Jun 2003
Fri, 27 Jun 2003
RIAA Sues Downloaders
Cary Sherman of the Recording Industry Association of America said, "There's no such thing as a fee lunch."
Did he really say that or am I seeing things? The irony is not lost on me. Anyhow, here's the original article and a screenshot. I'm sure they'll fix the brain-dead editing before long.
Posted at: 10:16 | permalink
Tue, 24 Jun 2003
Motorcyclist Survives Deadly Accident
I've ridden route 322 from Franklin to Clarion occasionally. I often wonder about the randomness involved in accidents. Somehow, the surival of this motorcyclist doesn't quite seem random.
Posted at: 07:02 | permalink
Wed, 18 Jun 2003
Funk In A Nutshell
I've been watching all this talk about funk on Sam Ruby's weblog and while it's catchy, I thought it might be useful to explain the somewhat intuitive, but elusive nature of the word funk. Of course, I am a musician. You would expect me to say something like this. Worse, I am a drummer. That makes me a weird musician. So here goes:
When we look up funk in the dictionary, what we find isn't exactly elucidating.
An earthy quality appreciated in music such as jazz or soul.
Uhh, yeah. No words could adequately explain what 30 seconds of George Clinton would hammer home. So what is it that makes funk, or makes music funky, or so special and different from any other music?
The essence of funk lies in the art of surprise. When we say that something is funky we're really saying that it's surprising - in an odd, paradoxical sort of way. Funk music does this with patterns.
We have a strong psycho-acoustic tendency to expect a pattern to repeat. A drummer creates funk by introducing a pattern - a bar of music - something as simple as...
boom thwack boom thwack
and then introducing a variation in the pattern:
boom thwack boom thwack boom thwack boom (space) TWHACK (space) boom thwack boom thwack boom thwack boom (fill) (REPEAT)
It's that space, the resultant displacement of the beat, and the recapitulation of the original beat, that makes it funky - surprising, titillating. The mind begins wondering what the next surprise is going to be. The mind feeds off of these surprises. The better the drummer, the funkier the variations, the greater the effect.
This has been taken to extremes by practitioners such as Dave Weckl with Chick Corea's band. Dave developed a system of displacing beats such that it sounded as if the meter had changed but the reality was that Dave was playing his own psychotic boom thwack against the band while they were still a half beat or so behind him. This created some really wacky funk, comprehensible mostly by people who are into jazz fusion. Dave would then shift back the time in a few bars and the listener's mind would go "AH HA! I get it."
That's not the whole story. The very timing of beats within funk music is also very important. That is, if the time is constant, as if set by a metronome, each player in the band is not playing to exactly the same metronome. Rather, there are extremely slight variations in the placement of each player's relative time that cause the music to sound the way it does. This becomes very important in the relationship between the bass and the drums. Musicians refer to this as the pocket or being in the pocket or having a deep pocket. Similar effects can be observed listening to Ringo Starr play with the Beatles.
In this way, virtually any music can be funky by introducing the art of surprise and some tricky timing. So there you have it, the essence of funk in one easy lesson. If it were only that easy to do!
Posted at: 12:05 | permalink
Tue, 17 Jun 2003
Brain Salad Surgery
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that Pennsylvania's senate voted to repeal the motorcycle helmet law and the bill moved to the house. I've always enjoyed the sight of spilled monkey brains on the road so I'm looking forward to the house's rubber stamp. So, how long before we roll back seat belt laws? No matter, Darwin has a way of prevailing.
Through the miracle of google, we can see where this leads before it even starts. Note, the search includes only four terms: motorcycle not wearing helmet. There is no tom-foolery going on here. Google knows that semantically, "not wearing helmet" and "death" are related. Also, keep in mind that there are nearly 100 matches on this search in the last month alone!
Yesterday, I was out on the SV making a left turn across a fork in the road. Two Harley riders were coming toward me in the opposite direction from the fork. The one closest to the middle proceeded to turn his head exorcist-style, while still moving and drift through the stop sign while crossing the double yellow line into my lane. I swerved to the edge of the road to avoid him. Had I been driving my car, he'd be in the hospital. Without a helmet, he'd likely have a fairly severe head injury. That maneuver was a case study in bad motorcycle technique. 1) Failing to stop for a stop sign. 2) Turning head without keeping wheel straight. 3) Riding into oncoming traffic. 4) Both riders were wearing half-helmets and no protective gear. But he lived to impale himself another day. Maybe he'll get lucky and be able to do it without his helmet.
Mike Seate of the Pittsburgh Trib-Review has a good article on the subject.
Update: Mike Seate's got another piece on the subject and Michael Miller has one too - both from the Trib-Review.
Dress for the fall, not for the ride.
Posted at: 07:51 | permalink
Fri, 13 Jun 2003
The Number of the Beast
If these politicians are really serious about eradicating roads that bear the numbers 666 they're going to have to work harder because a few thousand miles from the southwest, we've got this one and I'm willing to bet it's not unique.
Posted at: 07:53 | permalink
Wed, 11 Jun 2003
Zoning The Amish Into Extinction
There are probably more psychotic maggot zoning boards across the country than there are horses.
Posted at: 16:11 | permalink
The Long Slow Decline
It'll be curious to see whether trends in US unemployment lead to the same place that the Japanese have gone. [Fortune and MSNBC, respectively]
Posted at: 08:46 | permalink
Tue, 10 Jun 2003
I'm No Mechanic
So when the PCMCIA bus on my venerable Inspiron broke a couple months ago, I resigned myself to being without a laptop until I found a good deal on a new one. Well, for some strange reason, I decided to disassemble the Inspiron this morning. After I got the myriad of odd-sized screws out of the bottom of the case and got the keyboard detached from the front, it became apparent that the PCMCIA male bus connector had simply dislodged itself from the female side. After correcting that disconnection and reassembling the purple wonder, I'm happily back on the couch typing with the Orinoco wireless intact.
Woo Hoo!
Posted at: 10:50 | permalink
Sun, 08 Jun 2003
Long Time No Blog
It all started with a filesystem crash about a month ago. I'm one of those people that classifies sysadmin like a special form of addiction such as smoking or drinking. I can look all this sysadmin work straight in the eye and it feels destructive, wasteful, unfulfilling; yet, at the same time, it's intoxicating because each new problem breeds a solution that creates new problems. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The filesystem crash occurred on an old Micron box that I had been playing hot potato with for a while. I always liked Micron for the "bragging rights at the bar, I've got the baddest computer in the land" effect but this experience with the only Micron I've ever owned has taught me a lesson or two. After watching the machine crash in very strange ways under virtually every OS I ever installed on it, I concluded it was some deep down bug in the BIOS, condemned it, and gutted it for parts. So I've got a spare disk in the Toshiba, and an extra burner and DVD-ROM.
I'd been putting off fixing the damn situation because when it crashed, I had a backup box that easily swapped in minus a month or so worth of blog entries and email. Yikes. That'll inspire all manner of violence from the wife.
So, I've been waiting for the ClarkConnect folks to release a 2.0 beta based on Redhat 9 and in the meantime I had grown tired of dealing with their slightly out of date release and subsequent apt-get massive attack.
I basically jerk around with 3 linux distros - redhat, mandrake, and clarkconnect. Each of them inspires a love-hate relationship.
I love redhat for it's sensibility but hate it for the lack of the GUI bits that mandrake provides like the ip masquerading proxy wizard. I love mandrake for the wonderful wizards, but can't quite get everything to work because it's not quite ubiquitous and there just aren't as enough eyeballs trying some really strange stuff like trying to run ASP.net on top of Apache 2. And then there's clarkconnect - the headless linux server for the home. It's a great idea whose time has come - run linux on an old box and use it as your proxy/gateway. It's a pretty common idiom these days. But I inevitably run into those situations that require the linux box to have a head. Did you ever try to install Image Magick headless? Run certain Swing stuff? Oh yeah, sure, the docs say it works great. Not on my hardware.
This weekend I installed Mandrake 9.1 and wrestled with configuring all the server bits that I require (arguably a lot more work than clarkconnect). But I've got most of it working tonight. I'm gonna take a look at the clarkconnect 2.0 beta this week and I reserve the right to go back to clarkconnect if it looks compelling.
I have managed to get out on the SV a few times a week despite the horrendous rain. I thought when I left Seattle, that situation would improve. Heh. On friday, I got back up to Tionesta via route 62 which is one of PA's unusually smooth snaking 2 lane made-for-motorcycle roads. It runs comfortably around 60 MPH though I did manage to find a variety of slow moving vehicles which I've learned to pass with the following protocol: click down one gear, apply throttle, swerve into oncoming traffic, swerve back into proper lane, cut throttle. Elapsed time? 5 seconds. My arms feel like Freddie Kruger after one of those sessions.
I'll leave you with this morbid mystery. I was working with mono's C# compiler, mcs 0.24, this morning. After all of the evolution that these compilers have been through, I can cast an assigment to an enum type beyond the values specified in the enum's declaration. Oh sure, you can argue that the compiler falls back on the underlying type of the enum for it's range checking but surely this isn't what they meant when they said, strict typing. Hmm...
using System;
class Hello
{
enum morality
{
bad,
good
}
static void Main()
{
morality m = morality.bad;
m = (morality)27;
Console.WriteLine(m);
}
}
Posted at: 21:58 | permalink
