru ports on my other sound modules will drive it. As far as driving it from the output of a groovebox, forget about it. This synth wants very very clean midi, proper voltage levels, and no timing glitches at all, even 0.1%..

Second of all, you have to void the warantee in order to rack-mount it – there’s a rack kit, but installing it requires removing a waranty sticker. Smoooth…

Third of all, when passed random garbage on the MIDI bus, the synth !crashes!. Yep, just like Microsoft Windows.

However, despite all its flaws, I love the thing. The sound is so lush, so fat, so sweet.. and yet, with the twist of a knob, it can turn into all the agression of a DX-7 or all the sawtoothed insanity of a Prophet or Juno. It even has a bit of Moog stuck in there for good measure. It’s a wonderful sounding synth.

I haven’t yet started trying to integrate it’s CC implimentation into the mess that is my CC control loop, but I’ll let you all know how that goes once I’ve done it..

This is one of those things that I know shouldn’t bother me at all, but that really upsets me anyway.

Off and on I’ve been doing sound for a local band called the Art Theives. They’re kind of your basic 70s-80s cover band, though they’ve definately got some talent. Anyway, I did a multitrack recording for them twice – the first one, there were too many glitches for the recording to be useful, but I thought the second one came out pretty good and I sent them some mixes from it.

So, then I hear that they played a outdoor festival and they didn’t invite me – I’m assuming that either some member of the band didn’t like my style, or .. I don’t know what. But one of the guitarests assures me that’s not the case, they just didn’t want to impose.

I’ve planned a band practice for tonight (Friday) because MC’s been having trouble getting togeather. Yesterday I get a email from them announcing that they’re playing Wayne’s World again tonight. Then guitarist X calls me to ask if I can do sound.. however, he doesn’t want me to bring any of my equipment except my mixer, and he wants me to do it along with his friend. I’m okay with working as a team to do sound, so I suggest bringing two 450s as a compromise (their PA has 300W, divided into 150 for mains and 150 for monitors) and he agrees to that – then I mention recording, and he says that they don’t want to do that – apparently it’s putting a dent in their spontanaity to know that a record is being made. And I can understand that – I’ve felt that myself a time or two. But, nonetheless, I’m not going to skip my band practice so I can go mix five vocal channels. So now I have to figure out a way to politely extricate myself from this situation. Among other things, it’s now (what with the friend, and the no equipment, and whatnot) crystal clear to me that they don’t like my style (which involves lots of watts, and lots of hardware, and I understand that that’s not for everyone).

Then his cell phone dies as I’m explaining that I don’t think I want to do it if they don’t want a recording and they don’t want a PA capable of making the audiance feel the groove.

So now he probably thinks I’m a asshole.

I don’t know what I should have done differently. I think it’s reasonable for me to not cancel my band practice in order to go do sound for people who don’t really want me there doing it. I’m really sad that they don’t want me there doing it, and that they don’t want any more recordings. I’m wondering if, despite all they said about how great the recording sounded, they in fact thought it sounded like crap. It’s definately true that my mixes don’t sound like anyone else’s – I mix to my preference, unless the band is there to say what they want. The band wasn’t there, so I mixed it the way I liked it. But..

I’m just unhappy in general I guess.

So, having decided that I have ADD, my doctors are now prescribing stimulants and mood stabilizers at the same time. This seems kind of like working at cross purposes, but hey, I don’t look like I have a degree in pharmacology. So I will keep my fingers crossed that all works out.

In other health-related news, I have a mole that has been declared a likely canidate for melenoma, a form of skin cancer. They’re going to remove it, via something called a plug-drill, on the 23rd. I’m trying to pretend that I’m not scared of having something called a plug drill used on my skin. Mostly I’m not succeeding.

I keep meaning to make some more updates to my web site.. maybe someday soon. But still, the ones I’ve made are pretty cool, the first time I’ve had a major format change in some time. Maybe it was about time..

I don’t know how well it will work, but I’ve added a new feature to http://www.wshr.org and http://www.wshr.us – in theory, they will stream random content recorded by sheer sound studios, taking random 3-10 minute clips from jam sessions and complete songs recorded and mixed here. It’s segfaulted once already, so it’s hard to say whether it will stay up – I’m too tired to work on it any more, and I have to get back to my paying job tomorrow, so.. we’ll see.

On the why-doesn’t-somebody-make-it front, where is my MIDI patchbay. I know all about automated MIDI patchbays and I have a couple of them, but I want something that lets me physically move cables around, and has a splitter and a merger. it’d have four jacks per channel, and probably just four channels, and probably require power.

The jacks would be – Input1 + Input2 = Output1 + Output2. I think it’d be most useful for them to all be on the front panel. Actually, even cooler would be all of them on the front panel, with thrus for the inputs (unsummed) and two outputs on the back panel. I’d happily pay $400 for one of these, especially if every jack had link and activity lights like a network hub.

Then, continuing on my dream model, there’d also be one midi input that was added (merged) into *all* the bitstreams.

You could probably impliment the whole thing with four moderately beefy ATMegas. I’d arrange to have it built, but again, I lack the funding to do serious hardware development and I don’t know how it’d sell. Send me a quarter of a million dollars and I’ll send you the prototype and the gerbers and the software and my blessings to make as many of them as you want. Or I’ll do it for $15,000 upfront and $10 on every unit you sell.

Any takers?

When I was about 12, one of the things I enjoyed doing was using Broderbund’s Print Shop along with my word processer to make signs, school reports that had headers and footers, greeting cards, and other assorted chunks-of-printwork. The software had all the limits one would expect of something running on a machine with 128k of RAM, connected to a 9-wire thermal printer, but for all of the suckiness, it did actually do some pretty cool things.

Fast forward to 2006. I’m browsing in Half Price Books, and I come upon, for $3, a copy of Print Shop V20.

Version twenty. Jeez, how many products make it to V20? Anyway, so, naturally I buy a copy, having just bought this super-snazzy printer, and bring it home, and guess what? It’s just as much fun as the original Print Shop. So you all will probably groan when I send you homemade cards and whatnot, but I’m having fun…

Also, for a day my web site had the source code for fetching entries out of LJ into mysql as the entry-of-the-day which is being fetched out of LJ. Somehow it struck me as wonderfully recursive.

I’m thinking of buying some more UPS capacity for my house – I have enough to run for about 20 minutes, but since most power failures last at least a hour, I’d like to get more. What I’m wondering is – and yes, I know that I could cut open the UPS and add the ability to add more batteries, but that it might fail spectacularly because the charger isn’t designed to charge said batteries for any length of time and the UPS doesn’t have enough cooling to run for two hours at full load – so what I came up with is to daisy chain UPSes – i.e. plug one UPS into another into another etc. Has anyone tried this and does it work as expected i.e. 3 UPSes gives you almost 3x the runtime of one UPS?

I’m also going to write a randomizer for my web site that shows a different photo every time, but has the ability to ‘weight’ the photos so that favorites happen more often. I’ve come up with a easy and fast if somewhat wasteful of disk space way to do it, and I wondered if anyone had any better suggestions.

What I came up with is to create a table which has one entry per photo, unless the photo has a weight greater than one in which case it has several – a bunch – of entries for that photo. Then call rand(0,$number_of_rows) on that table and there you are, a weighting system. I also want to use the same code to generate playlists for wshr to play when it is otherwise ‘idle’ i.e. no one is broadcasting on it, so it will always have a signal.

Hopefully I’m making all this portable enough that it will continue to run on the new computer, once known as Chloe but by request from Kayti now named Peterbuilt. [One of my other computers is the mac, because it’s the only macintosh I have worthy of being called a computer, and we just saw Cars a month ago, so naturally..

Okay, I know this is a much more mundane journal entry than a lot of my more esoteric ones, but nonetheless I’m happy with it. I can’t imagine that I’ll care about anything I just wrote ten years from now, but then, I’ve been suprised before.