evil thought of the day…

a virus/worm/exploit/whatever that breaks email servers so
they can no longer send email. Unless the email has
“test” in the subject or body

random thought of the day…

web forums should export their content is some sort of standard form (rss/xml/whatever…)
so that I can read them all from the same place with the same interface instead
of going to a dozen websites with all slightly different forum systems.

aka, a web forum aggregator.

And yes, that is getting really close to reinventing newsgroups over http.

I hate computers.

Updated work machine to fedora core 3. The user interface
seems to be getting worse and worse. Now every gtk app
has the horrible new file selector widget. It’s almost
as if someone took a list of the things I liked about
the old and intentionally removed all of them and added
some stuff I never use. The only nice feature that
seems to have been added is ability to list files
by last modified. Unfortunately thats only useful
because all the other file filtering abilities
of the old one seem to be gone. Theres no
text entry for a filename unless you hit the
magic key combo (when it works, it seems to
not do anything about half the time I try it, and
I’m not sure why yet). The tab completion is
weak, and “*.mp3” doesnt work anymore.
It doesnt understand “~/” anymore. On
my home dir it takes about 20s for it to
build the list of files. Then when you click
a file the dialog resizes. A good
30% of the dialog is to show me a couple
of options I never use. There is also no
way to tell a directory from a file. Not
even a trailing slash on dir names.

I now have a menu entry called “Edutainment”
filled with KDE garbage. Ugh.

Sometimes I hate “progress”.

I decided to look into getting a mac for music
stuff again. A quick browsing of the laptop
and software I want puts the total around the
$5000 mark. Ugh.

Play 20 Questions

That site is kind of addictive.

Finally got a new computer at work. The ~700mhz/~300Meg/16gig dell laptop
was getting a bit annoying.

New machine is a dual opteron with two gigs of ram and a 210 gig harddrive.
Also managed to scheme my way into a better monitor, this time a 21 inch
monitor. Yay! I can finally crank the resolution higher than 1024×768!

That said, I forgot what a pain it is to tweak a box to work
the way I want it to. Biggest thing missing now is a decent
web browser. Mozilla and epiphany suck. Firefox is almost
usable, aside from ui weirdness and no session support. Working
on getting a galeon-1.3.16 built for x86_64. That way I don’t
have to redo my somewhat insane bookmarks/smart tool bar/etc
stuff that none of the other browsers seem to do very well
at importing.

Played the show at Bickett Gallery last night.

Seemed to go okay. Wasn’t really happy with what I
played, but I think it may of been because I
was overthinking what I wanted to do both before
and during the show. Should get the recording
soon to check.

Crowd was a bit smaller than last time, as most
of folks I know had other things to do.

Pig And Iron played first. Went pretty well, lots
of interesting noise making devices.

Serpent Earth were up next. They played with
a slightly stripped down setup as compared to
last time I saw them. Just rob on ms2000 and
anthony on guitar and vocals.

Phasmatodea
played next. All day I had in my head to start the
first piece off with a theme of “giant robot death rattles”.
I was never really satisfied with my giantrobotdeathrattleness
and eventually morphed it into a vaguely ambient thing. I
wanted to play something nice and melodic all evening but
my brain was not going to let that happen.

A minute or two into the second piece after I
flailed about for a while attempting to do something
sorta melodic and sonically interesting, but mostly
just got frustrated (some minor equipment problems
didnt help). I then remembered that it was 919noise
and decided to live up to my end of the deal. Lots of
distortion and noise and whatnot. I seemed to only be
able to either bury badger under noise, or not
hear what I was playing at all, which kind of disoriented
me a bit.

For the last bit of the evening, we planned a jam of everyone
playing that evening. We decided to make it a simple game
piece based vaguely on the ideas of the surrealist game
“exquisite corpse”. I think it would be fun to try a more
formal game piece at some point in the future. In addition
to Rob and Anthony (from Serpent Earth), myself, badger,
Drew (from Pig and Iron), Brian (from Shadow
Of A Great Name and Razorwire Safety Net) and Michael (from
7 Years In Space) joined us.

Brian and Michael started out with some interesting electronic
noise, after a few minutes Rob & Anthony joined with keyboards
and a nice guitar riff that seems to pull things together a
bit. Next up was me and badger, badger on ebowed drones and
other noises, me doing a bit of processed “prepared” stick
(in this case, gently attacking the strings with a saw blade…)

At that point, the original idea was for folks to start fading
out. I didn’t actually expect that to happen, so wasn’t surprised
when it didn’t. So all of us were playing together for a few minutes,
creating quite an impressive noise. Sounded pretty
cool to my ears. Can’t wait to hear the recording.

I got busy and forgot to mention this,
but Phasmatodea
is playing at Bickett Gallery
this Thursday, er, today, as part of the 919noise night.

Also on the bill are:

Pig and Iron
Serpent Earth

Doors open at 9pm, music should start
9:30pm. We’ll probably be second,
but don’t know for sure.

$4 at the door, $3 if your a 919noise.org list
member.

I promise to try to make as many blippppppyzzzzcraaaasssssblopppy
noises as I can.

Hmm, weekend.

Kings on Friday for Rosebuds and “Utah!”.

Badgerhaus on saturday.

Phasmatodea practice
sunday. More experimenting with recording can be found
here

Trivia at Kings Monday. We were second last week so
got to pick a category: “movies featuring rockstars”.
Aced the category, and won overall. saspenguin
and friends showed up for the first time in a while.

Today spent on code annoying code. Annoying in many ways.

Trying to finalize the schedule for Thursday nights
919noise show. Kind
of last minute, but oh well. Which also means
Phasmatodea will
probably be playing again.

Went to Kings Saturday to catch Eric’s new band The BQ’s. Good
stuff, and Eric has more stage presence than anyone I know.

Headed to my parents place Sunday to visit, eat, and blow up
lots of lame legal fireworks. I’d make a trip to SC to pick
up the good stuff, but apparently cops in SC were monitoring
NC folks buying fireworks in SC and threatening to prosecute
them under anti-terrorism laws if they took them into NC.
On the Fourth of July. Yay irony!

Bought a ton of cds off of amazon, that _finally_ started
arriving. No more “free” shipping for me. In my attempt
to find electronica that I actually like, picked up the
latest Squarepusher. Not bad, kind of slow in spots but
tracks like “steinbolt” make up for it. Picked up
a The Mars Volta cd. Best way to describe it is “indy rock Tool”.
The jury is still out. Picked up the Battles ep, which
is excellent, to no surprise.

Maybe 40% though ripping my cd collection at this point.