studionebula.com

There’s an hour-long BBC interview with Brian Eno posted here. I haven’t watched more than the first four minutes so far, but Synthtopia described it as a “must see”. If, like myself, you don’t happen to have time to watch it right away you might want to download yourself a copy. The last time I looked at BBC documentaries posted on Vimeo they didn’t stay around long before the copyright police impounded them.

Eno’s one of my biggest–if not the biggest–musical influences and inspirations, so I’m looking forward to watching this interview.

Today is one of those rare days on which the weather conditions are just right for producing beautiful snowflakes. There is some magic combination of temperature, humidity, still air, cloud formation, etc. that produces big, symmetric crystals that accumulate without damage. Here is a photo of the front step:

Click that photo to see a larger version, and click here to see several others taken at the same time and location.

There’s a remarkably thorough comparison of three drum-machine plug-ins here. The guy compares key features of Tattoo, AudioRealism’s ADM, and Sonic Charge’s MicroTonic. As Chris said on his blog, one ends up concluding that one needs all of them, although personally I was never completely taken with MicroTonic’s sound.

There’s a good review here of Tattoo. Besides being fairly comprehensive, I think it’s the first review of our stuff I’ve ever read in which the documentation is mention. I thank the reviewer for this; I do try to make our manuals both thorough and at least somewhat interesting, even though Chris tells me that nobody reads manuals these days.

Many years ago, as a youngster living in Oregon, I found the following inscription on a jar of Best Foods mayonnaise:

This seemed faintly odd to me at the time. Why would one brand of mayo have two different names, and why would one name be chosen based upon what part of the country it’s being sold in? And besides, who cares? It’s just mayo, right? “Gee, honey, I love living in California, but I really wish we could still buy the Hellmann’s mayonnaise I grew up with in Rhode Island. All I can find is this Best Foods stuff.” Now that I’m a bit older and run two businesses, I’m somewhat more appreciative of the importance of brand recognition. As a kid it just seemed silly that they’d go to the length of mentioning this on their labels.

Years later, after I moved to Boulder, I happened to need mayonnaise. (It’s not something I buy frequently, mind you.) The inscription came to mind–why, I don’t know; it must’ve made quite an impression upon me originally. Hence I figured I was looking for Hellmann’s, since Boulder is in fact east of the Rockies, just barely. Somewhat to my chagrin I found the familiar Best Foods brand on the shelf in the grocery store. It still had the same mention of Hellmann’s on the label, but apparently Boulder’s location just east of the Rockies isn’t enough to qualify it for membership in the Hellmann’s territories.

Years after that I pointed out the passage to Tracie and related the tale to her. Recently we needed mayo for sandwiches so I picked up a jar of Best Foods at our usual supermarket. I bought the smallest one that they had because we usually don’t eat much mayo. However, I ended up on something of a fish-salad-sandwich kick and went through most of the jar fairly quickly. Tracie happened to go to the store next, and returned in excited triumph bearing a jar labeled Hellmann’s.

Apparently I overlooked it on my visit (maybe because I was focusing on the smallest jars, or because I was in a hurry), or maybe they added it since my visit. In any case, there it is. Of course I had to determine whether it has the converse notation on its label and was oddly pleased to find that it does:

So apparently Boulder, which is situated just east of the Rockies, but against their foothills, exists in a sort of condiment Lagrange point or neutral zone in which both brands are available.

Tracie asked whether I’d ever found out why one kind of mayonnaise has two different brand names. I replied, “no, but I’ve never googled it.” She did, and found a somewhat lengthy explanation in Wikipedia, the source of all manner of obscure information. As I guessed, the story began with a corporate acquisition of one brand by the other. It’s somewhat surprising that they’ve preserved both names for this long, particularly since (according to the article) they have to create two sets of advertisements for them.

A few friends and relatives have expressed interest in learning why this site disappeared altogether earlier this month, then reappeared only to be replaced by a placeholder page for several days. Here’s the story as it unfolded.

On January 2, Saturday morning, we discovered early in the day that we couldn’t retrieve our email, nor was my web site online. This wasn’t an unprecedented situation–anybody who spends any amount of time online knows that there are the occasional outages–so I didn’t think much of it at first. After an hour or so I became disconcerted. I managed to find a status message at my domain host’s site that said the server which hosted my site had experienced a RAID failure, that restoration was in progress, it might take until 11:00AM on Monday for everything to be fully restored, but that I should check my site occasionally because they expected to have most accounts restored within a few hours.

By that evening we still had no email and no web site, so I started pestering their tech support people. It didn’t quite make sense to me that it would take so long to restore a server to active use. Eventually I got them to tell me that the situation was that they’d lost an entire RAID-5 because of a hardware failure and had to restore over 600GB of data from tapes to restore all of the user accounts on the server. They also gave me an estimate of how much progress had been made at that time. Given that estimate, it didn’t take any fancy math to figure out that there was no way that they were going to get everything running again by 11:00AM Monday.

So, we waited, and waited, and waited. No email, no blog. It was a slightly surreal experience for two people who are entirely accustomed to reading and sending email almost constantly throughout the day. (I suppose it would be like having your television taken away if you’re a regular TV watcher, but since we don’t have a television I can’t really compare the two situations with authority.) I did use a Gmail account to tell immediate family and some friends what was going on, but I deliberately didn’t try to email everyone that I could think of because I was laboring under the hope that my service would be restored Real Soon Now.

Altogether we were without email for about four days, and it took another day after that for my site to start working again because somehow they managed to botch the restoration of my files. All email sent to us during that time never reached us. Once I had email again I had to reassure various people like my financial advisor and the person who does Audio Damage’s payroll that yes, I was back among the online living.

This was all very inconvenient and rather vexing, but it would have been worse if the Paper Jade site had suffered the same fate. Thankfully that site was on a different server and hence unaffected. My ongoing conversations with the tech support department implied that there really wasn’t any reason to think that the same thing couldn’t happen to that site, even though it was a very unusual failure. Since this wasn’t the first time I’ve been displeased with this hosting service, I started a task I’ve been avoiding for at least a year: finding a new home for both domains.

This is a fairly daunting undertaking. There are many, many choices and it’s difficult to have any idea of the quality of the service until you’ve lived with it for awhile. Fortunately I know several people who have much more experience with such things than I do, so I solicited their opinions, shopped around a bit, and settled on Media Temple. (Hey, if they’re good enough for Sony, Toyota, and Warner Bros, they’re good enough for me.)

My cousin Ziggy accurately compared moving a web site to moving your home. You have to pack everything up, get it from the old house to the new house, unpack everything, and put it all in its proper place. Since I was going from a turnkey web-hosting service to a dedicated server the transition was even more complex. To follow the moving analogy, not only did I have to move everything, I also had to change the locks, replace the windows, knock out a wall while remodeling the living room, and learn how to be a carpenter in the process. Bear in mind that this was happening at the same time I was finishing up Tattoo and subsequently *cough cough* addressing a couple of issues that sprang up immediately after its release. Basically for a couple of weeks I was spending all day on Tattoo and all evening on setting up the server and moving the web sites, taking breaks only for necessities like eating, sleeping, and playing Call of Duty on my Xbox360.

I had planned to make a seamless, behind-the-scenes transition with both sites by getting everything set up on the new server before switching over (i.e. changing the DNS name server entries). The Paper Jade site made the transition quite gracefully: once I finally had everything in place and debugged (with some help from a friend) the change-over happened late in the afternoon last Saturday without a hitch.

It didn’t exactly work out that way for this site. Some afternoon partway through the whole ordeal–around the 19th, I think–I was immersed in working on the Paper Jade site and we again lost our studionebula.com email access and this site vanished from the web. I’ll admit that I panicked slightly and decided to switch studionebula.com over to the new server without further ado. I somewhat hastily set up the email accounts, put a temporary web page in place, and submitted the DNS name server change shortly before going to bed. The next morning everything seemed okay at first, but I soon figured out that I’d screwed something up with the server configuration and all of the email sent to us between about midnight and 9:00AM had been lost. Whoops. Fortunately the mistake was fairly easy to correct. But, since paperjade.com is the site that generates money and this one isn’t, I didn’t start working on getting this blog back up and running on the new server until I had the Paper Jade site running. That’s why if you visited this site between the 20th and the 25th you found only the temporary page.

So, paperjade.com and studionebula.com now live on a nifty server which I believe to be far more reliable than their old homes and much less vulnerable to long-term disaster. This site is still missing the older photo gallery which I abandoned in favor of Flickr. I intend to restore that next but I’m not making any promises or guesses about how long it will take me to get around to it. Setting up the server and moving the sites was all very interesting but frankly the novelty has worn off, and there is still some behind-the-scenes details I’d like to tidy up first, e.g. setting up a system for automated offsite backups.

Mostly, anyway. studionebula.com now lives on a new, faster, better, stronger server. There are still some pieces missing, such as the entire older photo gallery, but I should now be able to resume blogging at my usual unpredictable pace.

Sorry for the interruption. I’ll provide a longer description of the transition and the reasons behind it shortly.

It’s been awhile since I posted a self-indulgent gear-porn photo, so let’s remedy that:

Actually it’s somewhat pertinent in that I spent part of the weekend happily making insect-like drones with the thing, and this morning have been happily making little filtered-noise whisps and patters. I think I could spend all day doing this, but alas, other duties call.

The date on this article is Dec 1 but it was only recently brought to my (actually Tracie’s) attention. It’s about liquefying corpses as a “green” alternative to cremation. To quote the juicy part, so to speak:

In alkaline hydrolysis the body is submerged in water in a stainless steel chamber. Heat, pressure and potassium hydroxide, chemicals used to make soap and bleach, are added to dissolve the tissue.

Two hours later all that’s left is some bone residue and a syrupy brown liquid that is flushed down the drain. The bones can be crushed and returned to the family as with cremation.

The president of the company acknowledges that “the ‘ick’ factor” is something of a barrier to the popularity of this technique.

It is with a great deal of pleasure that I announce that Audio Damage’s first software instrument is now on sale. It’s called Tattoo; it’s a drum synthesizer and integrated sequencer. All sounds are synthesized in real time–no samples are employed. Every parameter of every percussion voice has its own step sequencer. The sequencers have extensive randomization features so you can go completely overboard with unpredictable rhythmic and timbral variations. The percussion synths themselves are directly inspired by the famous Roland drum machines of yesteryear but provide a wider range of sonic territory. All this and more for $79, available now at the Audio Damage website. You’ll find several demo audio files there also, and you can watch video demonstrations of Tattoo on the Audio Damage YouTube channel.

This product represents our largest investment of time and effort to date, but it was a labor of love. Chris and I are both drum machine nuts and we’ve been talking about doing a software beatbox almost as long as we’ve been talking about anything. Six or seven months ago we decided that the time had arrived to take a stab at it, and now it’s done. We’re pretty proud of it and we hope that you enjoy it, too.