Rambling

I realize that postings here have been a little sparse recently. I guess I haven’t had much to say lately. Here’s a post that doesn’t have much to say either.

I was reflecting upon how it’s been 25 years since the Macintosh made its debut, after its eyebrow-raising advertisement ran during the Superbowl. 25 years later many of the user-interface concepts that were made popular by the Macintosh, such as moveable windows, pull-down menus, icons for files and folders, etc., are still in use, virtually unaltered. (Note that I said “made popular”. Apple didn’t actually invent most of these concepts, nor was the Mac the first product to use them.) Contemporary computers are faster are more colorful than the original Mac, but fundamentally they’re not all that different. On the other hand, the Mac was very different than any computer that was around 25 years before it. So if we’re all ostensibly being carried along by an exponential curve of technological growth, why have computer-human interfaces stayed more or less the same for the past 25 years?

I’ve been messing with an evaluation copy of Noatikl. Like its predecessor Koan, which I purchased many years ago, it has some excellent concepts for algorithm composition unfortunately bound up in a somewhat awkward implementation. I’m currently of the opinion that its MIDI output isn’t 100% kosher; see this thread. However, the author did fix the first bug I found admirably quickly. I’ll spend some more time with it and then decide whether or not to buy it. Coincidentally, Cubase 5 has a new MIDI monitor tool. (Why didn’t they put in this feature 10 or so years ago?) My copy of Cubase 5 is already en route from audioMIDI so it will be interesting to use the monitor to take a look at Noatikl’s output.

Be glad that you’re not moving. “Moving always sucks,” I’ve said since my college days. Chris and his wife are moving from Mill City to Portland, OR. I never could quite figure out why anyone as worldly as him would want to live in Mill City anyway, although they did seem to like it for awhile. In any case, they’re now trundling carloads of stuff from one place to the other, and we all (or most of us, anyway) know how not fun that is.

I’m in awe of the power of eBay. I advertised my Omega 8 synth here and received no inquiries. Chris mentioned it on his blog and I received no inquiries. I posted an ad on the AH mailing list and received no queries. Finally I put a fixed-price-OBO listing on eBay and it sold for my asking price in about 12 hours.

Peet’s is winning me over from Stash Tea. I’ve been a Stash drinker since high school (which means, uh, over 20 years) but some snippy person at their order-fulfillment service annoyed me recently, so I decided to try Peet’s tea and ordered five tins of their loose teas. Their “Pride of the Port” is currently my favorite, although I have several tins yet to try. Overall I think that the quality is a bit higher than that of Stash teas. On the other hand Stash has a much better selection of green teas, so I’ll probably still buy those from them. (On a third hand I haven’t finished the green tea that I brought back from our last trip to Japan. It is so much better than anything Stash sells that the comparison is kind of laughable, so I may just obtain my green tea in that manner henceforth.)