作譜

The occassional odd musing concerning an omniscient diety

WTF

One thing that amuses me about devout Christians is the fear of God. I remember the "Christian vs. Athiest" episode of Morgan Spurlock’s show 30 Days. The beefy Christian guy on the show was fretting so much about the well-being of his atheist guest’s soul, it made him sound … like a sissy.

Dude — if she’s hellbent, why stand in her way?

It makes me wonder something cruel. If God is someone to be feared, what would happen if it turned out he really didn’t care? Do you continue fearing a higher being who wouldn’t give you the time of day anyway?

God is all-powerful, so I was taught in grade school. In college, it was pointed out that part of his all-encompassing power was an ability to abandon his creations. His followers can’t deny him the free will granted onto them.

I would think ambivalence would be something to fear more than wrath.

aGLIFF program now available

Capital of Texas

The program for the 2007 Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is now available. Actually, it’s been available since last week, but this past Friday, tickets became available for non-members. This year, ticket pre-sale is happening only online — no station at Tapelenders, sorry to say.

I spent part of the afternoon leaving printed programs around south Austin, so if you want to pick one up, you can find a few over at Jo’s Coffee, Guero’s, Curra’s, Ruta Maya, Cafe Caffiene and Amy’s Ice Cream next to the Westgate Theatres. If they’re already gone, well, I’ll see what I can do about getting more. You should be able to find the printed programs throughout town.

It looks like this year’s festival is heavy on international films and documentaries. The films I’m planning to see are The Bubble (Israel), Boy’s Love (Japan), Eternal Summer (Taiwan) and Semper Fi: One Marine’s Journey (USA).

Instant radio hit (You’ll Dance to Anything by Terry Riley)

Technophilia Aural

I ran across a site called Hit Song Science, which uses the PolyphonicHMI algorithms to determine mathematically whether a song has hit potential. The site is offering four months of free service till Oct. 31, and I didn’t see much in the way of small print to determine what would happen after that grace period expires. I figured I may as well give it a shot with some tracks by Eponymous 4.

However much I may love the songs I create, I have this sense my music is too middle ground to fit any particular audience. It’s too commercial for the indie audience (with whom I have most affinity) but it’s experimental enough to keep it out of reach of mainstream taste. I went into this experiment knowing I probably wouldn’t score very high.

According to the site, a song with a score higher than 7.0 has less resistance to becoming a hit. Scores between 6.75 and 7.0 indicate a borderline hit which requires further marketing push. Anything below that, I guess, you don’t bother.

Here’s how it turned out.

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What I learned: You too can sound like you don’t suck at karaoke

Technophilia Aural

When dealing with the V-Vocal editor in Cakewalk SONAR, it’s important to know these helpful hints. For the past three weeks, I’ve been recording vocals, and I make no claims of being a singer. So the results often require lots of clean-up.

I tried figuring out V-Vocal on my own, but it’s a quirky tool and unstable to boot. I can’t count the number of times my computer crashed while I was using it. If you just look at it wrong, it craps out. Despite that inconvenience, it did work incredible wonders on my voice.

But to get to that point, it helps to know the subtleties of V-Vocal, which isn’t really spelled out in the documentation. In addition to adjusting pitches, V-Vocal can fix modulations (like vibrato or warbled notes) and smooth out portamento. That attack a little sharp? It can be flattened out. That long note a bit shaky? It can be tamed.

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The principle of the matter

Vital Signs

You’re in a store. A salesperson asks whether you need help. You say no because you actually have found what you’re looking for on your own. After a few minutes of more browsing, you start to leave. The salesperson stops you to say he needs to give you a ticket to hand the cashier when you make the purchase. You wonder why he needs you’re telephone number. He explains it’s required in order for him to get his commission on the sale. You take the ticket, but as you walk to the cashier, you realize he is going to get paid for not doing anything at all. What do you do?

Here’s what I did.

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Is it wrong for me to think this is funny? (Yes.)

Vital Signs

I pressed the close-door button on the elevator, and as the door was closing, another guy in the elevator held the door open for another passenger. After he got on, I made it obvious I was pressing the close-door button of the elevator. I got kind of ticked off that this guy would interfere with my intention to not letting anyone else on. But I also had to admit it’s rather dumb for me to be upset about something like that.

Are you subscribed?

Administrative

Here a feed, there a feed, everywhere a feed, feed.

Pretty much every social networking and blog site provide syndication feeds for users, and my own sites have their own feeds. I just assume if you know me, you’re probably subscribed to them. But I shouldn’t be so presumptuous. So for the convenience of the three people who read this site, here are all the feeds you should probably know to keep up with what I do:

What I learned: High-res screenshots + Ableton Live = Frustration in my blood

Technophilia Professional

Making a high-resolution screenshot for printed materials will always be fraught with peril. I learned that the hard way when I attempted to incorporate screenshots of Ableton Live into artwork for the cover of Eponymous 4’s In C. A simple Google search for "300dpi screenshot" yields a lot of advice, some good, some bad. (The first result in the search is actually incorrect.)

For an explanation of why making high-resolution screenshots are so difficult, this AskMeFi question goes into good detail. This technique yielded the best results for other programs but not for Ableton Live.

The developers of Live have gone to great lengths to make the user interface look sleek in Windows XP. All the text is anti-aliased — not a single pixelated character in the interface. (Except maybe the menus.) Those anti-aliased characters wreak havoc when upscaling Live screenshots from 72ppi to 300ppi (or dpi, since that’s what Photoshop calls it.)

After experimenting with a whole bunch of tools — including some screenshot utilities for gaming — my only course of action was to remove all text from my Live screenshot. Once the text was gone, changing the color mode from RGB to Indexed Color resulted in a smaller palette, and I could resize the screenshot. Of course, that meant if I wanted the text back in the shot, I would have to add it manually.

Then again, there really is no way to go from 72ppi to 300ppi without some clean-up at the end of the process.

Apple users probably don’t have a problem with this.

What I learned: ‘Set Names utf8’ is your friend

Technophilia Professional

I knew at some point, given the amount of Japanese interspersed with English on my various sites, I would need to change the Latin-1 encoding of my MySQL database (say that five times fast) to UTF-8. It hasn’t been much of an issue because when I display that text on a web site, I send UTF-8 encoding in the header.

I reached a breaking point when with trying to sort a text field with mixed languages. Because the database was encoded in Latin-1, the multibyte strings were sorted as single-byte strings. On a web page, that meant Japanese text would appear in the middle of the sort.

Well, I finally did a Google search on what it takes to perform a Latin-1-to-UTF-8 conversion. So long as your data is fairly clean, it takes about four commands in a shell prompt to finish. And that’s what I did — I dumped my database, converted it and loaded it into an empty server to see the results. I liked what I saw in phpMyAdmin. Hastily, I decided to forge ahead and do a real conversion.

Imagine my surprise when I reloaded my websites and saw question marks where there should have been Japanese text.

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Huh, I thought it was 1999 all over again …

Technophilia Professional

The Register lists 10 signs you’re in a tech bubble. From my perspective, I would add to the list an item about getting contacted by third-party recruiters who have no clue about your skill set.

I can’t say I work for the most magnanimous employer where the purse strings are concerned, but there’s a stability here that I find refreshing from my earlier employment history. It would take, say, Nonesuch Records taking me on as their in-house webmaster to get me to budge. In other words, I’m starting to feel the other shoe about ready to drop in the next 15 to 18 months.