Kablammo!

I’ve had my Averatec 3150 laptop for about 18 months now, and it’s served me well the whole time. It’s tiny enough that I had a hell of a time finding a bag small enough to carry it in comfortably, and I’ve been able to leave it running for weeks at a time with no problems. After a while, my habit of leaving Firefox running for a week with a few dozen tabs open made me want more RAM, so I added 384 megs’ worth. The touchpad started failing on me after a year of heavy use, but with a little help from eBay I was able to swap in a replacement part. I wished I had a DVD burner in the thing, so I replaced the original optical drive. (The hardest part was cutting a corner off the new drive’s faceplate so it would fit in the provided opening.)

In short, I really like this machine—I only wish the battery held more of a charge—and I’m not afraid to open it up and tinker with the insides. Of course, buying it refurbished and thus having the warranty end after 90 days probably helped my courage. You might not be so ready and willing to tear off your stickers marked “Warranty void if removed” if their threats aren’t meaningless.

So when I recently noticed a disconcerting tendency for it to hard crash during heavy CPU usage, I naturally wanted to fix the problem. Whenever I was doing anything very CPU intensive, like compressing a lot of audio (or video for that matter), playing a game, or even running an innocent CPU torture test, my computer would do two things: (a) get very hot and (b) turn itself off. Naturally, I suspected the cooling system.

As it turns out, this was the culprit:

Apparently having a solid wall of dust keeping any air from flowing over your heatsink is a bad thing. Who’da thunk?

Here’s some more pictures of the disassembly/reassembly process for anyone who gives a damn about these things. » » Continue reading . . .

See, the problem is that I know an awful lot more than my professor—about one pretty minor subset of the subject matter. He’s obviously an expert in Protools; that much is obvious from about 5 minutes’ worth of class. And since he’s evidently made his living as a music producer and engineer for quite some time, I’m going to go ahead and assume his knowledge of the empirical, æsthetic, and business aspects of music production dwarfs mine. That’s basically all I could have asked for in an instructor, and I intend to learn a lot from him in the areas of his expertise.

The problem comes with everything pertaining to the physical manifestation of sound, and anything even vaguely resembling mathematics. The professor’s only talked about this stuff very briefly, and he seemed rather uncomfortable about it, and he qualified what he said with the disclaimer that he doesn’t like talking about physics because he doesn’t know squat about physics, or something along those lines. Which is all well and good, and I’m quite happy he admits it up-front when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I don’t want to come off to the class or the professor as some show-off brainiac, but a gay DJ once taught me an awful lot about acoustics, so I had to bite my tongue when my current professor said, for example, that a handclap in a room was an example of a standing wave.

I feel like it would be awful presumptuous to privately ask him if he’d want me to give the class a brief primer on things like v = fλ, but it would be even more presumptuous for me to blurt that shit out in the middle of class one day. So my current plan is to continue holding my tongue and hope that the topic never comes up again.

UPDATE: As it happens, I didn’t hold my tongue after all. Some of the professor’s comments and explanations to other people’s questions were quite helpful and informative, but then he claimed that the speed of sound was not a medium-dependent property. So I had no option but to strenuously object. And later I drew a picture on the board.

We’re on the verge of really diving into Protools, though, so I can’t wait for more of the class.

Song of the Moment: «Run» — Ratatat ft. Ghostface Killah and Jadakiss

I don’t like Microsoft Word very much, in large part because its default behavior is to assume it knows what you’re trying to do and how you want things formatted. (Search Google for “paperclip.mpeg” for some catharsis.) This default behavior, of course, makes it very easy to make numbered lists and indented paragraphs and the like. The problem is that if you actually know beforehand what you want to write and what layout you want, it’s similarly very easy to end up with Not What You Had In Mind. It’s very frustrating to be in the middle of writing something, making steady progress, when suddenly your formatting changes in a way you weren’t anticipating and could frankly do without, and you lose your train of thought after feeling compelled to immediately undo all the changes that were forced upon you. The program works best when it functions as a tool, not as an entity that tries to predict what you’re intending to do next. I’d rather have to specify each bulleted list I want than unspecify a bunch of bulleted lists that are provided as a “favor” or “time-saver” and accomplish less than nothing.

I bring this up, as it happens, in the context of also hating something else, and for the same reason. I learned to drive on a stick-shift, and in fact I had been driving for years before I ever drove an automatic. I’ve gotten a bunch of experience behind the wheel of an automatic since then, and I must say it reminds me a lot of Microsoft Word’s auto-formatting.

That is to say, I don’t like it.

With a manual transmission, you’re (more or less) in control of the car. With the exception of things like spark advance, which you’re legitimately better off letting an automatic system handle, you tell the car what to do. Barring outside forces, the car won’t start moving without you telling it to, and it certainly won’t change gears without your explicit say-so. The steering wheel, pedals, and shifter are present as tools, meant to make your life easier.

In contrast, driving an automatic relegates you to the position of a passenger, or perhaps more precisely a back-seat driver. You can make suggestions, and if you scream loud enough you can generally exercise veto power, but your control over everything but steering is indirect at best—the car often tells you what to do, instead of the other way around.

You control an automatic with the brake pedal, not the gas. Easing off the brake shouldn’t be interpreted as a signal to accelerate, unless you’re freewheeling downhill, which you probably shouldn’t be doing anyway.

I reserve the right to continue this rant in the future. I don’t like automatic transmissions. Working the clutch in stop-and-go traffic, as I’m now firmly convinced, is a small price to pay for a car that doesn’t think it’s smarter than you are. And I’d like to learn how to use a real camera, one that isn’t just a point-and-shoot “good enough” idiot box. (Though I love my idiot box, and it’s [basically] good enough.)

I’ve been a big fan of Love in Reverse for years. They ceased to be a while ago, and I was never quite as fond of Amazing Meet Project, but Ferentino’s next project, Transfusion M, looks quite promising. In any case, if you haven’t heard any Love in Reverse you owe it to yourself to listen to some, especially if you’re fond of post-grunge or neo-prog (whatever those mean), which is how Allmusic has decided to categorize them.

I Was Here is my favorite album of theirs—I was such a big fan of it that a few days after I bought a copy for myself, I went back to the record store and picked up another 5 or 6 copies that I gave out to friends in an evangelistic furore. The reason I was able to do that, incidentally, is also the reason why you can pick up a copy on the cheap as well. While it’s depressing to see such a good album sold at “please just take it off our hands” prices, with the entire music distribution apparatus writing it off as a loss, at least it means you have no excuse not to get a copy for yourself. Of course, Words Become Worms (Pitchfork review notwithstanding) and the posthumously-released Another One for You to Hate are good too, but I Was Here just has a special place in my heart, or something.

Anyway, there’s this song on I Was Here named “Play For Dawn”. I liked the song enough that, after a whole lot of web searching turned up zero tablature for it, I decided to figure out how to play it. It wasn’t that hard: Em, modified Em; G, modified G; D, modified D; F… But what the fuck came next? While the little riff on the D they played might have been the most immediately recognizable meme from the song, the chord that came after the F is really what defined the song and held it together. It sounded a bit like the F before it, yet at the same time sounded vastly different. After literally hours of fumbling around and trying every random fingering I could think of, I stumbled over the answer, which, as it turned out, was only different from the F by one fret on one string.

123211, in case you were wondering.

It was around 4 years ago that I figured that out, and it wasn’t until today that it occurred to me to find out what that chord might be. As it turns out, it’s an Fdim5, and the bizarre interval in it, the one that defines the song and makes the chord sound so unusual, is the “tritone” that was once considered the work of Satan.

So it goes.

So I was going to practice Finnish by reading this book:

But then it opened like this: » » Continue reading . . .

Well, it certainly seems like this will be the Semester of Music. In addition to having Meeskoor every other week, I’ve got the following courseload:

• History of Jazz and Blues.
• Music Theory I.
• Introduction to Digital Audio Production.

The history and theory courses are with the same professor—a guy who (a) knows his stuff, (b) loves what he does, and (c) is articulate. So at least as far as the professor is concerned, I’ve hit the trifecta and I’ve got no excuses in that regard, even if when the courses turn into a lot of work. And doing the work for the theory course should prove helpful with this semester’s Project I Won’t Get Around To Doing, which involves computerizing the sheet music for a bunch of Meeskoor songs.

So far (after one class each of history and theory) I’ve noticed a very striking schism between the classes: in one, the focus has been squarely on things like the “harmonic principles of the common practice period” and “the structural, formal, and procedural workings of Western European tonal music”; the other focuses on a style of music that rejects quite a lot of that stuff and replaces it with decidedly non-mathematical, non-notational content. Quite interesting.

And in a few hours, I get my first taste of the production class, which will hopefully (a) motivate and (b) require me to get off my ass and record some of the songs I’ve been meaning to record for weeks/months/years. (Possibly after I use the theory course to improve them as needed.)

Song of the Moment: «Chicago» — Django Reinhardt

So it goes.

» » Continue reading . . .

1. Whenever a character in a movie or TV show has to hold his breath for any reason, I feel compelled to hold my breath as well.
2. I have no compunctions about leaving dishes and silverware unwashed for long periods of time, yet I always wash the ice-cream scoop immediately after using it.
3. I really enjoy drawing pictures just like this:
4. I love salmon but can’t stand lox.
5. Having graduated from one of the most selective colleges in the United States, I am now enrolled as a student in my local community college.

Do any of these sound like books worth reading? Or writing?

• Standard Oil to Enron: American Energy Through the 20th Century
• Jim Crow to Diebold: A History of American Disenfranchisement
• OJ, Göring, Scopes: “The Trial of the Century” Through the Century

One man developed a romantic attachment to a tractor, even giving it a name and writing poetry in its honor.

(Stolen from: here.)

People I know:

• Bruce Greenspan
• Butterflynn
• Critical
• EstonianPunkCat
• Fire_Hazard
• Hille
• Manganese
• PBones
• Scarlett1304
• Spine Porridge
• Supachump
• SushiDeJaneiro
• Tomahagne
• Vaarikaisand
• WordToKyle
• Zepsub
• Zot

Things I read:

• badscience
• BillMon
• CommonDreams
• DailyKos
• Dan’s Data
• ebalogaalne
• Hullabaloo
• I, Cringely
• In These Times
• Ironic Sans
• Language Log
• Literal-Minded
• MediaMatters
• Paul Graham
• Salon
• Slacktivist
• The Economist
• The Gadflyer
• The Grauniad
• The Nation
• The Onion
• The Register
• The Superest
• Unclaimed Territory
• Wikipedia