Case in point here.
The Really, Really Big Picture
There’s a nice animation here that illustrates the size of Earth relative to the rest of the known universe. I should say that it attempts to illustrate that, though, since the scales involved are rather beyond our comprehension. Watch it in full-screen HD if you have the bandwidth.
(Thanks go to Chris for this one.)
Brian Eno Interview Video Posted
There’s an hour-long BBC interview with Brian Eno posted here. I haven’t watched more than the first four minutes so far, but Synthtopia described it as a “must see”. If, like myself, you don’t happen to have time to watch it right away you might want to download yourself a copy. The last time I looked at BBC documentaries posted on Vimeo they didn’t stay around long before the copyright police impounded them.
Eno’s one of my biggest–if not the biggest–musical influences and inspirations, so I’m looking forward to watching this interview.
Snow Crystals on the Front Step
Today is one of those rare days on which the weather conditions are just right for producing beautiful snowflakes. There is some magic combination of temperature, humidity, still air, cloud formation, etc. that produces big, symmetric crystals that accumulate without damage. Here is a photo of the front step:
Click that photo to see a larger version, and click here to see several others taken at the same time and location.
Another Tattoo Review
There’s a remarkably thorough comparison of three drum-machine plug-ins here. The guy compares key features of Tattoo, AudioRealism’s ADM, and Sonic Charge’s MicroTonic. As Chris said on his blog, one ends up concluding that one needs all of them, although personally I was never completely taken with MicroTonic’s sound.
Online Review of Tattoo
There’s a good review here of Tattoo. Besides being fairly comprehensive, I think it’s the first review of our stuff I’ve ever read in which the documentation is mention. I thank the reviewer for this; I do try to make our manuals both thorough and at least somewhat interesting, even though Chris tells me that nobody reads manuals these days.
Geo-Location By Mayonnaise
Many years ago, as a youngster living in Oregon, I found the following inscription on a jar of Best Foods mayonnaise:
This seemed faintly odd to me at the time. Why would one brand of mayo have two different names, and why would one name be chosen based upon what part of the country it’s being sold in? And besides, who cares? It’s just mayo, right? “Gee, honey, I love living in California, but I really wish we could still buy the Hellmann’s mayonnaise I grew up with in Rhode Island. All I can find is this Best Foods stuff.” Now that I’m a bit older and run two businesses, I’m somewhat more appreciative of the importance of brand recognition. As a kid it just seemed silly that they’d go to the length of mentioning this on their labels.
A Tale of Two Servers
A few friends and relatives have expressed interest in learning why this site disappeared altogether earlier this month, then reappeared only to be replaced by a placeholder page for several days. Here’s the story as it unfolded.
On January 2, Saturday morning, we discovered early in the day that we couldn’t retrieve our email, nor was my web site online. This wasn’t an unprecedented situation–anybody who spends any amount of time online knows that there are the occasional outages–so I didn’t think much of it at first. After an hour or so I became disconcerted. I managed to find a status message at my domain host’s site that said the server which hosted my site had experienced a RAID failure, that restoration was in progress, it might take until 11:00AM on Monday for everything to be fully restored, but that I should check my site occasionally because they expected to have most accounts restored within a few hours.
Yes, It’s Back
Mostly, anyway. studionebula.com now lives on a new, faster, better, stronger server. There are still some pieces missing, such as the entire older photo gallery, but I should now be able to resume blogging at my usual unpredictable pace.
Sorry for the interruption. I’ll provide a longer description of the transition and the reasons behind it shortly.
Morning Light on the Modular
It’s been awhile since I posted a self-indulgent gear-porn photo, so let’s remedy that:
Actually it’s somewhat pertinent in that I spent part of the weekend happily making insect-like drones with the thing, and this morning have been happily making little filtered-noise whisps and patters. I think I could spend all day doing this, but alas, other duties call.