Comment...

4 Comments

2 Comments

(youtube link)

This was a quick thing, using REAPER and the JSFX "sequencer megababy" and "super8", recorded and edited in 18 minutes while videotaping (taping hah). I'm going to do a longer version with more explanation of the tools used, I think. Lots of fun.

2 Comments

This is my first pedalboard. Andy was very very kind to give me The Wave and the Big Muff Pi and Pog, and I always coveted his Sunset. And I also copied his Iridium since it seemed appropriate. Anyway, so much fun. Good for recording and NINJAMming.

I also posted a song (second opinion) below... the drums I recorded when I stopped to check in on my studio, the rest from home. The words were a poem written by my grandfather (in the 90s, I imagine, given some of the references). My family edited and (self)published some of his works on Amazon.

Life keeps going on. Today I was looking at the graphs and timelines of things and got really angry with our state-level leadership (federal is another level of anger and despair). Had Cuomo put PAUSE in to effect a week earlier, think how many lives would've been saved. 15,000 cases before doing anything is way, way too many. California did their stay-at-home order with ~900. Bravo.

There's no use being angry, maybe, and I fully appreciate not having to be responsible for so many other peoples lives. I don't think a lot of politicians think this through -- the responsibility that comes with the power. Cuomo and Bill de Blasio clearly did not. There is no need for me to mention the other person who doesn't take the responsibility seriously. That's another league, and while some people say a malignant narcissist I prefer "bag of shit."

So now, I'm drinking a G+T made with the best grapefruit I can recall having had, making nothing of a perfectly lovely evening at home.

2 Comments

Comment...

Well time keeps on ticking, I guess. I've done as NINJAM-related work in the last week as in the previous 10 years, I think. The jam we had last night (see below) was awesome, I especially like the last track in it.

We started renting a cheap ($20/month) server for hosting some private NINJAM servers. My initial thought was you could request a private NINJAM server via a web interface, then it would launch a new ninjam server process and give you the port number. That seemed like a bit of work, so instead I did something that would be less work.

As the first experiment I ran 50 NINJAM server processes on the one box, and had it as a purely etiquette-based system, where you only join an empty server or a server to which you were invited. It had some usership, though it was hard to tell if people really wanted them as private or if it was just a big farm of more servers.

I thought about modes where you connect to a server, and then can temporarily set a password so only your friends can join. Seemed easy enough, though you might connect to a server you think is empty and have someone beat you to it, and people might hog servers.

One thing I noticed is that the mechanism the NINJAM server uses to decide when to sleep was fine for a few processes, but if you ran 50 of them, all those polling between nanosleeps added up.

Then I thought -- what if you had a server where if you connected with a password, that password would define the room-name you go into (the NINJAM server already has a User_Group object which is basically the whole server). This seemed like a great idea, but it turns out it wouldn't work, because the password challenge/response system doesn't allow identification of passwords, nor would it detect if two users used the same password. I thought about using part of the anonymous username as a server ident, but the downside there is that if you set that, then connected to a different server with the same anonymous credentials, you'd leak your private server name.

So what I finally came up with: the NINJAM server can now run in a lobby-mode, and via chat commands you can create/join private rooms. You can also chat in the lobby with other people who are in the lobby. So you could negotiate "hey want to play an ambient session? let's !join ambient." So you have private rooms (secret roomname), semi-private rooms, etc. Feels pretty fun! Not many users yet, though.

Of course this will all get ruined once someone decides to troll/spam/flood/etc. I'm sure at the very start IRC was amazing and simple, and by the time I left it it was a mess with bots and anti-bots and other things that just ruin everything. Oh well let's enjoy it while it lasts.

(anything to distract from what's happening outside)

Comment...

Ah so it's been almost a week since I've posted here. Time got really really slow for a bit there but now maybe it is speeding up as life as we know it becomes more routine.

Such a bizarre predicament that nearly (?) all of humanity faces. We're all in it together, unless we're in denial. When the weather has been nice (most days since I last wrote), the parks have been crazily busy, which makes running really difficult. So instead:

(lucky me with roof deck access) An hour is an excruciatingly long time. At one point before I tried an hour I contemplated doing 24 hours. Now I think that's insane. It might happen. Yesterday was cold and rainy and amazing, I could run wherever I wanted and nobody was around! Bring back winter!

I'm now on board with everybody wearing masks (not N95 but procedure masks etc) when they are out in public. It makes a lot of sense, given the fact that people are contagious before and/or without symptoms. The advice here has always been "wear a mask only if you're sick" which is no longer applicable! Anyway I've spent a great deal of time making a mask (and now starting a second) from this site's template/instruction, which seems to work well! I don't have a sewing machine so I'm using a couple of tiny travel sewing kits that I've acquired over the years and doing all of the stitches by hand. I'm terrible at it, but getting less so as time goes on.

Musically, I've turned to NINJAM at home again, Andy and I played the other night which was nice. Hope to do more of that!

(obviously it goes without saying, all the people out there who are helping other people: doctors, nurses, delivery people, people working in grocery stores, thank you thank you thank you. I'll try to say this more in person but it's hard with all of the other pressures of life outside of home)

8 Comments

(youtube link)

Apologies for my outfit (unless you're into legs, in which case, you're welcome), I ran to the studio from home. At 11am the Brooklyn Bridge was pretty empty, thankfully, but on the return it was getting more crowded. Plenty of tourists out walking in big groups, not practicing social distancing in any form. Sigh. Can't stop what's coming.

There were also a lot of people out in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I don't think playing volleyball today is a good idea.

Maybe I'm overreacting, but it's really not looking that way. I hope I'm overreacting. A "shelter in place" order seems not-unlikely for NYC at some point in the near future. We've discussed leaving, but have nowhere we'd want to go. Being home is a pretty good place to be, even if there are too many goddamn people around. Even if we had known what was coming months ago, I'm not sure where we'd want to be. I want to be somewhere else but nowhere else. Maybe after this whole crisis is over (will it be a few months? 18 months? ugh), a move is in order.

4 Comments

I bicycled from Manhattan to Brooklyn to play the piano some, and do a little Super8 session:
(youtube link)

On Wednesday, I had gone to the studio (which is right by Fairway) in the afternoon and stayed until the evening. I went into Fairway, which was pretty normal-ish. After my cancelled band practice and trip home, there had been a presidential address, which was a total failure in pretty much every way I could see, other than getting peoples attention. The next day, I went to the studio, and stopped in Fairway on my way home to get a few more things, and it was a total madhouse. Such a difference in a day.

Anyway since Wednesday we've been practicing Social Distancing, which is both easy and not easy. It's only been 5 days but it's going to be challenging.

A friend and I discussed food strategies via text. What Allison and I are doing now is basically trying to keep a stocked pantry with a list of things that we wouldn't mind having more of, and when we need something, we'll go buy that thing we need and other things from the list of things that we wouldn't mind having more of.

Last Sunday we were scheduled to fly to California, and yesterday I was scheduled to run a 50 miler in Marin County. We cancelled our trip the day before, which made me sad but after an exercise in sunk cost (figuring the difference in cost to proceed with the trip vs cancel, ignoring non-refundable stuff), it made total sense. Yesterday I found out the race was cancelled anyway.

There's my rambling. Someone on twitter said now was a good time to try journalling. My first thought is "my filesystems are all ext4, baby." I lied, I'm on a mac at this moment.

Comment...

(retroactively posted on March 15)

(youtube link)

This was last Wednesday -- I was scheduled on this day to play music with some friends, but we cancelled after one of my friends found out that an usher at a Broadway show that he had recently seen had tested positive for Coronavirus, and the reality of this whole situation became clear. So I did a quick two songs before going home. The title refers to the article Cancel Everything in The Atlantic.

Comment...

Windows has a unique (as far as I can tell) "feature", which I have not experienced first hand but I've heard about. If your system has more than 64 cores (effectively, e.g. 40 cores each with 2 threads would count), then it divides the cores into "processor groups." By default, an application that creates threads and does no additional work has all of its threads run in the same processor group (is this always Group 0? or is it randomly assigned? I have no idea).

The significance of this is that if, for example, you have a 36 core hyperthreaded CPU (72 logical cores), then a traditionally-written multithreaded application can utilize at most 36 cores. (It's also unclear to me if the 36 cores in a processor group in this scenario are 18x2 threads each, or 36 threads on 36 unique cores).

Anyway, we're now testing a REAPER tweak to address this. If you need to implement this in your application, see SetThreadGroupAffinity(), and get ready for some fun using GetLogicalProcessorInformationEx() with RelationGroup and parsing the output to determine the group structure (the documentation for that is a bit light IMO!).

So there you go, everybody.

2 Comments

Another super8 go, rough in parts, forgot to tune until mid session, etc, but here we go:
(youtube link)

2 Comments

For the first time in ages, I fired up the Super8 laptop rig, and did a bit of a session:
(youtube link)
(Note to self: a dead battery that won't take a charge in the Thinkpad X60 causes all sorts of DPC issues, hmph)

Anyway, a little rusty getting the songs started, but it's amazing how different tools can get the different creative juices (ugh that really sounds terrible) going differently. So much fun. I need to do this more.

Comment...

A show scheduled on short notice, to a nearly-empty Valentine's Day Crowd:
(youtube link)


Comment...