The hills around my office are on fire. Part of a huge firestorm in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. The air is filled with smoke, and close to half a mil­lion peo­ple have been evac­u­at­ed from their homes in sur­round­ing areas, but life remains strange­ly famil­iar. The dusky sun­light gives an eerie cast to the day, but busi­ness­es are open here and peo­ple are out doing errands while ash snows down on their heads.
Amid all the con­fu­sion and chaos, I am still pack­ing and prepar­ing for a vaca­tion to Egypt. My ordi­nary life has become sur­round­ed by the remark­able and extra­or­di­nary, so the nor­mal antic­i­pa­tion has been turned side­ways. I am no longer escap­ing a nor­mal life and return­ing to a nor­mal life. The incred­i­ble things I’ll see as part of my trav­els will dove­tail with the incred­i­ble things I am see­ing on tele­vi­sion and out my win­dow.
I won­der how this will all fit togeth­er in my mem­o­ries.
This 83-pound, 5-foot long NES con­troller actu­al­ly works. You can play games, but it takes the coor­di­na­tion of at least two peo­ple to man­age it.
I just fin­ished the most pain­less serv­er tran­si­tion I’ve ever expe­ri­enced.
$7.95/month when you buy a year. $6.95 if you buy two years.
I used Trans­mit (www.panic.com) to syn­chro­nize all files from my old host to a local fold­er, and then just syn­chro­nized from the local fold­er to my new host!
Both hosts offer php­MyAd­min, so it was easy to export my data from one host and import to the oth­er.
Done with­in a few hours.
Hav­ing recent­ly upgrad­ed to an Apple note­book (woohoo!), I am learn­ing the ins and outs of being mobile as I set­up my new machine for work and for play.
One thing that was annoy­ing was hav­ing to unplug my audio inter­face when I want­ed to take my com­put­er any­where away from my desk.
On Sat­ur­day, I was sick in bed with time to final­ly work on some music. But, being in bed, I did not have my audio inter­face con­nect­ed.
Usu­al­ly that means that I would need to reas­sign all audio out­puts in my sequencer to the built-in out­puts to work on music. And change them all back when I want­ed to work at my desk.
My attempts to rush out a TivoSlim­server­Client with Slim­Serv­er 6.5 com­pat­i­bil­i­ty did not fly. Some poor users did try to use 0.2.1a, only to be frus­trat­ed by its fail­ure to launch.
Release 0.2.2a is now avail­able from here.
Tomor­row I begin almost 3 weeks of trav­el. First, Dubai, UAE. Then, India.
There were changes in the com­mand line inter­face to Slim­Serv­er 6.5 that broke TivoSlim­server­Client. I have made a few changes to let users of ver­sion 6.5 in on the fun.
Grow­ing up in sub­ur­ban New Jer­sey, it required a lot of work to learn about new music. Record buy­ing trips to New York City were my surest method of locat­ing releas­es that I may have heard men­tion of, but nev­er actu­al­ly saw in stores. The sit­u­a­tion is very dif­fer­ent now, of course, but in high school, I was still a few years away from even dis­cov­er­ing Usenet news­groups and Mosa­ic was a nov­el­ty. My musi­cal curios­i­ty couldn’t be sat­is­fied eas­i­ly for rea­sons of age, loca­tion or bud­get. The record indus­try may bemoan the explo­sion of music on the inter­net, but it has become much eas­i­er for music lovers to dis­cov­er new or his­tor­i­cal­ly over­looked music. Back then, “Google” was not yet a verb, and research often required gas mon­ey.
In this con­text, dis­cov­er­ing free form radio was noth­ing short of mirac­u­lous to my young brain. WFMU (wfmu.org) was trans­mit­ting weird, cranky, fun­ny, obscure, impos­si­ble music. And I could dri­ve around quaint, qui­et and bor­ing sub­ur­ban New Jer­sey while lis­ten­ing to sounds that I nev­er imag­ined pos­si­ble, host­ed with unapolo­getic strange­ness.
This mix does not come near the eclec­ti­cism of WFMU, by any means, but it is my own exer­cise in mix­ing and sequenc­ing across genre.
Well, with 5 days remain­ing to play with Trak­tor before it requires reg­is­tra­tion, I am inspired to squeeze out a few more mix­es. Here’s a mix of 7-inch records that I have col­lect­ed over the last few years (mixed as mp3s). Main­ly from labels Mem­phix and Rehash, but not lim­it­ed to those.
Anoth­er mix of dub­step tunes. These have been wait­ing around to be mixed for a while, but I nev­er got around to it. This time, I used NI Trak­tor to actu­al­ly mix the songs togeth­er. As a result, it is quite a bit slop­pi­er than my last mix, which was assem­bled in Able­ton Live. Enjoy!