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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Summer Project 2008: Mic Test & Preview

    I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to the way I sound when recorded.

    [audio:Summer08/00-PreviewMix.mp3]

    The original plan was to use parts of three different tracks for the music bed so that this would be a proper preview of the Summer Project. Alas, I couldn’t bear to cut away from Yuki Kajiura’s “Melody (Salva Nos version)” and so you get the whole thing. Shucky darn, eh?

    Mind you, I also didn’t realize until I’d performed the final mixdown that I completely failed to refer to the music in any way… which is sort of the point of the project in the first place! It just figures.

    Enough of playing coy, here’s the deal: I want to highlight fourteen musical artists every Friday from the start of summer until the beginning of autumn. Part of the plan is to record introductory and interstitial material for three songs per week, but I could scrap the voice thing and rely on the written word instead. Hence this test.

    So, give it to me straight. Should I do it? Could you stand to listen to my voice once per week for fourteen weeks?

  • No! It will remain static, forever!

    Here’s why I don’t watch the television news, kids.

    “Blah blah blah polls indicate yadda yadda is the whatever hoo-ha, but that may change.”

    Oh, no. Do go on.

    Are you saying that poll results, or indeed any given state of affairs at this precise moment, aren’t completely static? Is it remotely possible, perhaps, that everything may change, sooner or later? People, unless you’re telling me about the speed of light or the fact that two apples added to two apples gives you four apples, I’m going to operate under the perhaps-misguided belief that the state of the world as relayed by talking heads on a glowing rectangle might, perhaps, be undergoing change nearly all of the time.

    Okay, so they’re not really trying to insult my intelligence. (Not this way, anyway.) It’s almost as bad, though: They’re just filling airtime. With X minutes to blabber through and Y amount of data, the average newscaster is going to run out of Y long, long before X comes to a close. Thus we end up with inane drivel such as, “But that may change.”

    These, as George Carlin once joked, are the thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools.

  • Planning And Pondering A Project

    I came up with a crazy idea, something that would run on Fridays here every week for an extended (but finite) period. It’s not a meme (the PPF project taught me better), and it may not be everyone’s cuppa. Hell, it may not be anyone’s cuppa. It would, however, get me posting regularly again as well as giving me some practice with advance preparation and scheduling. To pull it off I’ll need to assemble notes, plan things in advance, and maybe even work up a buffer of completed material before launch.

    I might even dig up a microphone for this one. Scary, wot?

    If I can accomplish this, then I’ll consider something really ambitious. We’ll see.

  • Quick Vista Tech Tip

    If you’re trying to install Windows Vista’s service pack number one, you absolutely positively must have the prerequisite little patches installed first.

    Mind you, it’s impossible to tell from the Windows Update display which of the little patches are the prerequisites. They all talk about “performance improvement” and “stability enhancement” and blah blah blee, but none of them say, “Oh by the way, if you don’t install this update then your Vista SP1 installer will simply fail. Silently. Leaving you wondering what the hell you did wrong.”

    Cute, Microsoft. Very cute.

    Of course, once the 16 little updates are installed and you reboot… then SP1 actually appears in the updater display. Gee. I’m sure glad that I downloaded the standalone installer, all 450 megabytes of it.

    The kicker? “Service Pack 1 includes all previously released Windows Vista updates.” So… I had to install all of those updates even though I’m getting all of those updates all over again? Stellar.

    I’d better be able to get my games working once this is all over or else I’m going to be a cranky little grey duck.

  • No, in fact, I am NOT a girl.

    I spent most of five minutes this morning convincing one of our clients that we do not, in fact, have an engineer on staff named “Karen.”

    We can’t all be 100% detail-oriented all of the time. I know this. The process of reading comprehension involves a lot of mental streamlining, the eye pulling in patterns and the brain supplying meaning of some sort as the reader goes along. Thus, when people read my name in print their brains often fill in the meaning for what looks like a familiar pattern. And so, the myth of “Karen” perpetuates.

    I shrug this off most of the time, but this particular client isn’t brand new and has dealt with me several times in recent weeks. And yet:

    “Yeah, some gal there set up this new account…”

    “Actually, that was me.”

    “Huh? Sez here it was this Karen person.”

    “Check again.”

    “Huh?”

    “Look at the email again. Are you certain it says ‘Karen’ at the bottom?”

    “Uh.”

    Eventually he saw the light of day.

    I’ve noted before that we moved quite often when I was a youngster. Every few months it was a new set of teachers, new people at the church on Sunday (during Mom’s religious-leaning stretches) and so forth. Every few months I suffered a barrage of “Karen” and “Carol” and “Kara” miscues. Lots of teeth grinding on my part, as you can imagine. Add this to my scrawny physique and unstable home life and it’s a wonder I grew up reasonably sane at all given what a natural bully-magnet I was.

    I still have to grit my teeth on occasion. Today was one of them. Normally, though, I can just laugh it off and forget about it, so it’s not like I’m constantly hung up about this.

    Even so, I’m probably going to punch my father in the arm the next time I see him. Just on general principle.

  • New Gear, Unexpectedly

    Factor The First: Lil’ & Geoffrey’s computer DFO‘d in a bizarre and decidedly terminal fashion. Their budget wasn’t ideal for a full replacement rig, but there was no guarantee that going on a part-by-part replacement binge would solve the problem.

    Factor The Second: My “stimulus” check from Uncle Dubya, however misguided a gesture it may be, is still money in my pocket. It’s hard to turn down money in my pocket.

    Factor The Third: The so-called “gaming computer” was getting a bit long in the tooth, though with upgrades over the years I’ve kept it nearly up to the desired spec. (Basically: “Can it play City of Heroes and Heroes of Might and Magic?”)

    Throw these three factors together with a flash of inspiration on the part of your humble journal writer and you end up with a solution which everybody can more-or-less afford. They get my old gaming rig, and I use the (quite reasonable) money I charged for it and some of the “stimulus” money to buy parts for a whole new gaming rig. Mind you, it’s not as powerful or neat-o-keen as the big HP workstation that I picked up last year… but it’s not meant to be. Its job is to play a couple of games when I have company over. With its Core 2 Duo and the 2 GB of RAM and the modest (but modern) video card, I’m quite certain that it’ll do the job nicely.

    Amusing side note: I walked out the door early Sunday afternoon with a black Antec Sonata case in my arms. I walked back in the door Sunday evening with the newer version black Antec Sonata case in my arms. Hopefully I won’t have any annoying problems with this Antec purchase…

    Now all I have to do is finish putting the thing together and slap an operating system on it. Well, I have ’til the weekend. Plenty of time.

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