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IMG_5652, originally uploaded by Adam Schabtach.

Boulder got dumped on last night and this morning. There are drifts well over a foot deep here at the house. I put up some photos from the morning’s excavation on my Flickr page here.

Looks like we’re in for a good snowstorm tonight. It’s just before 9:00PM, we’ve already received a couple of inches, and it’s still snowing steadily. There’s a Winter Storm Warning in effect with snowfall rates predicted to be up to one inch or more per hour, with a total accumulation of up to 12 inches here at Boulder. I dashed outside to take a couple of snapshots of the lights on the house and the snow. They’re not great–my camera just isn’t up to low-light photography–but it’s kind of neat how the flash caught the flakes in the air.

The temperature hit a low of 4F (that’s -15C if you live in a country with a sane measurement system) last night, and the high today was barely above 10F/-12C. This makes it easily the coldest day so far this season. We happened to have our monthly delivery of bottled water today, and it was partly frozen:

According to the readers of MusicRadar.com, “the No. 1 website for musicians,” Phosphor is the 20th best VST plug-in synth in the world today. Thanks, folks!

We don’t do sales very often–this is the second one in the history of the company–so get ‘em while they’re hot.

Yes, this is my obligatory wow-what-a-silly-date post. I am fond of mathematics, though, so it can’t be resisted. The date 11/11/11 rolls around only once every 100 years so I fully expect that I won’t blog about it again. Given that nobody could have anticipated blogging, or the technology behind it, on the last 11/11/11, I won’t even attempt to guess how humanity will communicate on the next 11/11/11. (Consider, for instance, that television is less than 100 years old, transistors are a little over 50 years old, and microprocessors are just under 40 years old.)

Also: a salute to the veterans. Even if I don’t agree with the leaders who sent you into war, I thank you for your service and sacrifice.

Since I try to keep track of such things, I should mention for the record that Boulder got its first snow of the season on the 25th of October, and more on the 2nd of November. The second storm dumped about eight inches across the city, and I think the first storm brought even more. Luckily, our power was not interrupted, but there were a number of outages in the area. Lots of trees were badly damaged by the first snowfall. We had a long and mild autumn so most trees had not dropped their leaves or even changed color much. Here’s a photo of a cottonwood that got knocked down not far from here:

This is a little strange, considering that it wasn’t long ago that Dennis Ritchie died, but I just learned that John McCarthy has died. Like Ritchie, his wasn’t a household name (unless your household happens to be full of computer geeks), but he also made a number of contributions which changed the nature of computing. He coined the term “artificial intelligence”, invented the LISP programming language, and even anticipated a number of very contemporary network-based technologies such as web-based applications and cloud computing.

I’ve been remiss in tooting my own horn by mentioning that Audio Damage’s latest product, Filterstation, is now available. It’s a dual filter plug-in with 12 different filter types, three routing modes, a tempo-syncable LFO, and an envelope follower. There’s also a dual XY control for sweeping the frequency and/or resonance of either or both filters. Also of note is this is our first plug-in in Steinberg’s VST3 format, along with the usual VST2 and Audio Unit versions. All have both 32- and 64-bit binaries on both Windows and OS X.

The filter types cover all the usual modes and also include some exotic variations, such as emulations of the filters in the Korg MS-20 synthesizer and Moog 914 filter bank, and the filter from one of our very first products, FilterPod. The envelope follower lets Filterstation do a nice imitation of the Mu-Tron III envelope filter, a product that a number of people have suggested we model.

You can listen to audio demos and buy one at the Audio Damage site. It’s yours for the low, low price of $49. Operators are standing by.

I just posted a number of photos here of the bridge I described in a previous entry. It was quite interesting to see such an enormous construction up close, and the perspective formed by the structures was a visual treat.