procrastination diagram

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's a lame post because I'm having too much trouble with SVG embedding right now to get the post I want finished:

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 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.