Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

April 4th 2003

We were supossed to leave for Portland this morning, but I needed to see the tax guy, since we’re returning on the 15th. the earliest I could get was today at 9:00 AM. So I stayed up last night late making Mitch’s singing quieter on the Aelita soundtrack. He sang La Internationale into my voice mail a few days ago. I got a recording of it (and Xena scratching like crazy) by holding a microphone up to the phone. Anyway, I fixed that, then went to bed late. Then got up to drive to Los Gatod by 9:00 AM. I thought it would take at least 1.5 hours, but it only took one. New freeways in the last ten years.
We went over to my dad’s house to burn a DVD of Aelita. He had no blank media so we went to Elite Computers to buy some blanks. Christi saw a DVD burner there and was surprised by the lowness of the price and bought it. But no software. So we went back to my dad’s house and used his software + burner. iDVD is cool. My dad and I got into a disagreement about the government. I said it was being run by defense contractors. He said it was being run by the media. Later, Christi pointed out that the defense contractors own the media. She said, “It’s rediculous to argue about whether the oil companies or the media or arms dealers are running things. They’re all the same people.”
My dad repeated his oft-stated theory that the US hasn’t won a war since WWII (because 5 years later the places are always worse off than we arrived as far as our interests go) and hasn’t had a government since the 60’s. Presumably, he means since Kennedy was shot. When I was a youngun’, I had no idea what he was talking about. We have a court system, elections, etc. Now I think he means than an elite oligarchy is running the show for it’s own, immediate interests instead of longer range national interests. He says that Rome didn’t have a government either for a while, until Ceaser crossed the Rubicon. Conservatives alwatys like to compare the US to Rome right before Ceaser or the Weimar Republic, that is Germany right before Hitler. During the Clinton years, Rush Limbaugh was always talking about how Clinton was like the last president of the Weimar Republic. Great. So what does that make Bush?
The NRA always fights gun control measures by pointing out that Hitler confiscated handguns. They say that they should be able to all have handguns without any sort of tracking or registration in case a future Hitler comes to power, they would all be armed. But the NRA would have supported Hitler. . ..
After burning a DVD, which is inexplicably titled “South Pacific,” we went home and packed and got the rest of the music together. I needed to put My Mom on an ADAT tape. I’d never used the optical output of my DIGI001 before. All of the final edits and dumps to take took a couple of horus at least. Then, we decided that we needed to get gas. Rather than look up the address of the Richmond Biodiesel station (which Christi insists will only sell biodiesel to boats) or put petroleum in the car, we drove to the 3rd street station in the City at 3:00 in the afternoon. By the time we got back across the Bay Bridge, it was 4:00. We got to Portland at 2:00 AM.

April 5th 2003

I got email from Wesleyan asking if I was going to go to school there. I wrote back and said that I anted to visit first and that I could come anytime after April 15th. Then I looked at my calendar and saw that I had to reply in writing with “yes” or “no” by April 15th. I wrote back explaining that I wouldn’t be home until the 15th and asking what to do. I’m worried that I will be precieved as flaky, but I am flaky, so I guess they would figure it out anyway.
Christi’s mom is sick. I called up my favorite Protland Digital Audio store (no sales tax) and asked about a pro-level minidisc recorder. They told me that they don’t have any with digital outs. I surfed around for a while. The cheapest pro-level sony has digital outs. I called back and asked if they hads them, they said no but the would order it. I’m not sure if they are actually planning on ordering one. Whatever. Minidiscs are cool. They don’t sound quite as good as DATs but are a whole lto cheaper and more robust and portable. My collection of recording gear continues to slowly grow. Yesterday, Elana, our 11 year old neighbor came over and was wandering around while we packed. She said we had too much cool stuff and had spoiled ourselves. prolly.

My last call to Digidesign Tech Support

this line is for registered products only.
I was helpfully reminded. The software has been out for less than 90 days and clearly falls under the warranty. sheesh. anyway. i got some work around for my problems. When protools crashes on startup (which it does about half the time, which seems to imply that it corrupts it’s preferences just about everytime it runs), you throw away all the preference files. When it refuses to play audio, which is just wayyy to frequent, well, that’s a problem with the SCSI card that talks to my CD Burner. this worked fine under os9, but under osx, i can remove the SCSI card, or I can do the work-around. The work around is to open the project file (which may or may not crash the software, see above) and save a copy of it to my firewire drive, using the save a copy command. then quit protools. then open the new copy. i have to do this for every pre-existing project that i want to edit. and for some reason, protools 6 won’t send midi out to quicktime, which means i have to go find synthesizers and plug them in to hear the midi parts. this would be find if i was recording a prog rock balland, since all the midi would be going out to synths anyway. but the midi is just there to remind me what the cello, flute and percussion are playing. it’s just a place holder. and my synths suck enough (for cello emulation, at least) that quicktime is better. anyway, i end up working with os9 protools more than half the time anyway. there are small feature improvements in PT6. Mostly, they have to do with how highlighting is handled. but all in all, it was not the best $75 I ever spent. I’d expect better from digidesign. This is not the kind of software that earned their reputation for excellence.

FTPing with Safari

I previously reported that Safrai barfs on FTPing. Not so. Safari causes your computer to mount the FTP server as a remote disk. Clearly, Safari is headed in the Internet Explorer embedded in the Operating System direction. You can also use Safari to mount a shared network drive. I don’t know how to do it without Safari, actually. But it still takes much longer to transfer ten gigs across the airport than across firewire.

Tiffany’s BART Experience

So BART was very delayed this afternoon. Computers were down and Tiffany’s train kept starting and stopping in the tube. After a long while, it emerged from the tube and the guy sitting in front of her, coughingly reached for his cell phone. this guy, who kept coughing, was sitting in front of Tiffany, near the door, facing about a quarter of the train. anyway, he called up his doctor and said, “Yeah, so I just got back from China and about half of my tour group are all experiencing the same symptoms. I’ve just got some chills and a fever and a cough. what are the other signs? *pause* Oh, well, yeah, but I probably don’t have it.” The doors opened for west Oakland and half the train car got off.
Um, yeah, so if folks can get SARS from airplanes, the can prolly get it from BART. don’t ride BART if you’re sick!!!
so we’re throwing Tiffany out of the house. No, um, she’s upstairs drinking OJ and popping echinacea.

Dreams

Last night, I dreamt that I was watching TV ads for BeOS. They were combination personal ads/pleads for people to buy the software. Like the Apple switch ads, but more extreme. All these cute hipster girls with moodlighting explaining how BeOS was in trouble and they were going to be out of a job and they really wanted to date BeOs hackers.
But I guess Steve Jobs wanted to save NeXTSTEP more than BeOS. I’ve just discovered that if you pass a FTP:// type URL to the command-line ftp client, it does the right thing. This is good because Safari seems to barf on FTP, even from Apple’s member sites.
I like electronic music because it’s as nerdy as you want to be. If I feel un-nerdy, I could go write a string quartet. Moderately nerdy, I can do something with my synthesizer. Even more nerdy, I can edit stuff with pro-tools. Or if I get nerded out, I can download source code for a MAX competitor and compile it on my machine (as soon as I FTP down the latest version of the development kit from the Apple Developer Connection) and write software to do some nerdy real-time sound thing. Not that I don’t like MAX. But it isn’t a real programming language and this new thing, made by Stanford, apparently is closer. C-sound does everything, but it’s like command-line Unix. MAX does just about everything that C-sound does, but in a hands-off kind of way, like OS9. this new thing, who knows what it is. It claims to have more access to nuts-and-bolts, making it the OSX of audio software. Will it live up to the hype? It’s cross platform. Link: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/osw. I love new software. It’s like bright and shiny objects. I see it something new exists and I think, “wow! a new thing! It must be better because it’s NEW! I’ll abandon something I know works to spend hours trying to see if this one works too!”
It’s more fun than debugging MAX code, at least.

Where do tires come from?

My car needs new ones. Are these petroleum products? Who is being killed for tire ingredients? I don’t know where they come from, but I know where they go: gigantic landfills. Two such landfills are on fire right now in California and will burn for years, inflaming asthma and reducing air quality. You can’t really do anything with them. The rubber is “vulcanized” which means you can’t shred it and melt the shreds into new tires. Sometimes they are used as ingredients in asphalt or rubber tracks around highschools. Most of them just get dumped. Also, they wear down on the highways and tire dust settles across the landscape or runs off into streams. What are the long and short term effects of this? I’ve heard that tires are one of the biggest environmental problems around cars.
Christi’s nonprofit laid of two people and cut Christi’s hours. They are trying to raise money by auctioning off a Lou Harrison score on ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2517100659&category=2331. So far, no bidders. Even though the seller has a feeback rating of zero, I can vouch for their integrity.
I went to the last evening of MFA thesis concerts at Mills last night, to get a feel for what the kids are up to. It’s one of the most prominent schools at which to study composition in the US, so I thought it would give me an idea what’s going on these days. The first student had a piece in the gym with a bunch people playing alto instruments: violin, flute, sax, clarinet, oboe, etc. The started out in a large figure-8 and walked inwards and then back out again. It was more about texture than meoldy. It was beautiful ot listen to and interrresting to watch. The composer said people could walk amongst the musicians, which I think diminished the performance aspect a bit, since I stayed seated the whole time. It guilded the lilly. But it was a beautiful piece.
The second student did something with two laptops in the concert hall. What did he do? Who knows. Maybe he checked his email while a tape played. I hope that if he were going to plan something in advance, it sould have been more thought-out tho. Also, he played a quicktime movie of a giant pound sign jiggling. For half an hour? Longer? While he checked his email. And repetititve, loud popping souns came out of the speakers. Or maybe the sound system was actually broken and nobody caught it. At the risk of seeming reactionary, I would like to bann the laptop from the concert hall. It is not a solo instrument. The program notes said the artist wanted to embrace “radical superflousness.” I think he succeeded admirably.
The third student moved us all out to the Greek Theatre, behind the concert hall. There was a large fire burning in a big pit thing. A string quartet was poised someplace up the hill from the theatre. A woman wearing black came down, read a short text and then sung it several times, circling the theatre, then the string quartet played. It was all very exciting. Then, for unknown reasons, a tape of Sun Ra started playing, looping on the part where the band sings, “Venus, Venus.” Someone yelled “Space is the Place” from a window. It was a mixed performance and went on too long. All the tape parts should have been cut. She should have stuck with the woman in black and the string quartet and the other ensemble of percussionist, singer and PVC didgeridu. I think she took everything she did while at Mills, including her homework for her introduction to recording techniques class and used it in her concert. Which, um, I kind of did the same thing at my concert at Mills, but I was an undergrad. Anyway, she was an excellent singing vioce and her quartetes were quite good and her work was not apolitical, as, I’ve heard, almost all the works presented over the course of the festival were.
So, it was a mixed bag and not at all different from what I remember as an undergraduate. I’ve heard rumors t the effect that absolutely nothing has changed. Who says you can’t go home again?

the BLO

I have an mp3 of the BLO playing the commie anthem. I coudl tell you why I haver just this exerpt, but I would have to kill you. Disk 3 exerpt. It’s short, low-fi and loud. It’s also a recording of what tuba players hear in disorganized marching bands. You could use this for a paper, if you had to.

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