Total snark encased in the warm, cheesy burrito goodness of customer service language:

“Anyway, I’ve got to get back to work. Aside from this million dollar international tort, and the no-recourse lien on my property filed by the ‘executor of the court’, is there anything else I can help you with?”

From the second chapter of this righteous post, most of which is about rocking hard on a totally different axis.

I get to sling more than the average tech worker’s share of English-language kung fu, and that’s fun, but sometimes I could definitely stand to know more relevant law.  Also, it’d be nice to get spec’d out for (paid) argument on a wider range of topics.

I mentioned this inclination to the missus last night, and she made a good point, which is that we’re scheduled to start creating some additional humans over the next couple years…and that’s cool…

I sort of took that at face value, and didn’t draw any further conclusions, but the subtext (probably the text, as she’s not one to beat around the bush) was that I should be home in the evenings instead of at night school for four years, and I should make the most of my current professional trajectory.

On the other hand, I can do my current job from home.  Also, four years of night school and $100k or so sounds (to me) like a really small price to pay to turn a software/proto-business outlook into a software/proto-business/legal outlook.  Like, it’s harder to imagine that guy not affording a private aircraft that’ll do 200 knots cruise someday, or getting pwned by a perfect storm of weird tech market forces.

The Suffolk website says that to apply for Fall of ‘09, one should take the LSAT no later than February.  I’m just saying, that’s what the website says.

Apple publishes a specially formatted file which powers another website’s human-friendly representation of the data.

While looking at that page, I caught myself projecting sweeping personality demographics (some virtuous, some slightly contemptible) in the data, despite its hugely-lossy compression.  To join me in this exercise, you first need to know that the 3g iPhone is available in exactly three flavors: 8GB Black, 16GB Black, and 16GB White.  I interpreted the “out of stock-ness” as follows:

8GB black:
“I’m not paying extra for additional utility or additional bling.”

16GB black:
“I have the resources to get the one with the best available feature set, but I’m not particularly interested in telegraphing the fact that I paid extra for the 16GB version.”

16GB white:
“I have the resources to get the top of the line model, and I want you to know it.”

Locales (as of this writing) where only 8GB black is sold out:

• Birmingham, Alabama
• Tampa, Florida
• Indianapolis, Indiana
• Hingham, Mass.
• Troy and Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Huntington Station, New York
• Columbus, Ohio
• Austin, Texas
• McLean, Virginia

My theory about Austin TX and McLean VA is that lots of workers independently purchased iPhones to replace their BlackBerrys, with an eye toward expensing the cost.  Or, a huge volume of corporate iPhones purchased through AT&T Premier accounts has cut disproportionately into 8GB black iPhone stock in those areas.

But let’s get to the “drinking the Hatorade” part: locales where only 16GB white is sold out:

• Tucson, Arizona
• Palo Alto / Stanford, California
• White Plains, New York
• Victor, New York (Eastivew, “the mall where the white people go” in this suburb of my hometown Rochester, the same mall where to my eternal shame and in a move totally out of character I once applied for a job working at Aeropostale…and appropriately did not hear back)
• Houston, Texas

If you find this interesting at all, have a look at the linked page for the “I might not spend extra, but if I do I want you to know” locales, the “if I’m spending extra, it’s just for more space” locales, and the “by god, give me any iPhone you still have available” locales.

Around 8, I was thinking of going to elements at the Phoenix Landing to see Crook and Lenore (the residents) spin.  I started messing with a drum & bass setlist to sort of get myself in the mood for that.  Shortly before 9, I started trying to make a mix out of the setlist, and finished up that attempt around 10 (when elements gets rolling).

I stuck around here and listened to the mix, appalled at how bad the first few transitions were, but noticing some promising bits and thinking of ways to make it better.  By around midnight I had a new setlist figured out, and thought again about going out to catch the second half of elements.  Then I thought about going to bed, or having something to eat.

Instead, I rubbed my eyes a bit, and went back to the turntables to attempt a second mix.

And…I’m not ashamed.  Link to 80MB mp3 after the break.

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My once and future digital production partner/sensei writes:

so explain to me the ideology governing the move to use vinyl to control digital audio files - on one hand, i feel minorly poserish ’spinning’ without a set of turntables in front of me, but on the other hand, i would feel minorly poserish getting out a bunch of hardware just for the sake of looking hard in the booth.  are you rocking a hybrid setup, e.g. half vinyl half digital?  do you just like the feel of vinyl?  or what’s the deal?

The more I think about it, my answers become more accurate, more numerous, and less cohesive.  Join me, will you, for a bit of light philosophizing.

The Technics 1200 interface has some awesome objective qualities:

• It’s big as hell.
• None of the controls look like any of the other controls.
• The controls that light up each light up with a different color.
• When spinning, the edges of the platter convey pitch information in an intuitive visual format.
• It has a lot of angular momentum in it, so clumsy human-scale forces can be applied in ways that result in very non-clumsy changes to its behavior.

Having said that, it’s possible to imagine a software control interface with equally well-labeled controls, more features, and zero danger of derailing the show by accidentally bumping the large, very lightweight, fragile object splayed over half of the work surface.  [[[The best available software]]] is far from ideal, but it’s highly configurable, comes with a great integrated mixer with effects and sampler, and doesn’t have any tonearms.  Instead of an external mixer, you could use a midi controller built to look like a mixer (which exist), or you could use a real mixer that also outputs midi control signals (which also exist).

On top of that, [[[Beatport]]] exists, so it’s now entirely feasible to audition lots of potential source material, find the <1% that you actually want to play, then acquire it a) instantly, b) affordably, c) with rights to play it out, and d) in an archival-quality lossless format.

It’s worth contrasting that state of affairs with the world of even 3-4 years ago (to say nothing of pre-2000, to say nothing of pre-internet boom), where the whole dance music economy was based on barriers to entry: a) limited availability, b) high prices, c) singles were generally vinyl only, CD releases were generally mixes (and thus unsuitable for DJ use).

So maybe this isn’t so complicated after all:

1. Past states of affairs, few of which had anything to do with UI design, led me to invest in a set of mixing interfaces.  That’s not just a financial investment of course, but an investment of time, experience, hope, activation potential, etc.
2. The vinyl interface has clear theoretical weaknesses relative to interfaces using software with external midi control, but it also has strengths that go well beyond familiarity.
3. Although my mix output doesn’t heavily feature “vinyl tricks” (scratching, tears, backspins, live braking), I do make light use of them, and I find the idea of backspinning on an oversized midi knob unsatisfying.  To be clear, that’s my problem…not the knob’s problem.  The knobs work; they sound great.
4. More than the feel, per se, I’m more tuned to the sounds of mixing vinyl than I am with the discrete digital alternatives.  For example, wiping a beat back and forth under the needle in preparation to release it into another, nudging a track forward and hearing the whole thing pitch-up momentarily, scraping my fingers lightly against the side of the platter to gently pull a track closer to one following just “behind” it in beat space, etc.
5. Controlling digital sources from vinyl timecode takes the best things about vinyl (the interface, the familiarity, and indeed some cool factor) and divorces them from the ungodly bullshit involved with actually acquiring and maintaining a collection of record singles.

At the end of the day, it’s not really about having the best possible tools.  It’s not even about having the best possible tools for what you personally want to do.  It’s about having whatever tools inspire you to actually do shit instead of just talking about doing shit.  This [[[vinyl timecode shizzle]]] rigged up to [[[Ableton]]] on the recording end got me spending more time at the decks over the past few days than I’d spent in the previous couple of years.

The “it’s cool, I’m not going to keel over or suddenly decide to crash on purpose” button:

Renewed my FAA Class III airman’s medical certificate yesterday, combo’d with a new Student Pilot cert.  My eyesight has gotten a little worse since last tested; the doc opined that by my next renewal I’ll probably need corrective lenses.  If I were going for a Class 1, I think I’d need them right now.  So within the next five years, I’ll probably be able to live my dream of wearing totally hot eyeglass frames.

The “I’m local; please dip the broomstick in lube first” button:

Today, received a reprint of a January 2008 utility bill to facilitate residential exemption discount for FY2009 real estate taxes.

under the spotlight/
neither black nor white/
it doesn’t matter.
as drunk as you might/
working day and night/
whatever happens.

If one starts Ableton before one starts Torq, Torq will enter “ReWire Slave Mode” and disable external vinyl control (rendering it useless).  But if Torq is started first, it’s totally feasible to control it from turntable timecode while simultaneously (ie - on the same machine, but using a separate hardware audio i/o) record the output of one’s outboard mixer in Ableton.  (80kb PNG diagram and link to 31.7MB mp3 after the break)

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Native Instruments is currently running a special on their “Komplete” bundle of products.  If you own a qualifying DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) product, they’re taking $300 off the price of the bundle (which works out to about 30% off).

Upon hearing this “news,” my wife suggested I “use what [I] have.”  Good advice.

So out of the basement came:
1 - turntable stand
2- turntables
1- M-Audio Connectiv audio i/o

Problem the capitalists want you to have: After those pieces were all wired together, along with a 4-channel Pioneer mixer borrowed from a CD mixing rig, the USB cable from the audio i/o wouldn’t reach my home computer.  So I installed the Connectiv/Torq software on my work computer, transferred some (legally licensed!) music to the work machine, and turned everything on.

Over the next hour or so, I practiced mixing (first some dnb, then some new disco / ed banger stuff).  It’d be interesting to try to use one computer to both drive the virtual vinyl process AND record the results (coming from the outboard analog mixer) through a separate interface.  I’m sure the Mac Pro has the processor horsepower to handle that, but I’d be a little worried about doing all of that i/o against the same hard disk.

Other options for recording are (of course):
1. record using a second computer
2. record onto a non-computer (like a MicroTrack II…or a tape cassette)

Finally got around to tracking down my “Wordpress API Key” and activated Akismet comment spam protection for this blog.  Since I get so little actual comment traffic, this brings my maintenance effort down to basically zero.  It also gave me the convenient option of neatly deleting the 1500-odd comments I’d manually marked as spam over the preceding years.  Nice.

1. Tom Waits show in ATL was awesome, and it was great to spend the weekend with Erica without thinking about work once.
2. My locationLogger iPhone app is now successfully communicating (via JavaScript) with a Google Maps API object embedded inside a UIWebView, and mapping/badging the coordinates returned by the iPhone Simulator’s CLLocationManager instance.  It’s trippy to be programmatically generating JavaScript inside a compiled, client-side application, which controls objects defined in a static webpage that was served from the cloud.
3. I was using Coda’s FTP slickness to work with the local/remote Google Maps API stuff, but I decided to stress it: upgraded the version of WordPress serving this blog.  That mostly seems to have worked out, but now I’ve got weird unicode-looking stuff in all my previous posts.  Not Coda’s fault.