After a 3 year ultra-pause, I've got most of the site working again! Radio Modular will start streaming soon too, maybe with some video too.

I've been building a digital rig in my media room to try some digital sound compositional experiments. Here's what's in the rig so far:

- Symbolic Sound Pacarana
- Sonic Core XITE-1
- Eventide H8000fw
- Fractal Audio Axe-FX Ultra
- Access Virus Ti
- TC Electronic Digital Konnekt x32
- Metric Halo ULN-8
- Metric Halo LIO-8
- Intel i7 with RME HDSPe 32 channel AES/EBU
- MacPRO with UAD-Quad

Three instruments will feed it:

- Continuum Fingerboard
- Marcodi Harpejji
- Moog Voyager

Key Software:

- Algorithmic Arts
- Numerology
- Plogue Bidule
- Apple Logic Studio
- Steinberg Wavelab 7

I've decided against Max/Ableton. Monitoring will be done on the Martin Logan Summit's. I've found full-range speakers to be better for monitoring than nearfields lately. This room is acoustically treated, and has digital room correction to optimize frequency and time alignment at the sitting position.

Here is an early picture of the new media room / digital studio when I started this project in January 2010:

I'm really happy with the custom design of the Harpejji (it matches the continuum fingerboard):

(The Harpejji comes in a few months)

I'm trying to keep a 'death star' feel with blacks, greys, whites, and red so I can crank up some evil self-composing algorithmic evil-empire type music.

The German company Access Music makes a really nice line of DSP based synthesizers (the Virus). I got the itch, called Nova Musik, and poof it arrived almost next day.

Here's what it looks like:

It blinks all sweet with lights and buttons and sounds very nice.

The first night I had it, I did these two versions of Tetris with it:

Tetris Take 1, Tetris Take 2

Here's a bunch of other MP3's demonstrating the things sound:

Presets_On_Parade_Bright_Side.mp3
Presets_On_Parade_Dark_Side.mp3
Walthius_TI_Demo_2.mp3
Walthius_TI_Demo_3_Arctic_Oct06-1.mp3
virusTI03.mp3
virusTI04.mp3
virusTI05.mp3
virusTI06.mp3
virusTI07.mp3
virusTI11.mp3
virusTI12.mp3

Nice sounding VA huh? The coolest thing is that it is very tightly integrated with a computer, so you can edit all the settings with your PC in your sequencer.

I give this device an 7.5/10 (it'd be a 9/10 if it had fewer bugs).

So I watched the movie 'The Bounty' tonight, which was pretty good, even though Mel Gibson (playing Fletcher Christian) was in it. I did a bit of research on Pitcairn, the island the mutineers colonized, as well as Norfolk Island which Captain James Cook discovered. Lots of great history here. Pitcairn looks like an amazing place -- so far away from shipping lanes that imports only come 3 times a year. The generator runs for 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours in the evening. I shall visit this most isolated place, perhaps build a small house there -- it appears reasonably easy to live there.

Apparently, they have a honey experiment going on, so I bought some honey online:

I hope the honey tastes of the defiance of the mutineers in the face of their colonial antagonist Lieutenant William Bligh:

William Bligh

Yaarrrr. :)

Whew, what a break I took from blogging! I tell you, that was a little unexpected, but the sun is shining and there was lots of biking to be done.

Quickly, what's new:

- My house is a bit cleaner due to improved habits
- I've lost a tad of weight due to biking around a lot
- Went mucking in Platsville where I grew up (Grades 2-8: School pic 1, 2 3)
- Saw Robert Rich in Concert in Toronto (same church where Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Session was recorded).
- Checked out the local Butterfly Conservatory

I really love green on black text heavy displays on CRT's. Cyan and white text is okay as well (occasionally yellow too), so long as the background is black.

Ahh, the 3270, I hardly knew yea.

When I was in high school, I worked at a software company and did a lot of work on a Toshiba T3100 'laptop', which weighed about 40 pounds. Back then, the only way computer geeks could get in shape for the beach was to bench press their laptops.

My dear T3100 Amber Screen -- productivity has not been the same since

Most of the screens I use these days are LCD, but two of them (a Lacie 22", and my Mom's Emac) have CRT's, and I *really* like the look of CRT's handling of text. It's just smooth. Only problem is CRT's tend to decay a lot over the years, while LCD's just get dim and sometimes the cathode start pulsing along with its power supply at 30 or 60 Hz. These new ultra bright LCD's are okay, but they give your eyes a lot of stress if you use them in darkish rooms. I like darkish rooms for coding, and find I need to adjust their brightness -- but when I do, their color accuracy goes out the door. Also, the 'blacks' are still not 'black' with LCD's. CRT's rule for black blacks.

Another sweet picture of that Toshiba. Note how its keyboard is actually nicer than laptop keyboards today. Of course, you can plug in another keyboard, but that's really just acknowledging that laptop keyboards aren't great. The Toshiba's keyboard was awesome.

Why, just today I noticed how awesome the text looked when I went to M A T R I X S Y N T H, which uses the green text / black background. I feel that a green/black background lets my brain go into a more abstract, 'deep flow' that leads to greater productivity and higher quality work. I don't really like most GUI screens. I'm certainlly not a fan of scrolling, although any 'page' oriented interface better support extremely rapid refreshes so it can get you data faster than scrolling. I always liked a tabbed interface that lets you navigate sections rapidly -- with the tabs always on the screen.

GUI screens require our brain to process many things that keep you from the task at hand:

1. the relative position of windows
2. keeping track of mouse position -- i.e. where you left it, or where it is
3. focus selection level -- e.g. window, page, field
4. relative page position -- e.g. do I need to 'scroll up' to see the pages nav buttons?
5. what's on top shading cues

I really like the IBM 3270 concept: No scrolling, page oriented, form oriented. Sure, it's dated, but a lot of its ideas are extremely poignent today and should be re-thought and implemented in new interfaces of tomorrow. Speaking of 'interfaces of tomorrow', you should all check out Squeak Smalltalk, which is still dumb in many areas, but offers crazy potential for making ultra productive interfaces. Dump Java, go to Squeak. It's interface is called 'Morphic', and is pretty great. They just need better fonts.

Computers used to be mysterious and cool. Now they are mainly just buggy.

I think we should create 'COM2' - a new type of computer system for cool people. It will use a characterset like APL, be entirely parallel by nature, use some sort of next-gen Smalltalk*censored*Erlang*censored*APL. It will have a 'flow' based GUI that organizes itself around what you are doing, vs. you organizing yourself around its chaotic space. etc... It'll be great. We need that type of system to power the starship computers of the future. If you want to work on the manifesto with me (hehe), call me, we'll do lunch. Manifesto writing is always a great way to spend an afternoon in a cafe.

Every now and then I check for 'submissions' (articles you folks submit). Most of the time submissions are just spam. It amazes me that people wrote robots that seek out geeklog driven sites just to submit online poker spam and links -- Surely we have excess population and need to THIN THE HERDS. Do folks really think that the 288 unique visits/day of paulsop.com are interested in poker links?

The recent controversial, yet startlingly truthful secret UN funded "Human Effectiveness Study", suggests everyone fits in one of these pie chart segments:

Clearly, all the readers of this site are in the 2% (+/- 1%) grouping of critical, effective leaders of our collective Tomorrowland. But where does that put the poker spammers? I'll leave it to you as an exercise.

I know of (casually) two people who have effectively stopped working to play poker almost 24/7. It's like Magic Card Addiction of the 90's all over again. It's amazing watching them slowly decay into madness. But I suppose it is necessary, for someone has to pay for the people who write robots to post PokerSpam on my web site.

Ahh, the circle of life.

So I'm considering a car with manual transmission. My idea is that a manual will:

1. Save on gas
2. Save a touch on the car
3. Make me pay more attention to the road
4. Improve handling and finesse
5. Help me understand what driving shoes are for
6. Make me more manly (hehe)

So yesterday (Saturday) I took a 2 hour lesson to learn how to drive stick. Overall, it went well. I think I only stalled the car 6 or 7 times.

It took a bit of effort to find someone who offered lessons in a standard. It apparently costs something like 12 to 16,000 bucks a year for commercial insurance. Also, I'm sure that the clutches on these cars need regular replacing. Several years ago, my brother even tried to teach me, but that lesson only lasted 4 to 6 minutes before he feared for his clutch.

So, in looking for someone, I tried:

Mary's Driving School - 571 8124 - NOPE
Ogi's Driving School - 722 1988 - NADA
Assurance Driving School - 579 1122 - SADLY, NO
Ace College Driving School - 885 2791 -- ZERO
Driver Training - 568 8210 - Said: "Try Dominion"

Dominion - 576 4494 - SCORE!

Turns out they offer 4 hours of car training for 180 bucks. If you only need 2, it's 90 bucks. My class was yesterday (Saturday) from 12:00pm to 2:00pm. The chap who showed up to teach me was actually the owner of a Dominion franchise (I think). He said the job was too stressful and he can't keep drivers. He also says that they loose money on the Standard training, it is good PR and Marketing (only they offer it around here).

I was reminted several times by my (panicked) instructor of several points: come to a complete stop at those red octagonal objects stuck into the ground every now and then. Also to not 'cut corners' -- apparently corners are made by painted lines on the road -- my strategy has been to avoid curbs. That usually means driving in the middle of these handy lines (I call them Guide Lines). Also, the instructor felt that it was not entirely good to drive "speedlimit+10", which I happily informed him was the real speed limit. Apparently, people loose confidence if they a car with 'driver training' written on it engaging in these behaviours. So I learned these things too. hehe

So, to recap, I'd recommend Dominion if you're in Canada. I had a very good experience. The instructor my not have. He said I *didn't* need the second 2 hour portion. Hmmm....

My lease is up in a few days, so I'm searching for a replacement. Since I live in Kitchener Waterloo, I google for 'Kitchener used cars'. This shows me 'www.kwautoexchange.com'. I say 'GREAT', and click. Then the surprise:

... .. . o.O ... . . whA?

Surely I am not going to buy a car from Guatemala, or Rajshashi Bangladesh. . .

Nor Luanda Angola....

This site, to me, represents the PERFECT ANTITHESIS OF SEARCH.

It's totally mind boggling!

It's STILL boggling!

BOGGLE I SAY!

I am working on an instructional video. It involves recording and synchronizing six things:

1. Screen of computer as application is being used
2. Stereo 44.1khz 16 bit audio from mixer
3. Wide angle video shot (high definition)
4. Close up video shot
5. Narrative track (voice over)
6. Spliced in slide graphics

The workflow to make a professional product looks something like this

It turns out to be a lot more compicated than seems. It turns out:

1. Laptop too slow: My G4 Laptop glitches audio when recording the screencam and stereo audio at the same time. I want them to be recorded at the same time so they are synchronized. It doesn't glitch if I lower the framerate to 3/sec. But that's sooo slow.
2. Digital audio is tricky: The audio is mixed digitally, and arrives via AES/EBU (similar to SPDIF), and the clock sync from source to mixer has to be set up. Without it, I get clicks. This would be easy, except certain Mac audio software seems to reset the mixer to sync to its internal clock and not the external clock. I had to spend hours to find simple software that would let me record the screen and video properly
3. HD Video is new to me: I have to record the high definition video. This requires lighting, lots of monitoring. It will be interesting to mix the screencam video (1024x768 and the high definition video (1080i which is 1920x1080, sent interlaced). I hope iMovie can do that without too much dimensia or resizing. I want the computer screen to becrisp, and the video to be crisp too.
4. Need to mix in SD with HD: The close up shots are standard definition. I hope I can mix the DV with the HDTV. I know I'll have to colour match it somehow.

So, I spent most of the day just on steps 1 and 2. It was really brutal. So much software just didn't work. I tried:

1. Good screencam software is rare: Setting up VNC2SWF on Linux to record the video. That sort of worked, but it wasn't as smooth, and I figured I needed to convert it into an MPEG or something I could edit with later. I couldn't find an SWF to MPEG converter.
2. Linux tended to suck: I installed Ubuntu on a laptop, and put in an Echo Indigo IO sound card in the cardbus slot. It's a great sound card, and supposedly has Linux ALSA drivers, but heck if Ubuntu could see it. Ubuntu just defaulted to the internal (crappy) sound system. Google was not useful to find a dr iver, and I somehow didn't feel like building kernels all afternoon to try to get the card running.

So I abandoned Linux, and tried to see how much I could get running on my Apple. I was going to use a fast intel iMac to run the app, do the scr eencam, and record the audio. It certainly is fast enough. However, the screencam program uses a kernel extension and isn't yet a Unversal app. So I had to use an older G4 Laptop. This laptop is *BARELY* fast enough to run the app, screencam, and audio track. I had to change process prio rities, and tweak for 4 hours to get a 95% glitch free product. So not good enough.

Tomorrow I will try running the app from Windows, and doing all the recording/screencam on Windows. We'll see how that goes. Apple is *almost* t here. Linux totally bit the biscuit.

And I'm only at step 2 of 6!

Yikes!

So I watched the first season of LOST on DVD. Oh my God, it's so good. This ultra-awesome series eeks out Dead Like Me and gets the crown as "Bestest Series Ever". My uber-favorite character is Lock:

Lock is Ultra-Uber

On other fronts, the radio station [to the left] is VERY unreliable (sorry to all the folk who have emailed me), due to lockups on the Windows 2003 server the streaming originates from. It seems Windows is now the least reliable operating system I'm running, as my Win XP 64bit also hangs for me at least 2 times per week. I did full memory diagnostics (courtesy of memtest on the Ultimate Boot CD), full temperature/event log/process logging -- no obvious or even semi obvious reason they are crashing (just unobvious). I'll put Linux up on those boxes soon and see how reliability fares (perhaps it is the hardware? -- soon we will know).

Also, the cheezy webcam I'm using to drive the video uses up 30% of my CPU for some reason. It's crazy. If I switch to a firewire video card, the CPU drops down to 3%. GREAT DRIVERS CREATIVELABS. THANKS.