I bet I could throw a drumstick over them mountains…
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I’m back in the acoustic game again. It felt weird playing a set of Al Foster Jr. Hip Gig drums for three solid hours tonight, but I finally got into some tasty grooves by the end of the night. This video is actually the first real song that I played on them. The christening so to speak. Enjoy. |
Is this anything?
Sometimes, when I get bored and thirsty, I just start throwing random stuff into my blender. Unfortunately, nine-times-out-of-ten, the result ends up being a complete disaster. I now realize that trying to blend a lone flip-flop with some potatoes and a whole can of CheezWhiz back in ‘77 was a bad idea, and I have paid dearly for that one by way of a two-percent loss of equilibrium. Tonight was nothing like that fateful day. Blendius, the Greek God of Blending, must have loaned me his entire emerald shotgun/sceptre full of good blending karma to me. Old boy has been pretty stingy with it ever since I invented that new alphabet. At any rate, for tonight’s mortality distraction, I heedlessly tossed a cadre of hand-selected Central Market strawberries, what-was-left of a bottle of Kahlua, a half-cup of yogurt, and three tablespoons of confectionary sugar into ye olde 1.21 Gigawatt Osterizer. I cranked that sumbitch up to 11 (the only speed) until I smelled burning. Then, I enjoyed what is sure to be the new over-21 smoothie phenomenon of 2006. I’m calling the beverage “Bullet Bob’s Strawberry Infinigon” until Coor’s or the metasnazz files a lawsuit. Also, mitya000 please note that my new pride-obliterating blender technique is most unstoppable. Do-da-do-da-do. 
RSS Parser in 10 lines of Ruby or in 153 lines of C++
I know there’s like 10 libraries to do this already, but they all seemed a bit heavy to me. I just wanted to grab the items from an RSS feed. Plain and simple. What’s amazing to me is that it could be done in 10 lines of Ruby. This parser reads an RSS feed, and stores the descriptions, items, and links into a hash of arrays.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'http-access2'
h = HTTPAccess2::Client.new()
element = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = []}
while urlstr = ARGV.shift
response = h.get(urlstr) { |data|
data.gsub(/<(description|title|link)>(.*?)<\/(description|title|link)>/m) {
element[$1].push($2.gsub(/\s\s+/m,’ ‘))
}
}
end
site_description = element['description'].shift
site_title = element['title'].shift
Stupidly, I wrote the same code in C++ first because I thought it would run faster. After starting down that path, I found myself wanting to use ActiveRecord. So, I ported over to Ruby.
The C++ version is here if you really want to see it. It’s 121 lines of C++ with a 32 line h-file. Truth be told, it actually took me less time to code the C++ because I made a couple of mistakes in my Ruby version at first. All said and done, the Ruby version is a helluva lot easier to maintain than the C++ which I think is why I spent the time to do it in the first place.
Minor Spark Alright at SXSL
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Well, this was the first secret gig that Minor Spark has played for the world. The inauspicious thunder of VDrums and AM noise was heard at the first stop on the “Hell Bent for Naugahide” tour. BJ arrived on his trademark Vespa wearing a Shriners hat with some kind of animal in tow that was somewhere between a goat and a moose. We rocked out for a good hour. Then, we did a second set of old Appalachian favorites with overdubbed slam poetry. The footage of the second set was immediately locked away in the Minor Spark 3DES vault in Des Moines lest our reputation be tarnished by the heedless decision for the rest of our days. |
Xgl and Kororaa
Xgl is what the Lunix world has needed for a long time… A snappy desktop that has all kinds of Appleriffic effects bungled in. I tried out Xgl via the infinitely excellent Kororaa Live CD demo. The effects are fluid. The interface is snappier than OS X. I almost want to dump a bunch of time into making this work on the latest Ubuntu on my Thinkpad. Unfortunately, my Intel gigabit network card wasn’t recognized. So, I couldn’t produce a screen shot from the Live CD environment. Despite this, I was really blown away by the Xgl desktop on Koraraa. Highly recommended.
Feburween Ideas
I found this laying around unpublished on my Wordpress backend. I think it’s some discussion about Halloween costumes that me and BJ had last October, but I don’t remember the context. Nonetheless, it amuses me, and I needed to do something to respond to Februween.
<mitya000> you could be the limit of the speed of light. <hoyhoy> I’ll just get a suit with italic ‘c’s all over it like that question mark infomercial guy. <mitya000> I would dress up as division by zero and we could have a fight to the death. <mitya000> If i win, the universe implodes.
Boomerang Foo Video
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Well, at the risk of looking like Uncle Rico, I’m going to post this old boy. After Wednesday night’s practice, I setup the old Canon SD500 digicam, and recorded some footage of me playing drums for a while. Looking through it last night, I found about 7 minutes that I’m reasonably proud to show to the world. Since the audio from Canon’s microphone seems to be some kind of mono 16kbps stream, I replaced it with the full SPDIF track that was recorded with Adobe Audition via SPDIF through my M-Audio 2496 card (that’s why you don’t here the clicks from the sticks, and the expletives that I shout when I make a mistake).
Update: I suppose I should explain the Boomerang. Essentially, all it does is play what you played right back. It’s made my signal path from the TD-20 something of a nightmare. However, after two years of trying, I’ve gotten it sorted out now. The recording from the Boomerang is actually a separate channel into the mixer, and then an analog in to the computer (a separate track in Audition). Using a phrase sampler with drums is surprisingly difficult. You have to start the sampler, immediately start playing, and then stop it at the exact microsecond that the phrase ends. This is done live, and you can’t tweak it. I’m not the first drummer to use a Boomerang, I stole the idea from Stanton Moore. I might be the first VDrummer to use a Boomerang though. |
Bass Player Wanted
I posted this one to craigslist today half-jokingly. BJ kept on about me posting to their musician community page as he won’t go there because he’s afraid of becoming a dirty hippie by merely typing the URL. Some old boy was severely nonplussed by what I thought was a damn funny bass ad. His response read, “Wow, you guys are too clever. I mean, cheese wheels! WOW! How witty. Man, I really hope you guys find that perfect bass player who learned how to play yesterday and isn’t too fat for your MySpace-savvy deluded image. Grow up.” C’mon, cheese wheels are funny. What else ships in wheel form? Am I wrong?
* Oh, and for the record, the “NO FATTIES” thing in my ad was a reference to some weird thing that David Cross used to put at the end of every fake classified ad on Mr. Show. I didn’t realize how offensive that was in pseudo real life.
