Hmm, Sunday afternoon already. I could really use another weekend day. Last week was one of those stupid weeks dominated by stupid events. In retrospect I’m not sure why it was as tiring as it was, but several days ended with me feeling like I’d been busy all day and yet hadn’t really made any forward progress on anything. One of the things you discover after running a business (or two) for awhile is that a certain amount of time gets consumed by dealing with stuff that, while necessary to keep the business running, is neither interesting nor something you particularly thought about when you started the business in the first place. This stuff includes things like having three different phone conversations about one fraudulent credit-card charge or sending faxes to accounting departments that seem somewhat impaired in their ability to, well, account, I guess.
Late November Snow
IMG_0377, originally uploaded by Adam Schabtach.
It snowed enough to be photo-worthy for the first time this season. That’s a shot of the aspen in the back yard; click on it to go to my flickr photostream to see a few other snow photos.
Comparing Kyma, Max/MSP, and the Nord Modular
There’s a very amusing and informative post here [read the first post, scroll down to the third response] which compares and contrasts the Symbolic Sound Kyma DSP system, Cycling ’74’s Max/MSP, and Clavia’s Nord Modular synthesizers. I have quite a bit of experience with the latter two and have always been curious about the former. I can say that the writer does an excellent job of describing the pros and cons of the two that I’m familiar with, and has reawakened my curiosity in the Kyma system. (I ran across this post while trying to google up information on the new Kyma hardware; apparently the info was leaked and subsequently retracted from the blogs which posted it.)
Lots of cables
I’ve been using–as opposed to constructing–my modular synthesizer lately. I think I’ve had more cables plugged into it at once than at any other time in the past, so I grabbed a photo of it.
The Saddest Thing I’ve Ever Seen in a Grocery Store
Tracie and I were shocked and quited dismayed when we noticed this sign in the grocery store today:
This is truly a tragic turn of events. Mind you, I haven’t bought a package of Mother’s cookies in probably 10 year or more, but they are a prominent fixture in memories of my childhood. I won’t say they were a staple–cookies were treats, not staples, back then. I think it’s not too much of a stretch, though, to say that there was a package of Mother’s cookies in the house more often than not.
Sounds You Hope to Never Hear
There’s a sort of morbidly fascinating collection of sounds at this site. The site is a web presence for a data-recovery service named DataCent. They recover data from dead hard drives and other storage devices. Apparently as an attempt to help prospective clients identify potential problems, they’ve put up an impressive catalog of audio recordings of noises emanating from failing hard drives. The recordings of drives with bad bearings are particularly disconcerting.
(Rule of thumb, for those of you who haven’t lived around hard drives for as long as I have: if it makes much noise at all, be worried. Today’s hard drives are usually nearly silent.)
First Snow of the Season
It snowed last night, for the first time this season. It didn’t amount to much and may not have even qualified as “measurable precipitation”, but at least it made it feel somewhat more normal around here.
Something Else to Vote For
You have until December 3 to vote for the name of the baby panda at the Atlanta zoo. Go here to see the list of choices and to place your vote. Okay, yeah, it’s kind of silly. The ramifications of this vote are far less serious than those of the presidential election, but hey, he is the only panda born in this country this year.
MIDI Pipe Organ
Some folks in Edinburgh have put a MIDI retrofit on a 19th-century pipe organ. There is info and video clips here. Mostly I think it’s neat that the interest in this project led to the restoration of the organi itself.
Random Bits
Well, now that the election is over I have to go back to actually thinking about things to blog. Let’s see…
Um…
Well, okay, here’s a few random things:
It still hasn’t snowed yet. It’s been cold enough to snow, now and then, but it has neither rained nor snowed since my last weather-related posting.
I just started reading Barry Blesser’s book about aural achitecture. I’m only a chapter into it but it seems pretty good so far. It crossed my mind that I haven’t read much of anything for awhile, so I’m trying to get myself to sit down and read every day in an attempt to not look like an inept vice-presidential candidate.