"Can you, you know, maybe put the whammy on me...so I don't even know who the current president is?" Anyway. Sorry for the lag. Things been busy in these parts I guess. In the meantime, I grew a beard and then later shaved it off. Shows shows shows since the last entry. PDX noise fest 2005, Wolf Eyes, Angels of Light, Pigface, and even 2 Pixies shows in the same night. I released the cāniah page tonight, and thought I should mention it, so go check it out. There's also another improved nzbperl around the corner (soon, but honestly, who knows when).

Holy shit. Normally I'd say something clever here, but I've watched this 3 times in a row and I'm still completely fucking speechless: Baby Got Book Finally, the internet journey for the best worst thing ever has come to a close. ;) We can all turn off the computers and sleep soundly now.

I stumbled upon an old email related to this usenet post and got a bit nostalgic about my LED sign and its roots. I ended up googling a while and actually discovered some other people that have done similar things: Todd cracked the checksum (or something) on his sign's firmware Josh Burley has a freshmeat project about his sign software hacks. devito-p has a tripod (yuk!) page and links related to the signs. Maybe Silent Radio isn't really dead and maybe it lives on? There are listings for "Silent Radio" in southern CA and at least one Mike Levin in CA. There are apparently still companies that are selling SilentRadio signs, although they look newer (ie. multi lines, multi colors). The real question, though, is what happened to Mike Levin? Why do I even care? Is it related to that cryptic message that Julian sent me in 1999? Maybe I've somehow inappropriately romanticized the whole situation? Maybe the human side of the story is ultimately more interesting than the technology... Thoughts?

It's long overdue, but I managed to get my P5 glove working in pure-data a few days back! Stoked. The build process is still a complete mess, but at least it's working for me. I hope that the tutorial thing can help others get it going too. I doubt I'll get to it tonight, but I intend on giving a progress post to the pd and yahoo-p5 groups/lists. If you're bored, you might as well watch the video. :) Also started working on new features for nzbperl. Quite a bit of progress, but the next release is still probably a few weeks out. Gotta keep it brief. Us old guys need our rest.

I didn't have a chance yesterday to write this up, but it's absolutely worth saving, so I'm covering it today. I had a long work day yesterday, and I was driving home somewhat sleep deprived and exhausted. I wasn't really in the mood for music, so I tuned on NPR to kill some of the the drive time silence. I was mostly spacing out (half listening) when All Things Considered ran the greatest story I've ever heard in my life. I strongly encourage you to listen to the stream from their site, but I absolustely had to save a copy for posterity. I was alone and laughing out loud! What madness this world can bring! All credit and respect to NPR, All Things Considered, and Robert Siegel: A big thank you for turning around my day and putting a big nasty grin on my face. I guess I should also add that I released a dot-version of nzbperl last night to address a stupid-yet-critical bug. If you're running version 0.6, should should upgrade asap.

So Firefox kicks ass. Anybody who's in-the-know has been using Mozilla/Seamonkey/Firebird/Firefox for quite some time and realizes the superiority of said browser. I know I've been using it for at least 5 years [he said smugly]. I fucking hate doing my taxes. It's a bureaucratic bullshit overly-complicated and ultimately retarded process. Fortunately, there are these great little online tools (read: web applications, that seems to be the buzzwerd) that can walk you through a finance-for-dumbasses style wizard to fill in the blanks of some government form, for like $30 or $50. That's cool...I'm a tax tard and I admit it...so I'm willing to pay for the [mechanized] help... Except now. Some TurboTard has decided that unix (eeeewwwwww-nix) browsers (whatever the fuck that is, eh, and who are these eunuchs?) including firefox aren't supported. Except, guess what? They actually are supported! A brilliantly useful summary from the "NetWizard" describes the issue and how to work around it. Stupid stupid stuff on the part of Intuit, great great info on the part of Yakov. In summary: TurboTax has decided to implement some silly ineffective JavaScript to detect the browser version. If they don't see your current browser in a small (read: incomplete) set of mainstream configurations (think Win/OSX with IE or Netscape, yeah, like people still use Netscape), they flip you the bird and tell you to bend over. Fortunately, a little client-side hack with the help of a Firefox plugin clears things right up. I'll be trying this soon. Firefox is Firefox, people. Sure there are going to be teeny tiny differences between Windows and OSX and *nix, but for the most part, the developers have gone WAY out of their way to make sure that the behavior is consistent (not only consistent, but standards compliant). I've been using your product for years now -- why would you try and alienate me now? Who cares what the host OS is? Unless, of course, there's a hidden agenda in there somewhere. Da.

I released nzbperl version 0.6 tonight. I suppose it's not complete, but I think it's consumable. Good stuff inside.

And I also made a monkey skull stencil on the dry erase board. Here's what it looks like from a distance and also up close. We're all monkeys anyway...and I recall that Mr. Byrne wants you to understand the facts.

Where the hell did the last month go? It was a blink...a flash in the pan...and I promise that I didn't intentionally delay this post for an exact month. Is that a symptom of getting older? So the noisybox blog now has a RSS link in the doc head, so that that fancy icon shows up properly in Firefox (look in the lower right-hand corner of the window). Too bad I never seem to post. After the last post, really, not a lot has been going on (outside of the 40+ hour grind). I spent many an hour rebuilding nzbperl into version 0.5, and a new release is already around the corner. This isn't really the place for technical details, but I'm pretty damn happy with the latest release -- it handles multiple connections and has a dope-ass colored ASCII (remember when we called colored ASCII ANSI?) screen. A few silly bugs and minor improvements will be in the next version...probably within a few weeks. The holidays (the blur that they were in my sieve-like memory) were great. Dustin made it up to P-town (surprise) and gave us a fancy new DVD player that supports all kinds of newfangled formats. Rad. I also got a DVD burner, so I'm no longer 2 years behind the times! Speaking of Dustin, his new site is up and running, so give it a look. The BCR2000 (been drooling over this for months!) I got is a bad-ass control surface that worked right out of the box with the Linux USB MIDI drivers in 2.6. It's nice to be able to control multiple things in an intuitive way at once...but there's one drawback: if I run pd with realtime settings and then power off the BCR200, it seems to (some-fucking-how) disable my puter's keyboard. There's always something...

So there's a new recording up on the art page for download: [Trichinosis](/art/Infiltration Lab - Trichinosis.mp3). It's a terribly long generative piece that's seeded with streaming scanner audio. Mostly, it's intended to be an informational piece that explains the dangers of improperly prepared meat products. Modern day farming practices and pork feeding habits are both of critical importance. The work should also be available on archive.org within a few days. That is all for now. I haven't really created anything new or progressed on any other projects...but I will...

The election has got us all down. My selfish hopes are that this administration stirs up enough animosity to motivate the players into sculpting the next generation of great and truly revolutionary music. It should inspire hatred anyway. What more can I say. I saw Les Savy Fav a few weeks ago and caught Wolf Eyes most recently. Both were great, but perhaps didn't quite meet my expectations. I've got some pictures from both...maybe I'll post them soon. Dustin and I are doing some remote noise collaboration. If we stick with it, there could be an album in the works. I broke out the Ghetto Drum System today for the first time in years. With a little finesse, I managed to get it hooked (via comport) into pd. The response time is significantly better than I remember it. I think it's time to finally build an 8-pad platform for banging...at least until I decide that I absolutely need velocity sensitivity. Sure, it's no Akai MDP16 or Roland SPD20, but it's still surprisingly usable. I'm also thinking about building a variable speed vibrator tool for use with my toy guitar and/or spring reverb. I think those little pager motors with the offset weight should be a good fit.