Just after uploading the photos in the previous entry, I noticed that the morning sun is hitting the dahlias in a most photogenic manner.
It may be worth mentioning again that the photos I post here link to my flickr account, and if you click them you’ll be taken to a page where you can view them at their original size.
So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.
As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes.
–Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times
(Actually he said this a few days ago, but he quoted himself again today.)
Users of iLoks–or people who have defended their use after I suggested that avoiding them altogether might be a good idea–may be interested in this discussion thread. It seems that if you don’t pay the yearly PACE protection money insurance fee for your iLok, if something goes wrong with it, you’ll get charged over $200 for its replacement. If you have the insurance, replacement is going to cost you over $100. Even better, it appears that this insurance policy actually doesn’t cover what it’s advertised as covering if the product in question is from Waves or AudioEase, whose products presumably represent a majority of iLok usage.
Hot on the heels of Automaton, I’m pleased to announce that Audio Damage has just released a new product. It’s called Rough Rider and it’s a stereo compressor.
It has a warm sound and a vintage quality, and when pushed hard will pump like crazy. It’s not the be-all and end-all of compressors (as if there were such a thing) but it probably sounds better than the compressor that came with your DAW. Windows VST and OS X VST and AU formats are both available.
“Oh, and one more thing:” it’s free. Trot over to the Audio Damage website and grab yourself a copy. You’re welcome.
I’m in awe of the skill and craftsmanship exhibited here. This guy built, from scratch, a 1/6 scale model of a Chevy V8 engine, apparently machining all of the parts himself. I was impressed even before I learned that the thing actually runs. Amazing.
(Thanks go to Tracie’s aunt Linda for bringing this to my attention.)
Quoting from MoveOn.org’s pre-fab suggestion for email to send to my friends:
Hey,
Want an Obama T-shirt? MoveOn’s giving them out if you make a small donation to their young-voter registration program, aimed at registering half a million young voters in swing states. I just got mine, and wanted to share the opportunity with you.
Click this link to get your Obama T-shirt:
http://pol.moveon.org/newobamatshirts/index13.html?id=-535443-lVDFnVx
Thanks!
Looks like a nice shirt, too. I like the artsy silhouette.
Now available at the Audio Damage website, we present Automaton. Automaton is our most experimental product to date, using a tempo-synced cellular automaton to trigger its four different effects processors. It’s intended for more experimental styles and will be much more at home on glitch and IDM tracks than on something like the next Enya album.
That link up there will take you to the product page where you can hear audio demos, read the manual, find links to video demos, and buy a copy for your experimental self. Automaton is $49 and is, like all of our products, available for both OS X and Windows, VST and AU formats.
I’ve seen some pretty strange ideas for computers, but this one takes the cake: scented laptops. Yes, Asus now offers “A Computer for All Your Senses”, available in four models with four fragrances. The fragrances are Grass, Floral, Perfume, and Ocean. Yes, Ocean. I grew up in Oregon so when I think of the smell of the ocean, I think of brine, seaweed, and perhaps a hint of dead seagull. I have to assume that that’s not what an Ocean-scented laptop actually smells like, but all things considered, I’d probably rather smell the ocean.
Since I managed to get a bunch of people all worked up awhile ago by suggesting that musicians boycott software companies that use PACE’s invasive copy-protection system, it seems worth mentioning that the issue of copy protection and whether consumers should put up with it is now being debated in a much wider field: the gaming community. [I guess it’s called Digital Rights Management, or DRM, these days so I’ll start using that acronym for brevity.]
There’s a new game called Spore. There’s a good chance that you’ve heard of it. Its makers have been hyping it for a couple of years, it was created by the same people that did the original Sim games, Brian Eno did the music for it, etc. It doesn’t really look like something I’d get into but I was considering picking it up eventually if it turned out to live up to some of its pre-release hooplah. It was released a few days ago, and it crossed my mind to see what the user reviews on Amazon were saying about it. So I took a look here at its product page.