Never been one to let the carrier drop

Lately I’ve been thinking that Spider Robinson has the right approach – just assume that everything will be fine, even in the face of all the evidence that it won’t, and keep on building on the assumption that things will come togeather. I would observe that every project I’ve ever successfully built has come from a willingness to just start out with a scratch version that’s utter crap and keep on improving until you end up with something good. A certain amount of patience is also important.

Speaking of Spider, I read a short story of his yesterday that was oddly well timed for my current mental space.. ‘Melancholy elephants’ – it talks about intellectual property, and how few original songs (for example) there are.

The number-line theory that I talk about has a interesting corallary, by the way – it says that not even God, if there is one, can create or destroy information. You can move it in and out of scope for the current universe, but it always exists – you can’t get rid of it. 😉 Perhaps this is why we’re immortal?

I was once a part of a recording project to record the band Wheels of Autumn. It was a classic PC-recording gig, using a Echo Layla and a ADAT deck – 8 channels from the Layla’s internal a/d, 8 more via ADAT using the ADAT deck as a A/D. It had whatever mics I could afford, a Alesis Studio 32 as mic pre’s, and in general was done about as ‘wrong’, from a recording-pro standpoint, as you could possibly do. I used Cakewalk 9 to actually record it. 😉

That said, I went out on the net and tried to find the band that I recorded so I could listen to some of their stuff recorded ‘right’, and completely failed to do so. So, here is my recording. No money changed hands – I just showed up at a jam session one weekend and recorded it. If any of them show up and ask me to take it down, I will, but it seems unlikely at this late date.

They were good enough that the track still shines through all the things I did wrong in recording and mixdown. Somewhere I still have the masters on disk, although assembling a computer that would know how to open a cakewalk 9 project file might be tricky, and I have at least three mixing jobs in my intake hopper that I haven’t done yet.. (sorry, Mike!) so it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

Wheels is very similar to Phish and the Dead

That said, the tracks are at http://www.sheer.us/stuff/wheels_of_autumn

Here are the lyrics for ‘Headlights’:

Sunshine watched the summer end
with just a taste of snow
so it was a far off chance..
changes, they come and go..

she watched the bluebells (?)
fell to the ground to hide
the next generation would never know
of the knot that had been tied

[chorus]

Shine on, let the sun shine in, shine on
Shine on, feel the warmth within, shine on
Shine on, freedom to this land
’cause the children of the sun are gonna take a stand
Shine on..

Darkness filled the city’s heart
the people watched the moon
it came and went as hours spent
aging in the room

And of all the poeple who’ve been set free
from the darkness to the light
remembering sunrise and sunset
and the ying yang, black and white

[chorus]

[approximately 12 minutes of jam]

The was a child who came to town
with just a pencil in his hand
he drew the sun shining through the tress
he loved the sagebrush land

He showed it to the moon that night
and hung it inside of his room
the next day sunrise gave off first light
he said ‘Sister, shine on through’

[chorus]

————————————————

Good luck figuring out what their lyrics mean, but the song is wonderfully upbeat… 😉

Pictures of my current layout: http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=34398

For some reason I find playing with model trains more relaxing than most video games – I suspect it’s because there’s not much sense of ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ – it’s relaxing in the same way simcity is relaxing – and yet very challenging at the moment because I’ve got all these used cars from ebay all of which have something wrong with them and I’m learning to do micro-surgery on them

In the meantime, I’m hoping to get back to working on my car this week – the mk3eb project has been stalled for more than a month, and that’s just not good. Also I’m hoping to do more music.. I’m going to try to scale back some on work-work – not back to 80 hours, but my new attempt is going to be to limit myself to 100 hours a pay period. As near as I can figure, that will still let me pay off all my debts before December (if nothing goes wrong) and all my credit card debts by the end of July. (Again, if nothing goes wrong).

One of the things I’m looking forward to is unless something goes really wrong, my next paycheck will pay off my 31% card, leaving me with no obscenely high interest rate debts.

I’ve decided for fun to try and pay off one credit card per pay period. I won’t go into why this is difficult, but I will say that it requires enough strategy that it took me a fairly complicated spreadsheet to figure out how to do it. However, if my theories are correct, I should be able to pay off one card per pay period until they’re all paid off.. at which point I will feel $20,000 lighter. I actually think my credit cards are a major source of worry and depression for me – the fear of what awful things could happen if I lose my job..

I’d really like to have a year of operating expenses in the bank – theoretically, not that I usually like to look this far ahead – but theoretically, by the end of 2008, I will.

So, I bought some passenger cars for my train set on E*bay – they were described as ‘Like new’. The trucks won’t hold the wheels, the couplers are all damaged.. my question is, do I give bad feedback? I hate giving bad feedback.. I’ve only done it once when a $500 item completely failed to show up. [at which point I discovered that paypal’s money back guarentee is useless because it only applies for like 20 days after the transaction – and generally you give at least 14 for things to show up, so you have to apply for it inside a week or so, and then they want you to do arbitration first.. anyway, that’s the only time I’ve ever given bad feedback on ebay – but, at the same time, the trucks and couplers are clearly damaged on all four cars.. these are *not* ‘like new’.

Don’t know what to do.

*sigh*

I’m becoming one of those people who only reads the first few paragraphs of news articles. Gah. I hate this in myself.

Wow. I should have read the second page. (And not underestimated the cleverness of the GNU people.. ;-))

(as I ponder installing linux on my desktop..)

is there anywhere I can send a donation that will help the opposing side on this lawsuit?

For that matter, how does one sue ‘linux’? That’s like suing ‘terrorism’. I suppose you could sue individual distributers of it..

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/

It’s occuring to me that microsoft isn’t really equipped to deal with a protest the size of the ones that happened in Seattle before.

If I ever had any doubt that the evil empire was evil – and I admit, for a while I did – well, there’s no doubt any more.

What can I do to singlehandedly help destroy microsoft corperation? Any ideas?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7193470719293309352

is it really neccesary for singingfish to crawl my web site three times a month, downloading every single MP3 on it every time? Wouldn’t it be enough to seek to a few random spots in the file and verify they hadn’t changed since the last crawl?

I could exclude singingfish via robots, but I do want people to be able to find my mp3s.. (I should really add some id3 tags to increase the odds, I guess…)

Also, why on earth is the most popular file.. by far.. http://www.sheer.us/stuff/Cloe_MP3/Tory-060704.mp3

it’s not any different from any of the many jam files I have on the server.. except for some reason it generates several hundred downloads a month…

Strange.