Rewriting a good chunk of the core smarts of up2date
on a “what if” whim to see if I can make it faster.

And listening to Voivod really loudly.

No trivia last night.

But thats okay, Battles played
instead.

And Battles are, to say the least, excellent. Extremely
good. Totally freaking bad ass. Rad like helltrack.
Veritable gods of math rock.

It was a good show. I like the math rock.

The weird thing was, I don’t think I recognized
but maybe one or two non-employees at the entire
show, but it was still a good crowd. Apparently
there is a secret raleigh mathrock crowd that
only comes out for shows featuring members of
Don Caballero.

Music was mathy, intricate, complicated, multi-layered,
syncopated, spastic, polyrhythmic, and heavy. All of which I like.
Sort of somewhere between Don Cabellero and Drums&Tuba
but more intricate than either (or both combined, for
that matter).

Three guitarists, all using loopers of some sort (
two edps, one dl4, and a laptop that seemed to be running
some sort of software looper).

And the drummer setup at the front of the stage. With
his crash symbol mounted about 7 ft in the air so he
could barely reach it.

Lots of wacky spastic polyrhythmic head bobbing going on.

moog movie

Just to make sure badger has enough things to
spend money on.

Primus tonight. Should be interesting.

Couple of interesting shows coming up.

Battles (aka, guitarist from Don Cabellero, and drummer from
helmet plus other weirdos). aka, bring the math rock
Kings Barcade
Next Monday

FREE TEXAS FESTIVAL
3 day noise/experimental/rock freakout ++++
April 30th-May 2nd
PS211

Subscape Annex
Ps211 winston salem
march 23

DON CABALLERO
Go room 4
March 28

I attempted to accomplish very little this weekend, and
actually accomplished even less.

Saturday attempted to hit schoolkids on hillsborough, except
of course, it isn’tt there no more. Went to record exchange instead.
Picked up a handful of cd’s ( new Trans Am, new Descendents, a
Elliot Sharp, an Eno I didnt have, the melvins/fantomas cd,etc).

Eventually wandered over to Kings to see The Weather and
The Loners and to hang out and whatnot.

Sunday went over to badger‘s place to play
a bit. Decided to take over the guitar since I have
barely played in the last year.

Ended up playing it the whole time. I apparently at
least vaguely recall how to play. Even got in a
fun “turn up the amps and let everything feedback” interlude
for a while. Some nice ambient swirly stuff, some loud
harsh stuff, and a little bit in between. I liked
the results, I might try playing guitar more often.

For no obvious reason I’ve been thinking it might be
fun to do some sort of guitar/drums duo thing. Figure
I’m only three years late on that being cool, so why
not. Don’t really know any drummers though.

Thought about how a new depsolver for up2date would work.

Primus show tomorrow, trying to figure out plans.

Fiddled with mythtv again. It’s tempting to get a box specifically
for it. Or maybe use the old 1ghz celeron box I have (albeit, with
a mere 20gigs of drive space or so).

Historically, I tend to get these type of projects to the point
they work, then realize I don’t really need it. Aka, the remote
controlled mp3 box I built and never used. Or the proxy/firewall/mail/dns/etc boxes.
Or the mame box (though that never really made it to “working” state..).

I might try installing the cvs code and seeing if its any faster
(commits messages seems to indicate fixes for various performance
problems I’ve seen in 0.14 are fixed). If not, I’ll probably
wait another year ;->

One of the somewhat annoying things about
mythtv is they used mysql for everything. For some reason, I’ve
always hated projects that use sql dbs. Most of the mp3 jukeboxes
being prime examples. But for mythtv, it also seems to be
one of the primary performance bottlenecks. Things like all the
config settings are stored in the db, and queried every time they
are needed. And if I’m reading correctly, there is a db connection
build up/tear down, every time a setting is accessed.
And the music app, for example, queries settings for every song.

Maybe I just have something configured wrong, as it’s pretty
close to being usable and lots of people are using it without
too many complaints.

Heh, had to write an “artist statement”. Thats an interesting
exercise. Oddly, there are about 20 “how to write an artist statement”
links on the web. Weird.

Now I need to figure out if I want to sell anything, and if
so, what insane prices to put on it.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to try to rewrite the
up2date depsolver. I’m pretty sure I can make it significantly
faster. And it could really use it.

Also, I want to here William Gurstelle speak. I’m trying to figure out who to bribe
to try to get him to come give that talk at work. That would
be interesting.