Just recently, I spent a day in Vegas, a day in L.A., and a few days in San Diego with my old compadre Herr Downtime der Arschwischer. Outside the airport, I found this wonderful cassette tape and decided to take it with me...even though I now understand that there could have been some terrorists hiding inside (thanks Stac! :)). Anyway, enjoy the aging samples and help prevent them from fading into oblivion.

Is it possible that we've already climaxed as a civilization? I suspect we're in trouble...fighting a war on [at least] 3 fronts: Energy/Environment, Iraq, and now Katrina recovery. Sure, it could be a lot worse, but I don't exactly have a lot of confidence in the current administration to pull us out of all this. So glum. So on a different note, I played an annual round of golf with the company people. It was completely enjoyable, but not something that I'd really want to do more than once a year or so. That same night was a fantastic noise show in a basement in SE Portland. Although I had seen most of the performers before, it was a really good time. A similar lineup is playing at Reed on Monday, but I'm not sure I'm going to make it out again. Last night I soaked up the Found Footage Festival at the Laurelhurst. I can't say enough good things about this! Highly recommended! I suppose I could have done with a bit less of the comedic sketch work of the curators, but it wasn't a big detraction. If it comes to your town or if they end up releasing it on DVD, you should certainly check it out. And last but not least, I kicked out nzbperl version 0.6.6 today. Pretty rushed, but it's got some things that people need.

I don't believe that I really had a true feel for the Katrina situation until I was synced up with an irc channel ( irc.deadjournal.com:6667 #interdictor and #scanner), a few live scanner feeds, and the live webcam feed of the armed bloggers holed up in a secured 27-floor building in New Orleans at 3 or 4am EST. Media fucking overload. The scanner audio, at least to me, was especially striking. Cops, state troopers, and SWAT teams were having a considerably difficult time sharing information. There was a soldier who was shot in the leg at the superdome, and the shooter perhaps became a corpse. Lots of reports of and queries about police escorted busses (one report of 500 of em) to and from the crises, plenty of 10-21s being readily given on the open airwaves (quite unusual), and talk of entities like "Dragon 6". It's really only in situations like this where you get these unique, surreal, and ultimately frightening OPEN MIC sessions from SWAT teams.

How come it only really takes me less than 15 minutes to post an entry, but I can never find the time? Something has got to give! Work has been kicking my ass...I need to take some vacation time. So I went to the noise show on Saturday at Slabtown...great stuff, especially Pulse Emitter and The Future is Dust. You just haven't lived until you've heard a mic being destroyed by a Dremmel...and Pulse Emitter's TV sensor setup was really sick. Stacy and I also walked the wildlife reserve on Sat and worked on sanding/painting the baseboards in the bedroom. My legs are still sore...I'm so out of shape. And I'm probably the only person I know who's pretty excited by the recent buzz on the pd-list (see thread called Pure Devil). The prospect of having multiple GUIs laying on top of a PD engine is perhaps a bit frightening, but I really like the idea...could lead to some fun/strange interfaces (like pd isn't strange enough already). Must...find...time...to...make....

I heard 95 from some sources, and 102 from others. In any case, especially without A/C, it was a hot mutha. After putting in some time and maybe $3 (fuses) + $6 (power amp IC) + $60 (speaker) and $6 (misc screws), the amp is back in like-new-but-refurbished condition! Thanks Dust! I hope to have a new nzbperl out in a few days. Perl threads are just a hassle, and as it turns out, you can't (I can't?) properly set an environment from a thread and pass it on to an external proggie. Fucking weak. I guess I'll end up working with it...or rather, around it. Stacy got me a sub to Make, which is actually much cooler than I had expected (a coworker of mine gave me a copy that I ended up talking Stacy's ear off about). Between that and the Circuit Cellar sub, I should have enough reading material to pass the bus time...although I'm WAY less inclined to take public transport in 102degF weather. Not only is the heat deathly annoying, but there seems to be some NW fad around not properly showering and/or applying deodorant. Dumb. I also managed to finally sync up w/ Eric (antbrainworm) the other night and get a 3-CD copy of the PDX noisefest this year. I'm hoping to get clearance from the players and get it posted to archive.org for everybody's enjoyment. It's going to require some work (listening, removing a handlful of minor minidisc stall gaps), but hopefully in the next month or two I can get it done. Oh yeah, and wtf is wrong with snd-virmidi kernel module??? Why am I the only person having these issues? I did a lot of googling and turned up squat. Fryingpan? Fire? FIIK.

So I was struggling through some issues with my scanner when google turned up this thread (summary: the usb stack in 2.6.11.x is fucked). Sure enough, upgrading to 2.6.12 fixed the problem (and I probably my gphoto related camera issue, although I haven't confirmed it yet)... After upgrading, I discovered this blog entry and learned that the kernel realtime lsm has been deprecated in favor of the set_rtlimit program. The good news is that set_rtlimit with 2.6.12 seems to be working beautifully! I'm running jackd and pd each with a priority of 30 and haven't been able to see any xruns! In fact, it's working way tighter than the previous setup. Rawk. The downside to all this is that jackd is completely clusterfucked in Debian unstable at the moment. I dist-upgraded as part of my earlier troubleshooting, so now I'm stuck with a bit of dependency hell until the package maintainers get caught up. Fun. It might be a little early to tell, but it also looks like the upgrade to 2.6.12 fixed the regular gkrellm crash I was seeing, which is cool, cuz it was bugging the hell outta me.

Saw Damien on the 3rd, and that was awesome since it's been so long. Very odd (not him, just the experience). Continued hacking features and bug fixes into nzbperl. Maybe I'm in the pessimistic zone, but it'll probably be outmoded around the time I "finish" it (as always). Summer sucks. It's finally hot and annoying and depressing. Also, I stumbled upon this great Mount Eerie (aka The Microphones) release on archive.org. You should give it a try.

(that's the part of the commercial they don't play). When Shirley and Spinoza and Otis Fodder team up (as is happening right now, live on netradio), wonderful things happen. Thanks people, great stuff. Stacy and I and the dogs went camping this weekend about 2 hours away. Lots of good times hiking through the forest and along the river. Scout finally got to spend some time off leash and totally enjoyed splashing around in the water. Last week, I swapped out the amp chip in that Behringer amp and hooked up the old Infinity speakers in series and sure enough, the amp now works nicely! I should probably break down and buy a replacement speaker for it soon....in any case, it's nice to have some volume, and some of the effects are kinda interesting. I also completed all the remaining assembly for the ghetto drum pads I've been putting off for many months, but it looks like one of the pads got shorted or has a bad solder joint, so I just need to fix that one and it's done.

So I released the next version of nzbperl tonite. Pretty happy with it overall...we'll have to wait and see how the users receive it. I got the replacement part for the Behringer amp, but I still haven't really had a chance to swap it out...so no telling if it will work. The night was just too right tonight, couldn't waste it in front of the iron. Stacy and I busted out the new mini grill and ate out back to enjoy the nice weather...at least until the mosquitos kicked in. I finished soldering/gluing the ghetto drum pads yesterday, and it's quite nice to have it done, but it looks like I have a bad connection on 1 of the 8 pads, so I guess I'll rework it. We lost Lucy yesterday. :(

Stacy and I took the dogs down to the river on Saturday to walk along the esplanade and get drenched in the downpour. It was a blast, and the retriever, of course, just loved it (and the chi was more comfortable stuffed in a backpack). The Rose festival stuff was going on across the water, and we saw a rescue helicopter showing off some of its stuff. Also this weekend, I proved that nzbperl can run in Cygwin, which I suppose is pretty cool (even if the getch() handling doesn't work exactly right). I need to release the new version, but I'd like to hack in an external (socket or file?) interface first. Perhaps I'll save it for the next go around...I think it's stable enough. I also started hacking on the busted Blue Devil amp that Dustin gave me a while back. I tried a new fuse, and it still blew. I isolated the transformer, and it's good, so I then disconnected all outgoing connections from the power supply board and it still insisted on blowing fuses...so I think I've got it narrowed down to the supply. I ordered a replacement power amp from Jameco and will see if that clears things up. If it doesn't, I may just scrap the whole thing and use it as a project box...but I kinda hate to let it go so easily. So now I'm doing a little housekeeping on the desktop and trying to clear up some space (the album is going to require it). I think I'll also try and finish the remaining 4 pads for the ghetto drum within a week.