Big Kahuna1342 and the MBP

January 13th, 2011
Written by

I’m still amazed that some goofy tech issue I posted about, thinking it was mainly for my own reference and humor, seemingly turned out mildly useful for others. Along that same thought, while doing some tech support for a company, I ran across another on of those “gotta write this one down” issues + solutions.

I had an Apple Macbook Pro laptop, running Mac OS X 10.6.6 that would not remember the selected Airport  / Wireless Access Point after a shutdown or wake from sleep. Pretty frustrating, as one would need to enter the Sys Prefs, Network settings each time to select the network (nothing was showing up under the AirPort).

After the usual gnashing of teeth, the solution I found was far simpler than many others that were suggested. I did not need to re-install, zap PRAM, trash prefs, or any other sort of vulcan-death grip. Solution: I simply deleted the network services (click on the - symbol) from within the System Preferences, Network, one by one, and then added them back again.  Credit to MacRumors and Kahuna1342 for the fix.

Bam. Worked. Just like that. Didn’t even need to re-enter the WAP password. Write that one down. Tasty Burger.


Posted in technoscene | No Comments »

Bullet-Time (for music)

July 27th, 2010
Written by

Enjoying 9 Beet Stretch and its spacious-density of colors, I thought I’d try my own hand with the software PaulStretch, by Nasca Octavian Paul. This little app (originally available in Win and Unix flavors) allows stretching of audio over time, minimizing “digital artifacts” from the process. Bullet-time for music, if you will.

I applied stretch to various contemporary works to hear the effect, discover new textures, and test time. I’ve pulled select elements from full render to give you a taste. Listen as if you both know and don’t know the original source.

For me, one of the lessons here is that there’s lots of interesting aspects to be found in subtlety; be it music, dance, art, science, humanity, etc. Read between the lines once in a while. Discussion and feedback welcome. Much more I could say on what’s happening here, and I might in the future, but just going to let the music play for a bit…

ABBA_Cadabra.DQ

Dancing Queen : ABBA. Stretched 25x from 3:51 to 96:01. I think it works alright here, as similar to Beethoven’s 9th in the original, ABBA utilized dense harmonies and wall of sound type production.

Way Pokey Face

Poker Face:Lady Gaga. Stretched 25x from 3:59 to 98:50. This might be a case where having a heavy dance beat doesn’t render out well at 25x as I feel like I’m right in the surf zone where the resulting beat waves are constantly crashing into me. Slower or a tad fast might be the ticket to ride.

The result is a pretty dark and menacing flow. There is a whole lot going on in this tune, even more audible stretched out, which is maybe representative of why dance music has its name. The high production value of largely digital synthesis results in a quite polished sound with tight harmonics; again, even stretched out results are pretty clean. On successive listening, I’m actually liking these results a bit more. With some digging around and piecing together, one could make something cinematically pensive worthy.

  1. Chorus 1 (1:38)
  2. Chorus 2 (:27)

Teenage Timewaster

Baba O’Riley : The Who. Stretched 25x from 5:09 to 128:32. Piano’s and other rich harmonic elements prove to be fun anyway you stretch them, forwards or backward.  The noise of the guitar distortion + piano really creates some rich sonic waves. Even the yelling of Pete adds some interest in between the lines. This render really turned out quite interesting.

  1. Intro (2:47)
  2. First Piano (:50)
  3. First Vocal (1:13)
  4. A cappella (1:34)

Believe In Space and Time

Can’t Believe It : T-Pain. Stretched 25x from 3:51 to 114:14. Different feel than I expected (like you didn’t expect something 25x slower?). The drum hits get a little rumbly, but overall, this is a pretty chill render. T-Pain comes in like a metallic ghost, and everything else is just trippin’.

T-Pain at 25x sound like, well, T-Pain at 25x; however, if you subscribe to a minimalist ear and theory, after a bit “he” becomes “it”, and takes a life of his/it’s own (like rapid arpeggiation a la Philip Glass). And to me, that’s interesting.

While ok at 25x, I think this might have sounded a bit better, avoiding this weird middle time space of not knowing to stay or go, and stretching around 12x or 50x.

  1. Intro (1:14)
  2. Long Vocal (1:13)
  3. Mid Space (:33)

7448 Seconds to Mars

Kings and Queens : 30 Seconds to Mars. Stretched 25x from 4:59 to 124:08. Lesson 1: double snare hits come out like you’d expect: full-on buzz and rattle and noise. Lesson 2: this piece turned out kinda “fun”…almost HoS worthy.

The massed choir-crowd provides an interesting texture that peaks out around the synth and guitar. I might not have expected such a large spacious gap in the placement between these elements, but the verb effect in the original mix served the choir well.

Jared Leto’s middle a cappella behaves as one might expect. I’d almost say nothing special, save for when subtle string chords come in for support. A bit of flavor.

I did, however, include the climax of the piece with the lead singer ending on a screamer, and the mass choir crowd rolls in like a tsunami wave. Full flavor ON is found rolling into 5:28 in the Closing Screamer. Can’t beat that. Long, but worth it.

  1. Intro (:38)
  2. Verse (1:34)
  3. A Cappella (1:05)
  4. Mass Closer (7:55)

Posted in music & art | 2 Comments »

95° and Rising

July 14th, 2010
Written by

Layoff, Day 137. I approach the ides of July with LA temperatures rising, along with my real level of anxiety. I’m not sure if I’m in the Inferno or Purgatorio, but any sense of internal or external Paradiso would seem to be absent at this point.

A colleague that was attempting to do some well-meaning networking on my behalf, forwarded the email response from his contact:

“BTW, I spoke to a couple of people I know regarding your friend’s job situation and THERE ARE NO JOBS!”

Thanks, Dante. Divine comedy, indeed.

Posted in bp should get a dog | No Comments »

Help Wanted

April 15th, 2010
Written by

In my job search, one of the tools I’m utilizing is Yahoo Hot Job’s automated search results. With it, I receive a daily email listing new job posting results based on my prescribed job search terms and locale. You can have any number of these automated searches running, based on your own personal search terms.

One of my searches uses the terms “creative technology.” I was doing a quick scan down the list of daily finds on “creative technology” in the LA metro area when this job title and brief caught my eye:

Project Manager, Clinical R&D – Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery

…Heck, I think I’ll apply.

Posted in bp should get a dog | No Comments »

Outside Looking In. Inside Looking Out.

April 11th, 2010
Written by

I recently signed up to volunteer at a German Shepherd Rescue, here in the LA area, hoping to do some good,  get a little perspective, and keep myself among society in wake of my layoff from employment. Maybe figure out if a dog is right for me. Or a girl.

As far as accompanying prose, this picture and post title pretty much speaks for itself, and in volumes. A little double entendre here..maybe even triple or quadruple. If you have some idea about this blog’s roots and my current micro-world happs, this can be taken just about any way and length one could…and with milage to spare.

Posted in bp should get a dog | No Comments »

Stoking Racial Fears To Undermine Class-Based Reform: Nothing New

March 27th, 2010
Written by


Beyond the fact that most of the general economic political rhetoric used to scare folks about recent reform is identical to the discourse around every major move toward equity in the 20th Century, it is worth noting that the racist echoes, too, have a clear genealogy.  Class anxiety can be very usefully channelled into racial anxiety when momentum for the reform of the wealthy becomes too great to ignore. If poor Whites can be made to feel the the threat of the “racial other” in the midst of financial insecurity, the legitimate anger can be successfully redirected at an illegitimate target. Take for instance the following editorial from a Jackson, MS newspaper in opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935:

“The average Mississippian can not imagine himself chipping in to pay for the pensions of able-bodied Negroes to sit around in idleness on front galleries while cotton and corn crops are crying for workers”

In other words, Social Security will be a transfer of wealth not from the haves to the have nots, but from White to Black. By successfully reframing the issue into a racial one, many of the policies greatest natural allies become its most hostile opponents. Two examples of very recent invocations of exactly the same kind of rhetorical misdirection:

“Reparations by way of health care reform?

Still believe in post-racial politics? Read the health care bill. It’s affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color. President Obama is on the record as being officially opposed to reparations for slavery. But as with other issues, you have to sift through his eloquent rhetoric and go beyond the teleprompter to get at what he really means.” -FoxNation Online July, 2009

And this from Rush Limbaugh:

“As the economy performs worse than expected, the deficit for the 2010 budget year beginning in October will worsen by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion. The deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps. But in the Oval Office of the White House none of this is a problem. This is the objective. The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. And the objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return to it to the nation’s quote, “rightful owners.” Think reparations. Think forced reparations here if you want to understand what actually is going on.” – Rush Limbaugh’s Radio Program – May 2009

The relative poverty, the extreme inequality of wealth and income -and lack of opportunity for poor Whites in the Southeastern United States demonstrate clearly  the impact of this kind of false consciousness.  The acceptance of this way of seeing change is not just bad for people of color, it’s been devastating for poor Whites, too.

Posted in just bitching, media disinformation, political view | No Comments »

Perspective

March 25th, 2010
Written by

I’ve had a handle on this living in the “past” thing, and I seem to have acquired a better perspective with living for the “present” over the past year.  Now if I can just have a better idea of what living in the future might be…

Posted in bp should get a dog | No Comments »

7 Days

March 16th, 2010
Written by

Sometimes you just can’t get a break.

Posted in everyday beauty | No Comments »

Greater, Indeed

March 11th, 2010
Written by

“Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth — greater indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners.” – Henry Watson Fowler

Posted in political view | No Comments »

Caveat Emptor Empty Post

March 10th, 2010
Written by

I had a pretty nifty word spin last night but it seems that the post got lost somewhere between the iPhone wordpress 2.2 app and the blog. A casual search shows a possible bug. Any more comment on this?

Anyway. Achtung, baby.

Posted in technoscene | No Comments »

Where in the world?

March 9th, 2010
Written by

After working to adjust from east coast time (-5 GMT) to Pacific time (-8 GMT), and then struggling to do my night shift job for the past 6 months, something akin to Guam at -10 GMT (sometimes closer to -12 GMT), I’m now back among the daywalkers; however, I have a terrible case of jetlag, combined with a natural disposition to be productive nocturnal. My shift started at 6:00pm and ran until approximately 2:00am, with occasions of working until 3:30am or 4:00am not unheard of.

Thoughts and observations from my night-shift experience:

1. Nightshift is not condusive to career advancement. I’ve only been here for 8 months (before I got “furloughed”), but I feel slightly stunted. Most of the execs are long since cashed out when I clock in to start my day. You are not around for those impropmtu meetings. Even among the peer level, you miss out on social events during work (lunches, after work outings, etc). You just need face time with people and night shift doesn’t allow that luxury as such during the day.

2. You don’t have a social life, or one that is severely crippled. Your friends, significant-other, and family don’t see you until the weekends, and even then, you are sleeping until at least noon. You can’t have dinner or after work-social with these people.

3. There’s not much happening in LA as I thought there might be, all hours of the night. The only food joints open are the sporadic greasy spoons. Even the ubiquitous traffic dies down at night. I had a 7 mile 20 minute commute going (at 530pm), and an 11 minute return commute.  I can often count the number of cars I see on the highway, coming home at 3:30am.

4. In reference to the aforementioned, don’t stay at work too late, other wise you will get caught in morning rush hour.

5. Your work colleagues become your social network. This is both good and bad. Good, because you see these people everyday. Bad, because you see these people everyday.

6. One of the bright-sides to working at night is that you do get the option be out-and-about during the daylight. And oh-what daylight it is, here in sunny Los Angeles. However, please see

7. Another plus to being a night-sider is the ability to experience lower traffic and human flow, when doing basic chores such as shopping.

Regardless of any positives, I’d really prefer not to work night shift.

Posted in political view | No Comments »

Umerka: On The Persistence of Xenophobia

March 3rd, 2010
Written by

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that intergenerational linguistic assimilation is faster for the present wave of Spanish-speaking immigrants than for any large group of immigrants in U.S. history AND the fact that this country has NO national language, this sticker got me thinking. U.S. history is full of fears about Chinese, Irish, Italian, German, Slavic immigrants and their allegedly inferior character and slowness of assimilation.

There was great paranoia, for instance, in Cincinnati in the middle of the 19th century that the Germans were not speaking English and that the immigrants would “take over” the city. When immigrants come into a nation- into a community- they most often occupy the lowest strata in the labor market. It turns out that no matter which racial group (however contemporaneously defined) is represented, these poor immigrants are always believed to be violent, lazy, highly sexualized, unintelligent, and generally immoral. This way of understanding immigrant groups — and perhaps more importantly their lifestyle and life chances — makes their exploitation and subjugation all the easier to explain and tolerate. The ways in which today’s immigration “debate” is framed include plenty of these old and deeply troubling stereotypes.

My last thought on this for today: I wonder if the chain-smoking guy in the rebel flag hat that occupied this car considered that “America” is a hemisphere, not a country- and that the majority of the folk who inhabit this half of the world speak a language that is presumably not his own. Irony much?

Posted in just bitching, political view | No Comments »

12127

March 2nd, 2010
Written by

And so I begin day two of my unemployment journey in the California Republic. One of my first steps at finding somewhat a locus of control on myself and situation has been to contact the State of California Emplopyment Development Department, in hopes of filing for some sort of unemployment insurance payments, until I secure regular employment again. Monday I racked up 86 call attempts, shut down in the phone cue, hung up automatically on because of number of callers. The system is too overloaded to even place callers in a cue. The irony of this, of course, costs this heavily in debt state even more pain to the tune of billions of dollars for just the failed calls.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in political view | 1 Comment »

The World is Flat

February 22nd, 2010
Written by

In the span of a weekend, I went to regions of France, Korea, and Japan…all without traveling more than a 10 mile radius, no passport needed. Omelets, croissant, and cheesecake, sushi and sake, and beef tongue and octopus. Signage, language, and “authentic customers” included.  File this one under “Reasons I Like Living in Los Angeles.”

Posted in political view | No Comments »

Silver Screen

February 19th, 2010
Written by

I’ve been in Hollywoodland for six months, and have been to about the same number of movies in as many months. An interesting event has happened at every one of these movies that I’m mildly fascinated by. At the beginning and closing of the movie, the audience breaks into applause and cheers.

Granted,  I’ve only attended some of the more headlining movies, so my sample size is small and narrow. However, in my years of attending movies, I can only count on about two or three fingers the number of times I’ve heard noise from an audience in the midwest, save for the midnight geek fest showings: Dark Knight, Rocky III, Top Gun, Matrix, Star Wars.

Is this because I’m in the Hollywood, the land where movies and stardust is born from? And somehow it settles on the localized population, causeing such outbursts? Is it because a notable count of the populous is involved directly or indirectly in the entertainment industry? Does this happen elsewhere, and on a regular basis?

I’ll continue to collect data and monitor the situation.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

« Older Entries