A while back I wrote a, uh, thing to test zephyr servers in a bunch of virtual machines. I dusted it off today (taking a break
from the other stuff I'm working on), and I just want to reiterate how
much I like having automated tests. (It was just a smoke test before;
it now tests user session persistence (jargonwise: "subscriptions")
through server restarts.
Lev Grossman, author of the The Magicians, my
favoritist book here I wanted to slug the protagonist for most of it
(really, it's an excellent book), has a blog.
Andy Ihnatko posted how to disable wake-on-open on a MacBook. Maybe I'll get around to getting one someday, although I'm really wondering whether I want to give up and start doing music stuff on Windows after all.
I did ARRL Field Day 2010 at the OCRA/DFMA joint field day in
Hillsborough, North Carolina, with my parents. The clubs set up a
10-transmitter station, all running at 5W on battery power for the
duration of the event.
Sadly these don't give a good sense of the site. Notable innovations are the bucket truck on loan from the power company, and weather balloon; both of which I would describe as solutions to the problem of not having the Green building handy to string antennas from.
I was fiddling around with the M3, and ended up with a... tune that I
thought sounded pretty neat. The process involved just sitting down
at the keyboard, playing the first four notes of what I'll call the
lead twice and saying to myself "Huh, that sounds way neater than I
expected", then fiddling around for a bit until I had some variety in
the lead, and a bassline to go with it.
(There should be a player widget there. It may require flash. It may
also require following the link to the actual page on my site in what
ever reader thing you're reading this in.)
This consists of
with each bar repeated four times on the right hand, and
repeated on the left hand, played with on a very simple sound I put together
for the RADIAS card in my M3. It's basically a bunch of square waves
and a bunch of triangle waves slightly detuned and run through some
distorting effects so that it doesn't sound too polite.
Now, depending on how responsive you are to musical cues and how much
other sorts of media you've consumed, the bassline might be bothering
you a bit—it did me. Here's just the bassline sped up a bit:
Here it is sped and transposed up a couple of octaves played with a patch that
allegedly sounds like a french horn:
Now, at this point you're likely either looking at me funny or nodding
in familiarity. Once I recognized it, I realized that I have a
relatively powerful emotional reaction to those four notes, especially
when followed...
(Also, I apologize for the pun in the title.)
Also, yes, this was supposed to be last week's post, except that I got
bogged down trying to export the musical score fragments into SVG.
Images, though inelegant, Just Work.
I replaced the front brake pads in my car this weekend. Someone (Hi,
Mom!) along the way asked why I was doing this, rather than
paying someone else to make my problems go away. My glib answer was
that labor costs being what they are in Massachusetts, I didn't feel
like paying how much it would cost, or spending the time explaining
that I didn't want the disks turned, the pistons replaced, or the
dooflatchie reframulized.
A better glib answer is that I want to retain my Morlock (Stephenson
1999, Wells 1895) cred, and this leads
to a better non-glib answer: by repairing (preventative
maintenancing?) the machine that carries me around, I reassert control
over my environment, and reassure myself that I can adjust the aspects
of my world that most people take for granted.
(The correct answer, of course, is that taking things apart, getting
your hands dirty, and putting them back together, is fun.)
Here are a couple of demos of the Micro Modular, which is a scaled down version of the first-generation Modular:
Which led me to the following video:
Which in tern led me to the Metasonix TX-1 Agonizer, which is intriguing if expensive, which leads me to
Metasonix, who, although they no longer seem to make the TX-1, do make new vacuum tube-based analog synthesizers, including, oddly, a drum machine made with vacuum tubes, which has to be as far into the cool×odd quadrant as I'm likely to get today.
I have recently become aware of the the Nord Modular and Nord Modulator G2 synthesizers.The basic idea is that you have a DSP on your little black (red) box that you say "emulate this here analog synth", which is relatively old hat at this point. The trick here is that you tell these "emulate this arbitrary giant modular synthesizer", and while you're at it, make it polyphonic if you have the spare CPU. Not only could this make some potentially fiendish noises, but it could the eliminate the desire for much esoteric hardware.
This site has a bewilderingly continuous flow of synthesizer-related links and interestingly relevant e-bay options.
If you're around Cambridge, go see The Gondoliers, or The King of
Barataria.
Remaining performances Thursday and Friday at 8pm, or Saturday at 2pm,
all in Sala.
If you go to the weeknight performances, you'll get to
see me drop heavy pieces of the set on myself. The music is
interesting and the vocalists are quite talented.
(Yes, this is kind of a copout, but I am hella fried this weekend.)
