trebuchet!

a long time ago, when i was a software tester for a living, i worked on a project where the software we were testing was called 3D Castle Creator, so, naturally, i built a model trebuchet with which i flung tennis balls into the far reaches of the cube-farm that was my office… but it was a simple medieval trebuchet.

the one i got today, is a modern “floating arm” trebuchet, and it can do a lot more with a lot less, let me tell you… 😀

trebuchet

i haven’t tested it yet, but the previous owner claims to have lobbed a golf-ball over 200 feet on a regular basis. 😎

misc.

i panicked

i got this silly little app for my smart phone called Yellofier which is presented by a pair of folks, one of whom is boris blank (of Yello). the app is, basically, a sampler with a bunch of preset effects and a bunch of preset samples, and a sequencer, all of which is obscured by an interesting, quasi-intuitive interface. i’m not sure i’m going to actually use it for anything, although there is already a group that has has released an album using it… or, perhaps, because of that fact… but it’s silly and fun, and it will give me something to do while everybody else is playing angry birds. here is an example of what i’ve been doing so far.

snake suspenderz has been pretty busy recently. we did a wedding, and we did a set for the chateau at valley center, and today we’ve got a moisture festival ( 😐 ) gig. who knows how long it’s going to last this time, but fun is fun, so why not go with it?

ethical dilemma

there are rats that have been chewing on the bottom of our house. this comes almost immediately after we spent almost $10,000 to fix the plumbing and the kitchen floor after rats chewed through the old plumbing. there is no doubt that we DO NOT want rats under the house…

so, of course, i have been tasked with the job of trapping them. which, because of the fact that they are “wild” rats, means murdering them.

not just “killing” them, i discovered… actually murdering them. i discovered the difference when i put rat traps below our house two nights ago, and trapped two rats. the difference comes when i realised that they have the same, cute, beady little eyes as tame rats, which bug out of their skulls in a particularly disturbing way when their skulls have been smashed. and that’s not to mention the blood spatter. 😮

and it doesn’t get any easier… in fact, my impression is that it gets harder, because i cleaned up after my first murder, only to succeed in murdering another rat this morning.

so i really don’t want them to be where they are, but i feel really guilty murdering them, even though they don’t really give me much choice. 😥

just in case there are any republicans reading this blog

the government has been shut down for almost 2 weeks, because the republicans want to defund the affordable healthcare act.

which the republicans voted to fund six months ago.

they’re arguing that “obama doesn’t want to negotiate”, but all the negotiation was completed, done, over with and ready to move on SIX MONTHS AGO and the republicans decided to change their minds at the last minute.

during the intervening six months the republicans also changed the standing rules of the house, so that only the republicans could ask that the government could be re-opened, in case of a shutdown…

and NOW they’re hoping that nobody noticed this little change, so that they can blame the shutdown on obama…

i think it’s time to dump THE WHOLE LOT OF ‘EM and put together a government that ACTUALLY represents all of the people, rather than just saying it does. 😛

Sony Super-Audio CD

quite a number of years ago, i bought a CD of “The Antiphonal Music Of Gabrieli” subtitled “The Glorious Sound of Brass” by the Philidelphia Brass Ensemble, The Cleveland Brass Ensemble and the Chicago Brass Ensemble. it was, i believe, one of the first purchases i ever made on a, then, brand new service called “amazon”, but the current iteration of that service has no record of my purchasing anything like that, so it might have been some other online service.

i have been playing music by giovanni gabrieli for a long time, and he is one of my favourite brass composers, so i figured that this would be an excellent addition to my music collection. however, when i received the disk in the mail, i put it into my CD player and…

nothing happened.

this was before computers had CD players on a regular basis, and the dedicated audio CD player that i had was a sony “diskman” that someone had been throwing away, so i searched around and found another dedicated audio CD player that didn’t have such a sordid background and put the disk in that and…

nothing happened.

then i took a closer look at the CD itself. what i found was this TINY inscription that said this disc is designed for use in super audio cd players only on the back of the box.

no problem, i figured. i’ll just put it into my (at the time) “state of the art” work computer (which did have a CD-ROM drive) and it’ll play there… no, i didn’t think i’d copy it into MP3 files, because this was before MP3 files existed.

but i was mistaken. it didn’t play there, either…

but it is gabrieli, and i’m sure the music is SUPERB, so i didn’t send the disk back. i held on to it, on the off chance that, at some point i would run into someone who had a “super audio CD” player.

which brings us to today… close to 15 years later, and i have tried it on every single computer i have owned, and a bunch of other peoples’ equipment, and i have STILL never heard this CD.

i have, since, learned that sony introduced the super audio CD in 1999, and by 2007 it was considered a failure, and not significantly better quality than standard CDs, but that didn’t make the fact that i have this one disk of music that i really like any easier to listen to… or copy into a format that i can listen to — which, i suppose, is what all this copyright/piracy gibberish that i hear bandied about in the news, is all about to begin with…

but, come on… this is all music that was recorded previously — the SACD is a combination of three other 12″ LP records, released between 1955 and 1980 — and i paid for the music… NOT the incomprehensible file format, or whatever it is that makes this particular disk NOT PLAY in the audio equipment that i HAVE. 😐 furthermore, i’m NOT going to buy a SACD player, which are now “audiophile” equipment, and cost anywhere up to three times what they did originally, so that i can play this ONE disk.

bottom line: does somebody out there have a SACD player that i can hook up to my computer, so i can make FLAC copies of the music? i have a digital pre-amp that plugs into my computer and has RCA inputs, and i have RCA cables, so all i need is the player, and you’d be able to get it back after i’m finished… i’d really appreciate it…

skript-kiddie stupidity

i have been getting a lot of comment-spam recently, that is along the lines of this:

{
{I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4}
hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours.
{It’s|It is} pretty worth enough for me. {In my opinion|Personally|In my view},
if all {webmasters|site owners|website owners|web owners} and bloggers made good
content as you did, the {internet|net|web} will bee {much more|a
lot more} useful than ever before.|...

i don’t really understand the purpose behind such things… moreso than i don’t understand why people send spam at all, i mean probably 85% to 90% of ALL internet traffic is spam, and, as far as i have been able to tell, only a very minute fraction of a percentage of internet users actually think spam is a good thing, but… this is a new low: a person who uses a faulty, undoubtedly third-party script to drop faulty comment spam into a blog that WILL NOT publish it the way it was received…

it makes me understand a lot more how people like ken at popehat have policies like pasting. although i’m sure that, in this case, what they’re most interested in is a hyperlink, and i’m not going to do that for ’em, because their comment is obviously spam… and low quality spam (if there could be such a thing).

sibelius

the software, not the composer…

i bit the bullet and bought the academic version of sibelius 7… which cost $300, rather than the standard version, which has less capabilities, but costs $700 (a thing which i have yet to figure out, even though the capabilities that the educational version has are useless to me, because it requires that i have a network with at least one other installation of the educational version installed on it).

it actually took me a few days to make it “legal” because of the fact that moe’s WSU email address had been changed (since she graduated… oops!) and we had to work around that until she was able to phone the helpdesk and get things straightened out.

now that it is all legal and everything, i’ve gotta start actually learning how to use it. but it’s easy enough to use that, already, before i’ve even completed one of the FOUR two-hour tutorials it came with(!), i have been able to complete two lead sheets for beatles tunes that i copied from THE BOOK for snake suspenderz, and create a 6-part arrangement of a piano rag by scott joplin for the fremont philharmonic.

i still haven’t realised all of the goodies that this new, legal software holds in store for me, but i think it’s already well on the way to paying me back for the money i spent on it. 😎