My Quiet Life

This article is really stupid. My first hint should have been that it was linked from the front page of MSN. My second should have been that it was titled “‘The Hobbit’”: Overrated?”.

The guy is responding to the hype surrounding the upcoming Lord of the Rings movie, and the corresponding renewed popularity of the books. So, naturally, he claims it’s all hype, and The Hobbit isn’t that great. He’s your typical “well, this is popular, so let me explain why it sucks, because I’m too cool to like it; I only listen to alternative lo-fi indie country and my shit doesn’t stink” guy. You know the ones.

So what does he find to criticize in a novel that’s acknowledged as one of the greatest classics of the 20th century? The quality of the “poetry” in the book.

Give me a break. a) It’s a fantasy novel that was written for children, and b) it wasn’t supposed to be fuckin Keats, here — The varied forms of poetry used in the novel served various purposes.. Some of it was cadence in the form of marching chants, some of it was parody.. And above all, most of it was cutesy and clever stuff aimed at a younger audience. It was totally appropriate in the context of the book, and very reminiscent of that same sort of poetry in English and other cultures.

It makes me wonder if this guy read the book at all, and if maybe he should work on dislodging the baseball bat from his rectum.

Well, we got quite a bit done the other night.. organ, piano and guitar, mostly.

We still have quite a bit of guitar organ and vocal tracks to lay down, though.

However, as a special treat to all you readers out there (um, hi Amanda!), I’ve put up two mp3s which contain unmixed, unEQed, uncompressed versions of Suzanne and Together. Okay, Together actually is just bass, drums and organ, but hey, we’re working on it.

have fun..

My company is currently looking for firewall/VPN solutions, and they are considering a Nokia solution.. While I’m sure the Nokia stuff is pretty cool, I am confident it would be foolish not to tap the resources we have around the office and not have us computer geeks just put together a powerful firewall/VPN box using something like OpenBSD and IPfilter.

Using IPSEC tunnels and firewalling with ipfilter and stuff in OpenBSD is really painless, however one of the prerequisites to incorporating a solution like this is that it has to include a user-friendly (read: idiot-proof) web-based GUI. Unfortunately, we can’t have the administration of our firewall rules rely on the knowledge of how to add and remove ipfilter rules in BSD by hand.

I’ve looked around and found a few ipfilter pre-processors, and some that use a higher level language that can output its rules formatted for ipfilter, iptables, ipchains, etc., however they all seem to be very alpha, and not very web-oriented, nor very functional.

If you have any ideas, let me know.

Wow, a whole day without making an update. And so it begins!

Well, we ran into some really annoying problems in the land of recording.

It turns out recording each drum mic track individually one at a time from the 8-track to the computer won’t work.

This is because of the variable nature of the 8-track’s motor, and the fact that it doesn’t play at a consistent speed (just by virtue of being a mechanical device). So if you record one track, go back, and record another — they don’t match up. SMPTE or MIDI time-coding would fix this, of course, but that 8-track doesn’t seem to support that stuff.

So, we are forced to just take a mix of the drums (through my bitchin mackie mixer) and record the mix as a whole as one track. This sucks, because we can’t compress and EQ the overheads separate from the kick and snare, but oh well. I did it in the mixer, and it still sounds great. We’ll just have to re-record if we want to make changes.

Problem #2 occurred when my bass was distorting going into my soundcard for some reason. I have no idea why. It’s like it’s overdriving the input itself or something.

I really REALLY want one of those 8-in 2-out soundcards. I realized I don’t need 8 outputs.. I don’t need SPDIF in/out, I don’t REALLY even need MIDI. There’s one basically like that for $199, which is dirt cheap, but I am paranoid buying a soundcard for so cheap. There’s gotta be something wrong with it.

The last thing I need is to sit trying to figure out where a buzz or hum or static is coming from only to find out it’s the actual soundcard I bought.

Anyways, that all said and done, the tracks are really sounding good. Steve laid down piano tracks on Suzanne and along with my bass, it already sounds REALLY full and dynamic, and we don’t even have guitar and vocals yet. Should be fun.

We started recording last night.

We had to rent a bunch of stuff.. an AKG D-112 for the kick drum.. a few SM57s, i think.. and two really nice boom mics.. I forget what they are.. and nice boom stands for them.. and plus we’ve already got a bunch of SM57s and a 58..

Basically for once we have enough equipment to record our drums really well. They sound fuckin awesome. Unfortunately, though, the overhead right mic on all the tracks we recorded last night was distorting and we didn’t notice, so we have to throw all that away.

Not a big deal, though. Live and Learn.

Because I don’t have a multiple-input soundcard, what we are doing is piping all the mics into my mackie mixer, to use the pre-amps, and doing the actual recording of them on daniel’s 8-track.

From there, we are just going to dump each track individually into vegas audio on my computer. It’s a pain, because we have to do one track (four drum tracks for each mic per song) at a time to record it into the computer. Slow-going, but it’s worth it. Such is the price you pay for mixing flexibility.

After that, it’s all digital. I really need one of these. Anyone want to lend me a grand?

Ben is reminded of hunt-and-peck typists he used to see in computer labs who would have one expression for concentrating on the keyboard and then another when they looked up at the screen to see what they had gotten…
Ben says, “(usually surprise followed by anger)”

Hey, Amanda put up her blog. Her blog. Blog. Blog blog blog.
God, I love saying that word

This paper makes me smile.

I just had the most annoying experience. I was buying rolls of quarters and beer at the store. I bought the beer first, and then went to the customer service desk to get quarters.

They told me I couldn’t buy them with a credit card (since, I guess it’s not really a purchase, but a currency transaction), so I went to the ATM to get cash.

I pop in my card, PIN, and get out $30. It spits out my money and a receipt, and I yank it out and stare at it, as it says I just withdrew $50.

Upon closer inspection for about 10 seconds, I realize it’s not my account number, and it was someone else’s receipt. Simultaneously, I realize it’s printing out MY receipt, and I reach for it, just as the machine sucks my card back into the machine. For good. No warning, no beeping, no suck in and out to get my attention. Nothing. No more credit card.

Of course, the bank closed early since it’s a saturday, too. So, I’m stuck without any money for the whole weekend. Except for the $30, of course. So much for doing laundry.

If ATM’s were people, this one would be a bitch.

GRAWWW!!