| final post |
[May. 22nd, 2008|09:27 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | limbo | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  quixotic | ] |
here's my first LJ post, may 22 2001:
So I drank 4 beers and decided to create a Journal. The theory is that the upkeep and maintenance will less time consuming than updating my actual homepage. HTML sucks. I have nothing interesting to say. But I'll let you be the judge of that.
and here's my last LJ post, may 22 2008:
So I drank a fifth of Bourbon and decided to quit with the LJ thing. I deleted my homepage, blogs, web sites and servers a long time ago. It turns out I have nothing interesting to say after all. |
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| delete |
[May. 21st, 2008|07:49 pm] |
delete delete delete.
i just read a post from two years ago that i could have easily re-posted today. apparently the last time i wasn't endlessly miserable was approximately 3 years ago. i made one google job interview related post public that had been private before. i think i did that because i figured "they" might have been watching. who gives a shit what those guys think anyway.
delete delete delete.
jesus fucking christ, the interface won't let you retroactively change status on more than 99 posts without having a paid account. whatever. fuck you livejournal.
if anybody really cares about what i was doing circa 2005 and prior, feel free to read it for the next couple of days until i get up the motivation to actually [maybe] do a mass download and [definitely] delete all this for good. better hurry because i'm reading most of this myself and deleting posts one by one back to... 2001. |
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| The Foam Project |
[Jun. 1st, 2005|11:27 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  accomplished | ] |
I managed to get 14 frames built and 9 covered with fabric. I ran out of fabric first, so there are 5 more empty frames just waiting for me to get to the fabric store again. I am leaving for boulder again on sunday and I might not make it. I'll probably have time to hang a few on the wall tonight, and I'll take a better picture at that point. It felt pretty good to be doing something other than sitting in front of the computer for once, and they turned out pretty nice. I put some pics after the cut. The phone camera really doesn't like low light levels.
In other news, my new amp should arrive today!
( Read more... ) |
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| So long NY and thanks for all the beer |
[May. 11th, 2005|07:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  working | ] |
I'm back in Boulder. The NY trip was great! It's been raining for a couple of days here in Boulder and like a lot of dry desert climates, when the rain finally lands everything turns green. It's pretty cool.
Friday night in NY I went out to the dj_methodikal gig. The opening bands mostly sucked to various degrees from total equipment failure to ehhh to that's not too shabby. The most fun was the guy doing some kind of hard noisy stuff with a junky home made turn table as a midi controller. At least he jumped around a lot so it was fun to watch. djm blew everyone else off the stage, as far as I'm concerned. Not sure what the bands were at the end of the night. They might have rocked, but I left fairly early after the djm set.
Here's the only video I'll post from the gig to give you some idea of what the stage setup looked like. The rest sounded even worse. It's only 2 seconds long, and about 40k so you might as well check it out. Brad's giant tower computer has "laptop" written on the side of it.
The gig
The rest of the weekend was spent hanging in the studio watching plink make music. I spent much of the time napping on the comfy studio couch while listening to atmospheric sound beds being created. That was really nice after the last few stressful weeks I've had.
I managed to get some half way cool camera phone things. Here are some examples. They're around 1 meg, so they shouldn't be too awful to download and watch.
This first one is kind of a walk through from the studio lounge into the studio. I came in while they were practicing something and discussing how many times to play it. That's what much of the discussion was like on Saturday, because they were basically playing songs that they'd worked out a bit ahead of time, but not 100 percent. On Sunday they switched things up a bit and just played one part for 5-10 minutes and then moved on to another part because they were mainly creating sounds. (Mike on guitar, Scott on bass, Bob on keyboard)
Studio lounge walk through
This second one is neat because Bob was just setting up his guitar and a bunch of fx pedals and it was making a really neat noise and so they just recorded it. This is how the magic happens. Right before your very eyes. This one is neat because you can hear the noise without all the distortion that ruined most of the sound. (That's Scott with camera, Bob sitting with guitar, Brad is the off camera voice)
Studio serendipity.
This is probably the only other vid where the audio turned out sounding half way decent when there was any music going on. It's about 1 minute long. This time I was in the studio control room. See what I mean about the quiet sound beds? Imagine after an hour or so of this how you might be feeling pretty sleepy but in a good way.
You are getting sleepy
And now back to the present. It's 7:30pm, and I'm at the cabin, but not done with work. My plan is to work for a couple of hours, make some dinner and then go to sleep as early as possible. That's a typically exciting evening for me these days. |
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| Video Blog |
[May. 6th, 2005|04:53 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  rushed | ] |
I spent all day working, which was ehh, expected but not fun. The good news is that I'm done with what I needed to finish. My friends are showing up at the venue in the next hour or so, but I'm going to run across the street and do some laundry first.
I just discovered that if you save the little camera videos to my phone memory card (320x200 quicktime), it can store 8 hours worth. Whoa!
So instead of posting more crappy cell phone pictures, I'll do videos, since the motion really helps make things a little more interesting. They'll probably be about 30 seconds long, and only about 1 meg in size with audio. I'll try to make them less boring than this, but to test it out, I walked around my sister's house...
Upper floor...
Lower floor... |
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| Clones? |
[Apr. 14th, 2005|10:44 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | SYL - Alien | ] |
Owen Wilson and Dennis Hopper cloned from the same genetic material? That broken nose isn't fooling anyone...
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| Snow pics |
[Apr. 12th, 2005|09:24 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
Last weekend we had a big spring snow storm. After I actually found my phone I took some pics. By tuesday, almost all the snow had melted...
View from the deck:
And a few more after the cut...
( Read more... ) |
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| Glutton for E-Punishment(tm) |
[Mar. 24th, 2005|04:25 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
I lowered the price and relisted the one item that didn't sell on ebay, my G&L bass. I guess it only took me a couple of days to recover from the ebay pain. That, plus I was tripping over shipping boxes when I was trying to do laundry. All the other transactions are completed, except for one guy who is sending me a wire transfer.
So far it's just been a typical week around here. Writing code, testing things, fixing bugs, checking in code. Drinking coffee. And running back and forth to UPS and the Post Office.
The weather has been awesome this week, so it's nice to get out of the house once in a while. I went down the hill to get chicken curry from the local Thai place for lunch. Mmm.
I totally spaced out on Monday (playing Fight Night 2, a totally addictive boxing game and my new evening vice), and forgot to go see my friend Brian's new band sound check at the Moore. There's this live sound recording class at one of the local schools and their final project involves mixing bands in a big theatre down town. It would have been fun, but oh well. It was totally my fault. I should probably start using the calendar in my phone.
Low is playing a live set in seattle which is being broadcast on kexp right now. You can stream it on kexp.org, and if you've got the technology, I recommend it. They're good live. Last time I saw them was when gse came out to visit.
Update: The KEXP show is over, but they're playing a real show later tonight. I probably won't go. I gotta beat up some guys on the TV tonight. |
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| ebay week is done, with bonus treo rant |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|09:28 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
| [ | music |
| | beck - sea change | ] |
Well, I managed to sell all but one thing -- my bass guitar, which is kinda understandable, since you'd sorta want to play it first, and it's something I still theoretically have a use for. Theoretically.
Two guys still have to send payment, but they're both smaller items. Man, I forgot how much paypal really screws you on fees. It's painful.
I think that's all the sellin' I'll be doing for a while. I'm going back to boulder pretty soon and I don't have enough time for another round of picking more stuff out of the closets, taking pictures, putting up auctions, waiting for them to finish, negotiating with the buyers, rounding up boxes, packing and shipping stuff. Maybe next year.
So far having the new treo phone is just as annoying as my old palm pilot. Not so much the device, so far it works as advertised. It's all the little fucking software download web sites that require you to register before you can download your trial version of some shitty $9.95 shareware app that I'm just going to delete after 20 seconds. Generally if I think of looking for some software to do something, I'll find 27 different applications available, some of which are 4 years old, almost all of which suck butt. So much for the "robust developer community". As far as I can tell, that mostly means it's easy for any fuckwit to write a demo app and clutter up the various software databases with it. Yeah, there's 400 guys out there who all wrote a memo app, great. How does this help me?
At least I can always use it as a phone. My old palm pilot just sits in the closet. Anyone want a nice aluminum palm vx? Free? I thought about selling it on ebay, but I'd rather have a fork in my eye than go through that experience any time soon. |
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| tgif |
[Mar. 18th, 2005|03:27 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
Man, this has been a seriously boring week. I need to find something fun to do this weekend.
Work amusement today consisted of correcting a variable name typo from LISITNG_TYPE to LISTING_TYPE. Wow. It wasn't just in one place either, it was everywhere that variable was used. That's pretty hard to do.
Most of my auctions end sunday, a few on monday. So far it's been pretty slow. Lots of watchers, no bidders. We'll see, I guess. That'll be enough ebay for a while. The thought of listing 1000 cd's just horrifies me at this point.
My "force myself to leave the house every once in a while" expedition today was to get a new phone. Not that I really needed one, but I'm going to be "on call" at work so I figured I could justify getting something that can handle email and maybe some emergency remote ssh from time to time. So I got a treo 650. Definitely a dork-o-phone, sure. Embrace the dorkitude. |
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| Happy St. Patrick's Day |
[Mar. 17th, 2005|10:24 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
Happy St. Patrick's day to all those Irish and pseudo-Irish folks out there. If you aren't wearing green, you get a punch in the arm.
Last night when I was on my way to the Croc to see that show (which was pretty good, though sparsely attended), I was stopped at a light and I noticed an odometer conjunction. I chose to interpret it as a good luck omen and took a picture. If anyone needs some luck, you are welcome to share some of mine!
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| Ebay week continued |
[Mar. 16th, 2005|10:21 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
I put 4 useless (to me) rack mounted synthy devices up on Ebay last night.
Korg TR-Rack Synth, Axon AX-100SB MIDI converter, Kurzweil Event Station Drum Trigger, Alesis DataDisk, Lexicon MPX-G2, G&L 2500 bass. Lots of stuff.
I've been hauling this synth stuff around since I was in Garden of Shadows, when I was playing guitar synth, circa 1999. Time to get rid of it. I've also started getting these weird "please, I'm a starving student, would you end this auction early for me at the offered price without me actually having to bid because I have a project due monday!" emails. Whatever. I may be generally trusting of humanity, but I'm not THAT trusting.
I'm going to a show tonight, to support my friend Jon's band. He's the one who bought my amp too, so it'll be neat to hear them using that.
As far as work goes, I'm keeping busy. We're kinda late on the final delivery though, which was supposed to be Monday. I made the analogy this morning that we are in the "pothole filling" stage of the construction of this software. The road is done, but there are all these potholes in the road that have to be filled before we can let anyone drive on it, and our people are running around filling them randomly. "Oh, there's another one over there, could you take care of it?". Except I'm not sure how many of them there actually are.
Another analogy might be a giant game of "whack-a-mole". We're knocking things down, but who knows how many of these things there are under there? When it ends, will we have enough tickets for that skull key chain with the eyes that light up?
In this case, we're definitely fixing potholes rather than whacking hamsters, although from the trenches, it's kind of hard to see the difference.
Obviously in kind of a strange mood this morning. Too much coffee without any food... |
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| Ebay week continued |
[Mar. 15th, 2005|09:53 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
Well, I ended up working until 8pm last night, so I didn't get a chance to put anything up on Ebay. I'll probably do that today. I was cruising the web this morning and stumbled across this killer japanese collectors edition Alien DVD Boxed Set. The box is a giant plastic Alien head that the DVD's fit into. Neat! With shipping and stuff, they cost about $300 on Ebay. Since I've been trying to reduce my toy collection, I'll definitely have to pass. But I still kinda want one. Images after the cut.
( Read more... ) |
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| It's ebay week |
[Mar. 14th, 2005|03:29 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
I dug a whole bunch of old musical gear out of the closets and I'm finally going to put it all up on ebay this week. Everything that I haven't actually used in a couple of years is going. I picked out a synth unit, some midi processing rack things, some fx units, a couple of bass guitars. Quite a bit of stuff, really.
The funny part is that my first pass didn't really reduce the apparent quantity of stuff in my closets at all. I'm going to take pictures this afternoon while there is still enough light, and then put them all up tonight. Hopefully it will all be gone in 2 weeks by the time I have to head back down to Boulder. |
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[Mar. 11th, 2005|12:15 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Trivium | ] |
More food nostalgia today. I'm going out for a Gyro. I used to eat 'em all the time when I worked down town. There's one place fairly near by that I haven't been to yet (Aladdin's Gyrocery), so I'm gonna check it out.
Update
Yes, Gyros are pretty awesome. Also, I took a crappy cell phone picture of my "office".
Top shelf has 2 sets of speakers, my neat new LCD monitor and the wireless keyboard mouse/receiver. Middle shelf has (L to R) crap behringer mixer, laptop, mackie big knob, and keyboard+mouse. Maybe I'll dig my camera up and replace this with a better picture.
Edit... since a bunch of my geek friends have the same ikea desk, we were trading pictures, so I took a better one
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| Quest for a Bitchin' Burrito |
[Mar. 10th, 2005|10:05 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  drunk | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Red Sparowes - At The Soulless Dawn | ] |
After getting this new big knob doohickey, I rearranged the way all my computers and speakers and mixers and stuff are hooked up, and I needed some new cables (and a new guitar strap, since I took one to Boulder...) So I rolled on down to Guitar Center. It's amusing how the sales guys all remember me even though I haven't been there for 6 months. I mean, I don't buy that much stuff. Do I?
When I was done with that, I got all nostalgic for Bimbo's Bitchin' Burrito Kitchen, which was across the street from where I used to live downtown. Since I was pretty close to that area already, I made an expedition of it. First I went to Everyday Music, which is a pretty cool CD shop up on Broadway. It turns out they've doubled in size, and they have a new upper floor now. It's nice to see the local shops growing instead of going out of business. I only got two CD's, Red Sparowes (yes, that's how they spell it) and The Mars Volta. I probably would have gotten more, but my mental list of stuff that I'm looking for always seems to disappear when I actually go in a store.
Then I picked up a bitchin' burrito with shredded beef and extra hot sauce. Amazingly, I found parking pretty easily at both places, although it was about 8 and the night crowds were starting to pick up. On my way back to the freeway, a crazy guy who looked just like Kevin Klein in A Fish Called Wanda tried to commit hari-kiri on my front bumper. That's one thing I don't miss about living down there. But I do miss the burritos. |
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| Dead Can Dance |
[Mar. 10th, 2005|09:53 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
Hey, look at that. Dead Can Dance is touring North America in August/September. Check with your local theatres ASAP. Tix here in Seattle (Sep 17 and 18 @ the Paramount) go on sale tomorrow.
I remember seeing their farewell tour at the Warner in DC years ago, and that was a great show.
Whoever wrote this little blurb on the paramount web site needs a good slapping around. I happen to like Tuck, because he's a badass guitarist, but WHAT?
It took Dead Can Dance to find the common ground between black-clad gloom rockers and Birkenstock-sporting new-agers. They accomplished this by emphasizing the melancholia in their mix of mesmerizing vocals, catchy drum beats, synthy world music, European Renaissance folk, and modern studio wizardry. Wrapping it all in Joy Division-style album covers helped lure in the Alternative Rock crowd. The amazing part was that they never watered any element down, but created a world and a sound all their own. They plunge you into a Technicolor Seventh Seal that shows the beauty in death and disease while keeping the chess-playing grim reapers at a safe distance. For those who love Siouxsie Sioux and herbal tea - Dead Can Dance are the Tuck and Patti for the Anne Rice set!
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| Tax Time |
[Mar. 9th, 2005|09:16 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  shocked | ] |
I started doing my taxes last night. It didn't take very long at all until I got to the rental property section. Now that I bought a house and I'm renting out rooms, things just got a LOT more complicated. I haven't spent anything yet, but I'm going to have to start keeping track of everything that I spend on the house. And since the house is also for "personal use", I can only deduct a percentage of expenses (although it looks like you can pretty much make up whatever number you want so I've been choosing %75 since there is 1 me and 3 renters).
So, the weird thing is that since I'm renting it, I can now write off depreciation for my house in addition to the mortgage interest? Is that right? No wonder property owners make so much money. According to their depreciation formula, that will just about offset the rent that I'm taking in. I don't have any other deductions since I haven't done any repairs / improvements / appliances. So... I have do all this extra work and the net result is that renting out these rooms only costs me like a couple hundred bucks in taxes because of this depreciation write off thing. For some reason that worries me. Since it's a net change of basically zero, I really feel like taking the don't ask don't tell approach on my house mates. There's no signed leases and they pay me in cash anyway. If the IRS is reading this, I'm just kidding. It's a net zero, so I might as well declare it. I need to double check again to see if I can only write off %75 of the depreciation as well since some of the property is for personal use. That seems to be another "choose your own formula" section.
Oh yeah, one other thing. As far as I can tell, the only down side to this rental property depreciation thing is that when you sell it, it reduces the basis value of the house for counting the profit that you make. So, if you write off 50 grand in depreciation over the years, that counts as taxable profit when you re-sell. But oh look, none of that is taxable since it's my primary residence. Say what? Someone tell me if this is actually a legal loophole, or if it's gotta be a "one or the other, not both" thing or if I should start voting Republican. |
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| Computers suck |
[Mar. 8th, 2005|12:36 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
Sometimes, working on computers all day sucks. I got my desktop rebuilt last night, fortunately. Windows System Restore saved my bacon. Then today my laptop started having network problems, which mysteriously resolved itself after a couple of frustrating hours.
On the bright side, the weather is amazing today.
I'm ready for some lunch anyway, so it's time to take a walk around the block to chill out, then go downstairs and make a sandwich. |
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| Back in the saddle^H^H^H^H^H^HSeattle again |
[Mar. 6th, 2005|01:15 pm] |
I got back on friday and immediately went out to see my room mates' crazy band G.A.W. down in Pioneer Square. It's been a long time since I've been down there and it was fun. I stayed out too late and drank umm... too much and so I spent saturday recovering and catching up on my cable tv watching.
Woke up early this morning I watched the first F1 race of the new season. It looks like it will be a very interesting one. Lots of new team/driver configurations and rule changes.
Now that I've "wasted" the first couple of days back, I have a bunch of things to do around town, at the house and at work.
So, I'm outta here... |
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