Never been one to let the carrier drop

https://www.tshirthell.com/shirts/tshirt.php?sku=a251

S.

A way to ask, ‘given these keywords, how many pages down would this site be’?

Just my opinion. 😉

S.

So I was listening to d&b artist radio of a friend of (see http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?songs=227247&T=9470 ) and watching some optical illusions posted by at http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_mib/index.html and I experienced my very first ever acid flashback.

Lasted about 20 seconds, and it was unmistakably the feel of tripping.. fun!

S.

[p.s. kids, I’m not saying to go out and try acid. it definately has down sides, like most recreational chemicals. Among other thngs, when mixed with sleep dep it can cause insanity in some people i.e. me..]

Good and bad today..

Went to sleep at 5 am after admitting that I couldn’t beat the computer as GLA. Dreamed that 5arah had gotten a copy of C&C generals to play me. Very strange, since I’ve never met her. Woke up to phone. evparts is moving their server back home. No complaints here – they’ve been bumping the hell outta my bandwidth cap, and I’m paying isomedia more than they’re paying me in bandwidth overages every month.

Okay, so lost sleep over that. Came home, went to sleep, and dreamed that I was installing a car stereo while driving a car.. had volume remote on steering wheel even though none of the cars I’ve ever had had.. and was trying to get to work.. then realized I was driving and paniced.. then stopped in a police station to finish the work, went inside and they had this thing where you confessed to a crime and they sentanced you on the spot.. and a giant rabbit bit my nose, and then I couldn’t see but some other animal was sinking its fangs into my face..

So, yeah. On the other hand, called Ron up, we’re gonna be hooking up some more trance jam goodness in the basement monday night. I must must must prepare a happy bizarre sample bank, which means wading through the [THUNK!] instruction manual for my new snazzy (well, used ebay but whatever) hardware sampler.

Ron likes his early christmas present though. Scott also likes his.. hopefully P. will like hers. G. got all bent out of shape when I offered to buy her a (used) Roomba because it was too expensive. My sister and dad are still mysteries.. my mom has suggested giving my dad a trip down there to go canoeing, but I did that last year..

I don’t know what’s up with me and christmas this year.. I just feel like I want to find everyone the perfect gift for some reason… like a compulsion. Something to remember me by after I’ve died of skin cancer.. 😉

[seriously, I may have to reconsider my stand on health insurance here, one of my mole-thingies shows _every single one_ of the list of danger signs for skin cancer. Great. I gave up smoking so I could die of skin cancer?? To quote Lou Reed, No good. No good at all.]

I want to listen to some Jesus Jones – not ‘Right Here Right Now’, which doesn’t describe how I feel about this moment in time politically very well in any case, but more like ‘Welcome back victoria’, which kind of does. Or maybe ‘international bright young thing’.

And I keep meaning to do a real, kickass techno version of strongbad’s techno song. But I can’t find my extra ADAT cables. I bought two extra, and I stuck them in a box in the living room, and then I moved it to the basement, and now I can’t find it. Waah. Waah.

L., if you’ve read this far, want to make some money helping to clean the studio? Can you over-under coil? 😉 [sha, right, like I ever over-under. Like I ever coil, for that matter…]

International bright young thing..

I miss songmeanings.net. And I don’t believe they’re ever coming back.. I think the music industry got to them, threatened them with nuclear meltdown if they didn’t stop providing all those lyrics in such a conveniant and non-advertising-infiltrated way. And now they’re collecting donations because hey, why not?

[let me put it to you this way: Does it really take two months to upgrade a server? No, it does not.. They’re coming back like napster came back.. owned by the man. I emailed napster like three times asking how I, as a amatuar recording artist, could share my works on their servers. No reply, no response. So I’m not paying one cent to them.. sticking with good ol’ WinMX.]

I’m offering one cookie to anyone who actually read all this.

Bleh.

Ipodary.. it turns out third party companies sell batteries for $50, and supposedly apple does for $100 though I can’t seem to find it on the apple store.. so I guess the Ipod isn’t throwaway after all.. 😉 Which is encouraging. But still, sad that apple would have ever taken the party line of, ‘Your Ipod is useless 18 months after you buy it, throw it out and get a new one’.

Not that we don’t see a lot of that in the computer industry either. 😉

http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/

I swear the first scene in this looks like a place just down 45th street..

I’m going to have to go out tomorrow and look to see if any of the signs have been .. umm.. improved. 😉
S.

p.s. anyone want to bet about whether that battery is replaceable with a dremel and some duct tape? I admit, though, Apple really ought to be ashamed of themselves..

Well, I’ve gotten christmas presents for four people on my list.

I’m a little at a loss as to what to get for the other ten or so, though.

So, journal friends, tell me what you want 😉

I’ve been having lots of fun with my intelligent lights. I’m going to put ’em on stands in the basement tomorrow, and then I can simultaneously play music and do pretty and colorful things. Should be interesting to see Ron’s reaction the first time I stab him with 1500W of white light.. 😉

Anyway, so I’ve also been doing lots of parking-meter-related stuff, moving ever forwards. And I’ve even found time to do some EV stuff. In general, I feel like my life is progressing forward nicely aside from the fact that it’s freezing in Seattle. For three days in a row, when I turned in (@ 4 am naturally) it’s been _snowing_. P. actually is spending the night because she can’t face the cold.. [well, there might be other reasons too.. one could hope anyway..]

Global warming indeed.

Must be getting warmer somewhere, but it’s not here.

My sister managed to blind herself getting lased.. (well, only in one eye and they think they can fix it.. but this makes two people I’ve heard of in the last month who had significant vision degradation as a result of getting their eyes laser corrected – kind of makes you stop and think. And then think some more. ;-)]

And I need to go to doctor [I keep developing new, and strangely discolored spots on my skin.. I’ve had a bunch of spots, moles really, as long as I can remember, but now there are way more of them.. maybe I’ve got skin cancer or something? I hope not] and to the dentist [for one of those cleaning-check-up thingies] and to a psychologist [who, me, crazy? ;-)] and then if I have any money left, I think I’ll buy a new pair of shoes..

Hmm. This is a very mundane journal entry. Oh well. Things are very mundane right now…

S.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted in this thing.. H. came last week, and he tends to demand 110% of my attention. His favorite trick is getting me thoroughly trashed and then pressing me for dates and time commitments.

At least he seems to have given up on wanting me to do 16 hours of work while he’s here, which is encouraging.

This morning I couldn’t really get myself interested in getting out of bed.. but I had to get something to the mail place before noon. I did manage (by like 2 minutes, the fedex guy came in as I was signing..) but it’s sort of alarming. i can’t get seriously interested in anything.. I just feel like going back to sleep and waking up when it’s summer again.

I did have fun last night playing with lasers and intelligent lights. With six heads, I’m getting pretty close to a nifty light show. Sadly, one of the heads sucks – I think I will auction it back off on E-bay (where I bought it). Whoever programmed the DJ-Scan 250 should turn in their programmer’s badge. And American DJ should have the firmware rewritten. It’s really horrid. You tell it to scan from one position to the other, and it thinks about it for a second, and then scans in two or three short hops – the visual effect is, hmm, irksome.

On the other hand, the KLS I-Scan 362s came in, and they _rock_. Software dimmable, which means they don’t always have to be in-your-face, a super-wide optical path that means a whole lot of light makes it to the apeture, easily focused, fast and slow strobing, really quiet operation.. I bid on two more of them. 😉

There is no excuse for any DMX fixture not to do software dimming in this day and age..

I’m thinking of writing a DMX control plugin for WinAmp [if no one has already, which would sort of suprise me] – at the very least, researching if anyone has already done so. Just imagine the coolness factor!

Okay, so maybe I can get interested in something.

Saturday I went to a rave.. okay, party, I’ve been informed that the proper word is no longer rave for reasons that have to do with vocabulary shift – kind of like hacker is no longer a good thing – anyway.. it was great. The decorations were wonderful, the sound was excellent – first class, balanced out almost exactly the way I would have done it, not pushing the amps harder than they were ready to give (well, integrated speakers, so hard to do ;-)), cool laser effects, friendly people.. I had a breif moment of panic when I discovered I knew no one there [all my friends left at 2ish] but was reassured by a really nice guy.. left at about 6a, because I was afraid if I left any later I’d fall asleep on the way home.

Some visual artifacts that I will always wonder about.. decorations, hallucinations, or somewhere in between? Anyway, it was a awesome party and I’ll be looking forward to the next one.

Gah, my angst just isn’t angsting any more. I guess that’s good. But I really did intend to write one of those I hate the world I’m going to go jump off a bridge everything is hopeless kind of entries…

So, today it’s not parking meters, but Access/VBA code. Good clean fun. Then tomorrow, back to parking meters. 😉

GOt to go see if I can find Access 97 SP 2.

and send Psyphyte her serial number, which I keep flaking on doing..