They have the technology ... they can rebuild

So last night I had an excellent wipe-out on the trampoline at the Cambridge Kips Gymnastics club. Where I was instructed to do a forward tuck off of the trampoline onto the mat, inexplicably I somehow chose instead to land on my neck. The worst of it is that my chin was bashed into my chest and caused a big ouchie. Other ouchies include neck and spinal trauma.

Here's what they say:
It appears that you have a pinching of your C8 spinal nerve which exits below C7 (between C7 and T1). The pinching of the nerve is from hyper extension through cervical and thorasic spine causing trauma at the joining of the cervical and thorasic spine (c7 AND t1). The impinging of the C8 spinal nerve would be the cause of the slight numbing of the fingers as C8 spinal nerve is what controls adduction and abduction of the fingers.

Here's an image that can help make sense of that:

So now that you know, you'll surely want to express your sympathies. For information on where to send Cards and Gifts send a self-addressed non-spam email to PAULSOP@PAULSOP.COM. Or you could come around to the back of the house that PAULSOP.COM built where you'll find me recuperating in the hot-tub.

Spent some time organizing files on the SAN today (over 500k) and came across some of my older songs in a pre-mastered stage, so I thought I'd re-master a few and compare my current remastering skill to my originals. So, direct from my studio this morning here's a song (Clear Daydream) I did a while back, which I remastered and re-encoded this morning. A spot of different.

Cedric Puddy informed me of this monsterous offense of twisted reality. Thanks Cedric!

Herald in the new age of Anthropomorphic Hi Fi

Okay, so our Xmas party is comming up, and me without a new PAULSOP.COM worthy image... So off I say to Neiman Marcus at Tyson's II in Vienna, where I snazz me up a fantastic red velvet jacket, and some excellent tuxedo pants. Armed with this excellence, I hanker for a snack.

Enter, The Maestro, the restaraunt at the Ritz Carlton here. I realize I have not been since July, and realized I had a very real need for some of Chef Fabio Trabocchi's AAA Five-Diamond Restaraunt's fare.

The meal started unexpectedly when I received the surprise delivery of a drink I had not ordered. Luckily, Vincent Feraud, the sommelier (formerly of the Watergate), corrected it and delivered my Pimms No. 1 Cup -- but sacrilege! NO CUCUMBER! Yes! I know what you're saying! They claimed they didn't have any cucumber! They garnished it with a very tasty fresh slice of mango instead. hmm. what's happening I wondered... a Karmic Realignment?

So I order the highly randomized and inspired Tasting Menu (5 courses) (of which they delivered like 8), with my usual requests of No Fish / No Olives. Strangely, another CATESTROPHIC ANOMALY, in that they delivered some fennel / anise soup with some SALMON tar-tar -- SEND IT AWAY I EXCLAIM! No seafood for me!

The next dish which arrives is some nice tomato pesto thingie-thing but whatever it was I was horrified to realize it was garnished with some kind of concentrated olive essence paste. AM I IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE? YIKES! So far I wonder... they're batting 1000 -- cummon (I mean, wrong drink, fish dish + olive dish -- my two no no's), this is an AAA-5 star restaraunt! What's going wrong?!

So my confusion and bewilderment catch the attention of some of the more senior staff and I see motion in the shadows. My next plate is some kind of fantastic rich gnocci with preserved black truffles and truffle foam, in a rich cream. LIKE YUM. IT GOES DOWN FAST. ARE WE ON THE ROAD TO WELLSVILLE?

I continue reading my hacker zine (blacklist411) until the next thing appears. The next thing happens to be this rather cool buffalo cheese pasta in some kind of amazing sauce. Each ravioli had a nice tempura snow-pea on it, and the sauce was amazing. Vincent had poured some fantastic wine that was all peppery, and saucy like a drunk french woman who growled a lot. Speaking of which, a beautiful mature woman, obviously made of money kissed Vincent on her way out -- and he blushed and smiled at me enjoying the attention, while the woman went on to kiss many more men on her way out. I called her 'easy', but apparently she was a favorite of the staff and I was informed I would 'have a talking to' :)

Next up was this pork-belly thing that was initially challenging. Imagine bacon, but 1" thick instead of bacon. Lots of fat. I'm not normally one for fat, but I've learned to eat everything the Maestro puts infront of me, barring fish and olives of course. This pork-belly was lavished in some kind of sherry sauce, with apple shavings, and a deep fried battered egg thing, and some delicious applish sort of cream. Simply tremendous -- bring it on I say! The fat was really like a boston cream donut, and on a taste level was certainly not challenging, but on an intellectual level there was a bit of a battle. I'm happy my taste buds prevailed, if not my health-sense. Still, the Maestro is a rare treat.

Next course was the main meat, which was a duck confit I think, with a 9 spice espresso mix, which went down real fine. Super tasty. It had little fruit seeds (persimmon -- nah. what is it? the one that Hades tempted Persephone with? Wait, yeah, the pomegranate. This thing had pomegranate seeds. I'm too drunk right now to know for sure). Anyway, it was all pretty grand in conception, and Vincent had a great new wine with it... not as exceptional as the first, but it paired well with the duck and my general semi-overtaken state.

While Vincent was doing something elsewhere, I noticed he had a port-cart with him, and realized I had to have some 1977 Dow Port... With what though? decisions decisions.. perhaps I'll forgoe the default desert course in anticipation of the cheese tray. And so it came to pass that PAULSOP.COM selected 4 cheeses: a light tripple cream cow milk, a saucy peppery harder cheese also from the cow, a rich and complex cheese, again from our favoured moo-machine -- this one was rolled in barley and oats for the rind, and finally a complex and sharp cheese with an orange and waxy rind that reminded me of zit puss. Needless to say all were fantastic, and the warm fresh baked rasin bread and apple compote completed this particular experience.

I was ready for the bill, but that was not to be. Feeling bad about the initial mis-direction, I got about 12 deserts, which I shall attempt to enumerate here, with ratings from 1/10: A white chocolate ball full of guava sorbet (10/10), a chocolate super exploding choco-cream mouse thingie (10/10), a small jar of fresh baked madelines (9/10), a grapefruit jelly (7/10), a raspberry jelly (10/10), a pistashio chocolate super choco choco choco (10/10), a weird pistashio illuminati pyramid with a red jelly top and a peice of gold for the ye (10/10), and possibly other things -- I was nearly in a Coma at this point.

I think I forgot about a course on the way :)

Water provided by pellegrino. When the bill came, they told me they'd taken the water and the wine right off the bill -- classy guys they are. Staff, as usual, was excellent and very chatty tonight, which I love. Great place -- check it out. My boss, incidently, doesn't care much for the place -- froo froo he terms it ;) He prefers more substantive italian fare, esp. Veal Chops, of which he's an expert.

Ciao!

Let's remember our roots, our history, our collective heritage. We must step in the future with one foot firmly rooted in the past. Let us not forget the wisdom of those who came before us, and owned our bases. Let us not set up us the bomb to others as others have set up us the bomb to us. Let us welcome all to our bases, and share them. There is always time to survive, and not be on the way to destruction. ha ha ha.

NEVER FORGET!

[btw ... I fixed comments -- they're working again]

I've set up a Christmas radio station tonight, just to test some streaming audio. I don't have a LOT of bandwidth (this is all on a Cable Modem presently), however, if you want to check it out, try CLICKING HERE FOR DEATHRAY FUTURE RADIO SPECIAL PREVIEW PLUS. Once things get stable, I'll set up a high bandwidth relay and a few more stations for different kinds of content, and probably up to 50 users.

All the streaming is currently being done using Shoutcast and Winamp 5 on a Windows server, which I'll tell ya came together a lot easier than iceCast (which for some reason isn't recognizing libshout, even though it's there-arr). My goal is to do it all on Linux or OS X eventually, ideally using the Darwin Streaming Server, but it's good to know how these things work on all platforms. Encoding is done by LAME, using VBR so quality should be good.

In setting this up tonight (it only took an hour) I found out that AOL essentially shut down NULLSOFT, except for 3 employees! That's right! The folks that gave us WinAMP, Guntella, distributed secure file systems, and essentially invented internet radio streaming. I hope AOL folds as a company. I use their AOL CD's as coasters.

(oh, and Jason Guse told me that my comment links are broken -- and yup, they sure seem to be -- something about the CodaX theme not having a theme for comments. I'll try to patch that up this weekend). Until then, you can sing my praises by calling 1 800 966 1337, or emailing paulsop@paulsop.com.

I was researching higher bandwidth sites, as my dream is to have some boxes nuzzled right up to an OC-192 with a Gigabit link between them and the net. Seems the best bandwidth limiter most colocation companies have is either a 10 Megabit Ethernet, or 100 Megabit Ethernet connection :) It seems that super great bandwidth exists in only a few places, and it seems that Vienna VA has some good colo's, and since I'm always down there, it is looking tasty for sure. Anyone wanna go in with me to make the costs more manageable? Any good Colo seems to sell space by the cage/rack/half-rack, along with roof-space options (for that satellite uplink perhaps?).

I also have been researching personnel tracking technologies, like low-power tiny GPS systems. Sony makes a good one, but it doesn't emit standard GPS signals over RS232, instead, favoring for, as Sony seems to practice as a fundamental phillosophy, as a Sony Binary GPS proprietary format. Dumb heads. I am THIS close (.. -- space between two periods) to never buying any SONY stuff ever again (but look how iddy-biddy it is! awww! what a cute GPS receiver!).

Peace out.

This weekend I'm going to be adding some streaming radio stations to the site. Initially it will support probably two or three connections, since I'm presently just on a cable modem, but I'm moving my server to some major bandwidth (around 150 megabit), so things should improve significantly after the move, which is scheduled before year end.

If you're wondering what kind of server this is, it's a poopie Mandrake Linux box, with only 512MB Ram, and some kind of AMD chip in it in the 2.4Ghz effective range. I paid about 400CDN for it a while back. Seems to work okay, considering it's a goofy clone-of-a-clone mobo. I have an NFS Mount to about 2 TB volume of media (all purchased by me thank you very much RIAA). Surprisingly, the NFS mount is running on Windows 2003 Server (Storage Edition) through Services for Unix, and seems to be okay. Network is all full-duplex Gigabit.

After the radio stations are up, my plans are to set up a few interactive camera relays (e.g. Back Yard, Kitchen), a Giger Counter feed (so you can see how irradiated my house is -- hmm wonder why?), and the obligatory weatherstation.

Long range plans include me publishing my latitude/longitude from my blackberry wherever I am and plotting it on a globe, possibly with sattelite recon from terraserver, or somewhere else. That should prove useful if you ever want to fire a missle at me.

My dad turns 74 this week! and we celibrated his birthday today!

Now this is cool. PAULSOP.COM has gotten 10,000 hits since its inception in September. That's over 3000 hits/month for sure! Of course, the galleries get the most hits, but hopefully some of you read the blog, or check out the files. What else do you want to see on the site? Shoot some comments back folks!

Spectral processing experiment affected in the frequency domain vs. time domain. I used AudioMulch to produce two initially identical arpeggiated baselines, each slightly varying (by say, small cut-off frequency and LFO Depth) to produce very subtle differences (I did this so I could do frequency arithmetic on the frequency and level differences between the L and R channels). These arpeggios are sent into DelayDots SpectrumWorx product (see attached screenshot). The MP3 starts with the unaltered arpeggio, transforms to a cool spectral enhancement (listen carefully for intermodulated beating), then gets a bit scratchy with more spectral glitching, then fades back to original. The background hiss is 'cuz I'm using a demo of the SpectralWorx plugin.

Click to see screenshot of Audiomulch setup

It is easy to do multiple things in the frequency domain that would be expensive if applied using convolution in the time domain. Duplicating frequency bands, creating side bands, delaying frequencies, etc... all only require a high resolution FFT -> {your frequency gunk} -> iFFT. Of course, the FFT/iFFT adds latency you wouldn't get with a discrete linear convolution in the FIR and block convolution approach. As you well know, if you FFT, depending how you FFT, you'll impose a sample latency of at least 2 x the nyquist, or, if blocking, particularly with a SIFT approach, FFTSize - FFTSize / Overlap Factor samples.

Of course, any zero-delay convolution algorithm only gives you 0 latency if your CPU usage increases as the algorithm is worked through -- which is why the CPU usage for longer-tail convolving reverbs is so high while short ones is less.

So, with the FFT approach, you impose a 1 time delay, and make it less expensive to do many operations (i.e. did you know that frequency multiplication is actually equivalent to a circular convolution?) -- or you can use CPU like it was made of sand and get zero latency with a zero delay time domain convolution.

Still, apparently you can have your cake and eat it too, ... with a caveat..., if I interpret what Bill Gardner wrote in 1995 in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, if you are happy with imposing a penalty of a block of N samples, in which case you can do your convolutoin in 34 log2(n) time! That's pretty fast! For a 3 second block at 44.1khz (132300 points), each output sample would need 428 multiplies. Fun Stuff!

Trans-modern music is all a matter of compromises my farties.