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360 San RafaelSunday, May 11, 2008 11:49 AM Yesterday I took a walk into Barbier Park, climbing up San Pedro Mountain. It's really just a big hill on the North side of the San Rafael valley, but it is big enough to have very nice views. The trail starts at the end of a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood, and is initially quite steep, but soon levels out and is a much easier walk. It took me about 45 minutes to get fairly close to the top I expected to get to one of the highest peaks and take in some panoramic vistas, but actually the radio relay stations or suchlike are surrounded by security fences and dense bush on either side of the trails, and the best views are to be found about 3/4 of the way up: This is a true 360 view, with San Pablo Bay in the North East, Mt Diablo far away in the East, the Richmond Bridge in the South-East, and the San Rafael valley in the South-West, and the glorious Mt Tamalpais. The Sun is thinking about setting in a couple of hours, behind the hill to the West. Deer at McNeerMonday, April 28, 2008 11:36 AM I walked down to McNeer's Beach yesterday as part of an effort to get regular exercise. It was very busy, lots of people picnicking and playing volleyball and suchlike, but also some quiet areas without anyone around, where if you were patient, you could see some wildlife:
Tod at TEDSaturday, April 19, 2008 10:23 AM I had heard of Tod Machover from the pages of KEYBOARD magazine many years ago when he was working on augmented Cellos. This 20 minute video of a talk he gave at TED this year is fascinating, but from about the 13 minute mark on, it actually brought me to tears: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/246 I was reminded of William Horwood's book Scallagrigg, which also blends the themes of Cerebral Palsy and Computer Software, and enablement. New SONAR Color SchemeMonday, April 14, 2008 01:09 AM in Studio SONAR 7.02 is running great, positively humming along (except with no audible hum thank goodness). To celebrate, I am releasing a new color scheme: Prodigal Clips 8.clr (save to disk and remove .txt extension) Preview (click to enlarge):
Death By ChocolateSunday, April 13, 2008 09:02 PM I've been so busy recently that I haven't been thinking about posting here. Well, here's a report from the end of February. With J and A living in Napa we occasionally hear about food-related things that interest us. This time it was that COPIA, the American Center for Wine, Food, and The Arts was holding their annual Wine and Chocolate Tasting, billed as "Death By Chocolate: The Ultimate Chocolate Festival". Naturally, we were interested. We drove up to Napa with a couple of co-worker/friends from China, thinking they would enjoy the drive (and the chocolate) and possibly get to meet up with J and A who were also planning on being there. Alas, the weather was grey with odd spots of rain but it was still fun and the chocolate was delicious.
The wine-tasting part was frustrating for a couple of reasons. One was that the various chocolates on offer were overpowering for the most part, that I never felt I was appreciating the full flavor of the wine.
One thing I really wish: 1) that I had discovered the Port Wine vendors upstairs sooner, and 2) that I didn't have to drive us home. The variety of chocolate goods on display was quite astounding, including icecream and also some gluten-free chocolate souffles which were very delicious and reminded me of my numerous gluten-intolerant relatives (as well as my own history). I meant to take down the details of the vendor but I seem to have misplaced my notes. Darn. The other product that sticks in my mind are Jade Chocolates. These were quite special. Discriminating TasteWednesday, March 12, 2008 08:59 AM in Politics [Ferraro] ignited a flap by telling a California newspaper that "if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." "And if he was a woman he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept," Ferraro said. What a load of bollocks. I think there might be reasons other than being Black in Obama's case. However I think the only reason Clinton is still in the nomination race is because she's a woman. Two - no, Three UpdatesTuesday, February 26, 2008 11:58 PM in Studio I've just uploaded fresh MP3's of Playing With The Big Boys, Future Imperfect , and Painting Abstracts to the Prodigal Sounds section of the web site. Both hi-fi and lo-fi versions of the files have been refreshed. I've been listening to the versions on the web site off and on over the last month, at work, and I finally made some notes about what I didn't like: Abstracts, it turns out, was an older version. I had completely forgotten that I'd already fixed many of the things I noticed. So the new version hasn't had any recent work, but is a remix that I did a while ago but never refreshed on the web. Future Imperfect. has been beefed up a little, with one instrument dropping out completely (no more Pipe Organ) and another returning in its place (subtle Melange strings). Big Boys has has more radical work done: Thanks to a free VST plugin, TickyClav from Big Tick Audio. This great little soft-synth (did I mention it was free?) picks one thing to do, and does it well. After playing around with it, I decided to replace the clav sound in Big Boys, and ended up recording a few new phrases, and removing some existing instrument tracks that were no longer needed. In the process, I also decided to re-balance some sections of the song with an eye to how this would sound if there were only one guitar player. So now, where before there were clean guitar chords backing a lead guitar, the backing track is now being played on TickyClav. Additionally, I re-recorded the brass section with a different, better sounding patch. And removed a second keyboard sound that was responding to the brass MIDI track. You really couldn't tell it was there but it was muddying things up a little. Just a quick couple of days work, but the 2008 versions of these two songs are much improved, I think. A Short InterludeFriday, February 22, 2008 06:46 PM Scene: Driving to work Me: So I got a reply from Ed in the CD office. He likes my code, says he is learning something from it. Her: He's not allowed to fall in love with you. I fell in love with you from reading your code. Anyone would. Me: I think "anyone" is a little broad... Her: Are you calling me short? Me: ...I would use the term "petite". Of course I want a woman in the White HouseSunday, February 03, 2008 01:13 PM in politics In the unlikely event that someone is reading this that can vote in the Democratic primary, and hasn't made their mind up yet, please watch this speech, and then decide: Michelle Obama speaks in Delaware: "Watching her, I started to feel oddly sorry for her husband's opponent." Thank You Derek CrudgintonTuesday, January 22, 2008 11:52 AM in Computers This is exactly what I needed to know:
Essential Software List 2007Sunday, January 20, 2008 02:08 PM in Computers Time for a round-up of the Free and/or Open Source tools I've been using on my work laptop. 1. Eclipse 3.3 (IDE, Java and generic) I've been dipping into various versions of Eclipse for Java development for years. Its plugin architecture is brilliant (see below). Out of the box it handles Java development as sweetly as any "Professional" edition out there. It also has a built-in editor for Ant build files (an XML dialect) which I'm finding particularly handy right now. One feature I really appreciate is the ability to create a "generic" project that basically just lists all the files in a directory, regardless of what type of file they are. Very handy for my current work which involves a series of versioned directories containing various flavors of text files. Which brings me to: "Afae" stands for "Another Freebooter's All-purpose Editor". It doesn't appear to be under active development and has stalled at version 0.9, but don't let that stop you from using it. It adds a TextMate-flavored text editor to Eclipse that allows me to edit .sh, .bat, .sql, and other types of files in syntax-colored goodness. It has a bunch of other features that I'm not using (such as a "post to blog" button on the toolbar?) but I've found the text editing to be solid. 3. DiffMerge I've mentioned this before. Since then it is up to version 3.1 but it is still free, and although other file comparison tools probably have more features, I've grown to like this one. 4. AstroGrep I have long ago given up on making Windows Search find anything on my file system. How I long for the File Manager applet in FoxPro for DOS 2.0. That thing was fast. AstroGrep is a GREP utility for Windows, with a simple UI on top. It's fast, and I can search the contents of text file with regular expressions. On my latest project I have found it invaluable. Cloverfield (2008)Saturday, January 19, 2008 11:34 AM in Film Review I feel stupid about this because I really wanted to see this film in the theater, with a bunch of people around me. I dragged L along with me. I thought it would be part of the fun to not know anything about the movie going in, but perhaps that was a mistake. SPOILER Is it fair to say that the film is "Blair Witch Project vs. Godzilla"? Yeah, it probably is. Except that it's an apt description of the movie I'd wished I'd seen, because it only really describes the first half of "Cloverfield". Blair Witch succeeded (for those who enjoyed it) because we never really saw anything. The producers of Cloverfield were not brave enough to maintain this throughout the film, and the second half of the movie is an unlikely sequence of Perils-of-Pauline near-miss encounters as we see more and more of the monster until nothing is a mystery anymore. (Any fan of Doctor Who knows that monsters are scariest when you see only glimpses of them.) Actually the only mystery remaining is how the handi-cam's battery powered the thing for 84 minutes. And of those 84 minutes, the film actually seems 20 minutes too long. "Cloverfield" succeeds when it is focused on telling a personal story of regular people on the periphery of an extraordinary event. It fails when - like a dinosaur trapped in a tar pit - it is unable to break free of traditional block-buster movie cliches. |
Another was than I'm not used to wine tasting - I know you are supposed to taste and spit and to be honest, there wasn't a lot of spit-receptacles available and this place was crowded. I don't think they were really set up for the formal taste-and-spit process. Best you could do was sip, taste, then spit discreetly back into your glass at which point you had to make your way through the crowd to the nearest "wet trash" bin. So I stopped sampling the wine and focused on the chocolate.