More Music -- 'Passenger Seat'

My roommate Shana lent me her acoustic guitar today, and I was playing the Death Cab song 'Passenger Seat' and got inspired to have a go at recording it. It's a nice simple song, so I figured it would be about as painless as they come. Here's the result: Passenger Seat, 3'46, 4.3MB, 160kbps mp3. It was a bit of a hassle getting the timing right. Even though I only added a simple bass part, I wanted the guitar to be in sync with the tempo of the Logic song, so I had to record the guitar to a crappy little drum part which I then removed. You can tell at a couple of points that the guitar and vocals are both uncertain if they're running fast or slow. I could point out numerous other flaws, but you won't have a hard time finding them. The original version of this song is on the album Transatlanticism, which I love and highly recommend you buy. Update Jan 2: Argh ... the levels in that mp3 are way too low. If you can crank it, you can hear it, but I wouldn't bother on crappy laptop speakers. Will fix it soon and upload a new version.

Bill Tracker

Figure: Household, Person, Bill, Membership, Responsibility and the relationships between them.

This could be a useful around-the-house application. It's meant to track the paying of bills by roommates and the subsequent paying of roommates by roommates. The motivation to use it is that people owe you money, and this is how you demonstrate that to them. Here's a quick story list:

• As a user, I need to be able to log in and see how much I owe others, and how much I am owed by others.
• As a user, I need to be able to enter payments by me to others and by others to me.
• As a user, I should be notified if a payment I enter appears to be a duplicate of another payment so that the two participants in a transaction don't both enter the same payment.
• As a household member, I should be able to end my own and others' memberships in my household so that the removed member no longer shares in bills for the household.
• As a household member, I should be able to create new memberships in my household for new or existing users.

Update 12/31: So Membership and Share are both diamond shaped to reflect that they are relationships, but in both cases I think they're entities worth take advantage of. I may remove the relationship between the two, however. I had in mind that a Person's Share in a Bill would be in virtue of a certain Membership in the Household. For flexibility's sake, that should at least be optional. If I pay for H's dinner and drinks one night, I want to be able to apply that to whatever money we owe one another. So Bills can be recurring or non-recurring expenses of whatever sort that someone in the household has paid or will pay. How might I want to split a bill?

• As a user, I want to be able to divide a bill in the following ways:
  • evenly among current household members,
  • evenly among some current and some former household members,
  • arbitrarily among a random group of people.

tagged software project

Home of ...

Can you imagine what it must do to the people of the Minneapolis / St. Paul metropolitan area to be living in the place that gave birth 2 Prince? I dont' know how I'd get through the day. Tagged fluff.

Weird band self-promo site

This band does something really weird in its song listing. They have a separate genre listed for each song on their album, including the ones you can't listen to. Is that not weird? They're also keyword-marketing with names of bands they sound like (or want to sound like). I got to them through a sponsored link on Gmail:

To Wilco Fans - www.OursToDestroy.com/Wilco - We Built It, It's Ours to Destroy, Music Influenced by Wilco

That's the exact link from my Gmail. I have no idea what sort of information it contains or whether you will cause this band's pay-per-click total to increment by clicking the link. If it turns out to be destructive or useless I'll change the link. Looking at this awkward page crowded with information that's good to have in Google but sort of unattractive for the reader, I'd recommend that they do something a little more radical with the stylesheet to de-emphasize some of that text. At the very least, the genre labels should be a different (more subdued) color. In addition, some left-padding would give them enough space that they don't seem crowded up against the song titles. Filed in: music, pr, web, design

Liquors

Last night I ate at Liquors (map) for the first time. Unbelievable. I've been living less than a ten-minute walk from this place for six months now, and I've been missing out. I started with a chicken quesadilla appetizer. It was delicious. Tasted like the flour tortillas were fresh. It was topped with an avacado sauce and fresh pico de gallo. The waiter (who was also the bartender) brought out an asian hot sauce with it, and the combo was awesome. My main course was grilled mahi-mahi with mashed sweet potatos and spinach and a brown sugar glaze. This too was awesomely delicious, though my love of mexican food had me missing the appetizer. If you're looking to eat in Ft. Greene, and Liquors isn't too crowded (as it often is), check it out. Tags: restaurants, food, brooklyn

Rehashing

I'm torn about whether to try use my new tools to recreate music I previously half-produced with Reason on my Windows machine. It should be only about a two-hour project to set up the old box so I can transfer audio. But most of what happened there was really internal to Reason, so I'd either have to export some parts as audio or recreate them with Logic's synths. It may be worth setting up even if only to listen to the old stuff and be reminded of what's worth using. tags: music

Movin' My Cheese

The more I listen to that little thing I did in Logic, the more I laugh at its cheeziness. It's cute though.

Back in BKLN

Got home from SoFL a couple of hours ago. Wiped. Xmas at home was fun. Got to see almost everyone I wanted to. (Missed Hank, who was sweating in his shoes.) The fun part of today's flight was that I was seated next to the adorable 8-10-(guessing)-year-old daughter of none other than Jimmy Page (from Led Zeppelin). (She wasn't supposed to tell me what band her dad was in, but she was perfectly happy to give me clues.) The cutest part? Since they were spending Christmas in Florida, her mom wrote Father Christmas a letter asking him to deliver her presents to England so they wouldn't have to fly home with them. She's hoping he brought a new hamster cage. So cute!!!

Flabound

Tomorrow (well, technically later today) I'm headed to Ft. Lauderdale for Xmas with the fam. I may try to go boating next week just to be ultra-South Florida. A significant portion of the second half of next week (after I'm back in Brooklyn) should be dedicated to working on music stuff. I'm excited. I ordered a buttload of t-shirts for people from Threadless. Hope they arrive while I'm down there and fit the people they're supposed to fit.

See Studio

You didn't ask, but I know you wanted to see a picture of the new home studio. You probably sensed that I had no real place to put the studio, and so had to mount it on the weird closet rack thingy that sits at one end of my bedroom. You were right. Click through for a fascinating and detailed analysis (in flickr notes) of what you see pictured.

First Logic Output

I just uploaded an mp3 export of the first thing I've done with the new studio. My first impression is hells yes. This uses a bunch of Logic's plugin instruments, as well as a guitar part that I recorded w/ my electric plugged directly into the Traveler. For a while I played guitar through Logic's guitar amp-simulating distortion effects unit. Real-time response and the sound quality were excellent. Now I have to figure out how much of this stuff I travel with tonight. More to come!

The Studio Reborn

I've just today spent a buttload of money to once again have a working music studio setup (and a fairly portable one at that). Added to my PowerBook G4, I now have:

• a MOTU Traveler audio interface,
• an M-Audio Radium 49 controller keyboard,
• and Logic Pro.

This is exciting. If I haven't released something you can hear within 2 weeks, punch me in the arm!

Chronicles of Yawnia

Ok, so the special effects were nearly flawless. The action was very well executed. Fine. But WTF is with the near total lack of character development of Peter "the magnificent" and Susan "the gentle"? Is that how it was in the book? (Here's where I admit I haven't read it. I did have a significant portion of it -- maybe the whole thing -- read to me in school, which was weird, but I don't remember a lot of that.) Lucy and Edmond both had important roles to play, but the two elder children were mostly just standing around. (Ok, Peter did a lot in the battle, but that doesn't make him an interesting character.) The fact that Peter was elevated to the highest status among the four children seemingly by default because he was the eldest male may have seemed natural when and where the books were written, but in 2005 it seems arbitrary and wrong. This is a movie that's going to be shaping children's minds for years to come, and the shape it's squeezing them into bugs me. Grrr!

Go trains go!

I'm psyched about the full MTA strike not happening (at least for now). I don't know if I'll actually be using the MTA today, but since my roommates were all able to go to work, I get the apartment to myself. :-) (I'm on vacation. I can be totally selfish.)

Categories vs. Tags

I know tags and categories aren't the same thing, but I don't care. All I need to be able to do is allow my friends to ignore one side of my writing while everyone else can ignore the other. (Also, anyone is free to ignore both.)

Categories in Blogger: Rolling my own

So what I haven't considered yet -- but I guess it's about time -- is writing my own non-bookmarklet solution to this problem. A bookmarklet ain't gonna pump files onto my server, and that's really what I need here. After each posting is published, I can ping a script on subRes to create category-specific html views. What will I need to do?

1. read the posting (either the xhtml or atom xml) and determine which tags are present (this should probably use Technorati's a rel="" attribute),
2. for each tag, find the existing or create a new category html view (at path ./tags/tagname/index.html),
3. profit create an atom.xml or rss.xml or both under the same path.

Seems simple enough.

Categories in Blogger

So I want to do categories, but Blogger doesn't support it. Now I'm on the hunt. The article 'Categories in Blogger' by Martin English suggests an interesting hack that really exploits all the free crap Google will give you. He has you:

1. Set up a separate Blogger blog for each category as well as a master Blogger blog.
2. Set up each category blog to automatically email all postings to a Gmail account.
3. Set up the master blog to allow posting via email.
4. Set up a filter in that Gmail account to forward all mail received to the master blog's posting address.

It's kind of cool, but kind of ridiculous. If you want a consistent and customized look and feel, you've got to enter your template on all those blogs. What about permalinks? An entry would have a different permalink depending on whether you were looking at the master blog or the category blog. No posting could be posted in two categories. Then there's the mess of having either two separate comment threads for each posting or not allowing commenting directly from one of the two blogs where each item shows. This is just too messy. There are two other common tricks I've come across:

• Using del.icio.us tags
• Using a Google search

These are both best used with some bookmarklet or Greasemonkey enhancement. Having looked at some examples of using the Google search method, I'm not interested. The results are just too ugly, and even though Google is rock-solid, it makes me nervous having my categories based on a full-text search of the postings. (Just because I mention Java in a posting doesn't mean I want it showing up in my Java category.) The best info on use of del.icio.us to do blog post tagging seems to be on Freshblog. Between "3 ways to use del.icio.us for categories in blogger" and "Tagging with BlogThis," we've got a lot of options. The third method in the first article sounds great, if I were using Firefox most of the time. Alas, I prefer Safari, so Greasemonkey is not for me. (Maybe I'll give Firefox for the Mac another go now that 1.5 is out, but for now I'm sticking to my brushed steel buddy in spite of some of its quirks.) The best option for Safari seems to be the suite of XBlogThis! bookmarklets described in the second article, which apparently originated over at Ken's Meme Deflector. So I try the CategoryTagBlogThis bookmarklet from Freshblog, which sounds like the best thing I'm going to get. It works. I highlight some text on a page, click the bookmarklet, get a little popup where I'm prompted for an author citation and a list of tags. When I submit that, I get the normal Blogger BlogThis! window, but pre-filled with a posting title from the page title of the page I'm blogging, the URL of the page in the link field, and a body that contains the highlighted text as well as links to my del.icio.us links for the tags I entered. This is cool, but optimized for the linkblog, which isn't really the use case for my blog. The key thing it doesn't do is take care of actually creating the del.icio.us link for the new posting, which is a key manual step I want to eliminate. A second bookmarklet that I could click after posting would improve this a bit, but it's still pretty lame. Hopefully Blogger will add category support soon.

Ken's Meme Deflector: XBlogThis!: An Extended BlogThis! Button

Some Author Here's what I get from the CategoryTagBlogThis! bookmarklet. This post says it's filed in bookmarklet, but it ain't so. There's the rub. Filed in: bookmarklet, article

Test post from flickr

IMG_1467.JPG
Originally uploaded by duelin markers.

Here's me doing a posting from Flickr, which should be able to post to blogger automagically. Not quite sure what this is going to look like, but there's a picture of me. I'm lovely!

Lacking Categories

I was sure that having Blogger publish to my own server via FTP was going to be painful and annoying, so I tackled that risk first. It turned out to be easy and smooth (as was lunarpages' sub-domain support), so the parts I thought would suck were all done. Now I'm noticing that I don't have post categories (nor tags). Can I live without them? Sure, but will anyone who cares about my photos from the family Thanksgiving gathering ALSO care about my struggles with some J2EE-ass techno-crap? Probably not. What to do?

First post from blogger

This is some test of some new blog I just set up on some blogger. If this works cool, but how will I import my old stuff from Radio Userland? The hosted convenience of blogger means there's no database I can dump those old posts into to have them show up. One step at a time.