Category: Uncategorized

General blog stuff.

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Wow, time flies. I could offer a lengthy explanation of why I haven’t managed to post anything for four months, but it’s actually a pretty short story. First, I’ve been working a lot–“a lot” as in 6-7 days a week since mid-December. I’ll have more to say about that project soon; it’s the Audio Damage sequencer which we showed at the Trash Audio meet recently. Second, most of March and some of April became devoted to caring for ailing cats. That in itself is a long story which frankly I’m just not inclined to write up. Let it suffice to say that instead of taking our customary spring vacation in Japan, we spent a week making twice-daily visits to one of our cats at the specialty hospital while he recovered from a life-saving surgery, then several more weeks of helping him recover at home, followed by another week of helping a different cat recover from dental work. No, it wasn’t fun; yes, it was very expensive. But our cats are our family, so (as the saying goes) whaddya gonna do?
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that I’ve got some posts planned for the near future (say over the next week or so, realistically). The first one will be snapshots from the Trash Audio meet. read more

Typography of the (Past) Future

A phenomenon which has long fascinated me are visions of the future from the past. Since we’re now well into the second decade of the 21st century, we’re living in what has been considered the future for, well, all time up until now, I suppose. More to the point, though, when I was a kid–which was squarely in the time of the Apollo space missions–there was a good deal of speculation about what the future might hold, and it was entirely implicit that anything after the year 2000 was definitely the future. So, now that we’re living in what used to be the future, it’s interesting to look back at what we used to consider futuristic. The 1939 World’s Fair is possibly my favorite example, but obviously any number of science-fiction books and films are also artifacts of speculation. The film 2001: A Space Odyssey was possibly the most influential on me since I saw it at a somewhat tender age and it was (I think) the first sci-fi film I ever saw. (In fact, the first time I was taken to it–by my parents, at a drive-in, when it first came out–was too tender an age. The opening scenes of early humans frightened me so badly that my parents had to take me home.) read more

Makeover Time

Yep, my (long-neglected) blog is getting a facelift, courtesy of the Customizr theme. Stuff will probably be somewhat in disarray for the next few days (at least) as I tinker with it.

2013 in Review

I’m not gonna get carried away with a massive examination of the previous 12 months, but enough things happened in 2013 that a bit of retrospection seems appropriate. Any of the following items are worthy of a blog post in themselves, some have been detailed here previously, but many haven’t been mentioned here. I think the cumulative effect of it all knocked the wind out of my blogging sails.

In no particular order, here are what stand out as the most significant events–on a personal level–of 2013. read more

We Are Sans Email

Due to a couple of computer disasters, Tracie is currently without email and my access is severely impaired. I’m so frustrated that I don’t even want to talk about it; let it suffice to say that yesterday was the second worst Christmas Eve I’ve had. (The worst, should you be curious, was last year’s, during which I watched helplessly while Tracie was doubled over in pain in the waiting area of a hospital pharmacy due to trigeminal neuralgia.)

So, if you need to get ahold of us, use the phone or Apple Messages. Hopefully I’ll have things sorted out by tomorrow, but it’s Christmas, after all, and there’s things I’d rather do than wrangle computers. read more

Tokyo Desu

We’ve been back less than two weeks and I miss it already. I recognize almost all of the locations in this video: