You know you are in a room of geeks, when someone describes something using the term “orders of magnitude” and specifies that is decimal orders of magnitude.
Yearly Archives: 2006
westford, ho!
Off to westford, ma for a few days. Work stuff.
Hopefully, the weather will be nice for a change.
bring out the lug
Reminder, I’m giving a talk on gimp tonight at LUG at NCSU.
worlds biggest icehole
islands in the stream
I know a couple of people that read this are up on osx audio, and/or icecast and such, so…
I was reading loopers-delight, and one of the posters detailed a setup they used to stream a live set to the net. Not the newest idea in the world, but I’d never really given it much thought as something I could do if I happened to be playing a show in a venue with some wireless access.
Anyone using icecast or similar tech under osx? I’d probably be running the sound into cubase or Ableton Live to record, so would probably need to stream it from there (perhaps after some basic compression, etc). Anyone done anything like that?
All the phasmatodea stuff is freely licensed anyway. I don’t really expect anyone to listen in, but it would be something interesting to try anyway. Geek value.
Though the idea of adding a big pile of software to the already complex setup I have is probably asking for trouble, I might give it a try one day anyway.
If anyone has any experience doing this under linux, I’d be interested in hearing about it as well. I can always bring along the linux laptop as well.
Some info on doing this via icecast someone from the loopers list posted.
Protected: teeth
gimp talk at ncsu lug
This Wednesday, I’ll be giving a talk on/about gimp at the Linux Users Group at NCSU.
music thoughts
finally got around to syncing the mp3player/workstash/homestash to be consistent, and was thinking about cd’s I’ve bought over the last little while
The good:
Red Sparrowes/At The Soundless Dawn: really cool post-rock/post-metal/whatever. In the vein of Isis, Explosions in The Sky, GYBE, etc. Long cinematic[1] instrumentals. Very cool. High recommended.
Adrian Belew/Side B: second part of a triology. I like this one better than Side A, even though Side A features Les Claypool and Danny Carey. This cd is very low key, with a bit of a kraftwerk/80’s electro/new wave sound to it. And of course, plenty of odd lyrics and off kilter guitar sounds.
Jesu/Jesu: Jesu is Justin K. Brodricks new band. Broadrick is mr Godflesh. This album pretty much sounds just like Godflesh. In other words, it freaking rules. Utterly massive plodding machine provided drumbeats, walls of heavy droning feedback drenched guitars. This is the part where I throw a metal hand gesture and start looking for a goat to sacrifice.
Sunn 0))/Grimrobe Demos: Walls of heavy droning feedback drenched guitars. No drums. Still heavy as all get out. I like it. Too bad I’m out of goats now.
Fripp & Eno/The Equatorial Stars: Pretty good, pretty much what you’d expect from these two. Heavily processed soundscapes for the most part.
Drums & Tuba/Vinyl Killer: drums, tuba, and guitar driven math rock. Lots of looping. Tuba makes a surprisingly good bass in a rock context.
Zoe Keating/Once Cello x 16: heavily layered acoustic cello. Very driving and cool. Zoe is 1/3 of Rasputina.
Other Random Stuff:
The Swans/Children Of God/World of Skin: eh. About one in three songs are really amazing. The rest are kind of boring. But they all have _way_ too many vocals in them. Not really my thing I suppose.
Arcade Fire/Funeral: Yawn-tastic. Why did I buy this? Mediocre over produced lifeless indy pop. I’ll gladly give up one hipster point to not have to hear this.
[1] I say cinematic, meaning what I would like movie scores to sound like. But lets face it, 99.999% of all movie scores are horrendous cliche ridden coma inducing symphonic piles of worthless glurge[2]. Hans Zimmer, I’m looking at you. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to see a movie with a good score. How am I supposed to “suspend disbelief” when your blasting the tritest freaking orchestral bs at me in dolby 9.13 sound at 130db.
[2] glurge is not a word. Thats how bad movie scores are. At least there not musicals.
year
So, things I want to do this year. Resolutions of sort, I suppose.
Take a sabbatical from work. I’m not entirely sure thats an option, so we’ll see. Three months sounds about right.
Take a wandering cross country road trip. Maybe by motorcycle. Maybe by car if theres some reason for that. Or maybe just fly around to the places that look cool. In that aforementioned sabbatical perhaps.
Buy a house. I really need to buy a house. I keep saying that.
Buy a new car.
Reclaim my Jaded Bastard status. I used to be opinionated. But man, thats a lot of work sometimes. I’m much more interesting when I’m opinionated though.
Learning at least rudiments of a another language. For no particular reason, ASL or spanish perhaps. I don’t watch enough/any anime to want to learn japanese.
Watched “Serinity”. Wasn’t familar with “Firefly” the series, and I couldn’t figure out where I recongnized the “Jayne” character from. Turns out it’s “animal mother” from Full Metal Jacket. Thank you IMDB.