Category: musings

My wife has a baby on the way and we’ve been attending some baby related classes to prepare ourselves a little bit mentally. The class we are in now is about the birthing process and we have heard about a number of techniques, both medical and otherwise, to make the experience more comfortable for the woman. The thing that keeps striking me as so curious is how most of the most up to date “best practices” essentially equate to just letting nature take its course and doing things the way people have done them for hundreds of years. The really curious part is that these are generally cutting edge or progressive ideas about childbirth among the U.S. medical community and are not even widely practiced yet.  How did things get so turned around such that doing things naturally is somehow progressive?

Since we last spoke I’ve spent about 4 weeks on a jury, among other things.  The jury was a great experience, even if it was tedious at times (man, the wheels of justice do turn slowly, don’t they?), and I wish people wouldn’t try so hard to get out of jury duty.  You just don’t get experiences like that every day.

I also got a new camera to play with… a Canon G9.  The official reason for the new camera is to take lots of obligatory pictures of the new baby when he arrives, but in the meantime it’s just a new toy.  The picture above is my favorite one so far.  It’s the “look I got a new camera and I went into my garden” type of picture you see all over but I like it anyway.

Whenever DreamHost has a massive screw-up of some sort, the thing I most notice about the customer response is the high level of animosity and aggression in the comments. People obviously have a right to respond to any situation in their own way, but still I can’t help but feel that some of them would benefit from taking a moment to step back, take a look at their actions, and consider if those actions are really the most effective path towards a positive solution for themselves.

Websites can be very personal in nature and it can be emotional to have something like that not functioning properly. Technical people in particular can become very frustrated when a technical issue is out of their control. They can feel powerless and in a situation like that anger is certainly an understandable emotion to feel. Still, it seems like an odd logic leap to me to go from feeling some anger inside to taking that anger and using it to fuel more anger and animosity. Ultimately, the goal in any problem scenario is to get to the solution as quickly and painlessly as possible. Obviously emotions can interfere with that but still most people can stay focused on the resolution anyway. The form that particular resolution or solution takes is obviously an individual choice.

What I see an unusual amount of online is people deciding that the best resolution for an unpleasant situation is to get revenge, no matter how much effort it takes. People decide that it’s worth hours and hours of their own time to start up ‘anti’ websites or to post message after message of spite and bile to message boards or blog comments. I get angry myself at times, but I just can’t comprehend expending so much emotional energy over something so ultimately minor. There’s just not enough time in the day.

What’s most unusual about this is that I feel like I don’t see this sort of animosity in my day to day life. When the burrito place up the street gives you a steak burrito instead of the veggie burrito you ordered, do you scream at and wish death upon the guy behind the counter? When the auto repair shop takes 3 days longer than they said it would take to fix your car, do you make picket signs and walk around outside of their business yelling at people walking past? I’m hoping not! What is it about the Internet that makes people exhibit such odd behaviors? Where does all the animosity come from?

Something got me thinking about Compute! magazine the other day and the role it played in my early computing life.

In the late 1980s my family had an Atari 800 XL home computer which had a slot for game cartridges but also had a full keyboard and was similar in ability to the famed Commodore 64. We mostly just played games on it, but it was a personal computer and not a game console. It was later replaced with the awesome (for the time) Amiga 500 but we were an Atari family for a long time before then.

Issues of Compute! had source code (usually Basic, I think) for games and other small programs that would work on all of the most popular home computers of the era, including our Atari, and my family would spend time entering them in line by line into the Atari. The source code was mostly just gibberish to us at the time so it was usually a two person job… one person reading the code out loud and the other person typing it in. It would usually take my parents and I several days to a week or more to do one of them. The programs usually ran and worked at the end but sometimes had small glitches due to typos on our part. When they didn’t run at all it was pretty heart breaking. The games were never awesome, but it was still very gratifying to see the result of our efforts and it was painful to end up staring at useless text. Towards the end of that era of my computing life I started trying to change random bits of our working code to see what would happen, too. I didn’t know then what role computer software would play in my future life, of course.

The cover of the issue here mentions a hands-on look at the Amiga 500 so it seemed like an especially fitting one to go along with this little trot down memory lane.

I was lucky enough to be part of a historic event a few weeks back. It was a test of strength, power, stamina, and courage unlike any the world has seen before. I present to you… Team Bruce Lee vs The Superheroes…

Ultimately my team, The Superheroes, was victorious. Here’s our team photos:

(Can you guess which one is me?)

On October 20 I went to an Interpol show in San Francisco, and then on the 26th I went to see The Jesus and Mary Chain. The picture here is of the Interpol show and I stole it from Flickr.

I kinda don’t really like Interpol’s latest album much at all and despite having some strong songs I don’t think I’ve managed to actually listen to the whole album without switching to something else.. there’s just something about it that bugs me… I think maybe the vocals are too loud or the songs are just missing some magic dust the earlier albums had. Eeeeeenyway, the show was still pretty great. I suspected they’d play a lot of songs from Antics and that they did.. in fact I think they may have played nearly the entire album, in addition to selections from earlier albums. I think they also played some from Our Love to Admire, but honestly I don’t really recognize those songs and I only think that because there were songs in their set that I didn’t recognize and were also not raw enough to be earlier material.

The Jesus and Mary Chain had not been part of my musical listening experience up until the show, though I had of course heard of them. They’re apparently ‘new wave’ which is a musical genre I’m still trying to get a grasp on since it just simply didn’t really exist when I was in high school in North Dakota. To me The Jesus and Mary Chain sounded mostly like just good old guitar rock heavy on nice fuzzy chords… pretty much just like a cleaner version of punk rock. I guess that might explain why some friends I have known who were into new wave later got into punk rock!

So, yeah… it was a good week for live music for me!

I’m trying to jump into this crazy web phenomenon of wanting to be ultra-connected to lots of people all the time (even though I kinda wore out that idea back in 1999)… so to that end I’m giving Twitter a try, but to really get much value out of twitter I need to have some people to follow. I’m on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dallas. Follow me and I’ll follow you.

I got my copy of the Logic Studio upgrade yesterday and had about an hour of borrowed time to play with it last night before bed. When it was first announced I was one of the people who was thinking something along the lines of “including Soundtrack is cool, but is this really IT?” The upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1 added several very useful virtual instruments so it felt like a jump to 8.0 should have also included some. I still would have liked to see some of those (maybe 8.1?) but after only an hour I have to say I am happy with the UI changes Apple has made. Logic actually feels like an Apple application for the first time in its history, and that’s a goooood thing!

The new unified window interface is pretty slick. It effectively makes window management almost completely a non-issue. In previous versions of Logic I would always use at least 2 or 3 screensets to give myself different setups… a main ‘overview’ screenset, a midi edit screenset with one arrange window and one linked edit window, and sometimes a mixing screenset with the mixer on the bottom and the arrange on the top. Now you can still do all of that but you can also quickly bring up an edit window (or mixer or whatever) without disrupting your flow and having to resize windows. It sounded like a small upgrade when I read about it, but it’s nicely thought out. Another neat bonus is the screensets menu now shows you a list of what windows each screenset has showing so you know what you’re going to get when you jump to it. I’m sure I’ll find other niceties as I play with it more, but that’s the things I noticed right away.

One small oddity I noticed when trying to open a quite old Logic file (probably made with Logic 6) was that Logic 8 refused to open it and told me I’d have to open it in Logic 7 first. I guess they decided to not bloat Logic 8 with support for converting project files from two versions back, but I’ll have to see later if I agree with that decision or not. The upgrader does leave the previous version of Logic sitting in your Applications folder with the name ‘Logic 7’ so I’m not stuck or anything. I do have to make sure to keep that old Logic 7 sitting there, though.

Overall I think it’s a nice upgrade but it is still mostly look and feel and workflow oriented. It is undoubtedly a more pleasant interface and I think I’ll be more efficient with it, but I don’t know if that will help me make better or more interesting music or not. Only time will tell, I guess!

After I spend some time with Soundtrack Pro, I’ll post some thoughts on that, too.