Month: December 2003

so much for “three chords and the truth . . . “

“[Frampton]’s signal path begins with either one of two black Peter Frampton signature-model Gibson Les Pauls, a Les Paul 1960’s reissue with a TransPerformance system for different tunings, or a Suhr guitar. For acoustic work, he wields a Tacoma Jumbo JK50 or a Taylor spruce jumbo.”
“The electrics are sent to a Framptone amp switcher, which splits the signal off to four different paths. One route goes to a MESA/Boogie amp switcher that selects between a MESA/Boogie Mark IV rackmounted head powering a Hammond 147 Leslie (modified), or a MESA/Boogie Rectifier preamp. The preamp sends its signal to a pair of Digital Music dual stereo line mixers, which blend in the effects: a TC Electronic 2290 delay, TC Electronic 1210 chorus, Eventide Eclipse, dbx 1066 compressor, Ernie Ball volume pedal, Mu-Tron octaver, Foxx Tone distortion, Ampeg overdrive, and Korg DL8000 delay.

The effected signal is sent to a stereo MESA/Boogie 2:100 power amp and then to a pair of Marshall 1960 BV4xJ2 cabinets with vintage 30W Celestion speakers. A second signal route goes from the switcher to a Marshall 5OW Plexi head, which drives the famous Framptone talkbox.

A third route goes to a vintage Marshall 100W “Jose” Plexi, which is sent uneffected to another Marshall 1960 BV 4×12 cabinet. And a fourth path takes the signal to an Ampeg ET-1 Echo-Twin. Path decisions are enacted by a Custom Audio Electronics RS-10 floor pedal used in conjunction with two of tech Mark Snyder’s Custom Interface units.”

Good grief . . . . I’m sure it sounds sweet, but how complicated. And the article I linked to was about the wacky mouth bag/talk box (“Do you feel like I do?”) gimmick: Frampton has a company that makes the things . . . . I thought that was enough tonal manipulation, but evidently I’m further behind the times than I realized.

Of course, fans of high quality guitar strangling would have heard it here first.

one more for the LazyWeb

I’d like some way of scheduling or otherwise batching rebuilds (of pages or groups of pages). I’m not sure what other tuning options are available to me but I do know these rebuilds are a-w-f-u-l-l-y ss-ll-oo-ww.

So if there is a way of toggling a post or group of posts from “Draft” to “Publish” and making the magic happen on the server, outside a browser window, that would be useful.

holiday rituals

One of my growing list of holiday rituals is reading A Christmas Carol. If we watch a movie version, it’s this one. So it was with some interest that I saw this on MetaFilter . . . .

God Bless Us Everyone… with Some Vitamin D? | Metafilter

An interesting parlor game among pediatricians is to determine the ailment that afflicted the character Tiny Tim from a Christmas Carol. The most likely suspects include renal tubular acidosis or a vitamin D deficiency due to excessive London industrial smog, both of which result in rickets. (This would explain why Tiny Tim needed a crutch). Given that Tiny Tim’s condition was likely curable if Scrooge paid Cratchit more money, this has inspired one right-wing contrarian to argue that Scrooge should have worked a little Malthusian magic by letting Tiny Tim die.

I have to wonder if the “right-wing contrarian” forgot that Dickens answered that question in his little book . . .

‘If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’ Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief. `Man,’ said the Ghost, `if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die. It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God. to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.’

you can’t solve what you don’t understand

Gosh, pardon me while I chime in on this virulent (in a good way) meme . . .

die puny humans:

The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It’s about realizing that all the really hard problems — free expression, copyright, due process, social networking — may have technical dimensions, but they aren’t technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can’t solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.

This needs to be repeated until it’s understood. Refusing to see media piracy as a failure to see a business opportunity, this whole debacle about e-voting — people go on about these as technology problems but they’re policy/legal challenges.

The Center I was working at for most of 2003 could be addressing these issues.

the festive season

An eventful couple of days leading up to the Big Day . . .

Some last minute food shopping today (the third such trip I have made in the past 48 hours). Since the extended family locally have extended themselves elsewhere (significant others’ family, generally), we’re doing a small Christmas at home. So less variety of food, but all stuff we know we like.

Using the Santa lever has meant for some dramatically good behavior. We even got the younger set to take naps if they could open just one present upon arising. They of course chose to open the gifts they bought for each other just last night (a Barbie play bedroom and a frightening Transformer).

To church this evening (we’re regular churchgoers: once a year, whether we feel like it or not), and they were as good as gold. They were even brave enough to hold their own candles, and the resulting wax drips were handled with considerable bravery and self-control.

Now that they’re (finally) asleep, we can finish the final arrangements and get our heads down before the telltale sound of sleigh bells. We’ll leave St Nick’s treats out for him, first (mince pies and a cold glass of milk: suspiciously similar to what Dad likes for a snack). We’re close enough to the date line to be near the end of his route: perhaps the Big Fellow would like something a little more restorative, but that might set a bad precedent. Two fingers of Scotch at a few too many houses, and we can guess the result . . .

Now playing: Ave Maria from the album “Songs of Faith and Inspiration” by Robert Shaw Chorale & Robert Shaw

astroturf

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 21, 2003 – December 27, 2003 Archives

In the Internet age, letters-to-the-editor page editors really need to do more due diligence.

Josh turns up some “cut-n-paste” letters to the editor in support of the President’s agenda: pure astroturf. (Astroturf is how “man-made grassroots” campaigns like this are referred to: not as pernicious as ballot-stuffing, but not we need in a democracy.)

on innovation

ongoing · Telephony R.I.P.?

I have an iSight and a nice new Mac laptop. I also have a beat-up old Mac and a decent Canon videocam that I don’t use that much, not having (yet) developed videographer’s reflexes. Anyhow, the Canon has firewire output, so I plugged that into the old Mac and what do you know, it works just fine with iChat AV. So we put the old Mac and the Canon with a little tripod on a desk in a quiet but wired area upstairs and it’s a free videophone to anywhere in the world. Restating for emphasis: whenever I’m anywhere in the world and have an Internet connection, I can have a free videophone call home, that goes on as long as I need to and nobody’s counting minutes or running up a phone bill. Let’s see; free telephone with video, or pay-for-it telephone with no picture. Costly and voice-only, or free with a picture. I think this is what an inflexion point smells like.

Fast Company | If He’s So Smart…Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation

That Apple has been frozen out time and again suggests that its problems go far beyond individual strategic missteps. Jobs may have unwittingly put his finger on what’s wrong during his keynote speech earlier that day in Paris. “Innovate,” he bellowed from the stage. “That’s what we do.” He’s right–and that’s the trouble. For most of its existence, Apple has devoted itself single-mindedly, religiously, to innovation.

[ . . . . ]

Truth is, some of the most innovative institutions in the history of American business have been colossal failures.

From the Desk of David Pogue: Video Chats Using Microsoft Windows

Video Chats Using Microsoft Windows
By DAVID POGUE

Published: December 18, 2003

The quest goes on to find a hardware-software combination that would let Windows fans conduct full-screen, smooth, non-delayed video chats over broadband connections to the Internet. (This is in response to a recent column about Apple’s iChat AV software that, if you have a camcorder or an iSight pocket video camera, offers exactly that.)

more on genres

94.9 KUOW: Seattle’s NPR News and Information Station

Two-time Booker Prize winning writer Peter Carey has a knack for transporting the reader into a slice of history, even though Carey is a novelist. Carey’s last book, The True History of the Kelly Gang, was a set of imagined letters written by a real life Australian folk hero. In his new novel, My Life as a Fake, Carey starts with the true story of a literary hoax and creates a modern Frankenstein story. When the editor of a small poetry journal encounters exiled Australian poet Christopher Chubb in a grimy Malaysian bicycle shop, she’s drawn into his story of how a fictitious poet Chubb created became real and ruined Chubb’s life.

If this show is made available via streaming media, I’ll update this with a link: it was really good.

<UPDATE>here it is.

I just read this book and liked it, though as the interviewer said, it goes along pretty quickly. The story turns out to be a page turner and I was done before I was ready to be . . . .

What I found interesting about the conversation was how his books start. He has an idea, and just plays with and builds on it, without regard for if the book will be Literature or more accessible fare. (In fact there was a joke in the program about a book that was praised for its scholarship, it’s insights, everything about it, except it was too accessible: snobbery pops up everywhere).

I have read almost everything of Carey‘s (I never finished “Kelly Gang” as it was depressing me) and he defies any categorization. His books are set in modern times, Victorian times, on the Australian frontier (the Kelly book could be considered a Western but the skill of the writer makes it a different kind of Western entirely: more genre-busting), and even some touches of “magical realism.”

And the Ern Malley story is dear to my heart, as well.