Spent the weekend visiting relatives in Virginia. Its amazing how quickly a 1 year old
nephew can disappear from your site and get into various sorts of mischief.

Had a slightly odd day today. Work was normal, mostly. Then headed over to
kings for trivia night. But that was cancelled, so we played bingo instead. Kind
of a weird confusing vibe in general. Or maybe it was just me that was confused.

Discussed the Dave Attell/ Lewis Black show with R from our standard trivia
team. He enjoyed the show alot and mentioned Dave Attell would be at
Charlie Goodnights tomorow night, and discussed possibly going.

I didn’t eat any real food today, so was starving. So suggested we head
over to IHOP. After sitting down and discussing a few things, including
the Attell show tomorow, I noticed that sitting two tables away was of
all people, Dave Attell. So we figured that was a sure sign we should go
to the show.

Wandered over the badger‘s place sunday. Played with the
chapman sticks a bit. First was a bit of a minimalist phrase interlocking
thing that eventually morphed into me playing my soulless stab at
atmospheric space blues. Second bit involved more or less a
hawkwind/ozric style “bubbly echoey guitarish” thing, and various
permutations around that.

Borrowed a midi controller keyboard from badger on the way out.
Hooked it up to my home machine and was inputing data into
rosegarden in about 5 minutes. Not bad. Haven’t figured out
how to do General Midi via Timidity yet, but I suspect its
doable.

Now if someone would just build me a rh9 ish kernel with
O(1), NPTL, and the low latency and preemt patches, I’d
be happy. Apparently the first two conflict with the
latter two though.

random idea of the day: soft drink cans that change color when they are cold

Speaking of audio, midi, and gear that I want for no good reason.

I want a Korg MicroKontrol

And maybe an I-CubeX

been fiddling with linux audio stuff recently. Been making some progress,
mostly due to
Planet CCRMA.

It’s improved alot since I last took a look. Enough so that I’m kind of
vaguely thinking about what kind of laptop/small system I could put
together that would be portable enough and powerful enough to make
interesting noises.

JACK and
ALSA are pretty much required to do anything useful. Maybe we can
get ALSA into Fedora at some point
(if nothing else, with 2.6…)

But between JACK, ALSA, and LADSPA and
all caps acroynmns, it’s starting to verge on useable. Like so much stuff
in linux and open source software, integration is whats really needed.

Been fiddling with Pd, and AlsaModulatSynth
(I pretty much love any app with a menu item for “randomize all settings”),
Jack Rack, and some experimental support for windows VST plugins via wine.
See this screenshot for an example. Kind of fun.

I don’t really have anything midi, so I haven’t poked around the midi stuff that much,
but it looks like decent support exists. And it looks like my $20 sound card (soundBlaster PCI)
has a midi port/dongle thing thats supportted, so something to try.

I dont have any S/PDIF hardware, nor do I have an iPaq or any sort
of pda. But I still want a S/PDIF cf card with drivers for linux on iPaq

I don’t know why.