Spent a few hours carving/painting/attaching new black (sharp) keys for the piano today, woot. Also started tuning it. I ended up killing my fingers (blisters and whatnot) since I lacked proper tools, but it started to take shape. I didn't break any strings, even (though Biderman did, haha). So this evening I ordered a tuning kit, to aid in this venture. I know, I should just hire a professional, but A) I'm not sure if this piano is worth it and B) I'm going to wait until the piano is in a (more) climate controlled environment. Tuning wouldn't last long where it is now. But tuning it myself is proving to be very fun, and you get some really weird sounds at different times, when you have each of the strings for a note off the right amount, the harmonics are really fascinating. Anyhoo...

Recordings:

crapaloneacoustic

2 Comments

woot, made this page look like the pictures pages etc. fun with php. that is all.

Oh yeah, I also posted the Mac versions of Winamp on my code page, since nobody else seems to distribute them. Not that anybody would really want to use it, but a few people might find it entertaining.

7 Comments

Been flying my F-27 more, so much fun. Tried increasing the throw even more 
today, but it was too much, and the servo/radio combination didnt have enough
precision for me to fly as smooth as I'd like-- which is a shame, cause the
snap rolls were fun.

When Francis was in town we got a Slo-V (made by Parkzone as well), too. We
didn't get to fly it while Francis was here, but I managed to yesterday, and
while it is in fact very slow, it's also very underpowered. At 65F 80' above
sea level, it doesn't seem to have enough power to get out of ground effect!
I don't think I ever got it over 15' up (ground effect is usually 2x the 
wingspan, right?). It does travel nice and slow, though. Anyway...

I picked up a free piano off of craigslist last night (thanks for the help, 
everybody).. Going to start fixing it up a little. And then once it's
somewhere that is more temperate I will have it tuned/etc. Starting to make new
tops for the sharp (black) keys, using some spare basswood lying around. 
If anybody has any good resources for piano parts, let me know. 

A terrible little jam I made with the new piano is here.

3 Comments

freeform jam with brenfrancistoqer

steamingpileofpoo

Somehow I managed to get up at 7am today, drink some coffee, and do a bunch of
things.

A year ago I bought little foam R/C ready to fly parkflyer from parkzone, 
called the F-27. Today I finally got my shit together and went to fly it. 
And much to my relief, I still had it (it being R/C flying skills, heh). Was 
quite a bit of fun, and that plane is so light and has so much surface area
that it's really quite entertaining, you can get it moving and then burn off
so much speed nearly instantly. So after my first couple of flights (at a 
baseball field in Potrero), I cranked up the control throws and went to 
Golden Gate Park, in the wind, and flew it some more. Fun fun yum yum. When
parkzone's 3D flyer comes out, I'm so getting one.

We had a pretty good rehearsal/arranging session today, too.  A big difference 
from the nearly 4 hour drunken jam on sunday.  I have to say, I've found that 
after playing a lot in NINJAM, playing in person is so much easier. In many 
ways, NINJAM makes for good practice (like training at high altitude, etc).

Recordings:

freeform jam with brenchr

5 Comments

freeform jam with brenausjoshkevinbiderman

The stuff going on in New Orleans (and the rest of the gulf coast as well) is
just insane. All of the articles I read end up really fucking with my mind.

There's shoutcast streams up of police scanners in the area, so we had some
little NINJAMs to them. Which was a very strange experience, listening and 
adapting. Wishing I could do something to help. Here is one 22 minute segment.
Complete with Brennan ranting on shit.

Having said that, we all can do shit to help, at least somewhat.
If only we had some real leadership who could take control of this mess.

I hate how everybody is all like "let's not make this about politics now" but I
mean really, when is it ever a good time?

Sigh. An extra $200 billion would go a long way in the coming year, too bad we 
already blew it somewhere else.

Oh yeah, and Top Gear is on the discovery channel now. Such a great show.
Interesting, funny, well shot, and just plain awesome.  The guys who make it 
seem like they must have a fucking awesome time doing it.

1 Comment

freeform jam with brenchr

Just spent a bit making NINJAM run with ALSA on Linux. Had most of the code
written, just had to write a little glue. Works great, yay! If anybody wants
to test, let me know. You'll need to be comfortable compiling things on linux,
and have libasound and libvorbis installed, among other things. Should be 
releasing this version on NINJAM.com later this week or maybe next.

The other thing I'm going to be doing (which is sort of porting) is making a
native win32 GUI for Jesusonic. It should actually be pretty easy, though a 
touch time consuming to do, but will be very awesome (and make Jesusonic very
usable for most people, vs. only people who love text mode). Oh, how I will 
love it in embedded DX plug-in form, too. If it works out well, I'll do a 
Cocoa UI for the Mac version as well, making it much more usable for Mac people
(the current Jesusonic Mac version is really quite pathetic, having to run
in terminal and all). The first step of doing all of this I did last night,
while slightly tipsy, which was seperating out the UI-specific code from the
backend effect code. Was pretty easy, too. yummy.

3 Comments

Well let's see, it has been some time since my last post. Let me enumerate
things:
  * Been improving autosong.ninjam.com, which now has elite things such as
    ratings and whatnot. Some decent music in there, and tons of it!
  * Brennan, Christophe and I began practicing again, for a show we plan
    to have near the end of October.
  * (Sorry, ladies,) Allison and I got married a month ago (yay!).
  * Wrote some crappy lyrics for some music I made a while back, here's Bob 
    singing it.
  * Bob also sang a great version of the other song ("Sentry"), available here.

AND MORE! Err...

4 Comments

freeform jam with brenchr
pundits badvox

bladitty

girlinportland

freeform jam with kevin

freeform jam with kevin

I mean really, if a beach ball bounces up on stage, what do you do? Stop playing, complain, 
complain about the promoter who had their logo on the ball, then make the 4000+ people who
paid you $40 each for a show wait 5 minutes as a penalty? Stupid bitch. I mean really. If it
fucked you up, that's understandable, just be cool about it (which in fairness you were later,
once a guy got on stage). 

It happened during that terrible doorbell song, which was a plus, but then when you came back
on stage after 5 minutes (5 minutes in which I nearly left), you started over playing that
painfully crappy song. Don't make me suffer twice, too.

For someone who talks so much shit about "all analog" and everything, you seem to be going
a little bit too complex and digital (I mean really, a drum trigger that plays a guitar sample?). 
And you've finally succumbed to the "guy singing on piano is cool" wagon, too, it seems. *sigh*
Not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just that all the talk gets old.  

The opening band was pretty decent, though...

12 Comments

So I finally got an Athlon64 X2, and whoa, I love it. I had to get a cheap
PCI-E video card, though, because the integrated video didn't like the dual
core chip AT ALL. Was sorta a pain in the ass, but it's all good now (though
I'm out another $60 for a crappy X300SE). Whenever I'm running lots of stuff
(including autosong which loooves to chomp CPU) and I see the combined CPU 
use go above 50%, it makes me giddy. And everything UI stays so reponsive.
The other big thing that I appreciate is when some buggy application with
a high priority thread chews 100% CPU, I can still kill it trivially. This
has already saved me a couple times today. On a sour note, it seems my little
ST20G5 is slightly noisier with the added load of the second core and the 
video card (which is passively cooled, though), but is still quite quiet.
I've just gotten very spoiled.


songwriting

August 12, 2005
I started writing some lyrics for some music I wrote a month or two ago
("sparseish") today. Once I have inspiration for a song, and the music
done, I find it pretty enjoyable to write the lyrics themselves. Now if only
I could sing. Oh well, I'll enlist other people to help. Or wait, tons of 
people, maybe even. Here are my two initial versions crappy and crappier.
Here are the lyrics as a text file. If you want to sing on them, go for it,
just send me a copy. :)

Just note that you should take liberties with the timing, melody, and the lyrics
themselves (I'm really interested in what other people will do).

3 Comments

too addicted. way too addicted. that and jet lag, I guess.

in other news, there's other news, but I'm not going to post it here
just yet, because, err, I dunno why.

Recordings:

freeform jam with kevin

3 Comments

...and a happy birthday to my sweetheart.

This blurb is surprisingly shallow and shortsighted given the time spent by various people 
talking to the author. Maybe it was his editor's fault. At any rate, I'll take credit for coining
the phrase "fake-time" and point out that it's a feature, not a criticism. And that NINJAM has more
than a slight delay, but a huge delay--presumably, the other software/service/vaporware mentioned
has a "slight delay". Nevermind the other huge differences-- NINJAM working with actual audio 
streams, free software (as in speech), etc. I know it's just a blurb, but hopefully people will
investigate to see the truth. 

The other thing that bugged me was the use of "critics". Personally I haven't heard anybody be
too critical of NINJAM (i.e. haven't gotten any negative feedback, just positive and suggestions). 
At least, nobody who's actually used it. Some people who haven't yet will say "oh that sounds 
like it would be terrible", but everybody who has used it seems to enjoy it tremendously.

It's really a hugely addictive and fun form of entertainment.

Anyway... off to drink and eat a lot this week. woohoo.

8 Comments

lettertrack

Terrible is this. Not only is it stupider than stupid, they 
misspelled Shawn Fanning.

Saw some of Beck's show last night at Bill Graham Civic. I guess I've been 
spoiled by bands like Dungen, The Pixies, and Radiohead. Bands that know how
to do a proper live show. Beck's was just uninspiring, which I should've 
predicted, having seen him play SNL recently. And what's with the useless guy,
anyway? I can see the humor in it, but only to a point. What a lot of crap.
And all of the music, at least the parts not just played as samples by a guy
hidden way in the back, was a bit lacking in energy and execution, compared to
the album versions. It seems either Beck isn't that great of a guitarist, or
just doesn't try when playing shows... (OK so the tons of drums up on stage was
cool, but I didnt feel like they were properly used, and Beck doing his own 
little playing of them at the end of a song was kinda pathetic.. ugh)

Anyway. We've released NINJAM as GPL software. Yay. Rejoice.

The power supply for my Shuttle ST20G5 died. Their tech supprot number won't call
me back, so hopefully I can manage to order a new PSU for ~$60 from their sales
office sooner rather than later. They were supposed to email me a order form, 
but I'm still waiting for it (hoping it's taking its sweet time coming through
the spam filter).

Bleh.

Recordings:

how i feel now

7 Comments

freeform jam with craigbiderman

Today, I put together new NINJAM and Jesusonic software releases. Yay.

The Jesusonic release is just a bunch of updates that I never really released,
and some fixes that come in especially handy for NINJAM (the drum sequencer
is a lot more advanced now, and less broken).

The NINJAM release updates the Mac client with a better connection dialog 
(I think that's about it!?), and the Windows client with a bunch of updates,
including an installer and bundled Jesusonic effects.

4 Comments

loneparasite reprise

Dear bands who open for small big name acts in San Francisco,

Please, if you don't already have them, get drums.

I know, you see people like Tori Amos get by with just an amazing voice and a piano,
or Thom Yorke with a guitar and a wonderful sense of rhythm (among other things), and
think -- I can do that too! Get back to the basics, none of this modern stuff. Like
having some celtic singing style somehow mitigates the need for percussion! Let me
tell you, you're NOT pulling it off. There's a reason that the standard drum kit has
caught on. IT'S GOOD. USE IT. AND USE YOUR TOMS, TOO. Beating two peices of wood 
together, or worse yet random items found on the street, isn't cutting it! Really!

I don't know how these bands end up getting booked as opening acts. I guess the selling
point is that they don't have as much equipment to move or set up.

That is all.

BTW, Dungen was fuckin awesome, equipment failures and all. Wish I could see them again.

1 Comment

Finally, NINJAM is out! NINJAM is a software suite that 
allows groups of people to play music with eachother online.

Now I'm going to eat dinner and go see Dungen tonight.

2 Comments