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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
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| Saturday, July 11th, 2009 |
natowelch
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9:42p |
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davethebrave
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7:47p |
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natowelch
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6:37p |
Ding Dong
All of a sudden, my brother is married. Best of luck, bro. |
natowelch
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2:04p |
Cloud-Free
WTF was I whining about last night? I'm going outside. |
| Friday, July 10th, 2009 |
natowelch
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10:37p |
Eat and Run
My roommate's cat, Mr Fish, as a complete worthless dickhead/shitbag/asshole. It took the retard a complete week to find out where I moved Smoke's food bowl, but he still doesn't care enough to refrain from doing what he knows he's not supposed to. Fuck you, you little shit pump. Get dead. He's been this way since September, when he moved in. Please note it's taken this long for me to lose my patience enough to say such vitriolic things. |
ghettohaxor
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4:13p |
Hell Yeah
Laid off, my job has been eliminated. that means no cell phone right now! |
bludgasm
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10:05a |
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bludgasm
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9:56a |
Downpresser was cool. Creatures was cool. Nobody was there, Milwaukee's dead. Old news. |
| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 |
natowelch
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10:55a |
Surprise!
I received a surprise package this morning from Vancouver. Well, thank you for the spices and napkins. Whoever you are. |
| Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 |
natowelch
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6:20p |
The Royal We
I forgot in June, but I am resuming my monthly habit of reviewing my LJ for the month in years past. I'm also digging out information on what I've been up to in general, based on tags and such. At times, I feel compelled to update years-old entries, and link connections between old passages and new, refined, or even poeticized versions of the same thoughts that spontaneously erupt years down the line. I should think about taking a year, somewhere down the road, and dedicate it to reviewing all the things I've written throughout my life. Call it "A Year in Review". heh. I have conversations with myself all the time. But when you start chatting back and forth with yourself after you have forgotten, over the span of years, it feels more like an other. It starts actually connecting with my sense of sovereignty, respect, and company, like it could comfort loneliness. These are just words, of course. Letters across life. Time capsules. But there are other relics to be found: drawings, music, videos. Some I've created, some are mashed up, and some are pulled from others' work. Then, there will be software, like "siteblast", my first perl script for assembling web sites from templates (before I learned PHP). Even more interesting is the kinds of memories we could create for ourselves in the future. suppose you could build a "home theatre," stocked with robots, that could precisely record and playback performances made years ago? Disney's hall of Presidents in every living room. Your own personal Chuck E Cheese's pizza time theatre. Now wipe the cheese out of your mind, and put your own content in it. Youtube it. Share digital performance files online. Mash them up. And THEN, after all that, archive them, let them gather dust, and revisit them years later, and see what you had to say decades ago. Have a conversation with yourself. Confront your own younger demeanor. Krapp's Last Video Game. (Bonus points for anyone who claims the reference without Google) Imagine sitting in a room with the android presences of yourself, recorded at ten year intervals, as you describe your year. Record how each of you reacts to the others as you go. Were you ever alone? The past is looking a lot more interesting than it used to. I often imagine having contact with a multitude of me, with me everytime I imagine having contact with that multitude. A council of myself. |
natowelch
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12:30p |
Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
 Put me on the record now as not trusting of Microsoft, Apple, or Google. Doug Rushkoff has a rather convoluted way of saying people are worked up over nothing when worrying about the implications of cloud computing, and of Google's new Chrome OS, just announced yesterday. Being a long-time resistor of the idea of letting a for-profit enterprise take care of my data and software, I was a little surprised to hear this argument coming from a well-known proponent of openness. I was even a little crushed, perhaps. But then, after some analysis, it turns out he wasn't really talking about me. While there have been "cloud computing" efforts before, they always ran up against people's (false) notions of computer privacy, virus contagion, and fear of dependence. Rushkoff is one of those people that can actually make me reconsider and scrutinize my ideas. Were my notions of privacy, independence, and security, really "false"? I scoffed at first, but I decided to at least give Doug the benefit of the doubt, and listen to his argument. ( Unto the knot ) |
| Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 |
natowelch
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2:44p |
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natowelch
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2:23p |
Metastasis
Woot! Ricalope and Samalander got the place! They'll be moving upstairs into 407, jsut two floors above, at the end of the month, or thereabouts. We're going to take over the building! Mwa. |
natowelch
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12:45p |
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bludgasm
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10:23a |
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davethebrave
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6:33a |
LARPing is NOT lame.
LARPing isn't lame anymore guys. Someone did it right. Current Mood:  awestruckCurrent Music: Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell by Das Racist (Wallpaper. Remix) |
| Monday, July 6th, 2009 |
natowelch
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11:41p |
Closing in on a Solution
So here's what I think my DJing toolchain is going to look like: jackd -R -dalsa -dhw:0,3 -r44100 -p1024 -n2 -P & ecasound -i jack & cle mplayer -ao jack:port=ecasound -af scaletempo -quiet -slave sometrack.mp3 cle mplayer -ao jack:port=ecasound -af scaletempo -quiet -slave someothertrack.mp3 [...] JACKd provides the low-latency sound server and signal routing between mplayer and ECAsound. ECAsound will be standing between mplayer and the soundcard; I intend to use it to control the signal routing and mixing between the stereo channels of each mplayer "deck" (of which there can be unlimited numbers, apparently!) and the four output channels - stereo mains, and, of course, stereo headphone monitors. On my cheapo Sound Blaster Live! value, I've got a front and rear stereo surround, so I just split the "front" jack to the speakers, and use the "rear" jack for the headphones. Pie! ECAsound can apply LADSPA effects, if desired (EQs, compressor/limiters, phasers/flangers... etc.) and volume levels, of course, all of which can be controlled in real-time through any MIDI controller. The reason I'm stuck on Mplayer is because of the scaletempo audio filter, which handles the pitch-moderation necessary to keep a track at the same pitch while changing the playback speed, avoiding the "chipmunk effect". Having it handled at the source, by a native mplayer plugin, instead of having to hack something together later in the output chain should make things much, much easier. Then I can use mplayer's slave mode with a script to control the seeking for cue points and "nudging", and the playback speed for tempo synchronization and beatmatching. I am pretty happy about this, because I have just put this together and verified that the latency through this chain is TINY, as far as I can tell. I was tapping keys to launch cue points in time with the currently playing track with somewhat better success than I was with Mixxx last night. And I haven't even tried to install OSSv4 or even a real-time kernel. After spending a few hours frustrated by trying to connect bits with UNIX fifos, this is looking good. I love ecasound. It helped me out a lot when I was trying to peel annoying ads off of Magnatune tracks (which they no longer tack on, thankfully), and it is one of the best-documented audio tools I've seen. Nice for an application with no GUI whatsoever - which actually makes it eminently usable to a hacker, because you can script everything. A GUI is a Graphical USER Interface, but a Command Line Interface is, in essence, an Application Programming Interface at the same time as a user interface. That API accessibility is what GUIs have lost for a long time, and are starting to reclaim with things like Applescript (which is certainly old, but confined to the Mac OS ghetto) and DBus. |
natowelch
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6:40p |
Assessing the Envelope
People used to be the most important thing in the world. I used to follow this up by saying "It's a good thing I have one on me at all times." Now I feel like the only one left that means anything to me with any depth. I know how deep the well can go, though I'm sure it can be deeper. Otherworld is over. It was a success - but the problem being the was part. I helped create it, make it work, and that's satisfying. I felt loved, and appreciated. And then... I went home, without a plan. It was an event designed for the moment, for the NOW. That's why it's called a burn. Leave No Trace. Temporary Autonomous Zone. I don't doubt that I need these things. To feel good to have given, to be hugged and thanked, to clean up the mess, and propagate the glow one gets and shares, are all certainly keeping me sane and content. I will doubtless do it again. But there is this idiot intellect inside me that simultaneously wants more, and doesn't know what more is. More what? MY imagination seems to have outstripped my desire. Maybe this is where boredom comes from. I got impatient, recently, looking at fire spinning photos. If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all. Is it right, then, to say, that I'm bored of burning? Could I use some synthetic schizophrenia? |
| Saturday, July 4th, 2009 |
natowelch
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5:26p |
Mixed Gags
Nobody could have predicted the Spanish Inquisition. |
natowelch
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12:36p |
Pulling Themselves Together
It IS a bipartisan bill; it appeals to Democrats - and conservative Democrats! Don't let plutocratic capitalists stop it because they're afraid to compete with "socialism". Granted, I still have no idea if I would be able to afford anything the bill offers yet. But I'm getting the idea that if public health insurance is actually allowed to compete in the "marketplace", it will indeed be "unfair" how popular it will become. Of course, the health insurance lobby could be about as wrong as the copyright cartel. I mean, market fundamentalists like these are always the ones saying that government is incompetent. So what are they afraid of? |
| Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 |
natowelch
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7:13p |
DJ Software Update
I hit a brick wall today when I discovered I couldn't mix mplayer's output across two outputs (one for fronts, one for monitoring). So instead, I went back to review some old DJ software. Mixxx is starting to look much better. It was not hanging and crashing as much as the last time I tried it, and it's under active development. Apparently they are grabbing the attention of hardware controller vendors, who are releasing open source drivers. The beta version even has a scripting environment that looks fun. BPMDJ also released a new version recently. I guess I'm not real excited about how the interface is put together, but the tempo analysis is top-notch, and using the "beatgraph" visualization to set cue points is a nice tool I've not seen elsewhere. So after an email exchange with the author, I was able to decipher the binary format used by its index files, and wrote a php script (meh. it was fast, and I knew it) to parse the beat period, calculate the tempo, and use eyeD3 to insert it into the mp3 file's id3 tags. Mixxx, once it loads the file, will then pick the bpm out of that tag, and synchronize track playback based on that. The beta version of Mixxx also saves cue points in it's library. I wonder if I could translate that to the id3 Event Timing Codes tag? That way all that data is stored in the file. I suppose I'm about to find out whether the existing tools are useful enough that I won't be reinventing any wheels after all. Also interesting in the Linux audio front is a recent review of Linux sound drivers, which speaks very highly of OSSv4. There's a widespread impression that OSSv3 was left behind for ALSA back in the day when the the original developer decided to close the source (a more than adequate reason). But since that time, 4front has re-released OSS version 4 under the GPL, giving it an opportunity for a second look. And it's very, very good-looking indeed, with latencies well below ALSA in most cases, backward-compatibility with all ancient applications that never switched to ALSA (indeed, often the problem is that apps don't support OSS), and non-blocking behavior now the default. I will need to check this out soon. |
natowelch
|
2:08p |
Money is Bad for Me
I found out last night exactly how little money I make. Over the past few months, I'd had the feeling my own cyclic poverty was something I actually had in common with my friends. Now i feel... unique. I actually take something of a minor sense of pride in how poor I get away with being. My consumptive participation in this rapacious industrialized economy is squeezed to its limit, and I am still trying to reduce it. It gets more difficult, the lower one goes, but I expect that, and don't mind. I aspire to a kind of timeless, amaterialist vow of poverty with a long tradition, but my inspiration is not religious in nature. The more efficient I can make my lifestyle, the less precaritized I am, because filling my consumption needs becomes that much more effortless. I have felt for some time, however, that as my efforts to reduce have steadily paid off (so to speak), that I feel like an alien in a world that isn't with me. As I walk everywhere (I can seldom even afford to take the bus), I am passed by countless cars I don't drive, flirted with by countless advertisements for things I don't buy, greeted by countless people whose jobs I can't work. Even my friends, who know how I think and how little I earn, often invite me to buy goods and services "for cheap", even though I still can't afford even that price, because it either means substituting basic food or rent, or I really, actually, truly don't have five bucks on me. In a culture so fixated on earning and spending their way out of every problem, I feel like I don't belong here. I don't want to live here, but I have no idea where to go, except into an open source Internet that, unfortunately, doesn't accept atoms. Though I am no stranger to isolation (pun intended), I am curious where people with thoughts along these lines might be found - and where we might live. It is almost certainly somewhere else. I don't want to give the impression that I'm complaining. I have a roof over my head, and few, small debts. I live this way partially by choice, which is more than you can say for most people in my situation. I have become accustomed to not missing things I can't have. I have learned not to want things that cost too much. I am beginning to measure the value of things, not by their price tag, but by how they rank on my personal budget priority lists. If a thing can't bubble up to the top before other more important recurring expenses re-assert themselves, I stop caring about them - they don't exist. A affordable price becomes, ironically, the most valuable thing of all. Nothing will change the world if people poorer than I am can't get it. Your iPhone is worthless. I measure the prices of things in hours. How much of my life is it worth losing to own this thing? Expense is also partially driving changes in my diet, although food prices pale in comparison to rent (notably, the opposite was the case during the great depression. Food is cheap today, compared to housing and health care). I have been noticing that, when I come across more petty cash, I spend it on unhealthy, extravagant, convenient foods. Money is bad for me. I feel good about what I am doing (It must be because I paid the rent on time this month. Can you tell? This isn't another panic post!). My sense of disenfranchisement and displacement is not blossoming into malaise or depression. It is a puzzle, a mystery, an enigma, a challenge. I'm getting the love I need to stay well. But I'm still wondering how love might be used to flourish, thrive, and become more than well. I don't know. |
natowelch
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12:02a |
Public Celebrations
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 420smalander, my old roommate and friend, and ricalope have finally gotten fed up with their current landlord, and it appears to be a strong probability they will be moving into a new apartment in the same building as mine August 1st. Yay! I navigated the post-fireworks crowds downtown this evening. |
| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 |
natowelch
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1:26p |
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natowelch
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11:22a |
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kult_members
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