VexVox

I'm at the age where it's easier for my family just to hand me cash and to let me get what I want for myself. They can't get me anything simple like a Wii or an iPod Touch. No — I would ask Santa for exotic stuff like bass traps, monitor speakers, scores by Morton Feldman and Steve Reich or albums by VOLA & THE ORIENTAL MACHINE and KAREN.

I also live 2,000 miles away from the closest immediate family, 4,000 miles from the majority of my family. And the number of friends on which I'm willing to spend money is barely a handful.

All that to say, I don't do many gift exchanges. I participated in one last night at a dinner party, on which I spent $5.25 trying get there because I got lost on some toll roads. (Go Christmas spirit.) I've got a gift exchange coming up with Double-A, which is really just an excuse to eat at Musashino. That's about it.

So this list of Christmas swag is … minimal.

• A Røde NT1-A condenser microphone.
• Sony Sound Forge 9
• Mastering Audio by Bob Katz
• In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
• Feed the Animals by Girl Talk

The Mastering Audio book was purchased with funds provided in part by my mom, who has this running gag for Christmas. It's great. She'll buy this tacky Christmas toy and find nooks and crannies into which she'll stuff cash. And she's been pretty clever about the places she'll put it. Some years required tweezers.

I tell people I bought the Røde microphone with my company bonus, but in reality, I put that thing on Guitar Center credit. I usually get some form of cash for Christmas, and my plan is to use it to pay part of it down. It's a more intersting and simpler story just to say I bought it with the bonus. Is it really Christmas gift if I still have to pay for part of it? I'll consider it one since I've been meaning to buy another microphone for a long time now.

What I did buy with the bonus was Sony Sound Forge 9. I've been wanting to upgrade since I started working on some Eponymous 4 tracks with Japanese titles. The MP3 render supported only ISO-8859-1 tagging, and I needed UTF-8. Sound Forge 9 supports UTF-8.

The Neutral Milk Hotel and Girl Talk albums were purchased while I was Christmas shopping for my nephew and niece over at Waterloo Records. Maybe I should just consider those my usual CD purchases in a month.

The dinner party gift exchange limited purchases to $5, so I came away with:

• A journal
• A USB flash drive
• A budget 2-CD set of classical music used in movies
• Soap
• A Swiss Army knife
• A bag of dried tropical fruit
• An electronic organizer

I actually like all of those gifts. I streamlined — I bought two packs of Moleskin journals that come three in a pack and split them up among everyone. Yeah, not very personalized.

I'll amend this list if anything else arrives.

Yesterday, I wiped the hard drive on the old Dell Dimension clean and installed Windows 98, the operating system which shipped with the computer back in Dec. 8, 1998. (A little more than 10 years, actually.)

I spent a good part of the day hunting down old discs with drivers, installing anything Windows 98 couldn't find. It was nice to get the graphics card driver installed because looking at 640×480 monitor with 16 colors is a bit lo-fi for my taste.

Once everything got set up, I couldn't help notice just how speedy the computer ran. With XP on it, clicking anything would tax it for seconds at a time. It was excruciatingly slow. Back to its original state, it ran like a charm. It almost had me thinking it might be able to withstand a upgrade to Windows 2000 and no more.

But I have to reel myself back in. The hardware components are out of date, and a 500 mHz processor is not enough power to drive a modern day blow dryer. I even fished out the original receipt from the order. (Oh, yes you better believe I kept it. An old apartment was broken into once.)

Back in 1998, the computer shipped with a 13GB hard drive, 96MB of RAM, a CD burner and a ZIP drive. Yes, a ZIP drive! Your iPod probably has more space than that machine had in 1998.

Right now, I have a 40GB drive in there — yes, very spacious — and 512MB of RAM. I even put in a PCI card to support USB 2.0 and a network card. No, I didn't opt to get a network card in 1998. I was still on dial-up.

No, this computer must join its brethren into obsolecense. I guess that will be my secondary holiday project, in addition to studio time.

It does feel weird reviving the patient, only to know it's going to get gutted.

In 1998, I bought my first computer with my own income. The computer I had been using was an old Acer model, which was given as a birthday gift in 1995. But the Dell Dimension L500c, which I named NEMESISVEX in the Windows settings, was the first I bought with a loan I took out from the credit union.

I built many a website with this computer. In 2001, I used it as a web server to deliver Musicwhore.org and various other sites in the Vigilant Media network. Maintaining it got tired — and unreliable for users — so I moved all my sites back to Dreamhost.

When the computer I used as a developement server died in 2005, I bought a new machine — which is also now getting long in the tooth — and moved the Dimension into that role. By then, it was 7 years old and far past its prime. It had only two USB 1.0 slots, and its processor could handle only 512 MB of RAM. Large hard drives of the 120 GB magnitude needed to be partitioned. But I decided to max the machine out as best I could, even installing Windows XP on it!

I created some of the very first Eponymous 4 demos on this machine, before its limitations made it difficult to handle the demands of digital audio. I even wrote a novel with it.

For the last three years, it's served as a Shoutcast server, an FTP server and network buffer between the outside world of the Internets and my primary computer.

Last night, I thoughtlessly installed numerous XP updates. When the machine rebooted, I got a boot error. I tried it again and got the same error again. Huh. At that moment, I knew it was time. I could have fought a brave and valiant fight, rolling back the updates or reinstalling XP. Instead, I switched out the drive with an old one from the Windows 2000 days to see if it would boot up. It did not.

The only work I have on that machine is my web development, and with the numerous hard drive enclosures in my stead, I had little incentive to pump new life in a machine that should have been retired the moment I bought a new computer.

So I shut it down. I put the drive in an enclosure and moved my web sites over to my current desktop. At some point during the vacation, I'm going to wipe the old drive clean and install the factory settings. I will bring that machine back to 1998, then haul it down to the Good of Will. An old 15-inch Sony Triniton will most likely go with it. I want to bring the 14-year-old printer as well, but I don't have a replacement in the budget.

It'll be nice to reclaim some space, but it also means reallocating a number of resources. Relaunch the Shoutcast server? (Unlikely.) Install a newer FTP server? (Very likely.) Reconfigure the firewall? (Depends.) And getting that machine ready for donation is going to eat into studio time.

Still, that machine was a real trooper. And I pushed that thing to do a lot.

Now I want to shop for a new computer.

Fact: I grew up in Hawai`i, and my parents still live there.

Fact: Starting tomorrow, I'll be on vacation for 10 days.

Fact: As of this writing, Christmas is two days away.

Given the length of my vacation and the fact it's the holiday season, it's easy to assume I might be traveling all the way to Hawai`i. A number of co-workers making small talk have asked me the very specific question, "Are you going to Hawai`i for your vacation?"

It's not a vague question, such as "What are your holiday plans?" or "Are you doing anything special for Christmas?" It's a very specific, "Are you going to Hawai`i for your vacation?" The answer surprises them — no.

For some reason, the specificity of that question has been bugging me, more so than the surprise I get from my answer. Yes, a trip to Hawai`i would require a lengthy stay because it takes an entire day of travel to get there and another to get back, and historically, any long stretch of time away from the office meant I was back home. But is it so odd to take vacation time for the express purpose of not coming to the office? Using vacation time doesn't necessarily require taking an actual vacation. (In the same way sick time isn't necessarily taken because of illness. Not that I ever do that, no.)

Then there's the surprise at the thought of going nowhere for 10 days. I fail to see why that should be such a weird idea. I would love to take more vacations where I do nothing but stay at home, get neglected chores done, wander about town aimlessly, maybe even chip away at some fun work. Some of my best vacations in the past followed that agenda.

The people who ask this question tend to have families, and I don't think they can't frame the holidays as anything but social.

But this time of year is one where I can take a lot of time off and not burn so many vacation days. And I'm using it to get as much work done for Eponymous 4 as I can. I spent four days recording vocals last Christmas vacation, and I haven't been as productive since. I'm almost of the mind to reneg on all the social commitments I've already made. Rather, I'm ruthlessly instituting a first ask-first answer policy. If you're the first to invite me, I'll probably accept. Everyone who asks afterward gets a no.

The Thanksgiving weekend went by fast for me, even though I took five days off. I had gotten so focused on recording, the days flew by. I hope I can do that again for this vacation.

That's my idea of a vacation. Evidently, it's not anyone else's.

Early last year, I thought I found a replacement for the green jacket. At that point, I was well ensconced in the 200s of my weight. I needed a new green jacket — which turned out to be blue — because I had grown out of it. As I would later discover with the new jacket, it didn't handle a shift from cold to warm temperatures as well. The green jacket does great in chilly weather, and when fortified with layers, it holds against some downright cold temperatures as well.

Last year, I didn't take out the new jacket all that much. The winter was really temperate, and since I had started my exercise regiment in Fall 2007, I could actually fit back into my green jacket again. So in reality, I haven't really worn the new jacket since I bought it nearly two years ago.

I took it out today in order to brave the rock bottom temperatures this morning, and I made a startling discovery. The jacket didn't fit me — it was too big! Damn, I thought to myself, this thing is hardly hugging my body. How is it going to keep me warm?

Despite the loose fit, the lining of the jacket kept me remarkably warm, especially with a sweater serving as a second layer. But I have to admit I'm slightly disappointed. I like this jacket, even if I don't get much chance to use it. But now that it's too big — or I've gotten smaller — the fit that won me over no longer applies. I'm keeping it around, though, because it kept the cold out, and that's pretty important for a jacket.

A few days ago, I took out a clean pair of jeans from the closet and did the ritual filling-of-the-pockets — wallet, phone, pen, keys, lighter, breath strips. I put the jeans on because I was on my way to do an errand, and I hadn't yet looped the belt. Without it, the jeans needed just a slight tug to fall off. Another bittersweet victory! It looks like I can fit into a smaller size jean. But dammit, I made my last long-awaited downgrade back in April, which I should have done back in October 2007. Again?

About two weeks ago, I went to Azul Tequila for dinner with Double-A. We went to Target afterward because I wanted to find some sweatshirts so I can go to the gym in cold weather. I usually go for extra large, but when I tried one one, it looked like a potato sack. For amusement, I also tried out a small, and while the fit seemed flattering enough — through margarita goggles, at least — I didn't want something so tight on me while I worked up a sweat. So I bought a pair of large sweatshirts.

Haven't worn them yet because I've so far chickened out of going to the apartment gym in cold weather. (That doesn't mean I'm not working out — I have a pair of dumbbells I use in the apartment on such inclement nights.)

I could maybe trade all these extra large t-shirts in my wardrobe for large, but I don't like clothes that cling to my body. It feels restrictive and itchy. So I wear what I've been wearing.

A downward change in wardrobe size is empirical evidence my workout regimen has indeed worked, as if the scale reading weren't enough to indicate as such. But it's a hassle too. Clothes are a low priority in terms of budget — practically no prirority next to gear, music and software — so these sizes changes come at a time when I'm not really flush with cash. (But when am I ever flush with cash?)

I also don't really want to commit to a wardrobe overhaul till I've gotten past this plateau that has me stuck at 170. My aim is approximately 155 to 160 (more likely 160.) That's when I'd like to show off for real. And what's not to say any new clothes I get now won't face a similar situation if when I reach that goal? Therein lies the conundrum.

I didn't mind it this much when I was getting bigger. Probably because a lack of work went into achieving that girth, and it happened over time. I've went in the other direction in the course of a year. That's kind of drastic.

I spent most of today remixing and remastering a number of songs I posted to Facebook. I wonder if it's worth the effort putting these songs up on my profile. Only one person really comments on them and not often. I bet if I were to ask any of my Facebook friends in person whether they heard anything I posted, the answer would be no.

And why shouldn't it?

From last I heard, about 35,000 albums get released every year. That

34,999 more people than I, trying to get someone to listen to their

work. And what about the unknown number of people working in their home

studios, putting their stuff online? I'm just saying I have a realistic

expectation about the number of people who listen to me. It's probably

some asymptopic number. (But plotted on what kind of graph?)

Or perhaps my friends are truly courteous and don't want to hurt my feelings. Yes, I am human, and criticism can be hard to take. But I like to think I'm a bit more left-brained than the temperamental types so stereotypical of creative individuals. I'd rather hear why and how I suck to see whether it matches up with my own perceptions of why and how I suck.

(Aside from my singing. That's plainly obvious to me. And to my family. My friends, though, don't seem to bring it up. Politeness? Or just a higher threshold for crap singing?)

Perhaps part of the conundrum is the fact I'm limiting my distribution channels. I'm not a very active member of Metafilter, and my audience on Facebook is, at present, only 86 people. Maybe I should post to more places. Such as this site …

(This is a cover of a song by one of my favorite Japanese singers, Cocco. I bet no one is going to comment here either.)

When I decided to experiment with releasing a CD earlier in the year, I became a member of ASCAP, just to be thorough. I'm nowhere near the point where I could start using ASCAP's services, but I didn't see the harm in signing up.

A couple of weeks ago, I started receiving a e-mail newsletter from ASCAP containing some pretty good links analyzing the changing paradigms in the music industry. One thing that struck me was the vitriolic tone of the newsletter's author against Creative Commons.

In fact, ASCAP gives some pretty confounding advice about Creative Commons. From what I can tell, ASCAP thinks Creative Commons encourages creators to give away all their rights, leaving no recourse for compensation or protection. But I don't get that sense from Creative Commons at all. Lawrence Lessig, of course, answers ASCAP's claims, and in doing so confirms a few things that makes me skeptical of Creative Commons as well — but not to the degree of ASCAP.

When I read that CC licenses are non-revocable (see the quesition "What if I change my mind?"), I had to stop and think about it. If I slap a CC license on some music files I post to the web, anyone who grabs that file can use it under that license. If I take that license off, the next person who downloads the file can't use it under that license, but the previous person can. So, uh, how do I make sure that distinction is explicitly noted? That would be up to me, the content creator, to figure out, and I have enough to think about with creating content.

But for the most part, I don't see much harm in Creative Commons, and I don't see how it would interfere with the mandates of ASCAP. ASCAP doesn't deal with mechnical royalties, and Creative Commons seems more applicable to tangible products — i.e. recordings — than to live concerts and broadcasts. If I screw myself out of mechanical royalties because of an overly-generous CC license, what business is it of ASCAP's? Maybe in the realm of podcasts would ASCAP's involvement be an issue, but putting a file on my web site does not constitute a broadcast or performance. It's distribution of a physical product. And ASCAP clearly stays out of that business altogether.

At the same time, I'm not going to slap a Creative Commons license on everything I create. In fact, I really don't have any plans to use Creative Commons at all. CC licenses are good for people who want to encourage derivative works, and I'm really not that generous. Every time I think about using a license, my instinct always seems to lean toward more restrictive language. If that's the case, I may as well slap on "All rights reserved" on my work and be done with it.

Honestly, I'm just trying to get things finished. I'm almost reaching the point where I need to consider these options more seriously, but I'm going to put that off for now.

Still, Creative Commons doesn't strike me as the bogeyman ASCAP would like me to believe, and at the same time, I'm not convinced it's the panacea for an aging and sickly commercial music model.

• Trying to figure out if I'm doing something wrong or if I've found a bug.

For the last two days, I've been trying to figure out how to use the getid3 library. I integrated it with CodeIgniter and build a simple interface to edit Eponymous 4 MP3s online. There's no documentation, and the demo scripts included in the package are minimal and not very instructive.

I ran into a problem with URL information getting wiped out when I make an update. I managed to fix the URL writing, only to discover the year went missing. The only way to get both to work was to set the library to write ID3v.2.4 tags, which is not a widely adopted version of the specification. My dealings with ID3 tags are all abstracted through software. MP3Tag is my editor of choice, and it pretty much shields me from the minutiae of dealing with the specification. It's only when I'm trying to build my own tag writing tool do I find the differences between the versions confounding.

Let's take the example of Sony Sound Forge.

Sound Forge would sometimes complain about MP3s I would open up, and I would just pass it off as a Unicode thing. Sound Forge 8 supported ID3v2.2, which uses an ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) encoding, and I have a lot of files with Japanese tags in UTF-8. Sound Forge 9 supports ID3v2.3, but sometimes, it still would complain, even with English-tagged files. I discovered today that files I tag in MP3Tag wrote v.2.4 tags instead of v.2.3, and that would make Sound Forge complain. (Thankfully, an option in the preferences allows me to write out v2.3.)

I'm not sure what kind of problems might pop up if my online tag editor writes only v2.4. tags, but I would prefer to use v2.3, since it seems to be the most common. I'm fairly sure the problem I encountered today with AWOL tags is a bug, because I went into the library, moved a line and fixed the problem with URLs and years writing at the same time. If I can hack a solution, then it's a pretty serious problem.

• Overly long Christmas concerts, especially on an empty stomach

At noon, I went to the state capitol to hear a large crowd of tuba players perform Christmas carols. I was hoping it would be a half-hour set, because I was getting hungry. Around 12:20, I wasn't concerned about the length of the concert. But then they players kept playing and playing and playing. Toward the midpoint of the concert, the carols got a bit more obscure, and the playing got murkier. When I checked my watch again, it was 12:45, and my stomach was rumbling. I had started to make snide remarks at the 12:15 mark, but when I saw the concert had really gone longer than I expected, I let that hipster snark fly.

People started clapping in tempo with "Jingle Bells", so I had to be a dick and clap at a faster tempo. When the conductor attempted to address the audience, I critiqued his inability to project by calling him not a singer. I hummed a pedal tone at the fundamental during "O Come, O Come Emmanuel", because really, no performance of that carol can go without one. I joked that I'd pay to hear these players do "Carol of the Bells", only to eat my words when they got around to doing it.

I didn't really want to tear away from debugging the ID3 thing, but we were going to lunch afterward. We were out for three hours. I don't ever stay late in the office on a Friday, but I didn't want to leave till I had a solution for the ID3 problem.

Also, the server at the restaurant took his sweet time with everything. He maybe earned 15 percent of that compulsory 18 percent gratuity.

I think I would have had a better time if I had not gone at all.

• Waiting for UPS to fish out a package

The moment I saw a notice on my door that UPS tried to make a delivery yesterday, I groaned. I wondered why my mom would send a package through UP(O)S, and this time of year, they're worse than ever. The slip indicated I could leave my signature, and the package would be delivered even if I weren't present. So that's what I did.

Of course, I came home hours later than usual, having battled an ID3 problem and attended a too-long concert, and I found another frakking slip on my door. The deliveryman (intentionally sexist to remain grammatically correct) used the slip to create modern art, because I couldn't figure out heads or tails what he'd do next. He marked that a third attempt would be made but scratched that out. He marked the package would be left at the office but scratched that out. Then he circled that a third attempt would be made and marked a time I would not be at home. Fuck — make up your mind.

My mom left a message on my answering machine asking if I got the package, and I called her back to say yes and no — they kept delivering it, and they kept taking it back. I told her she would get better service from the Post Office. Man — how bad do you have to be that the federal government can do a better job than you?

I decided to call UPS and do the dreaded will call. That meant heading out in the middle of nowhere, then waiting in a cramped lobby while the drivers unload the truck to find the package in question. I got there at 7:25 p.m. and didn't get my package till 8:10 p.m. I should be thankful — some people showed up only to be told the driver wouldn't be back till 9 p.m.

Showing up on Saturday at 9 a.m. would have been another option, but I've had packages get back on the truck before. As Double-A would say about her dog, "Not the brightest bulb on the planet."

UPS reminds me of software with such rigid, bad interfaces that any deviation from a set procedure produces unwanted or no results. Kind of like Finale. Or Internet Explorer 6. I don't think I've ever encountered a delivery service that does so much to make receiving packages such a difficult endeavor.

At work, I'm one of two people heading up an initiative to improve a web-based tool used day in and day out by our department. I don't know why, but they're some of the rowdiest meetings I've ever attended at work.

I've been in a lot of meetings (who hasn't?) and most of them are very cordial, mostly serious, very business-like. Then you attend my meeting, and it just gets inappropriate. At some point, someone turns into a 12-year-old boy and reads something into the phrase such as "getting her carpet cleaned." Today's meeting went 39 minutes before someone mentioned a pharmaceutical popular among the spamming sect.

A number of people in the meeting have been at the company for a long time, and trips down Amnesia Lane are not uncommon. Most of the time, these excursions are triggered when we explore the interface of this particular web-based tool and run across names of long-gone employees.

The attendance of the meetings has been pretty good, mostly because it really doesn't feel like a meeting. And I'm the person who schedules them, so ultimately, they're my meetings.

It makes me curious what factor makes this particular group so relaxed. I was talking to one of the other people who attend, and he says no one acts that way in the other meetings they share. I don't even act that way at other meetings. So what's happening here that's not happening elsewhere?

It's probably because I never lead any meetings, and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. It's not like I've never led meetings before. I held them all the time when I was an editor at the college paper, and I took that role way too seriously. I haven't really taken up any leadership positions ever since because, well, they make me cranky.

It's part of the reason I was reluctant to be a point person for this initiative. I know my tendency to be … particular about how things should be done, and my coworkers have so far been spared from that. Thankfully, I have an experienced manager in the group who is far better at this kind of stuff, and I'm often more than glad to step back and let her run the ship. If anything, she's probably setting the tone for the meetings more than I am.

(Yeah. That's it. It's her fault.)

I can't rule out the mix of right personalities in the group either. Get some like-minded people in a room, and things get done without losing a sense of humor.

But I still wonder how the rambunctious tenor of these meetings reflects on my leadership ability. Does it portend good things or bad things? It might make me look charismatic, or it might make me look unable to take control.

Well, I'm not particularly fired up to find out.

Tomorrow, my work group is holding its first holiday potluck. Our department held a potluck before Thanksgiving, but this one is just for us. For the past few years, I've become something of an ambassador for Filipino cuisine, which is odd since I don't really eat much Filipino food.

I've brought in chicken adobo, lumpia and bibinka to the office, and because no one has ever eaten these foods before, they all think it tastes really good. But I'm not much of a cook, Filipino or otherwise, and I know when things don't come out right. I'm the only one who knows.

I'm bringing bibinka for this potluck, and tonight I experimented with method I've seen time and again on Good Eats — the creaming method. I started watching Good Eats in 2002, not because I was interested in cooking but because I thought Alton Brown was hot. I kept watching because the show uses humor as an instructional tool. In other words, I watched it because it entertained me. Your run-of-the-mill cooking show usually bores the crap out of me. But throw in cheap props and comedic acting, and I'll watch an egg boil.

The creaming method involves mixing room temperature butter with sugar first. Then mixing the flower with the butter-sugar mixture. Once the dry components have gained a bit of volume, the wet ingredients — for this recipe, vanilla, eggs, milk — are mixed together, then put on top of the dry ingredients. They're all combined, then baked.

In the past, I'd just toss everything into the bowl and hope for the best. Sometimes the bibinka came out surprisingly crisp. Other times — particularly when I didn't let the butter soften — it came out greasy and gooey. Tonight, I was wonderfully surprised by the results. The creaming method mixes air into the mixture, so essentially, I lightened up the batter. The batch I baked tonight had a light color but a crispy exterior. It was still chewy but easy to bite.

I think I may have found the secret to my aunt's bibinka. She took my mom's recipe and made some changes, improving it to the point where my mom started using my aunt's recipe. My mom only gave me the ingredient list and just told me to mix everything together. She never really makes note of a process. But now I have the creaming method, and I have the most surprising and pleasing results to show for it.

I knew all these years of oggling at Alton Brown would pay off. I just wish now he'd get a haircut.