After the total loss of my Apple development environment (requiring a completely new install of OS X and the developer tools on a bare hard drive), the near-total loss of Chris’s Windows development environment, various unexpected snags on both platforms related to building the installers, the demise of my cat, and all of the usual things that transpire over the months of work that go into a new product, I am pleased to announce that Discord 3 is now available at the Audio Damage website.
Widget, my cat of 16 years, finally departed for that sunny windowsill in the sky this morning. She lived about six months longer than anyone expected. Late last October she was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. A week or so later she took a sharp turn for the worse and we all (i.e. me, Tracie, and the vet) thought that she wouldn’t last through the weekend. She rebounded, much to everyone’s surprise, and was in reasonably good health for the next several months, all things considered. We really didn’t expect her to last until our trip to Japan in April, but she did. Hence she enjoyed a little vacation of her own, staying at the vet’s office, where she was waited upon by the techs and the vets. All of this was a prelude to the inevitable, of course. She slowed down over the last few weeks, declined sharply a couple of days ago, and now she is with us no more.
…doesn’t get much better than this.
I cleaned out a closet recently. That statement doesn’t adequately express the magnitude of the undertaking. This was a closet in my office/studio into which I would toss things when I couldn’t figure out where else to put them. I’d been operating in this manner for five or six years, and the closet had finally reached a sort of critical mass such that nothing more could be put into it, and nothing could be removed from it without a good deal of wrestling. Much of the contents seemed to be bound together with cables: audio cables (including instrument cables, mic cables, and eight-channel snakes of both the balanced and unbalanced variety), MIDI cables, RS-232 cables, AC cables, SCSI cables, VGA cables, Macintosh ADB cables, Ethernet cables, RJ-11 phone cables, and even the cable for the Lexicon Core Studio interface which I discarded some time ago.
Click here to see something nifty. No, I don’t know who did it, or how, or why.
Hey Brian–I’m not sure that I have current contact info for you. Email me or give me a phone call. No, it’s not an emergency; just wanted to say Hi. If you remember whining at Mrs. Woody, then you’re the Brian I’m trying to reach. (Come to think of it, I don’t know that many Brians.)
These have been up for a little while but I ran across them at about the same time and thought that the juxtaposition was interesting. I’ve always been kind of fascinated by how people envision the future and whether those visions turn out to be accurate.
The 1939 World’s Fair is probably the most famous past version of the future. Wired recently put up a nice photo gallery emphasizing its architectural influences here and an article about the General Motors “Futurama” exhibit here. It’s interesting to consider the influence that this exhibit had on the next few decades of this country’s economy and infrastructure when you consider that, at the time it was on display, most Americans did not own automobiles and there was no interstate highway system.
If I’d known that this was going to happen last night, I wouldn’t have bothered posting my previous “Springtime in the Rockies” entries:
The peonies are a little unhappy about this situation:
I don’t think that they actually froze, though, so they should be okay. Time will tell.
I just learned of this excellent site, an archive of reproductions of Radio Shack catalogs throughout history. I recognize most of the covers from the catalogs issued in the early 1980s, which makes sense since I spent a fair amount of time in Radio Shacks in the early 1980s. Back then Radio Shack was still cool, i.e. it was still a useful source of electronics parts, kits, tools, etc. Sadly, those times have passed, but now I can gaze with nostalgia upon oddly familiar pages of simulated wood-grain stereo components.
I’ve put up the last set of photos from our recent vacation in Japan. It’s a collection of photos of odd bits of Engrish, food, fashion, and other things which didn’t really fit in anywhere else. Just for the fun of it I’ll provide a guided tour here. All of these photos are hosted on flickr so you can click them to find larger versions.
Food
It’s probably obvious by now that I love the food in Japan, even if it isn’t really Japanese as such. Here’s a shot of Mister Donut, Kyoto-style:
