There's this thing called the demo scene, see? And in NVScene 2008, the winner was Stargazer by Orb and Andromeda. It's better to run the actual demo, but if you'd rather, you can watch it on Youtube. I wonder how many people seeing the porous fractal cube that is explored towards the end recognize it as a Menger sponge?

Mario V. Wüthrich, Hans Bühlmann, and Hansjörg Furrer... the latest krautrock heroes? No, the authors of this book I'm reading (for the second time). But I keep hearing "wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn...."

?!Charlie and Rebecca agreed that the latest mix was pretty good except for a weak 8-bar bridge in the middle. So I suggested he come up with a guitar solo to put over it, and as usual, he was up for the challenge. So figure a week after he delivers or mid-July, whichever comes later.

The web service I have been using to host files, BoxStr, seems to have vanished. Now, this could be temporary, because I recall them saying they were going to do a big server move early this summer. But it's disconcerting to get a message saying "there is no web site at this address." Also, I've seen a number of other (music-based) web sites vanish recently.

Anyway, if you want one of my files that you can't get from BoxStr, just send me a message through LJ or major zed music (all one word, no spaces, at) hotmail.

...and she is ?!Charlie's daughter. Her vocal contribution has been squeezed and stretched, pitched down and tuned up, EQ'ed and compressed, and put into place. Now I'm working on all the other parts that swirl around it. Making good progress.

but saw that "No Country for Old Men" was on Encore so I had to crank up the HD and watch it. If I could go back in time and tell myself not to bother, I would. A bizarrely dark story. It ended and my reaction was - WTF? That's it? Sort of like AP English back in High School. The more sophisticated the story, the less I liked it. Pfah.

Voodoo dolls came in the mail today. But I digress. Lead vocals for Rock In My Shoe are now in my trembling hands, and here is a sample of what the future brings. Thanks to the miracle of the internet and the far-flung and loosely-coupled nature of the Interröbang Cartel, I can work with this marvelous young lady and I don't even know her name. Go figure.

Wix?

Since my last post on the subject, I've put in a couple more hours. Replaced the percussion audio clips with MIDI to get more control over it. Rearranging multiple instrument versions of the main riff to build a more interesting lead in and bridges. The Superwave P8 voices I'm using are all heavily drenched in delay. It startled me once to stop the play and hear only the reverb tail for a few seconds. Nice. That's worth inserting two measures of silence.

Distractions are lessening now - just finished all the episodes of Life and Dollhouse, and I'm caught up with CSI. Almost caught up with Bones. Played Quake on the big screen a few times and then just lost interest.

Of course, there's work. And home fixups. But that's a constant.

I was getting totally exasperated and ready to give up on AT&T DSL. It seemed that certain times of the day - prime time evenings, when I wanted to watch internet TV - my connection speed fell from the usual 2500 kbps to 700 or even lower. Too low to stream much of anything. Sometimes rebooting the whole network helped; sometimes it didn't. Generally, around 10:00pm, it would come back. But last Friday, it didn't and I was totally PO'ed. Like I said, almost ready to bail and go back to cable internet.

But then I noticed something. ( Read more... ) Apologies to those of you with bigger problems.

i knew it wouldn't be funny for long.

A year ago, I got NO spam on my years-and-years old alumni email account.
A month ago I got a few spams a day.
Four days ago I got 27
Yesterday I got 28
Today I got 59.

How far can this go? How many messages for the SAME DAMN PRODUCT (Acai) can I get in the same day? Not that that is the only one. I'm so, so happy that so, so many people want me to be able to enlarge certain portions of my anatomy. (BTW, how do they know I'm male?)

I didn't mention it, but my last post was an important (and successful) communication test. I wrote it while sitting in the back seat of my minivan in a parking lot outside of a MacDonald's about 15 minutes from my house. Thanks to WayPoint and AT&T, if there is a (local/block/street) problem with my internet connection, I can still get through. Not that LJ posts are so important; it's when I need to fire up the VPN and communicate with the people who pay me for my sage musings....

Since my last post on RIMS, I've spent almost 3 hours on it plus some time on other music-related housekeeping. ?!Charlie offered to set me up with a female vocalist, so I'm stoked to get this thing up and running. Rendered one of the instrumental lines in 7 different synth voices; will pick and choose later. Now in the process of redoing the percussion line in MIDI. The new in-track MIDI view in SONAR HS7 sure helps... you can line up MIDI and audio to arbitrary precision by seeing the waveform and the MIDI note in the same timeline.

Internet TV is under control - I watch at most an hour a day. What's really threatening my work ethic is this: I managed to install Quake on the Dell/Vista. Actually, it went right in from the install CD with not a single glitch, much to my amazement. Haven't tried it on the big screen yet. Still tweaking the controls and scrubbing off the rust from my skilz.

Thankfully, my main email account has a pretty good spam filter, because lately the spam has been growing exponentially. But perusing the subject headers can be amusing (I'm sure it will wear off soon) with such grammatical gems as:

* A bare hand without the watch looks very miserable.
* Women will be eating your watch will [sic] their eyes.
* She will call you Your Majesty because of his magnitude.

Then these, which sound like they came from Mr. T. (remember him?)

* Your embarrassment has died instead you have the pride.
* Your new improved stick will be bigger than the brick.

Yesterday I picked up an HD set top box to go with my new 50" Panasonic HD plasma set (whoopee!) and got it activated. Watched some eye-popping stuff last night. Went back to the old set with the old non-HD box and I either get "not authorized" or a blank screen on channels I clearly am supposed to get. Tech support tells me it's because I'm not paying for the second box. They send me to sales, who says, yes I am being charged for the second box. But by now, the tech guy has rung off leaving the poor sales woman in the lurch.

So now I'm on hold, without even... wait, she's back....

Eeeuuuuw. Before I got the new box, they told me an HD box would be free with my existing subscription package and I would have to pay $6.95/mo for the old box, now considered second.

Now that I have the new box, they tell me that was a lie - that I have to pay $7/mo to upgrade to the new box as primary as well as the $6.95 for the old box.

So now I have to decide whether it's worth it - my old TV does pick up channels 2-99 without the box. Or maybe I'll try calling again and again. The stories keep changing, so eventually I'll hear a deal I like.

...sort of. Actually, I spent it analyzing "You and Me" by Eclectronica. Sorry, no links. They don't appear to exist anymore, except as an entry on last.fm because I and someone else scrobbled it. This was one of my all-time fave tracks from the old MP3.com when garage bands and wannabes could post their music for the world to hear. Maybe I'll put the mp3 up on my Boxstr account (temporarily) when they go back on-line. Anyway, it's a bouncy synth-driven number and they manage to keep it interesting despite the limited number of musical themes in it. I'm analyzing how they did it for inspiration on RIMS. The vocal prototype is less than two minutes long, but the real thing deserves to be longer (I think).

I confess, I haven't been spending nearly enough time on music lately. Maybe it's burnout from finishing the Tribute Album. Maybe its discouragement from ZERO response to my plea for help on RIMS. Maybe it's my struggle with the new laptop (though that isn't an excuse - the music software works just fine, thank you).

So here's something anyway.... From time to time I get a lick in my head (sort of like a rock in my shoe) so I go to the Yamaha keyboard and noodle around until I get it clear enough to commit to flash memory. Eventually, I suck it into SONAR and spit it out into a MIDI file on a slag heap of riffage. Someday it gets into a song, or maybe not.

Here are the latest five, in all their finger-pecking, off-rhythm glory:
EEECBAB_pensive
GEGGGGABCA_march
AAAADCB_multivoice
DDDAAE_similar_c
ACEDCDE_searching

In related news, for a limited time, Hulu is making the entire second season of Life available.

Thanks to ishldgetoutmore for the tip on infrarecorder. Dell sent me a new DVD drive, which didn't behave any differently from the old one, except now Roxio couldn't detect it. So I said to myself, "screw it" and installed infrarecorder. It, too, couldn't find the drive, but at least it let me tell it "it's drive E, dummy" and then it worked fine for burning an audio CD. Good enough!

My attempts at getting email support to re-install drivers failed, so I went in for a second chat session that repeated some of the first chat session. Eventually determined that there are no drivers because the OS takes care of running the optical drive. But this person apparently felt that the failure to read some disks (that the rival Thinkpad had no trouble with) was significant, so they are sending me a replacement drive. He warned me, however, not to get my hopes up too high. I might have to {shudder} reinstall Vista.