my song got played on rinse fm!

I forgot to post this before.

My dubstep tune “worldwide” got played on DJ Distance’s new talent section of his Rinse FM show on 6 May 2008. Unfortunately, he credited me as dj number instead of dj mumbler, but I was excited anyway.

The podcast can be grabbed here:
http://rinsefm.blogspot.com/2008/05/distance-6th-may.html

[update 8 Oct 2008] It seems that rinsefm.blogspot.com has cleared out their archive. Good thing I saved the podcast for myself!

Here’s the excerpt:

And here’s the tune without all the chat:

2007 Music Rewind

Ah, it’s that time of the year again. “Best of” list time. While 2007 has been a pretty active year for new releases, I found that I kept going back to the same albums — which were not necessarily the ones whose releases I anticipated the most.

By the way, a lot of the music I’ve enjoyed the most this year deploy obscene amounts of bass. If you don’t have a subwoofer, you hear only half of the music…
Continue reading “2007 Music Rewind”

Why I closed my Facebook account

The NY Times has published a column in its Bits Blog that summarizes the evolution of Facebook’s Beacon advertising program.

I think that it is more revealing than focusing on the backlash or petitions to actually examine the program itself, along with the supposed improvements made by Facebook along the way. The column does a good job at pointing out the small tweaks that seem to address raised concerns, while essentially presenting the same thing again, but with more labels.

It becomes the user’s responsibility to be ever watchful for Facebook’s unorthodox info harvesting. A better approach would have been a way to opt-in instead of having to constantly opt-out. There is currently no way to globally say “no thanks” and be done with it, either.
Continue reading “Why I closed my Facebook account”

Off to Egypt!

image uploaded to latimes.com by Irvine resident

The hills around my office are on fire. Part of a huge firestorm in Southern California. The air is filled with smoke, and close to half a million people have been evacuated from their homes in surrounding areas, but life remains strangely familiar. The dusky sunlight gives an eerie cast to the day, but businesses are open here and people are out doing errands while ash snows down on their heads.

Amid all the confusion and chaos, I am still packing and preparing for a vacation to Egypt. My ordinary life has become surrounded by the remarkable and extraordinary, so the normal anticipation has been turned sideways. I am no longer escaping a normal life and returning to a normal life. The incredible things I’ll see as part of my travels will dovetail with the incredible things I am seeing on television and out my window.

I wonder how this will all fit together in my memories.

New digs

I just finished the most painless server transition I’ve ever experienced.

My hosting deal with godaddy was about to renew, so I looked around for another deal, and I ended up going with bluehost.com. Here’s the vitals:

  • 300 Gigabyte Hosting Space
  • Host Unlimited Domains
  • 2,500 POP/Imap Email Accounts
  • 3,000 GIGS of Transfer
  • SSH (Secure Shell), SSL, FTP, Stats
  • CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL

$7.95/month when you buy a year. $6.95 if you buy two years.

I used Transmit (www.panic.com) to synchronize all files from my old host to a local folder, and then just synchronized from the local folder to my new host!

Both hosts offer phpMyAdmin, so it was easy to export my data from one host and import to the other.

Done within a few hours.

Soundflower + mobile audio

Having recently upgraded to an Apple notebook (woohoo!), I am learning the ins and outs of being mobile as I setup my new machine for work and for play.

One thing that was annoying was having to unplug my audio interface when I wanted to take my computer anywhere away from my desk.

On Saturday, I was sick in bed with time to finally work on some music. But, being in bed, I did not have my audio interface connected.

Usually that means that I would need to reassign all audio outputs in my sequencer to the built-in outputs to work on music. And change them all back when I wanted to work at my desk.
Continue reading “Soundflower + mobile audio”

TivoSlimserverClient 0.2.2a

TivoSlimserverClient

My attempts to rush out a TivoSlimserverClient with SlimServer 6.5 compatibility did not fly. Some poor users did try to use 0.2.1a, only to be frustrated by its failure to launch.

Release 0.2.2a is now available from here.

Changes in 0.2.2a:

  • fixed “players count ?” crash
  • fixed duration display to support hours and leading zeroes
  • Tivo Remote Shortcuts help screen now scrollable
  • added duration to Song Info screen
  • using generic art on Song Info and Album Info screens