Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

My Growing Collection of Rejection Letters

So I got a rejection from Bowling Green in my email yesterday. It’s not surprising, since the piece,a woodwind dectet, had some problems. For starters, part of it was in three, but is written in four. I need to fix it. I would have fixed it before sending it, but the deadline was looming and I had already put a lot of time into it. I probably should have sent a tape instead, but I thought they would be more willing to play a score rather than a tape. The key things is that the score has to be up to snuff.
Of course, I learned my lesson about doing things at the last minute. I check the email with the rejection letter even as I was rushingly re-mixing a piece for Sonic Circuits (due date: yesterday) that I had recorded the night before. Ok, so I didn’t learn my lesson. Even a little bit. the Sonic Circuit piece is boring and sounds completely different on headphones versus speakers. I delayed buying monitor speakers cuz they’re expensive, but clearly, I need them. But I went ahead and mailed my boring, sparse, flat sounding tape off to Sonic Circuits anyway, priority mail, since I wasn’t sure if yesterday was a receipt deadline or a postmark deadline. Costs of postage plus media was about $6. so it will be a $6 rejection. Not counting the cost of computer, synthesizer, headphones (but not monitor speakers) needed to make the boring CD-r.
So my real estate agent in Connecticut has yet to dig anything up. I wonder how long I should wait before becoming concerned.
Speaking of more profitable skills, the Just Intionation Calculator now opens Scala files, but it approximates cents as fractins, since this is the Just intonation calculator.
No other new news

Pride

I got more pride than I know what to do with.

We went to dyke march and got there very late. Not only had the march already stepped off, but it was almost completely gone from Delores Park. We got in near the back and noticed a very high percentage of creepy guys among us and so rushed forward to some place more firmly in the middle of the march. but creepy guys still abounded. In years past, creepy guys watched from the sides, but at least stayed out of the march. No more. And the ones on the sidelines were in about ten times their past numbers. Gross. It was bothering me a lot, so I took several swigs from Christi’s flask and felt enough better about it to take off my shirt. And then snarky, disgusting guys took my picture.
We need to take out an ad during the super bowl and it needs to say, “attention men: not everything on earth is done for your benefit. you do not own everything. some things are and forever will be completely off limits to you. cameras may be forcebly confiscated from you at some events. have a nice super bowl.”
How long now before creep dairy researches come up with ways to impregnate cows without bulls. And that research will apply to humans. and then males will be completely obsolete and need not be tolerated as a necessary evil any more. then we can start getting rid of the ones that have too big of a sense of entitlement. Maybe some mad scientist is right now working on a virus that only kills people will too much testosterone with the idea that it would be militarily useful. then surviving males would have to stay calm and non-agressive or would die of this evil virus. kind of evil virus. somewhat evil virus.
anyway, so dyke march was kind of fun. I have audio recording. Despite media reports of extra boisteriousness from the supreme court ruling, it was much calmer than usual. I heard no shouts of “show us your tits.,” but I did hear one woman complain that nobody even seemed to notice when she flashed her breasts. Also, the bill board that usually serves as a stage for women having sex or taking off their clothes or whatever was empty. I think maybe the new moon was making dykes mellow? One person was hanging out her window holding a sign that said, “Lick my pussy, it’s legal!” That was as sexy as it got. Well, except for a woman in front of me who stripped down till she had nothing on but her tatoos. then some guy appeared and was touching her, but she didn’t seem to mind and I didn’t feel empowered to eject him, since she wasn’t objecting. In short, everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
Last year, I decided to not attend the lame, corporate parade and faire again, so I didn’t. I dig being legalized by the supreme court and stuff, but assimilation is so boring. Is there a way we can have all the same rights as straight people but still be extra-hip outsiders who know how to throw a terrific party?

Well well well

during flute band rehersal yesterday, I went to the underage labor cafe and I talked to the owner about labor laws. He told me that the twelve year old only works for a few hours on saturday only, but showed up on Sunday asking to work another day and that he checked with the Employment Development Department before hiring her and there’s no problem with a getting a kid to do a few light tasks (delivering food, making smoothies, pouring ice tea) for a few hours a week. So this is apparently a lot like my plant watering job that I had at the same age.
I’ve know been exposed to every single flute song. All I need to do is learn to play them perfectly, and all is very well. I have three that are in the needs-much-more practice pile and three that are very new. This should be very doable.
Other deadlines are fast approaching. July 1st is the deadline to submit a tape to Sonic Circuits. I want to write a new song for it, but if I don’t get moving, I’m not going to. I don’t think I’ve written any tape music in 2003. It’s pathetic.
July 1st is also the deadline to do tape editting for OtherMinds’ web radio launch. Of course, I haven’t started. I’m inspired by Christi’s ability to do great editting at the last second, even though I should not be. when I was inspiried by her ability to do great homework assignments at the last second, my undergraduate advisor told me “You’re no Christi Denton.”
Speaking of the flute band, our guitarist is missing. We may need a new one. Five songs on acoustic guitar. Practice for around one afternoon a week. And a gig in Vegas in August that pays. Free trip to Vegas! woo!
Some of you have things that I’ve lent you. Books. Music keyboards. My trumpet. (why do I not know where my trumpet went? ack!) Lord knows what else I may have lent out. Please bring things back.
Also, I have many things of yours. I’m storing musical instruments that belong to many different people. I can continue to store them over the next two years, but if you suddenly decide one thursday afternoon that you need back your double-belled sarousaphone, coordinating it’s release would require an introduction via email to my housesitter. Just a thought.
I called some real estate agents today and left messages. The student housing person who would talk to me about finding a place is out today, so I have to call again tomorrow. I need to find a place soon and start packing very soon (which is why I need things back…). I need to put my things in a truck less than one month from now and drive my dog across the country. Big change is creeping very, alarmingly rapidly. If I don’t do something soon, I’ll have to live in the moving van… Oh and I just got thru to an agent! yay! The very expensive places in Middletown could be up to $800. Which is about twice what I would like to spend, but I feel optomistic. Anyway, when I go out to look at places, I’ll get an idea of what a dollar will get you.
So everything is going well well well. This morning, I realized that if the overly optomistic oncologist had been correct in his six-months-to-a-year prognosis, my mom would be dying now. I don’t think my marriage or any of my friendships could have survived it.
Speaking of marriage. Christi and I are going to elope. We’ll come back and have a very big party. You will all be invited. And then we will enter into many years of highly annoying litigation around every aspect of our government duties and obligations surrounding everything from paying taxes to god-knows-what. When I think of the legal stuff, I become alarmed, so I think that I will not think about it. Or maybe I will talk to a lawyer. or not. As my grandpa used to say, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Missing blog posts!

I posted a very detalied and interesting (well, detailed) post a few days ago and now it’s gone gone gone. It was beautiful. It had headers and sub headers. It was broken up by topic. The writing was less chopy than normal. It may have been the best blog post ever written. I dunno where it went. I suspect that the blue imac is to blame for this.
Um, so Christi’s Chapel of the Chimes Concert went well. (In my last post, I lovingly described her intense search for samples, her last minute technical glitches, her extreme mellowness throughout, her heroic restraint in not smashing any computers and more, but alas…).
Tennis Roberts has a gig on July 4th in Santa Cruz, someplace in the mountains. the planners want to set off big fireworks. hopefully, there will not be acoustical curtains up to catch fire. Just drought-dried folliage.

Child Labor Laws Were Passed for Good Reasons

The world’s most fucked up little coffee shop just got worse. The coffee has always been terrible. It’s home to the hyper-quadruple-pulled latte. (this is a bad thing. Bitter and auful and served near boiling temperature). the service is auful. At least the food has gotten better. And the guy who used to flirt with Christi and touch her hair has gone away. But the last time I went in there (everytime I go in, I swear that I will never return.), the owner had a neighborhood twelve year old working behind the counter. Making smoothies. Delivering food. Pouring ice tea. “Breaking child labor laws?” I asked him. He’s always hyper. He jumps up and down. yells a lot. Pulls lattes at least four times. “No no! It’s leagl! It’s legal!” he insisited, “As long as the parents consent it’s totally legal! Her mom consented! She consented! And it’s legal to pay them less than minimum wage! I can pay her less than minimum wage! It’s legal! Mcdonalds does it! It’s legal!”
The issue of using McDonalds corp as your moral compass aside, it is not at all legal to hire a twelve year old for non-farm labor. If parents could consent to send their kids off to work, factories would still be full of children. (but her, give the pResident time, I’m sure factories full of children are in our future. We can call them juvenile detetion centers. Or public schools. anyway…) The labor department website says the minimum fine for hiring a child under 14 is ten thousand dollars. which leads to a dillemma. When I was 12, I had a job watering my neighbor’s plants twice a week. It paid $2 per hour. It was not particularly educational, but nor was it strenous or dangerous. The nieghbor was a sweet older woman. Last time I went by my dad’s house, I saw that her place was for sale. I hope nothing has happened to her.
Hyper-Cafe-Owning Man is definitely not sweet. It seems like there is a big difference between my job for Mrs. Stevenson and the 12 year old’s job for HCOM. I worry that she’s being exploited. But maybe she’s not. Maybe she really wants or needs the job. and I dunno if she works every day or just on weekends or what.
So, do I do nothing? Do I print out copies of labor laws and slip them under the door? Do I rat him out to the department of labor? the presence of such a young person working behind the counter was making other patrons uneasy too. One smallish child asked his dad, “If we eat here, am I going to have to go to work too?”
So, while HCOM is clearly a bad guy, the folks working for him are not. If he goes out of buisiness from fines (which he may sorely deserve), they’re all out of jobs too. Of course, if he replaces them all with little kids, they’re out of work anyway. What do you think? Leave comments, please

Surreal Spam

Found in my inbox

Greetings,
 
We need a vendor who can offer immediate supply.
I’m offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is
(Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment) Contact details
of vendor required, including name and phone #. If they turn out to be
reliable in supplying the below equipment I’ll immediately pay you
$5,000. We prefer to work with vendor in the Boston/New York area.

  1. The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a
    series wrist watch with z60 or better memory adapter. If in stock the
    AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction
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    Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI
    accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be
    great if reliable models are available
  2. The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor
    with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete
    jumper/auxiliary system
  3. A reliable crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup.

If your vendor turns out to be reliable, I owe you $5,000.

More on Lattices

JJiCalc now plays sounds via lattices. This is supossed to be very useful. The code I wrote to do this is ugly ugly ugly. But it works, and as my old boss used to say, “worse is better.” I’ll make it more wonderful soon. But in the mean time, you can download it and it will work, ugly or not. Mac — Everything else.
Just for fun, try entering a pythagoran tuning lattice and watch it draw a long line.
All improvements are mine. all bugs are from the other guys.

Pythagorean tuning lattices

Pythagoras really liked threes. A lot. You probably remember this from school. What they don’t tell you in grammer school is that the tuning ratio 3/2 is a perfect fifth. Pythagoras is creditted with discovering that. The story goes that he walked into a shop where metal smithing was going on and the smithing was very consonant and melodic sounding. He ordered the smiths to switch hammers and pieces of metal. In his experiments, he discovered that the tuning was not in the arms of the smiths or in the hammers, but in the strips of metal they were hitting. Somehow, he got from this discovery to 3/2, which is obviously completely perfect because it has a three in it and three is the most perfect of all numbers. Pythagoras really liked threes
Alas, it was downhill from there. You may recall the circle of fiths. It leads around to every note in the scale and is a nifty trick for remembering sharps and flats. So, theoretically, if you really liked fifths, you could tune every fifth from the fifth below it. The fraction for note N = 3/2 * (N-1). So the first note is 1/1. The second is 3/2. the third is 9/8. The fourth is 27/16. The fifth is 81/64. Every note is 3^^x/2^^y. This tuning was invented by Pythagoras and the list of notes you get from it it called a Pythagorean Tuning Lattice.
Not really a very good tuning system, but one used for hundreds of years. Anyway, Kyle Gann wrote a paper on tuning for beginners: http://home.earthlink.net/~kgann/tuning.html. In it, he says, “Equal temperament could be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and processed sugars and watching violent action films.” I knew it!

Weekend Update

There have been various improvements made to JJiCalc. I could tell you what they were, but I’d have to go look at CVS logs. Christi says that I’ve been very forgetful lately. This is true. She wants me to go see a doctor. Hrm. Forgetfulness = sign of brain tumor. Has my personality changed? Yes, she says I’m nicer. She says that it’s probably just that I’m distracted by other things. I have very sharp, clear memories of things from several months ago, but yesterday is fuzzier. Polly, of flute band fame, says that memory is linked to emotional engagement. So since I don’t care as strongly about small things as I used to, I’m not remembering them. Maybe I should carry a ntoebook.
The big news around here is that Ellen said yes and will be house sitting starting in October. Christi is apparently planning on staying around here until October, something she says that she told me a while ago. So I will be going by myself out ot the big, scary, new east coast and grad school. How can I be co-dependant when I’m alone. I need to remember to write my address on my person someplaxce everyday so that I’ll be able to find my own way home.
Christi’s dad was in town yesterday, catching defenseless abalone. He gutted three of them in my front yard. The dog was very happy about the proximity of abalone innards, but was ultimately disappointed. Ken is coming back next weekend. He apparently doesn’t approve of Christi’s new tatoo.
While he was here, we went to the Berkeley farmer’s market, where he purchased soap made out of the kind of tree that he just wrote an Enviromental Impact Statement about. He says that the soap is not impacting the tree population and the tree is not endangered. While he and Christi relaxed in the shade, Tiffany and I wandered over to the next block where the psychic faire was going on. We got our auras healed. Afetrwards, I asked the person waiving her arms around if my aura had been badly in need of healing and she said that she hadn’t read it. How do you heal something without looking at it? Anyway, apparently my aura now only contains my energy and nobody else’s. What if you want somebody else’s energy? My aura could do with some energy that can keep track of things better. Tiffany and I told Christi and her daad that we signed up for aura healing classes, but neither beleived us. And then Ken went home.
Gay marriage is apparently legal in Canada, even for Amerikans. Christi and I will be heading there very soon to tie the knot. It’s very exciting. Details will be forthcoming. (I know, you all knew it was legal a few weeks ago, but I forgot…)
I’ve been listening to Polly’s (of flute band fame) three songs over and over. It’s probably why I can’t remember anything. It’s getting tangled in lyrics. Gay marriage is legal no longer rosy fingered dawn.. anyway, it’s helping my ability to play the songs. and remember them. i’m not good at multitasking. i can memorize the songs, or i can be able to find my own way home, but apparently i can’t do both.
I had Tennis Roberts rehersal today. I burned some three song demos and gave ’em to Chand cuz Chand has friends in the music biz. Hopefully, we’ll get some gigs out of this.
And today was fathers day, so Christi and I headed down to Cupertino and had dinner with my dad, my uncle and my brother. I didn’t know what to get my dad, so I got him a small statue of Chairman Mao. I think he likes it, but I’m not sure. He clearly thinks that Mao was a bad guy and is talking about collecting statues of other bad guys like Stalin. Hopefully a joke. My dad says that Donald Rumsfeld talks in haiku. All his short statements break into haiku format. I’m skeptical.
Although many other things may or may not have happened around here, I have nothing else to report that I can recall. If I don’t get better about recalling things, I might make an excellent republican candidate for high public office. Or not. tomorrow is Christi’s birthday. She’s turning 27, but apparently has been telling people that she’s turning 29. Not on purpose. (I’m not the only confused person in my household. Maybe we have ergot poisoning… A witch! A witch!) and I’m starting working on cleaning up the Lattice feature in JJiCalc. I don’t get it at all. I think I might know what a tuning lattice is, but how the program deduces them, maps them, deals with them, etc, I don’t get at all. All I can tell is that it’s mostly illegible and it doesn’t play notes. I think a lattice might be a two dimensional representation of an N-dimension array. This is not a problem that I had ever given thought to before. Maybe I need to read a math book about graphing hypercubes. Anyway, I’m at a point where I should probably go put up a web page and recruit other programmers to come fix these problems that I don’t understand.

DarkStar Sierra: Come in, Come in

Don’t ask me what this subject line is. It has something to do with an angry airplane.
JJiCalc now saves and opens files. It’s very exciting. Right click (or control-click) on the link and select “save link as” or something similar to that: Tar Gzipped or .sit (Mac!!). These links are compiled only. If you want source, you need to go to Source Forge and then sign up to join the project. Ok, you can donload source without joining. but if you want source, then you ought to want to join. There’s no real webpage for the project yet. I need to figure out how to do that. on the one hand, it seems like it’s more useful to fix saving and loading files. on the other hand, nobody can sign up to do thigns and fix other stuff if I don’t make the page.
Speaking of saving and loading files, I was unable to salvage any of the tuning files that came with the original source. I need tunings! Chromaic tunings. Utonal tunings. Otonal tunings! 7-limit tunings! Dorian tunings! Pythagorian tunings! More tunings that you can shake a stick at!
You (yes you!) could be a contributor. Even if you can’t code! Just download the program and then go find some tunings. Eneter the tunings into the program and save them. Then, if you want to join the project, you can check them in. If you don’t want to figure out how to join the project, you can mail your tuning files to me and I’ll add them with a project with a note that you (yes you!) are the fab person who inputted the tuning. I don’t actually have very much tuning knowledge. Very little, actually. Fixing loading and saving files is not increasing my knowledge of tuning, only of file I/O. So, it would be good if people with tuning knowledge did the tuning files part.
tonight is mitch night. I should go practice some bass quitar. reveal yourself to me, i am tacet blue. In the time I spent typing this post, I listened to the evil three songs at least twice, probably three times. How long will it take you to read it?