June 2004
Saturday, June 26
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." --Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
Friday, June 25
From the Cheap Studio Thrills department:
In the corporate audio production environment that I have inhabited for hundreds of years now (or so it seems), there is usually a request for final sound mixes to be put onto a CD, in a CD player-ready format or as other types of files, such as .wav, .aiff, and others. General practice, for certain reasons, is to play the program in real time (as in, actual time of the program's length) and get a resulting file to burn onto a CD.
The following descriptive is nothing new or unusual, but is a welcome addition to otherwise routine operations.
Just lately, I've had requests for two or more different formats of the final program, calling for a time-saving solution to multiple real-time passes. As described in a previous entry, I assign (in Pro Tools) all tracks' outputs to bus 1 and 2, create a stereo Aux to receive bus 1 and 2, assign the Aux out to bus 3 and 4, insert L1 or finalizing plugin of choice, then create a stereo Audio track to receive bus 3 and 4.
Record the program in a single pass to the new stereo track, creating a final stereo master. Then, for each file format, do an Export Selected as Files, in whatever format and resolution you need. This happens in less than real time, and you can give everybody whatever they want: 16bit/44.1k for audio CD, 16bit/48k aiff for Final Cut, 24bit wav for whatever, mp3's...each in FAR LESS than real time.
Simple, elegant, hassle-free. And impressive to any clients with an inkling of awareness.
Thursday, June 17
"Many of us feel that our faith has been stolen. An enormous public misrepresentation of my religion (Christianity) has taken place. How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American?"
- read the article -
Wednesday, June 16
According to Merriam-Webster online:
fresh
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French freis, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German frisc fresh; akin to Old English fersc fresh
1 a : having its original qualities unimpaired: as (1) : full of or renewed in vigor : REFRESHED (rose fresh from a good night's sleep) (2) : not stale, sour, or decayed (fresh bread) (3) : not faded (the lessons remain fresh in her memory) (4) : not worn or rumpled (a fresh white shirt) b : not altered by processing (fresh vegetables)
frozen
Function: adjective
1 a : treated, affected, or crusted over by freezing b : subject to long and severe cold (frozen north)
2 a : incapable of being changed, moved, or undone : FIXED; specifically : debarred by official action from movement or from change in status (frozen wages) b : not available for present use (frozen capital) c (1) : drained or incapable of emotion (2) : expressing or characterized by cold unfriendliness
So: HOW IN THE HELL did the Frozen Potato Products Institute manage to convince the USDA to classify frozen french fry products as a fucking FRESH VEGETABLE???
Read it and ponder.
Saturday, June 5
For reasons I might take time to divulge in a future post, I spent last night in Cookeville, Tennessee, and did not get nearly enough solid sleep. This morning, in dire need of an external stimulant and with the drive back to Nashville in mind, I hunted high and low for a Starbucks. Any better-than-average coffeehouse would do, and as Cookeville is the home of Tennessee Tech University, I thought that surely there would be something available. Since Starbucks' primary goal seems to be total ubiquity, they were the focus of my quest. Mapco coffee was a very distant second choice.
I looked, and I looked, driving around the lovely town of Cookeville...I never found one. Not even an independent or better-than-average place. I settled for Wendy's, with half-and-half, which actually was okay and met the objective.
After returning home, I got on Starbucks' website to see if I'd overlooked it. I performed most of the search criteria, and apparently there is no Starbucks in the college town of Cookeville.
Then, I discovered I Hate Starbucks.
Friday June 4
Oops.
First, I thought I would display to the world just how forward-thinking I am, by placing an image link to no-www.org, a page that explains why putting the cumbersome, and verbally ridiculous, double-u double-u double-u at the beginning of a web address is now deprecated. (By the way, that is DEH-preh-cay-ted, NOT depreciated, as in the value of an automobile.) So, I read the instructions on how to modify one's .htaccess file on the server to make your site a Class B, and redirect any unhip browser requests for www dot yourdomain dot com, to a simpler, cleaner address minus the www.
All understood, yet they didn't explain the difference between Classes A, B, and C. So I set out to find an answer, by searching the forums at Sitepoint, an enormous wellspring of information for all things internet. I didn't find the answer I was looking for, but I did find a post by someone who had problems with subdomains not showing up after editing the .htaccess file.
See, I've been wondering why other people don't have "index.html" or something similar after their address, as displayed in the browser's address bar. I like the way it looks without it, very clean and professional. So just to see what would happen (heh, heh) I made note of what it said, then deleted the parts that said "index.cgi index.html index.htm". Then I called up the page you're seeing now, and voila, only my domain name without "index.php" after it. Beautiful! Clean, smooth, cool.
Then I remembered the post I'd just read, and thought of the five other domain names parked under mine. I tried to call one up (careymoore dotcom) and got MY main page instead. Uh oh.
Back to the Admin interface, put back the "index.cgi" part, called up the parked domain name, and got a lovely page of cgi redirect scripting. Hmmmm....
Editing again, this time putting everything back the way it was (ALWAYS write this stuff down beforehand). Still no good. Tried rearranging the orders, deleting space between them, all to no avail.
On the phone to Tech Support. "Here's what I did, here's why, I put it all back, and it no longer works." It turns out that I'd managed to leave a single whitespace at the end of the first line in the file, and that was enough to throw everything off. I couldn't tell by looking at it; you have to cursor a single space at a time to find that, and I never thought that would be an issue. Part of what I pay for each month, is to be able to call tech support and say, "Hi folks, I've really fucked something up...please fix it for me." As usual, OLM's tech support were courteous, polite, and thorough.
Hey, I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty. I'm not afraid to stick them in there and risk getting cut. That's how you learn things. Only now, I've discovered that there's a world of ways to modify the .htaccess file to one's beneficial use, so I've got new stuff to learn. I just need to be slightly more careful.
Thursday, June 3
Okay...I wasn't going to even bother with this, because I felt that if I started, I couldn't allow myself to stop until I'd exhausted all possible descriptives, and provided details I was unable to retain. Besides, I'd be essentially preaching to the choir, and there are similar missives much better than what I'm about to offer. But, at the very least, I have to mention this, just so people will know. Why? I don't know. People should just know.
I am a Todd Rundgren fan. Meaning, one of the faithful, a devoted die-hard, believing that there is no such thing as a bad Todd album, only less-than-superior ones. I don't follow the "Todd is God" line of thinking; I just think that he's one damned talented artist (player, songwriter, producer, visionary, whatever) who managed to fit right into the place where a lot of people's souls go for life's rejuvenations. I am one of those people. Todd's music and musical attitudes resonate with me like no one else's. With Todd Rundgren's music, I always feel like I'm in the place I most want to be.
See, there I go...what CORNY BULLSHIT...but true Todd fans understand.
The point of this desperate mush-babble is, Todd came to Nashville last Monday night, at the Exit/In, touring the "Liars" album. (Thanks, Todd. Please come more often.) The band consisted of Prairie Prince on drums, Kasim Sulton on bass and vocals, Jesse Gress on guitar and vocals, and John Ferenzik on keyboards and vocals. The stage set was essentially four steel-truss bordered square enclosures for each band member, with white backdrops upon which colored lights displayed in sync with the music, along with some other blocks of lights (LED's maybe) mounted in the corners of each member's station. Todd was out front. The band was in costume, keeping with the theme of the "Liars" album: Prairie Prince wore a Cardinal's suit, as in the Catholic guy, with the big robe and the big silk hat. Sultan was dressed as a priest, and Gress and Ferenzik as some type of holy men from the Orient and the Middle East. They played much (all?) of the "Liars" album, along with a few others from the past ten or fifteen years.
Todd and the band were red-hot, the light show was fabulous, and the sound was surprisingly good. Todd's occasional guitar parts were heavily reminiscent of the huge, soaring stuff on "RA" and "Oops! Wrong Planet." They encored with a classy, shuffle version of "Hello, It's Me" and "Just One Victory". There was virtually no promotion, and it was Memorial weekend Monday night, so maybe that's why the place wasn't packed full. But Joe, Gary and I were among the lucky ones.
It's kind of funny: I turned on to Todd in early '77, late to the party, and was a huge fan pretty much instantly. But it wasn't until 1989 that he finally toured anywhere close to Nashville. All the years before that, the closest he or Utopia ever came to our area would be Chicago or Florida, too expensive or difficult to try to get to for a show. Now, this makes the sixth time, in very different versions.
Okay, that's really all I can say, besides the fact that I consider myself fortunate to be a fan of someone so incredible. There are more informative reviews here; they pretty much describe the show that we saw.
Thanks, Todd...come back soon.
Wednesday, April 21
A few days ago, I was carrying window screens down from the attic, to replace the cold weather storm windows for the not-cold seasons we have thankfully entered. My hands are pretty big, and I hate needless repetition, so I had two in each hand. No problem there. But my feet are also pretty big, the attic steps are very shallow, and I was wearing some old yardwork shoes with slick bottoms. On my first descension, I didn't quite plant my foot as carefully as I should have, and slipped. I didn't go tumbling down, but landed hard on my rear end, banged my head on something (which hurt like hell), and somehow got a couple of nasty abrasions on the inside of my arms. One of them is taking forever to heal. A nasty little surprise that rattled my nervous system, and I told myself I'd make a lousy hockey player.
Then, yesterday, my next door neighbor (Michelle) was standing on a chair outside, doing something to a window, and the chair collapsed. She sustained some rather rude skin injuries, similar to mine.
I pondered on these coincidents with my wife and daughter, and posited that someone else in the area might soon experience a similar mishap. But my daughter theorized that, as Michelle and I were the second and third houses from the corner, the guy in the first house (Ray) had perhaps already suffered an accident of some kind, and it was echoing in progression up our street.
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