I have been playing a double bass drum pedal since late 1994. I am pretty fast with it, and I can do a lot of things with my hands independent of doing steady 16th-notes on the bass drum. I was reading Rod Morganstien`s article in Modern Drummer this month and I realized that I have a major weakness. While I can play the typical alternating right-left-right-left 16th note with my feet very quickly, I have a very difficult replacing a beat using my right foot with my right hand or with a rest. This exercise also made me painfully aware of my lack of right hand, left foot coordination. I finally could do it, but the beats still lack fluidity and do not appear to be effortless. After I was finished, my left leg felt a little painful because this exercise was essentially one that causes you to keep your left foot going while occasionally stopping your right foot. Which, for right-handed players, is the opposite of the typical scenario.

I started thinking about the whole exercise some more and realized there are likely thousands of exotic coordinations that I have not even happened upon yet. I think this is probably what separates my good drumming from Rod Morganstein`s great drumming. That, and the fact that I spend eleventy hours a day slaving over a hot keyboard.

I recently purchased Dennis Chambers “In the Pocket” drumming DVD from Guitar Center in Austin. It is absolutely the most educational piece of drumming media I have ever consumed. Having grokked copious inspiration from this DVD, I had been practicing single-stroke rolls over and over and OVER again for the past four weeks. I am to the point where I can execute them with some fluidity and control doing them down them down or up the toms as 32nd note sextuplets, and slightly less so as pure 32nd notes. I was at it last night for a good hour or so, and I felt my left shoulder muscle slightly tensing up. I thought nothing of it as I am young and invincible. After about ten minutes, the problem exascerbated from tenseness to waves of excruciating pain. It is at this point where my feelings of invincibility vanished. I think I pulled some muscle in my neck or shoulder. I am not really sure though, but it hurts like a humdinger. One thing I am sure of is this: ten hours of practicing single stroke rolls in seven days is a BAD idea if you are nearing the precipice of being 30, and even a worse idea if you spend 10 hours a day slaving over a hot RS/6000 keyboard. As Paul Barrere from Little Feat says, “If your mind makes a promise your body can’t fill, you’re over the hill brother, over the hill.”

I finally rebuilt my Windows XP box. I had previously been using a Via KT880-based Asus A7V board with a 3000+ Athlon XP. Unfortunately, it was never stable. I spent about 15 months tweaking things, adding copper coolers, ram sinks, different memory, new power supplies, and underclocking. After all of that, the machine _still_ had issues. I eventually put in an Athlon 1500+, and while that was more reliable, the machine would still occasionally flip out. Last night, I finally swapped out the Athlon motherboard and chip with an Asus P4P800 Deluxe and a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 (leaving all other components the same). Everything is working like the clappers now. The new board and chip are a lot quieter, and runs infinigons around the old one. Also, the P4P800 board actually supports all four DDR DIMMs that I bought for the KT880 board even though I had two different sets of matched pairs.

You may be wondering why I went Intel this time. I had been running an entirely AMD shop for a while now. Hudge, the machine that hosts involution.com is an Athlon XP 2400+/Via KT133A-based system, and Homestar, my ever reliable Linux firewall, is an Athlon 2600+/Via KT133A box. The problem was that I’m doing a fair amount of recording and video encoding now, and I have a ton of PCI gear that I don’t want to part with. So, I saw a good deal on the refurbished P4P800 board on Newegg for $85, and I decided to be processor agnostic again, and go with an Intel box. Before running the AMD desktop, I was using a 800MHz Pentium III on an Asus CUSL2 board. This was probably the most reliable machine that I have ever owned. So, all of this led to me going back over to the dark side and building another boring Intel rig.

The other big news is that I will not call my new machine Yellowdart as it was before. I have renamed it to Inifnigon after the terminology rediscovered by the metasnazz today. I thought about calling it Allupons too, but my LJ friends page coupled with my daft instinct prevented that from happening. This whole ordeal has allowed me to regenerate 23 happy cells in my brain.

Back before I knew better, I used Outlook for my email needs. I had about three years worth of the Outlook dbx files sitting around on a long forgotten backup mountpoint. I managed to find a wonderful tool called oe2mbx that converted those propreitary dbx files back into Berkeley Mailbox files. You can download the source code here:

• http://ftp.sslug.dk/oe2mbx-1.21.tar.gz

I had previously used a tool called out2unix which only ran Windows and relied on the full version of Outlook being installed from the Microsoft Office CD. Oe2mbx runs with no dependencies on RHEL4 just fine despite the fact that it hasn’t been updated since 2000.

Involution.com was down for a bit longer than expected when I moved to the new apartment. I had been hosting my server on an SBC DSL line which was very reliable, but cost a whopping $99 per month. So, when I moved to the new place, I went back to a $35 per month cable modem, but that meant involution.com was homeless.

I decided to move involution.com over to a completely new server. I had been running on Redhat 9 for quite some time, but it has not been officially supported since April 30. So, I made the decision to update to RHEL 4 when it was released in February. So, a lot of the downtime was due to the fact that I had to build a new machine, install Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 on it, port involution.com to the new machine, and ship it off to Ohio. Also, I had to get DNS, Sendmail, Mailman, my Hoyhoy mailing list archive, spamassassin, bogofilter, etc, etc, sorted out as well.

I think it was a good decision though as RHEL 4 is running bind in a chroot jail, uses SELinux, and is way more up to date than my Redhat 9 machine was. So, sorry for the downtime, and excuse the slight glitches as I am still working through some glitches and attempting to clean up some insecure PHP that is lurking around.

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