Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I went to see Journey live last night. Now, of course Journey is known for their series of amazing vocalists, but I did find myself studying the way their latest (Pineda) used his voice. Today when I was practicing I was noticably more conscious of my control of tone – and I also was doing some exercises this morning to try and flip in and out of falsetto more reliably and also to experiment with what tone control is available with falsetto. I definitely have gained (possibly due to the voice lessons, exercises, or just singing every day) some range over the years – I can’t quite do the “Don’t stop believing” high part yet but I no longer have any trouble at all with the “Ma’am I am tonight!” in “Walking in Memphis”, which I used to have a lot of trouble with.

I still am not happy with my pitch control. I need to spend some more time working on it. Journey was amazing, by the way.

I sent in my further-edited content from the album to mastering – I had gotten the first draft of the mastering content back and my already-marginal toms in Believing Is Seeing had become unbelievably muddy, so I did a bunch of cutting, pasting, effects and EQ changing, etc. These toms have been the bane of my existence ever since I started mixing that song – they sound different on every system. Initially, the problem I was having was they would sound great in headphones, good on studio nearfield monitors, and truly crappy in a car or on a laptop. Then I think I might have gone overboard with the reverb. The new convolution reverb plugin I’m using has instead of a dry/wet knob, separate dry and wet gain knobs. This is actually a much more flexible setup for a inline plugin – it lets you emulate the results of using a send to a seperate channel on the board with much less work and I think all reverb and delay plugin developers should consider doing it. Anyway, providing a hotter dry path helped a lot with the muddiness. I also discovered slight timing errors in places where I’d doubled roto tom and rack tom, which I fixed. I cleaned up a ton of little timing errors on high grade ore (originally I just wanted to fix one place where it was obvious I had cranked the gain on “ore” but at the point at which I was having to pay to redo mastering I figured I might as well spend a few hours sanding everything I didn’t like.

It would be really neat if some track on the album were to hit. It doesn’t seem particularly likely – although I do definitely get points for spanning a number of genres. But it woudl be neat. And I am going to try to market it several different ways.. although I also want to get back to tracking.

I continue to chip away. I’ll have to have some kind of celebration at 1000.

So, I was just involved in a argument on facebook with someone who was under the illusion that there are no stupid people. I mean, I would love to live in a world where that was true – but it just really isn’t. Recent things coming from this person’s corner make me suspect that they have recently succumbed to a damaging information virus (translation: religion)

Anyway, this is one of a few different times today when I’ve been bothered by people who obviously believe things which are not true because of the religions they are infected with. Normally I’m all for whatever gets you through the night, but I think these beliefs in things which are not true are really starting to hurt us all. I mean, you have all the people who voted for Trump due to deeply delusional beliefs, but it goes a bit further than that. You have people pretending peak oil won’t happen, global warming isn’t real, and that if we just pray real hard everyone in the Ukraine will be okay. (You also have people ignoring that the US has over and over provided the weapons – and sometimes the soldiers – to destroy people’s houses and kill folks just as Russia is currently doing to the Ukraine – generally because we didn’t like their ideology surrounding resource allocation although occasionally just because it was profitable for US corporations)

Anyway, my point is, one of my problems with religion is that it makes people believe things that are clearly not true, and then make decisions based on those beliefs. I’m not saying this is the biggest problem facing humanity but it clearly is a problem.

I don’t know why it rubs me so much the wrong way today to have people making clearly untrue assertions and suggesting useless actions in response to disasters. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood because of other factors. But the appeal of just deleting my facebook account seems larger than usual today. I do continue to think it will be useful as a vehicle for getting people to listen to my music, although it also may be that I’m never going to have that large a audiance because I am not sure I can be what most of the world would apparently want me to be – I mean, the odds of someone as anti-religion as me being cancelled seem pretty high.

I did unfriend the person – they haven’t contributed anything positive in my life in the last several years and various aspects of their smug superiority combined with lack of connection to observable reality made me think I’m better off without them. My patience with people who are convinced they are vastly superior to me seems to be wearing very thin.

So, occasionally I find my ability to control the future amusing. I’ve stopped transacting in bitcoin because I find the amount of power that it uses unacceptable and the lack of evolution of the bitcoin network distressing. However, I still have some bitcoin. If I were to sell this bitcoin, the future value of bitcoin would exceed $1m/BTC – after I sold it, of course. If I HODL it for the rest of my life, the future value of bitcoin will asymptotically approach zero.

Just sticking this here in the hopes that it will get listed in google and maybe save some folks a little time.

If you are trying to use rabbitMQ’s websocket STOMP connector, as discussed on https://www.rabbitmq.com/stomp.html, be aware that the URL given in the documentation on this page is wrong (or perhaps only applies to newer versions of rabbitmq).

The correct way to successfully create a websocket to RabbitMQ 3.5.7 (which ships with Ubuntu 16.04) is as follows:

var ws = new WebSocket(‘ws://yourhostname:15674/stomp/websocket’);

var client = Stomp.over(ws);

Later note: The documentation is correct for newer versions of RabbitMQ.

I posted this on facebook, but it occured to me it might be worth saving here

“Seeking a middle ground in racial politics, given that one side is nazis, is a little like seeking a middle ground between closed and open on a circuit breaker. It might exist (in the sense that briefly the contacts are in transition and there’s a arc drawn between them) but if you stay there too long shit is probably going to catch on fire and someone is going to get hurt. Some things really are black and white, and I am mystified as to how you can find middle ground between “I want to kill people who are a different race than I am” and “everyone is the same under the skin”.”

So, I’ve been buying Dell 7810s for my kitten trader 3.0 cluster, and I thought I’d somehow gotten three bad ones from two vendors. No, actually, Dell thoughtfully stores the slot that the video card is in in the BIOS! Changing the video card for another model results in no video – so, if you have a 7810 that you’ve put a new video card in that won’t display anything, the trick is to remove the battery, short the two pins that would have been the battery together, then power it on – the display will, after about 45 seconds (be patient) and one uncommanded power cycle actually light up with the dell logo and a option to push F2 to enter setup – *immediately* go into setup and select the slot # the card is in under ‘video’. (There will be a helpful hint listing video card type on every slot with a detected video card). It will tell you that on systems with a single video card you can select ‘auto’ but as far as I can tell, this is a lie, or maybe is only true if you use only Dell-approved video cards. If you don’t save this setting the next time you boot you will again have no video.

Most of these systems are destinated to be headless for me anyway so I really only need video long enough to configure them, but it’s still a great help. I hope this helps someone else in the same kettle of fish I was in as it took me 2 hours to figure this out.

So, it took me numerous tries, digging, and beating of head against curtin and the like, but I have finally figured out how to set a static IP on a host using cloud-init.

Mind you, I am not talking about setting a static iP for while the installer is running. That’s easy, and well documented. I’m talking about the next time it boots.

The solution requires two bits. They’re pretty straightforward, and both go in the cloud-init file

Bit one goes at the end of the autoinstall section, and deletes the default configuration and writes a permanent one instead. Note that the filesystem is mounted as /target

  late-commands:

  – rm /target/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/50-curtin-networking.cfg

  – mv /tmp/00-installer-config.yaml /target/etc/netplan

Bit two actually writes out the /tmp/00-installer-config.yaml that late-commands will be editing

write_files:

  – path: /tmp/00-installer-config.yaml

    owner: root:root

    permissions: “0644”

    content: |

      network:

        version: 2

        ethernets:

          ens160:

            critical: true

            dhcp-identifier: mac

            dhcp4: true

          ens192:

            dhcp4: no

            addresses:

            – {ipaddr}/16

            gateway4: 172.16.1.1

            nameservers:

              addresses:

              – 172.16.5.6

              search:

              – search.domain

So, one interesting question that occured to me is whether Paul genuinely believed that worshipping Jesus was the best idea – that God wanted worship, that one shouldn’t emulate Jesus but rather consider Jesus above one and a different type of creature – whether in fact the message of the sacrifice being necessary for God to forgive us and Hell being what would happen to anyone who didn’t believe in the sacrifice – and of course the ever-dangerous-and-stupid message that Christianity was the One True Way and all non-Christians were Less Than – whether he believed all that, or whether he found it a convenient thing for Rome to make others believe that.

Remember, Paul was originally Saul, who was tasked with squishing these peace-loving hippies before the love started to overrule the desire to run a militaristic empire. Gee, this story’s never happened before – or again … anyway, maybe he figured out that he couldn’t *actually* squish them like grape, but what he *could* do is subvert and confuse their beliefs into patterns that were useful to the empire, or at least not as dangerous to it.

Or, maybe he genuinely believed himself in all the things he wrote. He clearly had some moments of genius – as I said, 1 corinthians 13 has the ring of eternal truth and is some of the best poetry in the whole book – but he also had a lot of moments of confusing local truths (the customs of his tribe) for eternal truth, and he encouraged a lot of things that have hurt us memetically for centuries.

So, the other day I was musing about how that rat bastard Paul, who otherwise caused all sorts of unfortunate things to occur, may have written the most beautiful lines of the entire Christian Bible (1 Corinthians 13)

Howsomeever, he also did a lot of really awful things. Not that Paul started the patriarchy, but he certainly codified it into a document a awful lot of people have believed was the word of god.

And, as I’ve been discovering, he did something else that in some ways is even worse. If we accept the idea that Jesus existed as canon – and even if he was a fictional character I think we can safely accept he was created in the mind of his author – or lived – or something – around 30 AD – then I would hope we could all agree that Jesus’s message was “Be excellent to each other”. Over and over he talks about empathy, talks about using your gifts, talks about being a good friend, citizen, neighbor, etc.

Paul warped this into being all about ego, all about names. Got people to worship Jesus, worship Jesus’s name, to think that they needed to pray in Jesus’s name. He turned a “treat each other well, love each other well, be wonderful and live well” cult – a bunch of pot smoking hippies basically – into .. well, what we’ve got now. People who think God wants and needs worshipped. People who think they should be judging other people not just based on whether they treat each other well, but based on some very strange ideas about what is “sinful”. People who are anxious to condemn for everything from sex to being a “illegal immigrant”. And, people who think that God is completely broken internally and insane.

One of the basic tenets of Christianity is that the reason Jesus had to die is “God is a just God, and therefore requires a sacrifice to avoid torturing people for having made mistakes”. However, if you’re me, what this actually reads like is “Two wrongs make a right”. There’s no way that hurting Jesus because other people were hurt makes anything better. That’s not justice, that’s just insanity, the same sort of insanity that keeps revenge going for cycle after cycle – exactly what Jesus himself preached against when he talked about turning the other cheek.

It does explain a lot of the bad behavior of the Christians that they completely missed the point, and thought they should be worshipping Jesus himself. Just as Buddhists do not worship the Buddha, but merely practice in a effort to become more like him, Christians shouldn’t be worshipping Jesus, they should be emulating him. Again, as I’ve mentioned, people who need and/or want unwavering worship – yes-men, in other words – are not all there. Stable, well developed personalities don’t need that sort of thing – I would think this would be *extra* true in the case of a larger neural network – which, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, if God is anything that has a personality I would think God would have a larger neural net than humans and be *more* capable, *more* stable, and whatnot. That isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for both gratitude and positive reinforcement, because there certainly is – as there is in all our friendships and connections.