Music
June 23, 2004
freeform jam with longbrenchr
June 23, 2004
A kind reader pointed out to me that I made a similar mistake as Bill Gates did in his book, in saying "factor large primes". I had the luxury of a head injury at the time (as the passage was keen to point out), so that's my excuse. What I meant to say on June 17th, was "factor large numbers into their prime factors" rather than "factor large prime numbers". Thank you, sir (I don't know your name, but I can say 'mr dkl tessellated who is uberpedantic'), and I'm pleased to know that I already had the ability to factor large primes, in constant time, err well logarithmic time, actually, since each digit takes time to write out... [edit: or I suppose, saying "factor large numbers into their prime factors is redundant, I could just say "factor large numbers"] In other news, just finished reading (last night) The Confusion by Neal Stephenson. So good. I can't wait for the third book in the series. I LOVE YOU NEAL. YOU RULE. CAN I BUY YOU A CHOCOLATE TREAT? :) Now I gotta decide what to read next, until September. In the mean time, ordered an Amtel AVR starter kit. mmm. Oh the irony, that on Webdog, I'm the only one (of Nullsoft) who's updated his .plan this year, and I don't even work there anymore! HAHA.
Installed debian onto an old Vaio 505LS I had lying around. Had to take the drive out to install onto it, they sure bury them in these things! The big Fujitsu I have is easy to remove the drive... Anyway, definitely missing Windows less and less, though still some. Making XMMS use the winamp base skin helped, haha. My light head injury seems to be getting better, still sore as shit. Been making new Jesusonic effects and improving the old ones more. Still a lot of work to do on the hardware side. Gotta start designing a good floorboard, perhaps using a microcontroller to communicate with the main board via serial... and have to find a good way to do a small LCD to one of these small via boards...
Christophe and I made this mp3, testing out some new Jesusonic effects, and otherwise playing around. Ah fun today dealing with the bank for a small business account. The account person there liked the company name a lot, though. Though she did misspell it at one point leaving out one of the o's. Ha ha. Oops. Thinking about canceling my Hiptop service since I never use it, and it gets very little signal at home (whereas my phone gets plenty). -- Oww, completely slammed my head into a doorway. Ouch. That'll take the bounce out of my step... Maybe this will temporarily disable part of my brain and let me learn how to factor large primes using my mind. Or to play the guitar better. Or vaporize a yak at 300 yards, err, something like that. Doubt it, probably will just give me a sore neck and bump on the head for a few days. Belh. And it looks like we have fleas in our carpet. And the ALSA drivers for the recent 686B VIA chipsets can't record (But can play back) properly. Bitch. Moan. Here I go. It pisses me off when I hear people say shit like "man, if I ever get a lot of money I'm going to move it all into some tax free country blablabla".. I mean, if you get that money living in a society that enables you to make that money, don't you think it's your duty to pay tax? And if that society as any good, with a large amount of money, you shouldn't have any trouble making it grow, WHILE paying taxes. Or do the tax-free muni bonds. Then you're investing in your state. Anyway...
Did this a couple days ago, combined a jam from a few weeks ago with a pd sample. happened to fit pretty close, heh. bleh. drama.
Mostly moved, lots of unpacking to do though. I need to get a couple of these. I'd be willing to buy them. Anybody have any ideas who I should talk to? (update later, got em, thanks)
I bowled a 161 last night! In unrelated news, my brother Brennan's bitchlog is something I read a fair amount, cause I agree with a lot of what he has to say. Wish I could do more to help shit, too.. http://badmofo.org/hl. Fritz really wants to help too. What can we do?
I've been saying this for a long time, well over a year now.
Heading to E3 tomorrow for a night.. should be lame as usual. Not really lame, just doesnt interest me that much. So been spending all my time on this: www.jesusonic.com It's getting to be very rad and usable. Now if I could just find a cheap 24 bit USB audio adapter, ideally USB-powered... All the working in linux has been fun. Making your own tiny bootable system is groovy. Had to debug the kernel initialization process for that (now obsolete) Gateway Connected Touch Pad to get it to boot properly into text mode. Whee I should release the kernel patch, ha ha. I'm actually pretty impressed with the performance of the 400mhz Crusoe processor. Not bad for the floating point code that we're running. The sound on that thing is terrible though, and I couldn't get the ALSA drivers for it to work, so I'm using a Creative MP3+ USB device for it, which actually works pretty good (though it's sadly only 16 bit). Anyway, it's all exciting for me, and addicting. mmm.
So I'm finding that my Fujitsu laptop is like a hard drive oven. It looks as if my new disk in it may have failed-- it's only been in there for a year or so (edit: since last august), and the last one failed.. In all fairness this one is a Hitachi (*cough*IBM*cough*) Travelstar, so where the fault lies, I don't know. I'm trying to recover my ntfs partition, and it's being a real pain. Might just do a fresh install, but if the drive is what's failing, I should wait til I get a new one. But if the laptop is killing the drives, maybe it's time for a new laptop.. :/ spent all day dealing with this shit, makes me hate computers. oh well, anyway, I'm not losing any data thankfully (hooray for backing up non-replaceable data. oops I forgot to back up WINNT\, oh well (it's a pain to backup anyway) ). Having said that, if it wasn't for the heat, I would completely love this laptop. But it gets soo hot. bleh who needs laptops anyway, they just break all the time.
Saw DJ Shadow / Quannum World 2004 on Saturday. It was actually slightly annoying. When Shadow was playing his stuff it was great, when it was some other (more hiphop stuff) it was good, but there was WAY WAY too much of the "how are you doing bay area...that's not a big enough cheer, please try again" and shit. Sure, it's cool to have bands do that once in a while, but every 5 fucking minutes? I mean, YOU HAVE OUR MONEY. PLAY SOME GODDAMN MUSIC. THANK YOU, I will end my rant here, because it would just be more of the same. For a long time I've been contemplating (and discussing with friends) moving all of my software development over to open platforms. It's something I really want to do, but unfortunately I haven't yet been able to bring myself to it. Partly because I know win32 so well, and partly because a lot of the apps I'm used to using aren't available on other platforms. And the other part is that the userbases are so much smaller, and while I don't really care about the commercial implications of that, it does mean I can't take shit over to friends' houses and try it out (though maybe Knoppix is a good way to mitigate around that). But I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to ready. It just seems like the right thing to be doing, especially given the way win32 is headed. That being said, if Microsoft wasn't trying to forge ahead and I could just use win2k and the win2k-era APIs, and have good hardware support for it, I'd probably be more inclined not to switch. something I made real quick, the real interesting part is how bad the guitar sounds.
Spent the day using Knoppix and freebsd for programming. Kinda enjoying it. Don't think I'll always want to use it, but I'm at least appreciating how decent it's become. and /dev/dsp is actually pretty usable now! :) the only thing that really bugs me is that whenever I do something wrong the beeps are a little loud. aumix cant seem to fix that. listening to mp3s via mpg123 is kinda amusing too (I'm using knoppix lang=us 2 so I'm not in X11, I'm in consoleland yay fun. ) Ah yes, programming, I remember thee.
So a couple weeks ago I was sitting in the car parked at a metered spot, talking on my mobile phone. The meter had just run out, and a meter maid was like 2 cars behind me, so I figured I better move. I did, before the meter maid was within a car length of my car. I guess it was too late. I got the ticket in the mail earlier this week. Rather than fight it, I just paid the motherfucker. Fine, whatever. Not worth dealing with. So my question is, why can't the fucking DPT get here already? Someone blocked my driveway, I called them nearly 90 minutes ago, and nobody is here yet. I called them back 30 minutes ago, and they said "we'll be there when we can". I mean, come on. This guy will probably drive off in another 30 minutes, before the parking guy gets here, and get away with it. And I'll have to have sat here for 2 hours, waiting. Tired. Wanting to go home to go to sleep, in a warm bed. hmph. Yesterday I finally finished (after many months) Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. It required a lot of investment to read the 900+ pages, but man, was it worth it. I'm now itching to go buy the second book in the series. The stories were pretty good, but also, I feel like everything I'd forgotten or ignored learning in my 10th grade western civ class (managing to get a B minus I think), well not everything but some, is now back. In style. Leave it to Stephenson to make that stuff interesting (well in all truth I find history more interesting now than when I was in highschool, in general). I will be starting "The Confusion" soon, and if my reading habits of the previous book continue, I probably won't finish it for another 6 months. I seem to mostly read when traveling...
Woot, Brennan Christophe and I made Made Of Meat. I likey. Made a new little homepage, too. nifty.
*sigh* OK so I won't just make that my .plan update. I was very tempted to do the ol' ESC :wq ENTER. Hell, nobody probably reads this anymore anyway, since all I do is "blabla here's the shitty mp3 I made today"[0] (I could go off on a huge tangent of how I'm feeling about that shit now, but I won't. Well maybe I'll do it as a footnote[1]). Soon, that will change. Just waiting til I move, really. And get a few other nibbles and pieces sorted out. We went and had a really good lunch at Citizen Cake today[2]. Amazingly good, really. mmm. 0: I just checked webdog and it seems .plan are going out of style.. what with the rise of the "blog". fair enough. hell, even I'm a sucka and have a little webpage that lets you view this text. oh well, maybe I'll move to a full-on blog. some day. 1: I'm finding challenge in making things that sound good all flow and sound right all the time. I keep making 3 minute tracks that have about 5 seconds where I'm like "damn, that's nailed" and I wish that the rest of the track sounded as good. Ah the challenge of details. The integration is a challenge. It really makes programming seem simple in comparison--at least if you design code right, you can have all these simple independent systems abstracted and functioning together... can't quite get to that point with music, at least yet. This is compounded by the fact that I can only do one thing at once, this might (or might not) be easier with more people. 2: Allison and I have discussed logging where what and how we eat all the time. I'm tempted to, considering we do eat out quite a bit, and seem to find so many good restaurants, it would be as useful to us as anybody else, since we constantly ask the question "where should we eat?".