• 1:28 A.M.
  Nutrition Facts: None

As I was saying, since I have all this free time, it seems like I'd be able to get around to all those little projects that I put on hold while I was throwing my energy into work. Now, of course, I have no energy because I'm completely discouraged and drained from chasing after a new job. Maybe it's just that I never HAD any energy, and the only time I ever get anything done is when spurred on by desperation or fear? I get the feeling I've already ridden this particular train of thought around in boring little circles.

So what, I'm looking for a job. I'm writing a lot of almost-music. I spend a lot of the day listening to other people's (free) mp3s. Some of it is pretty good, but mostly it's not. That, at least, makes me feel better about my own music. I mean, given what people consider good enough to release into the wild, I am probably easily lost in the crowd of amateur musicians no matter how bad the music I put out. Maybe I'm a little afraid of going the way of the "Villain Thievz". Most people probably haven't heard of them. Well, the VT methodology was to get a MIDI version of a popular song off the web (like "My Heart Will Go On"), and then play it back through a vintage sound blaster's OPL3 midi synthesizer and rap over it. My favorite VT lyric is: "THE villain thievz the VILLain thievz the villAIN thievz the villain THIEVZ!". That guy recorded it all with soundrec32.exe or what have you and put it up on the web. He had thousands of listeners due to people making fun of him and linking to him. Maybe I can do the same for... whatever genre it is that I'm in. Electro-fat.

I kind of realized that my web page was a little out of date, what with the last item on the "What's New" menu being 5 years ago. That poor little optimistic What's New! button. Also the one for the webring-analog I was in, and the webcams. I do feel I have some kind of responsibility to maintain my website. I mean, that's what the people on the web think I am. This is the resource I have to distribute information as quickly and over the widest area that I can. I do maintain a mirror of the high voltage SID collection, so maybe I'm not completely outdated. That thing is hard to update, so many files, but in it you can find the musical influences of me and many like me, who make inexplicably noisy tunes with computers. Also, you can discover that when you were sitting in the stadium watching baseball, that crowd-pump-up music they blast from their thousand-kilowatt P.A. is actually Lazy Jones tune 21 (mp3 clip) by David Whittaker.

And now some multimedia. I mean, pictures. While I get myself some rice.

I met this guy! Sort of. You can't get your book signed unless you buy his new one, publisher's rules.
Neal Stephenson grew his hair and beard out and now looks just like Bluejack

Here's me on Mt. Rainier, enjoying the view, dropping the camera.
This is an "approach" type shoe, obsolete, but apparently a cult classic.
Pictures of my shoe are in high demand.

I went and saw Kris play at the Rainbow with Red's band, "Ryewire".
And here he is! Ironically, Red was not as red as Kris.

Woops, I dunno exactly how I spilled rice on the wall above the rice cooker. Maybe I was paddling it a little too vigorously.

I went on a little walk, thought a lot about commodifying attention, wrote it down, thought it looked stupid, and put it somewhere on disk. Could've posted it here, but.. now it looks REALLY stupid. I'm planning on arranging my web page the same way I arrange my computer files: by media source and type. That file will go under Media/output/text/stupid.

Some time ago, I wrote email to the IEEE President about some concerns regarding their project to develop voting equipment standards. I just got a letter back! Wow, all those capital E's. Someone got my email and must've read it, cause this is definitely about the same thing.. that makes me want to write more indignant emails!

I have enough free time that I got Spam Assassin spam filtering (w/ bayesian probability network features!) working with my (windows) mail client. I have since disabled all my normal email filters, and it is doing very well! Only 2 false negatives so far. No false positives, though it isn't as if I get a whole lot of non-spam email (a.k.a. "ham"). It's slow, I had to install perl + some old version of the Net::DNS module, and at first it was just completely deleting all email instead of filtering them, but I did mention having lots of free time, right? Oh yes I did, fifty million times.

Also my online journal is 7 years old. At my current rate of posting, I would have nearly 50 posts total! Woo! Online journals!!! Post the hell out of that nonsense!

FedEx admitted defeat and credited my account $50.90. For incorrectly charging customs fees on a delivery that occurred 2 years ago. I Win!

Kris and I are actively searching for other musicians to work with. We have received many responses from an ad he placed in the stranger. For the most part, people seem to be, if not on our exact wavelength, within the same class of radiation as us. Kris must've made a pretty good and specific ad. I understand it says VIDEO GAME ROCK in huge type; if they can get past that, we're halfway to an accord.

I'm trying different composing techniques. I'm not using any soft synths and most sequencing is done inside whatever machine is playing the sequence. It feels weird and I get nervous without a centrally stored record of a song. But anyway today's mp3s up there were made using that method. Mostly elektron synths. To get any more Swedish metal in here I'd have to hire Yngwie.

Ha ha spammers, go ahead and harvest my email address! You'll never get through to me! And if you do, I live in Washington, where there are legal precedents for me getting your money!

These things have 2mm brushed aluminum faceplates. They're sharp.
I'm serious, I cut my leg on the keyboard pretty bad.

A hardware version of a forward-looking compressor? What they got, flux capacitors, in there?" -- Kris, on the L2 Ultramaximizer