Indeed

DCI Quarterfinals on Thursday

2008-08-03T00:50:00.001-07:00

I'm taking off work this Thursday to watch the DCI Quarterfinals in theaters - the first time I've seen them live since I aged out.

With scores for the top 4 so close this weekend, this next week should be interesting. If other in the area are going to watch - let me know!

Mario Kart Wii

2008-06-16T00:18:00.001-07:00

We've had a copy of MarioKart Wii for a few weeks, and it's a lot of fun. I passed the 50cc and 100cc races without too much trouble, and now I'm starting to work on the 150's.

The real fun is racing online though - we have a few friends that we have raced with so far, but it would be great to find our other friends that own the game. Send an email to let me know!

Tom Dowdy

2008-02-25T00:10:00.001-08:00

When browsing through some of my blog links the other day, I ran across a post that said Tom Dowdy passed away recently. I didn't really know Tom, so I'll point you to better descriptions than I can give:

JAV's Weblog

Pablo Fernicola's Blog

Tom was one of the first people I ever met at WWDC. Travis and I came out with student scholarships back in 1998 when the program started. There were tons of great sessions and experiences during the week, but the student sessions really stood out. Tom was there talking about Apple, SimpleText, and other things I can't remember anymore. It was pretty easy to spot the really tall guy with long hair during the rest of the conference, and he was always happy to stop and have a conversation. His enthusiasm helped create one of the most inspirational weeks of my life.

I don't think I ever spoke to Tom since then (our paths never directly crossed), but I'm saddened to hear the news. If anyone else has other experiences, please post them or link to them from the comments.

This explains it

2007-11-30T22:12:00.001-08:00

While Daisie and others have teased me in the past about getting "huggy", I now know it's out of my control. I blame my heritage:

Swedes are habitual huggers

I would normally make fun of studies like this, but in this case I am happy that they have helped me better understand myself.

DCI Finals Broadcast Changes

2007-11-29T23:26:00.001-08:00

I saw this the other day, and I have struggled to find the right words to say:

dci.org: Drum Corps International places ESPN2 airing of World Championships on hiatus
(originally found from drumlineblog.com, which is a great source for other marching info)

I am really disappointed that I will not be able to watch these going forward, and it saddens me to know that there are many others that will not have the opportunity to see drum corps at all as a result of this.

Even though I try to make it to as many drum corps shows as possible during the summer, I still look forward to the ESPN2 (and formerly PBS) broadcast every year. I still have the recording from this year sitting on our DVR in case I get the urge to watch it for a 4th time.

I have always had a love/hate reaction to the broadcast. Overall, I loved that it existed. Having marched a number of years I always found the "special interest" segments to be really cheesy, but they are necessary for people that are not familiar with the drum corps activity. I really dislike how they cut down the show times to make everything fit in two hours. With the special segments and commercials I do not think they showed an entire performance for any of the groups. Some were trimmed only a few minutes, but for some of the corps they only showed a 30 second clip (out of an 11 minute show).

There probably is not very much money in the drum corps business overall, so I understand that it can be hard for DCI to fund everything. I have heard that the costs for hosting a show are rising as well, making it difficult for organizers to make a profit. With all of this, I hope that DCI is not using this to drive people to their paid video content. While it may help finances in the short term, I worry about it changing the 'soul' of DCI.

I am sure this kind of discussion (or whining :) happens up every time a free service goes away, but this one hits close to home for me.

Leopard Dock/Finder tip

2007-11-10T00:52:00.001-08:00

There's a cool thing that I discovered you can do in Leopard:

start out without any Finder windows open

drag an item from the desktop onto the dock icon for the Finder (don't let go!)

press space - and a new Finder window appears!

you can then drag the file to the desired location as you normally would

(it's possible that this worked on Tiger, but I don't have an easy way to check)

Twitter

2007-11-03T01:10:00.001-07:00

This isn't really news, but I have a twitter account that I've been posting to for a while:

http://twitter.com/cflake

If you have no idea what twitter is, well… your best bet is to check the links off that page.

I do all of my posting from Twitterific, which just released a new version a couple of days ago (I still need to try it).

In general, if I want to post something to the web quickly I will tend to do it on twitter, as long as it can fit (they only allow up to 140 characters). Ideally I would have posted this message over there, but well, you see the problem.

That is all.

Goodbye, cruel code!

2007-10-08T00:04:00.001-07:00

Wednesday the 26th was an odd day at work. Things were busy as I tried to finish up some loose ends before heading out on vacation. I had been going through a bunch of my old papers, magazines, and other miscellaneous things as I packed up my office for a pending move. There were also meetings to attend and other people to talk to during the day, but that part was normal.

The weird part was knowing that I might not ever write code again.

I have been working on Soundtrack (and related projects) for the past five years. Looking back it feels like both an extremely long and short amount of time. It has been a lot of fun and a great set of challenges for me. We had three major releases and countless other small ones. We were in 'super-secret' mode twice (once for each 1.0), which is rather unusual. I have worked with a lot of great people from our team and others. I learned A LOT - coming from a QA position and picking up SCM, debugging, building, and countless other skills.

But for me, this all goes back even further.

I went to school for a software engineering degree at Iowa State. I loved the Mac, and I wanted to work on it - somehow. The engineering part of my degree (rather than being in computer science) was how I tried to follow after my dad, and meant that I had to take more electrical engineering courses. I quickly realized that EE was not my forte (with transcripts to prove it :), but I stubbornly stayed with the engineering part of my degree.

There was no HCI program at ISU back then, and if I had known those programs existed I would have done things differently. For the courses and positions I was in, I did my best to design things well and present great user interfaces.

In Soundtrack and other places at work I have tried to do as much with UI as possible, but at the end of the day I was responsible for the code, and that was what got priority. My heart was still hoping to spend more time dealing with the designs and the UI interactions.

Then this summer I heard about the opportunity to work with UI all the time. I jumped at the chance and worked as hard as I could, trying to get the position that I have always wanted. And I'm very happy to say, things worked out well :)

So when I go to work today, I will be beginning my new job as an HI designer. I will be working with a great bunch of people, and learning as much as I can from them. It should be a fun and challenging time, and am really excited to get started.

Now, it is possible that I will still write some code. Coding has worked its way into my heart as well, and it would be difficult to give up entirely. It is very likely that I will not ever write code as a part of my job, it may end up being something for me to do in my free time. Check back in a few months or years and I will let you know :)

Ratatouille

2007-06-17T02:43:00.001-07:00

Trailers for Ratatouille have been showing up on TV more and more recently, and Lisa spotted something about a "sneak preview" on one. After a bit of digging on the internet, we got ourselves some tickets for a showing on Saturday (the 16th) and headed out to see it.

And it was awesome! My memory is probably skewed, but this is certainly one of my favorites. I was a little worried about the 1:50 running time, but it just flew by. It was surprising to have another good theater experience (we saw this in AMC Saratoga, but the new theaters in Valco were nice for our previous movie), even with a sold-out crowd.

Ratatouille is an amazing film, and I'm happy that we stumbled on this opportunity to see it already. This frees up my schedule for that other thing on June 29th :)

Sibelius 5

2007-06-08T10:21:00.001-07:00

I'm excited. Very excited. Sibelius 5 is announced, and it has undo!!!

:p

To be fair, it has always had great undo, except for plugins - and now those have it too. I've barely had a chance to look at the other features, but there is one other that sticks out - this version is a Universal Binary.

Just those two make it an essential update for me. More when I have time...

iPhone excitement

2007-06-06T22:05:00.001-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I was fine waiting for the iPhone. There hadn't been many interesting articles about it for a while, which lulled me into a state where I forgot that I REALLY REALLY WANT ONE. But as it turns out, my current phone actually wants it more.

I started hearing static from my old T610 that would change depending on how I was holding the phone. It wasn't something about the signal, it would change depending on how my individual fingers were positioned. I eventually figured out that by squeezing the phone fairly hard it wouldn't have any static, but that is not a fun way to carry out a conversation.

The prospect of buying a replacement phone two months before the iPhone seemed ridiculous, but I needed to do something. After thinking out loud around my coworkers, Iroro graciously offered up his old phone for me to use, and things started working again.

For a couple of weeks.

Now the static has crept into this phone as well, and I must continue to wait for the iPhone. At least I have pretty iPhone ads to keep me interested.

(sigh) It's gonna be a tough month.

I need to post more

2007-05-16T00:02:00.001-07:00

Well Winter Percussion has been done for a while, Final Cut Studio 2 has been announced and will be shipping soon. You'd think that I'd have all kinds of free time with those things out of my hair, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I've been spending time catching up on things recently, and I have intended to post more - but it hasn't happened yet. So here is a start. More posts to follow soon... hopefully.

Fremont Winter Percussion 2007

2007-03-28T01:42:00.000-07:00

We're very close to the end of the winter percussion season and I just realized that I haven't posted anything about it.

This year we are doing Shostakovich's 9th Symphony, and the show is titled "Not Another Winter Drum Show". So as you might guess from the title, we do some weird stuff in the show - playing other bits of music, doing visual jokes, wearing lots of costumes, etc.

The idea came to me after watching a really great DVD of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic (read the script if you're interested). It's part of a whole series called "Young People's Concerts" which contains a lot of amazing stuff. He goes through many of the different musical jokes that are part of the symphony - so we took those and add some of our own.

If you're interested in hearing some of the music, here is the set of original recordings that I made with Virtual Drumline 2: Fremont Percussion page

And here's a video of one of our recent performances: Fremont Winter Percussion 2007 - Granada Video (Google Video)

It's been a couple of weeks since that video was taken, and we've added enough things that the show looks very different. We have one more competition this weekend, and then we perform at a school concert April 9th (let me know if you're interested in seeing it).

Enjoy!

Steven Banks

2006-10-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

Wow. The internet rules.

Back in the day I taped a comedy routine that was on Showtime, and forced everyone I knew to watch it. It was "Steven Banks Home Entertainment", and of course, it's on youtube:

Steven Banks Home Entertainment - Part 1
Steven Banks Home Entertainment - Part 2
Steven Banks Home Entertainment - Part 3
Steven Banks Home Entertainment - Part 4
Steven Banks Home Entertainment - Part 5
Steven Banks Home Entertainment - Part 6
Steven Banks Home Entertainment - Part 7

It's pretty funny, and he does a bunch of really great songs. He sings, plays guitar, banjo, bass, harmonica, drums... I was amazed back when I first saw it, and it's still really cool.

I've been hoping they would release it on DVD, but I guess this will do for now. I still have my VHS copy, if anyone ever wants to see it in it's continuous glory.

I also stumbled upon the Steven Banks wikipedia entry and was surprised to find out that I'd seen him recently as the mime in the Aristocrats, and that he writes for SpongeBob SquarePants. Crazy cool! Good job internet!

Nike++

2006-09-22T23:22:00.000-07:00

My nano arrived today, so my lonely iPod sport kit (which was patiently sitting on my desk for the past couple of days) got some company - and I had to go try them out.

(Any idea what the color of the line means? Some people have a yellow one...)

Given where I work, I have tons of iPods. I didn't really think I needed a new one - until they announced the sport kit. It was then a matter of waiting for a new revision and finding some free time - and here we are.

All of the components are pretty nice - the hardware is really simple, software on the iPod is easy to figure out* (except... more on that later), the integration in iTunes is pretty transparent, and the Nike website is really cool. I mean - I'm in a graph... how awesome is that!

I'm enough of a data nerd that I'm somewhat tempted to carry my nano around with me all day to see what it would look like - maybe once or twice, just to try it. And since the battery lasts 24 hours, it could actually work :)

The possibility of wearing it during marching band rehearsals is intriguing too - both for myself and using one of the kids as a test subject :) ... it would be educational - really! However, that would mean I would need to trust one of them with my iPod...

Digging through the content of the iPod directories, it looks like the content of the run data is stored in XML files, which alleviates my fear of having data locked into the Nike site (as cool as it is). It doesn't record each of the individual steps (which would have been really cool for marching band tempos :), but it has a summary and some information about events in between - though I didn't look too close yet.

I wish there was some way to add information to the runs on Nike's site, to give some reference info about what was going on. I tried doing a 45 minute run tonight - which started out with me walking at first to warm up. I ran for about 20 minutes, and then my episode of Coverville (on iTunes) ran out, and I needed to pick another. Unfortunately I was still trying to keep moving during this, and I accidentally ended my workout session. I started another and ran the rest of the way home. I was going to grab food, so I just paused the workout until I started walking again.

The end result is that I have 2 workouts, both of which have quirks. My 45 minute workout lasted 25, and I have another 30 minute one where I'm only running for 10. Whew - it feels good to get that out... no more hanging my head in shame. I just wish I could write that on Nike's site somewhere :) Including the walking sections in my workout brings my average mile time down, so I'll probably avoid that in the future (gotta beat the system somehow).

On to the future...
I'll probably "gear up" soon and get a real pair of running shoes. I really don't like having keys in my hand (even less in my pockets) , so the Nike shoe 'wallet' appears to be in my future as well. I really like the new iPod headphone design, but my left earpiece was falling out constantly during the run - I'll have to figure out something for that too.

Drop me a line if anyone else wants to do challenges - with my recent lack of exercise I'd imagine I can help you feel good about yourself :)

Coming up for air...

2006-09-18T21:47:00.000-07:00

(I tried posting this earlier, but there was a problem somewhere in the chain between Ecto and Blogger)

I finally had some free time this weekend, for the first time in quite a while. I apologize if I haven't responded to an email recently - I will start working through my backlog soon.

More to come...

DCI championships

2006-08-13T00:06:00.000-07:00

DCI championship week ended tonight with Cavies taking the top spot. dci.org was down for a good chunk of the evening, which just made me miss marching even more. I thought championships were going to be on ESPN2 again this year, but I couldn't find anything about it online...

I'm used to being able to find pages and pages of information about computer stuff online - it feels strange when I search for drum stuff and don't find anything useful. Does anyone else know what's going on with the broadcast?

Update: Greg had added some comments earlier, but I just looked up the times that it will be on for 9/5 - it starts at 5pm for us west coast people. My DVR is set...

also see DCI's page

WWDC week

2006-08-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

It's gonna be a busy week.

I'm already up in SF for the student Sunday sessions, and I'll be around for the next 3 evenings.

Here's my schedule, for anyone that hasn't heard it already :)

Sunday night: possibly the #macsb dinner - http://upcoming.org/event/94755

Monday night: Buzz's party - http://upcoming.org/event/93479

Tuesday night: Drinking at the Irish Bank - http://upcoming.org/event/96636
(everything else had an upcoming.org page, so I created one too)

And then I have 12-hour days of band camp for the rest of the week...

I hope I survive :)

VDLMidi 1.1 Released!

2006-07-19T00:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I finally released a new version of VDLMidi - it's now a Universal Binary, uses SparklePlus for updating, and fixes some other bugs and annoyances.

The Universal Binary was pretty easy - I checked the box, recompiled, and the app ran! But wait - it app wasn't sending MIDI messages (that's 90% of what it's supposed to do). In older versions I was using a Cocoa framework for sending MIDI messages (Pete Yendell's PYMIDI, btw) - which was a quick way for me to get things done without having to actually figure out much MIDI code. It was only built for PPC though, so I figured the Universal release was a good time for me to figure out the MIDI code myself, and it really wasn't that hard.

I added Sparkle support because it seems like the in thing these days :). If you aren't the avid blog nerd that I am, you might not know what all of this is about - Sparkle is an open source framework for automatically updating applications. Sparkle-Plus has some additions that allow me to track what I should use for system requirements. The stuff is pretty easy to set up and get working, but it adds another bit of complexity to my build process. More for another post I guess…

After a day of being available, I saw that my total downloads from MacUpdate were over 1000 - which is a milestone I guess. I'd be more excited, but I'm sure there aren't that many people using it day to day. There are probably some bots out there that do downloads, because I pretty consistently get 2-3 downloads on the dull days (before the release, for instance).

Still, I'm excited I have it out and start working on other parts of the application. People seem happy with it so far…

And since marching season is approaching, I will be spending more of my time writing music soon - I'll make sure to get good use out of the new version :)

Recent stuff (domain, VDLMidi, drum corps)

2006-06-18T17:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went up and caught the tail end of the Hayward drum and bugle corps show and was able to see a few of the corps.

I saw SCV's drumline warming up in the fields, and they're back to flat snares with traditional grip - the line looks and sounds pretty good.

BD's beginning (music from the Godfather) sounds great and looks good - especially for the first show of the season. They have stripes on parts of their uniforms, and do some talking/chanting stuff - neither of which was very clear to me. The drums sound really clean and the drill looks sharp - both of which helped them end up 4 points ahead of SCV for the night.

If anyone happens to read this for VDLMidi stuff, first off - send me an email and let me know. Then you can check out a new pre-release built as a universal binary, with a few other features and fixes thrown in. That can be found...

At cflake.org/Files - part of the new domain I registered last week. I've wanted to register a domain for a while, and I finally got around to it. I intend to play around with Ruby on Rails a bit and add some other content eventually, but right now it just has a few video files from my camera. People might be interested in the Apple one and the video of what I think is SCV's 2006 60-second warmup (which is pretty cool!). Follow the link above to check them out...

Update - I've added SparklePlus support to the VDLMidi 1.1a2 bundle on the server. You can try it out and let me know if you run into problems... but I have done very limited testing with it. When the app finds a new version it will download the update and replace the original - there could be bugs, so please be careful and back up your data!!!

cflake.org

2006-06-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

cflake.org

w00t!

Help with a scanning problem - surface reflections on a photo

2006-05-28T22:19:00.000-07:00

I'm back at home for a bit, and I'm trying to help my parents scan an old photo when I'm here. I've never done all that much photo scanning, and I've found a problem that has me stumped. So I turn to you, the internet... (more specifically, my friends on the internet, but strangers and enemies are welcome to reply too)

Here's a flickr post with a portion of the scan, to get you started:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cflake/155311298/

...and the real photo, if I can get it to work:

The photo doesn't have those white spots when you look it it normally, but when I use a 10x loupe and have the light at the correct angle, I see reflections as well. I haven't had much luck removing the "noise" with Photoshop (v7), so I'm looking for other ideas.

There's a small corner of my mind that thinks the reflections would go away if I turned the photo 90º and re-scanned, but the rest of me doubts that would work.

I could take a digital macro shot of the picture, but then I have to deal with shadows, any warping of the paper, and DPI conversions that I don't want to think about.

One forum post on the web said that wrapping the photo in good quality plastic wrap would eliminate some of the glare... but that was just one guy on some random forum.

The closest match that I've found on the net is this part of the FAQ in scantips.com:
http://www.scantips.com/faq2.html#moire

...which tells me: 1. I'm screwed, and 2. try the digital thing I mentioned before.

Has anyone else had to deal with this? Any good ideas?

Leaked

2006-05-12T23:19:00.000-07:00

It has happened - the secret information has gotten out...

My parents know that I have a blog.

When I mentioned this to someone, their response was:

"Well, at least you don't write anything interesting..."
(it was said in the nicest way possible)

And we both laughed, because it's true on a number of levels...

Ecto problems on Intel? (not anymore!)

2006-05-12T00:56:00.000-07:00

I've been having trouble posting with Ecto on my Intel machine.... I've moved all of my account information and started over, so hopefully this will work...

(update) And it seems to be fine - hooray!

So much spam

2006-05-11T23:27:00.000-07:00

Sometime back in January I got tired of manually filtering all of my mac.com spam messages and I turned on Mail's auto filtering. The number of messages keeps climbing though, and it looks like I've got 325 for the past month. An unfortunate side effect is that I no longer take the time to report these spams back to mac.com, so I'm not really helping the "greater good". If anyone has a script that automates forwarding a junk email to the spam address, let me know... I suppose I could file a bug/feature request too...

Of course the mac.com number that isn't even close to the 679 from my main gmail account in less than a month. That's what I get for listing it on the web, I guess.

Strangely enough, the gmail address on my VDLMidi page doesn't have any spam...

My numbers are small compared to people that own servers, but it's still a hassle. And don't even get me started on all the crap I get in the mail... I need to call the number from an entry that Travis did... of course the link won't work unless you're one of his friends. The rest of you get to suffer with all your extra credit card offers.

It pays to know Travis.

I'll remember April

2006-05-06T14:10:00.000-07:00

It appears I didn't post at all last month, which seems odd because I wasn't teaching and should have had more time...

I've got Vegas photos and other things coming, so make sure you are subscribed to my feedburner feed (somewhere in the links on the right), which includes things I post to flickr and del.icio.us (which is about the only thing that has been getting content recently).

More later.

MacBook Pro!

2006-03-12T19:16:00.000-08:00

I've been playing with a MacBook Pro for the past couple of weeks, and it's a pretty nice machine. Some quick notes...

The hardware - some boring things that I've noticed:

corners are slightly less round
I keep pointing the remote at the screen, but the sensor is on the front. Doesn't work the best for my "just put the laptop anywhere on the bed/sofa/floor" method
it has a cute little manual
trackpad is wider, so using my right hand to mouse doesn't always move the cursor because my left hand position puts my thumb on trackpad
wider, thinner than 15". pretty easy to tell the difference when picking them up while open
magnetic power plug is awesome, and the cable is slightly thicker
because of the extra width and reports of 15" bags being snug, I'm glad I picked up a 17" bag back in the day

The software

In some limited testing, Halo seems to run fairly well
PhotoBooth photos are reversed (I knew the preview was, but I didn't know that about the final pictures)
Sibelius and VDL2 get sluggish with my larger scores - roughly the same as my old laptop

More to come as I notice things. If you still need more to read, check out the Ars review.

Conversation the other week

2006-03-09T22:20:00.000-08:00

I had a very odd moment last week. I was walking through the building talking with a couple of people...

Security Guard: Sir, you'll need to check that.

(I don't notice, because it's not like I have a bag or anything)

SG: (a little louder) SIR...

(at this point, I realize he _is_ talking to me, so I look at him)

SG: You're going to have to check that.

(I'm confused. I don't have a bag. He probably notices this in the way I look at him)

SG: You're going to have to check the muffin.

Me: Check..... the muffin?

SG: No food is allowed.

Me: (stunned silence)

I really wasn't able to make good decisions for a while after that. I didn't feel like getting into a muffin argument, so eventually I went to eat the it, and later passed into THE AREA WHERE MUFFINS MAY NOT GO.

Weird.

Ironically, there was a kitchen where I was going.

I did watch "The Conversation" the other week, but that has nothing to do with this post.

Debugging Spotlight importers

2006-02-18T17:07:00.000-08:00

(I don't have a full post about this yet, but I wanted to write this down somewhere)

A while back I was taking some time to get a Spotlight importer working, and I ran across a tool that really helped me figure out what wasn't working. With all of the various settings you have to get right, you're bound to miss one (well, I am, anyway)

There's a great tool for debugging in the LaunchServices framework - which lets you see if your application and importer are dealing with the same things.

Here's what I use:
(split so it will look better on the blog page)
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/
Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -dump | grep myAppName

The 'lsregister' command has lots of different options, and the -dump argument makes it dump the entire database out in text. There's a lot of stuff there, so I either grep for what I'm looking for or do a standard find while going through the text.

Of course, make sure you check out the Apple pages - Spotlight Importer Programming Guide - which has lots of good info as well.

More things as I run into them...

Undo closing tabs

2006-02-11T01:14:00.000-08:00

I _really_ wish there was a way to undo closing a tab in NetNewsWire or Safari. I guess I'll never know what that link was about :(

Heard at NAMM

2006-01-23T01:03:00.000-08:00

(a man speaking to a woman that was holding a strange looking violin)

Man: Do you know any Paganini?

Woman (confused): Do I know how to pack a mini?

(pause)

Woman (matter-of-factly): No, I don't.

Rumors

2006-01-09T22:42:00.000-08:00

I was mentioning to someone earlier today that the most shocking thing to announce would be _nothing_. He just sits on stage and stares down the audience, periodically raising a hand in "just one more thing..." fashion as the crowd gasps in excitement. Then the hand comes back down, and there's more intense looks. It would be the most interesting two hours ever.

I'll be up in SF Tuesday night, and during the day on Wednesday. Just call my cell if you'll be around...

Searching in NetNewsWire

2005-12-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

Wow. I should really look harder for these things - there's a search field in NNW!! I don't know why it wasn't in my default toolbar, because it's in the one from the configuration sheet. Sooooo useful…

I need to get back to my old practice of writing down bugs and features, in hopes that I get a chance to follow up on some of them sooner. I'm getting too accustomed to just accepting shortcomings (sometimes just perceived by me) in software.

Soundtrack Pro 1.0.2

2005-12-21T01:34:00.000-08:00

We released Soundtrack Pro 1.0.2 today (well, yesterday by now).

If you have Soundtrack Pro, you should go grab the update. If you aren't running Soundtrack Pro, then go buy it and then grab the update :)

Tip for today: cmd-B will add a file you have selected in the media manager to the 'Bin'. It's a great way to keep track of files you want to use later. (This isn't new - it has been in the application since 1.0, but the command key is only listed in the manual) Enjoy!

Also on the web:
Buzz's photo
Apple - Download Updates

Using and Debugging Cocoa Bindings

2005-12-17T01:05:00.000-08:00

I've got a couple of projects where I have been able to start using bindings recently, and I thought it would be worthwhile to document some of the things I've run across.

To start off with, make sure you read everything you can about bindings before you get in too deep. Since there isn't as much content out there as for other Cocoa topics (because it's pretty new), reading everything shouldn't be all that hard :)

Apple - KeyValueCoding
Apple - KeyValueObserving
Apple - Cocoa Bindings Reference

CocoaDev (searching for 'binding' - which has lots of related topics)
mmalc's page
Borkware - Quickies for Bindings

The easiest bindings to get started with are from the NSUserDefaultsController. I've been using them for quite a while, and they can be added to existing projects with very little change.

For VDLMidi I use an NSArrayController to populate the table. It's pretty close to the standard examples for tables that you can find on the web. After getting that working I wanted to add a search field, to mimic what you get from all of the CoreData examples (where dragging an entity into InterfaceBuilder hooks up a table and search UI for you). Most places on the web talk about doing this by subclassing NSArrayController - but there's a much easier way! You simply bind the search field's 'predicate' binding to the arrayController's 'filterPredicate' controller key (Note - I tried doing this the other way for quite a while - from the arrayController to the searchField - but I never got it to work). This only works on 10.4 and later, since the binding is new to Tiger. Since I wanted VDLMidi to work on Panther, I had to do more tricks to make it work - but that's a different post…

On another project last week I was trying to remove a bunch of UI updating code for an inspector. I setup things in the nib, but with lots of bindings and complex keypaths, there were quite a few things that weren't working. While I tried to figure them out, I searched through the headers to see if there was anything useful. The first thing I found was that it's still good to have an IBOutlet for your UI objects (and your NSControllers) so you can call various methods on them. Once you have your objects, here are some useful methods, starting from the top down:

NSKeyValueBinding -infoForBinding:
With a given UI object, this method will give you the keyPath and other information that is useful for working your way down to the model objects. I was spending most of my time with the @"value" binding, but you can use the '-exposedBindings' method to find what is available. I mainly used it as a sanity check on the values set in the nib, but then I would start tracking things down with the keyPath…

NSKeyValueCoding -valueForKeyPath:
You can call this method on your NSController to get to your model objects. When I bound a UI element to the keyPath "foo.bar", I would call down the chain to inspect each of the objects:

po controller
po [controller valueForKeyPath:@"foo"]
po [controller valueForKeyPath:@"foo.bar"];
etc.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on for some of this, but Cocoa seems to change some of the object classes for these to make KeyValueObserving work (that's my guess from the class name). Whatever they are doing seems to work though, so I've stopped worrying about it :)

NSKeyValueObserving -observationInfo
The method description makes it sound like this method and its companion setter are intended for greater things when overridden, but I haven't found a need for that. However, printing the result of this method gives an array that seems to list the observers for things that are bound to or through the object.

Between these and lots of time checking and rechecking my classes for KVC and KVO-compliance, I've fixed all of the problems I've found so far. Let me know if you know of other good techniques...

Katamari t-shirts from Panic

2005-12-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

Since I can't post to del.icio.us right now, I feel like I need to spread this information in another way - Panic is selling Katamari Damacy t-shirts. Check out Steven's post, or just go to the Panic store...

So cool.

Office Depot - 150 DVD-Rs for $37

2005-12-04T16:35:00.000-08:00

Just in time for me to worry about running out of room on my machines, I found cheap DVD-Rs at Office Depot. It's a buy 1, get 2 free sale - and you end up with 150 for $37 plus tax. Pretty cool.

Now to backup stuff from iPhoto (Aperture here I come!), my mp3's, etc. I just wish it didn't take so long to burn a DVD.

Does anyone use DVD+Rs? They have a similar deal for those, but I haven't really used them, so I just got the good old minuses... :)

VDLMidi

2005-11-16T18:16:00.000-08:00

Last week I was finally able to release a little app I've been working on - VDLMidi. A couple of links:

VDLMidi announcement on the tapspace forums
VDLMidi product page

I also happened to get my Subversion repository up and running again, which makes me feel more secure while doing development.

The app is only really useful for people that own Virtual Drumline 2 - the description line could make it sound like it would be useful when only using a music notation program, but it is specifically for using a notation program WITH Virtual Drumline 2. You can check it out without the other apps, but at that point it's just eye candy :)

It's an interesting experience trying to put all this together - there's all kinds of stuff to do that I normally don't have to think about at work: I needed to get a website up and running, create a quick icon, make a readme file, put together a disk image, figure out build versions, etc.
With that finally done I got the app listed on MacUpdate.com and VersionTracker.com, and started getting feedback from users that saw my original forum post.

It turns out that it crashes in Panther because the search field has a binding that is new to Tiger (and the IB compatibility checker didn't warn about this), so I created a version of the app without the text field so people could run _something_ on 10.3.9. Eventually I will just check for the OS version and dynamically hide the search field (for Panther) or enable the binding (for Tiger)

I will probably have more development posts about this going forward, and link here from the product page so people can see what I'm planning next. Let me know if that's too annoying for anyone, because I could always create another blog just for that... (even with the high costs of these blogger.com accounts :)

Things I don't miss about the old Mac OS (and things of that era)

2005-11-02T22:31:00.000-08:00

I was reading a rather inaccurate post about the history of the Mac OS recently, and it brought up memories of the various different OSes and pieces of software and hardware I've dealt with in the past. By the way, Wikipedia has a pretty good history of this stuff.

Here are the big things that I really don't miss at all:

floppy disks
getting to file servers from the Chooser
having to restart my machine to turn off RAMDoubler so I could play games
the System 7 look
running things in Classic (which I haven't done for years now, thankfully)
the rattling noises that my PowerTower's metal case would make
all of my failed attempts to get Rhapsody and the DP's working on my PowerTower
having to reboot to OS 9 to watch a DVD
having to turn off my machine and swapping my optical drive so I could burn a CD or watch a DVD (back before we shipped combo drives)
SCSI
blinking alerts in the application menu (back when it was on the right)
my first weeks ever trying to get sample code _to even compile_ for OS 7

While I'm at it...
Things I miss a little:

having edges on all of my windows :)
hacking things with ResEdit
macsbug

Things I miss a lot:

having time to play games
having time to play around with control panels, extensions, change icons, etc
finding the cool, weird Apple apps like Gerbils(?) and Project X (I think that's what it was called... possibly something with 'sauce' in the name... the 3D web navigation tool, where shift moved your forward, and option moved you back)

So what have I missed? :)

del.icio.us and feeds

2005-10-30T11:22:00.000-08:00

It's been a while, so I feel like I should post something. I've been using del.icio.us a bit more lately, so I modified my feedburner feed to only send out one link post per day.

I want to put together something about how crazy the whole paid blogging thing is, but I don't really have a full post in me. The Daring Fireball membership info boggles my mind - if someone wants to pay me to post more, I'd be happy to do so. I really do enjoy his site and the content, but wow - that's a lot of people and big chunk of money.

The Joys of Comment Spam

2005-10-05T00:24:00.000-07:00

Up until a month ago, I had never gotten any comment spam on my blogger account.... and then it began (insert ominous music)

I got two on a post and thought it was kind of cute - "oh this is what everyone posts about...". And then on October 1st, I started getting all kinds of 'comments' about how great my posts were, how I should check out some other fancy site, etc.

So tonight as I was going to delete some of the posts, I saw the information about blogger's new "word verification" and turned it on for the blog. It means that you get to type a few extra characters before posting a comment, and we'll see how well this works on my new internet fans.

Docktopus

2005-09-25T21:18:00.000-07:00

Eric and Startly released a new app last week - Docktopus.

I tend to stay away from most utilities*, but I'm finding this one pretty useful. It gives you four quadrents per dock icon, where you can attach little monitor and utility badges. I use the CPU monitor on all my apps(which is really useful for seeing when an application is hung, or which one is chewing up all of my processor), as well as the Mail and iCal peek badges (for seeing unread emails and upcoming events). I've tried the others a bit, but these have been the most useful so far.

Since I only use one or two badges per app, it doesn't add much visual clutter to my dock. It does however allow you to create the bug-eyed-vampire-finder:

The other thing I'm finding is that I really seem to want to mistype the name - I keep going back to correct myself from typing Doctopus, Docktapus, and Doctapus. At least it's much easier to _say_.

*Back in my OS9 days I used to have tons of apps that I would install and use on every machine, but once I started doing OS X testing and having to install a new OS at least once a day, it gradually wore me down so that I use very few extra utilities. Quicksilver is the other notable exception to this...

Fixing Bugfix Petitions

2005-09-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

Software petitions are nice and all, but they don't really mean much. Sure it's great to be able to say 'X' number of people have signed a petition, but it doesn't have much impact because it takes very little effort to say "me too". However, it's much easier for people to think about things in terms of money - and that's how petitions could be "fixed" (no, not the bad connotation of the word "fixed" :)

When I moved recently, I used the online USPS page to switch my address. The site charges you a $1 fee, probably just to lower the number of people that would try to hack the system. So petitions could do the same thing, except it would give the money to charities instead of the post office!

Someone (not me, since I'm not a web guy) could set up a site that would keep track of the different bug petitions and allow users to vote by making donations to specific ones. It suddenly becomes much easier to grasp _how_much_ people want a bug fixed, because they are donating money that either wouldn't have been donated otherwise, or could have been associated with a different bug.

Any thoughts?

Overheard at Blockbuster

2005-09-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

employee: ...if you're looking for something for a 10 year old, there's this new movie that's out... it's action and comedy, without too much violence, and no swearing... it's called "Taxi Driver"

(short pause)

man at store: are you sure you don't mean "Taxi"?

Let's all just forget about August…

2005-09-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

So the chaos that was August is now behind me. In that time I taught a week of band camp, wrote a bunch of music, had other miscellaneous drumline practices, had tons to do at work, packed all of my stuff, moved, and probably some other things I'm forgetting.

I'm still getting all my services straightened out at my new place, but I finally got internet access (via Comcast cable) hooked up and working on Saturday. I'm trying to get a TV working so that I can see the DCI finals on ESPN when they're showing on Tuesday, but there have been complications so far.

Send me an email if you need my new address for something... my cell phone and email info are still the same, and they're usually the easiest way to get ahold of me.

Selecting words

2005-08-06T22:15:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I'm compelled to write this tonight, but here we are.
(these tips apply to Cocoa apps - I'm too lazy to bother trying it in Carbon apps, since I don't use many)

Some of the best time saving tricks I've learned in the past few years have been for selecting entire words. At some point quite a while ago, I didn't know that you could move the cursor a word at a time by holding down option while pressing the left and right arrow keys. I'm not sure how I ever lived without it.

Everyone probably knows that you can select a word by double-clicking it, but if you don't release the second click and drag - you then select things by word. I probably use this more than any other type of selection now, since it works so well for programming and dealing with URLs (it was always difficult to get the location field of browsers to select the correct part of the URL... usually I would miss the leading 'h'). It doesn't really work with links in a webpage though, for obvious reasons.

OK, I'm finished being a text nerd for the night - what's your favorite text navigation tip?

Getting busy...

2005-07-29T01:04:00.000-07:00

I thought the summer would be less busy after shipping software (go get the 1.0.1 update!), but the free time just didn't appear. We're ramping up for marching band - I just got my upgrade for Sibelius 4, and I've been busy using it and Virtual Drumline 2 to work on the music and exercises. I always forget how much time it takes to get this stuff done... I'll be posting mp3's of the music as I make more progress on my .mac site, if anyone is interested.

I apologize for not being to talkative of late (both here and if you've sent me an email*), but things probably won't ease up for a while... :(

*unless you are the person that is spamming my gmail account 10 times per day - in which case I hate you.

Problems with Subversion on Tiger

2005-07-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a need to check in any code to my subversion repository since upgrading to Tiger... until now. Xcode gives "SCM could not go online. Could not reach host:...". Digging into the stuff via the terminal, it looks like Apache is reporting itself to be 1.3.33, even though I had previously installed Apache2 and had this working on Panther. I've reinstalled most all of the packages from Wilfredo's site, but 'httpd -v' still reports that I'm running the old apache. Anyone have any thoughts? I've tried mucking around with config files, but I'm really just fumbling about here...

Tap Tempo - Playing with Dashboard

2005-06-24T01:29:00.000-07:00

I finally upgraded my laptop to Tiger right before WWDC, since I was helping with the student Sunday sessions and I figured I should at least _look_ at CoreData before people asked me questions about it. I spent most of my time helping people in the "Intro to Cocoa" session, so it didn't matter that much in the end...

Before installing I'd been looking forward to using Spotlight the most, but I've been pleasantly surprised by Dashboard. I haven't used the standard-Dashboard-demo widgets too much, but here are a few that I've used quite a bit:

Air Traffic Control - for finding wireless networks. More for fun than anything else...
iTunesLyrics - a great example of something that accesses the web, but that is more than just a cover to a search site. It gets the lyrics for the current song playing in iTunes (yeah, I know, you probably figured that out from the name already)
Package Tracker - shows off another feature of dashboard - allowing you to have multiple copies, tracking different packages. I used to track this in my RSS aggregator, but this is a much better solution.

This week I finally broke down and started a dashboard widget, since I had an idea for one and naively thought it wouldn't be _that_ hard. It's tentatively called "Tap Tempo", and it's for... um... tapping... the tempo... of things (I'm Captain Obvious tonight). When dealing with music for Fremont I often need to know the tempo of a piece, and my $100+ metronome with that function isn't always nearby. Of course my computer always is, and the math isn't hard, so how hard can the html/javascript/css stuff be anyway? Heh...

So a few days later I finally have something that works. It has buttons, preferences, does the fancy flip, background image, etc. Well, it has the background image from the widget sample code :) And... the button is the icon from the sample code :) But hey, it works right? Hopefully I can convince Lisa to draw up something pretty so I can stop hanging my head in shame.

Here's an image for you - I'll get the real thing posted once I clean up the UI some more:

Ohhhhh soooo cheesy :)

I've been getting by with Javascript examples from an old 'jack-of-all-trades' web book and searching on google when necessary. I've been building up more links on my del.icio.us page if you ever need to find some. It's been kinda frustrating figuring out the language works (and how it interacts with html/css, etc) - I realized that I've been spoiled working in Objective-C for the past 5 years. But I really miss the development environment the most (never thought I'd say that :). Debugging using alert() to substitute for gdb or even NSLog()s is no fun - it throws a modal alert onscreen whenever you want to see something, which was recommended by one site (is there a 'print to console' equivalent?). And I miss having a compiler to warn me that I forgot a semicolon, assigned a value instead of testing for equality in an if statement, or that I typed 'val' instead of 'var', so it thinks I'm using some class instead of creating a variable - yes, all of these happened :(. I also managed to forget to add 'break' lines to cases in a switch statement, which is only interesting to me since I did the same thing 10 years ago when I was first learning C.

All in all, not the greatest week for my programming skills, but I know more about the languages now, and like I said - it works :)

But it's still ugly. For now.

Switched to NetNewsWire

2005-06-19T14:04:00.000-07:00

After a couple of years of looking at all my feeds online, I have finally made the switch to NNW. The bloglines integration from v2 made it really simple for me to bring all of my feeds over, but it still took some effort to convince me.

I grabbed the demo version about a month ago and got it working, but I kept looking at everything on bloglines without really thinking about it. I decided that I would do everything in NNW for a week, to give it a fair try - and I haven't viewed anything on bloglines since :)

The Good

Bloglines would get really slow sometimes, and at times it made me remember "oh, I'm looking at all of this on a web page". NNW gets rid of that feeling for the most part
It's nice to have access to articles when I'm not online (it was very nice on CalTrain during WWDC), and to search previous entries without having to do extra work
being able to share my subscriptions with bloglines and/or between machines is great
the diff'ing feature is so much fun! It's interesting to see how some of the more "out there" statements get brought back in line over time :) It also stops me from wondering why I'm seeing an old headline again

The Not-Quite-As-Good

Doing things with tabs takes FOREVER after the app has been running a while (clicking, closing, switching; it will sometimes take 10 seconds for the app to respond - I've accidently closed lots of tabs this way) - looking at the bug DB, other people have reported this as 1855 and 1857, so I'm not alone. It just means I have to quit and relaunch the app every day or two, so it's not the end of the world. Much better than crashing, which is what tends to happen to browsers after a while :)
Browser scripts - I have a number of scripts for things I do in the browser - 'add to bloglines' and 'add to del.icio.us', etc; that I don't have access to in NNW. There's probably a way that I haven't found yet, but for now I just have to open the page in Safari to use them...
Other browser things that don't always work - sometimes javascript popups or other plugins within a web page have trouble within NNW. Again, I just open the page in Safari and it's fine.
Although NNW does a really good job with it's outline view, I just don't like how that type of view works in general. There's probably a bigger design post about this to come...
As they mention in the help documentation, the bloglines support is pretty simple right now - there's no automatic way to add a NNW subscription back into bloglines, for example. I need to send them some notes on this...

I really don't have a list of "The Bad", which just shows off the quality of NNW. I'm really happy that I made the switch, and now I can go be the annoying guy asking them for new features :)

6 songs

2005-06-19T03:36:00.000-07:00

from catching the blog virus from Daisie - here's some of the music I've been listening to of late:

Shostakovich - 5th symphony - (3) Allegro non troppo

this is our fall show for marching band this year, by my favorite composer.

Basement Jaxx - Rooty - Romeo

I've been listening to more Basement Jaxx lately - Rooty and Remedy are pretty good, I'm not so wild about Kish Kash...

Charles Ives - Country Band March

our music from this past winter season. One of the strangest "standard" pieces of music I've ever seen - it was fun and challenging to work on for the season.

Fatboy Slim - Wonderful Night

I had to grab this after hearing it a million times in the background at NAB. Good stuff.

Freezepop - Science Genius Girl

Lisa and I played a little bit of Amplitude this weekend, and I remembered how much I like the songs from it and Frequency. The Freezepop songs they have in the games work really well, but I'm not as impressed when looking at their stuff elsewhere. The freezepop website has mp3's and videos that actually make me a little less impressed with them... but still, this song is cool :)

Beck - Guero - E-Pro

A great album with lots of great songs.

And of course you can find all of these on Amazon, but you don't get the fancy iTunes previews...

Update: I forgot to spread the virus :) Let's hear from the old college crew: Scott, Matt, Wade, Will, and Travis

June 12, 2000

2005-06-13T00:08:00.000-07:00

Today is my 5th anniversary at Apple, so for some reason I was compelled to ride my bike in and do some stuff (remember, 'today' is Sunday). There's probably a longer post in me somewhere talking about all of the changes this little Iowa boy has gone through since then, but I got more sun than usual today, which means I'm gonna get sleep, and you get nothing more. Enjoy :)

Peer pressure on the net

2005-05-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

I listened to my first podcast today. I've avoided them so far because I don't think they offer me anything - I can get information more quickly from text on blogs and news sites, those sites can link to other information, be copied or saved easily, things I don't care about can be skipped, etc.

But if iTunes is going to do it, I figured I should try. Unfortunately it was as bad as I expected (maybe a bit worse). It had music I didn't care for, talking that wasn't interesting, and I got to wait through 30-60 minutes of stuff to try to hear the information that I was looking for.

I found another good use for Soundtrack Pro though - it's good for figuring out what's going on in a podcast. With the mp3 loaded and zoomed out it was easy to tell the difference between the music and the talking, which allowed me to skip the music and save a fair amount of time :) I don't know how people can stand listening to these things on an iPod...

I'm also trying out NetNewsWire 2, since it always feels like I'm not a true Mac blog nerd without it. I've imported my Bloglines feeds, which works, but doesn't seem to bring over the folders. I keep reverting to using Bloglines though, so I think I'll force myself to just use NNW for a week to give it a fair chance.

Exciting stuff, I know. But at least reading this took you less time than a podcast. :)

Creating feeds?

2005-05-19T21:19:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know of an online service that will make feeds for pages that don't have them? I'm getting tired of having to read actual web pages :)

Soundtrack on Apple's HD page

2005-05-17T22:36:00.000-07:00

I've posted about one of my old Soundtrack songs before, but I got a surprise when looking at the Apple's HD Gallery page. One of the featured videos is of the NASA Space Shuttle, which has audio I created with Soundtrack (not pro!) 1.0 a few years back. Check it out if you have a fast connection - it's a 45MB movie. The link seems to have stayed up for a couple days, which is better than last time...

(this time it looks like it takes 5 clicks to open the movie from the main page; let me know if you find a faster route :)

A grand clone army of product placement

2005-05-16T23:44:00.000-07:00

Half of me is really excited about the new Star Wars movie coming out. The new Lego sets aren't all that interesting, but new is new :) Watched all of the "Clone Wars" animated shorts when they were on this weekend, which were really good. Lisa and I played through the rest of the Lego Star Wars game to unlock the hidden levels and, of course, the mustaches.

But the other half of me is already sick of all the ads on TV - even though we get to fast forward through them thanks to TiVo. The Clone Wars marathon probably had a disproportionate amount of SW3 ads, so maybe this isn't entirely fair. Hopefully the rest will die down in a week or so...

The unexpected thing that's been keeping me entertained this whole time: The Darth Side. Very funny, with better quotes and references than Clone Wars or anything else I've seen.

Cleaning links off my desktop

2005-05-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I got a chance to dig through some of the links that have been accumulating on my desktop - either by reading things and getting rid of them, or by posting them up to del.icio.us.

I've mentioned it before, but here's the link to my del.icio.us account: http://del.icio.us/cflake. It's a really cool service for storing and organizing links, as well as a good distraction to see what other people have been looking at. Going through my links also gave me a good excuse to try the new version of Cocoalicious that Buzz has been working on.

More of my finds to come...

Update: and something related I found today - a pretty big essay from Clay Shirky about del.icio.us-style tagging as compared to how things have been done before: Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags

Back from vacation

2005-05-13T23:33:00.000-07:00

Lisa and I are back from the East coast - our quick trip out to New York and Boston. It was the first time I had spent much time in either city - I think I had a free night in each of them during drum corps, but a couple of hours doesn't really give you much time to explore (though it did give the strangest feeling of déjà vu in downtown Boston).

We borrowed Lisa's sister's pocket-size NFT book (Not For Tourists) to help us get around New York, which was so helpful that we grabbed one for Boston as well. They are really useful little books with maps of each little suburb, showing you not only the usual street maps, but also useful things like restaurants, ATMs, and Dunkin Donuts in Boston. Definitely worthwhile if the city you're visiting has one.

And I got back just in time to switch buildings at work... after a week, I still have boxes of junk to unpack :)

Tiger and Subversion experiences?

2005-05-10T00:07:00.000-07:00

Does anyone with Subversion installed have any notes about upgrading to Tiger? (good or bad experiences) Just checking before I try it...

Soundtrack Pro

2005-04-28T01:46:00.000-07:00

(again, still catching up)

We announced Soundtrack Pro last week at NAB, and I'm so glad that we're no longer in "super secret" mode :)

You can check out the links on Apple's site for the best information (much more than I would want to write here)...
Soundtrack Pro press release
Soundtrack Pro webpage
Make sure to check out the Walter Murch video from the second link (it's a really cool video), and go to the "Quick Tours" section to see videos of some of the features in action.

I flew down to Vegas on Sunday for the introduction, and then demoed the app in the Apple booth the rest of the week. I was happy to finally be able to talk about what we've been working on, and it was great to get reactions from people at the show.

So enjoy - check out the info, let me know what you think... I can't think of much more to say about it right now. Meanwhile, I'm back from Vegas (as of a week ago) - at work going about the usual business :)

Winter Percussion takes 1st place!

2005-04-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

(yeah, it's a week late... I'm catching up)

It's been a tough season for winter percussion. We chose some pretty difficult music, and had to rotate our staff around because of schedule problems. Since I was busy with work at the same time, I wasn't able to get to all of the rehearsals and rework the music as much as I would have liked.

It took us a while to get through the first cut of the music, and then quite a while to polish it and make the parts sound good together. The kids were playing music that is probably more complex than most things out there, and trying to balance parts between the pit and battery (as opposed to having one group play while the other rests). They were doing it pretty well, but they weren't getting credit for it.

Part of the problem for balancing the sound is that many of the instruments are really made for outdoor use. All of the marching percussion instruments are loud by themselves, and putting 3-5 of them together (per section) and sticking them in a boomy gym is going to cause problems. On the other hand, pit instruments are pretty quiet (comparatively), and can't reach a volume even close to what the drums can. Because of this, the drums (bass drums especially) have to play REALLY soft while the pit plays REALLY loud - just to try and get a "balanced" sound. It works, but I feel bad for the drummers that don't get to play to their full potential.

Drumlines usually practice full strokes - where the drumstick goes from vertical (for snares and tenors) down to the drumhead - usually referred to as 12 or 15 inches. That would completely drown out the pit, so instead they have use much smaller strokes - only getting to about 3 inches away from the head at the highest point (in our case). This could be made somewhat better by using 'indoor' mallets - which don't make as much sound for larger strokes - and we'll probably use those next year.

For this year though - we just made due with what we had. After getting lots of comments from the judges the previous week, we spent a lot of time working on the dynamics - mainly bringing the battery volume down so it would work with the pit. We also added lots of extras to the show - trying to play up the "insanity" theme of the show. It was pretty fun to add the things, since we were already playing the music well. There were new visuals, facial expressions, jokes, acting moments, and other random things to try and help get the point across.

And... it worked! They performed their show at championships REALLY well, and they finally got credit for it. They got first in their division (which is really second, since it goes: champs, 1st, 2nd, ...) - which actually matches what we got last year.

The staff was pleasantly surprised, and I'd imagine the kids were as well. It's been a fun (and challenging) season, and I'm glad they got recognition for their hard work before it was all over.

And finally, some free time

2005-04-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

My busy schedule has finally eased up a bit, but only after it got worse in the past couple of weeks. Work has been busy with our new software release, and Winter Percussion has been taking most of my remaining time (more on these later).

So today I finally have some free time, and I can start catching up on emails, cleaning the house, and getting back to things that I've been putting off. Sorry if I haven't been too talkative of late - hopefully that will be improving... :)

Lego Star Wars

2005-04-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

I still don't have much free time these days, but I managed to spend some time playing Lego Star Wars after I bought it a couple of weeks ago. It's a pretty fun game, but short. You play through episodes 1-3, and I got through the EP1 levels the first day I had the game.

After getting through all of the story levels, I'm going to play through in 'free' mode, where you try to collect all the hidden items, using any character you've collected so far. Some of the stuff is kind of hard to find, so I'm glad I found a walkthrough on GameFAQs.

It's kind of funny that one of the main things that you have your Jedi characters do is collect "money" (little round LEGO pieces). Sometimes they are just sitting around for you to pick up, but usually you get them by killing things, pushing buttons, breaking stuff, destroying plants, etc. It all seems a little un-Jedi-like to me :)

Around 100 CDs

2005-03-28T23:59:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I decided to, but at some point in the past month or so I started listening to my CDs again. I have two big 100 CD cases at work, and I rarely ever listen to them anymore. So for whatever reason I started listening to them again, 1 by 1, without skipping any, no matter how much I wanted to.

And now, I'm through the first 100 (though some might have been misplaced, so it's probably a couple short of that). From classical, to jazz, to rock, to whatever others I had back in high school to fill out my case - I listened to a lot of music.

It was weird that wasn't looking forward to hearing probably 90% of the albums, but once I started listening they weren't that bad. It was really cool to rediscover some albums I hadn't heard for a while - I hadn't listened to any Frank Zappa for years.

My favorite part was getting to my Primus albums, which are just amazing. Another guy from the office saw that I had them out, and let me borrow his Primus DVD - Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People, which has all of their music videos and tons of other footage. Very cool stuff.

Still busy

2005-03-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

Just checking in to say I'm still alive, and I'm still busy. I spend enough time at work that I don't want to do much thinking at my computer when I get home (though I've spent some time programming a side project in the past couple of weeks - I don't really understand the logic in that either :)

Winter percussion has settled down a bit - we're done with the writing and learning of all the music, even after a last minute rewrite of the final song. We have another competition this weekend, which will keep this Saturday busy as well.

Now to get more sleep...

Busy week

2005-02-27T01:17:00.000-08:00

We had percussion camp this past week, which meant 5-hour rehearsals every night after work. I also had more music to write, and work was pretty busy this week as well.

So I couldn't be happier that the weekend is here. Lisa and I ran off to the beach, since we haven't gotten out there for a while. Tonight we tried the trick for using the microwave to make rice krispy treats, but we halved the materials and kept the times the same (2 minutes, then 1 minute), and we ended up with stuff that was rock hard after it cooled. At least it was good while it was warm.

It's not my night

2005-02-16T00:35:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping it's a coincidence that I just updated to 10.3.8, but...

I've been burning audio CDs tonight that won't show up on my machine
I tried updating my Airport base station, which then stopped responding at all. I then spent the next couple of hours getting it up and running again (I'm just not any good at networking)
And after all the Airport mess, my machine still doesn't reconnect after sleep (which was a problem from beforer). Looks like I'll need to call AppleCare...

Drum Corps on the web

2005-02-14T00:32:00.000-08:00

I went through a bunch of my links this weekend, and I did a search on Wikipedia for 'drum corps', which uncovered the DrumCorpsWiki.

I thought about making an IMDB-style page for drum corps info back when I was in college - for groups, songs they've played, members, staff, etc... but I don't really have the time or expertise to get anything like it going. At least all the information can get added to this site, although the linking might be more tedious. On the bright side, I don't have to do much of the work :)

Web access to .mac files

2005-02-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

Since I'm always forgetting how to find them, I'll post it here (and maybe others will find it useful as well).

I know this works for the 'Pictures' directory, but I haven't had much luck with others...

You can get access to the original files on your .mac account by specifying the path that it is found in your iDisk. For example, to get to my profile photo which is located at iDisk/Pictures/DCS02656s.jpg, I use the url:

http://homepage.mac.com/cflake/.Pictures/DSC02656s.jpg

which is:

my mac.com address with trailing slash
a period (important!)
and the remaining path to the item

I found this years ago back when I posted photo albums, and I've used it quite a few times since.

These days I mostly post to my flickr account, since I really only take photos from my camera anymore (and not even many of those). Speaking of, anyone else have flickr accounts that I don't know about? I need a good excuse to play around with the flickr graph...

New (purchased) music

2005-02-13T01:05:00.000-08:00

I grabbed a few of albums last week from Rasputin - 'Rooty' and 'Remedy' by Basement Jaxx, and 'Rewind' by Hexstatic. They're all really good - I heard the Jaxx stuff from shared playlists at work, and someone in my group showed everybody the videos from Hexstatic, which are just amazing. The cd comes with another disk of QuickTime videos that go along with their songs - and some of their newer albums have DVDs with content. I highly recommend them - you can find the albums from both the iTunes and Amazon links off to the right (but of course the iTMS doesn't have the Hexstatic videos).

New winter percussion music

2005-02-10T22:33:00.000-08:00

We're getting to the point in the season where things are coming together - so I've posted copies of the music (mostly for for the kids, but you can check them out too).

The music this year includes:

"Country Band March" by Charles Ives - mallet arrangement by Joe, the director, drums by me.
The profoundly named "Drum Solo", by John and Peter, two of our drum instructors
"Ivan Sings" by Aram Khachaturian (not yet posted)
And a reprise of "Country Band March" - actually just the second half of the song

Check them out - let me know what you think! We still have lots of work to do - the Ives song is particularly difficult, and will probably take a long time to get right.

t-mobile voicemail upgrade

2005-02-08T21:27:00.000-08:00

I got a message from t-mobile today - they are redoing their system and getting rid of the text messages to tell you that you have a voicemail.

I don't know where I would have filed a complaint about this, but I'm glad people did. It was annoying to have to delete a text message every time I had a voicemail message.

I can finally buy t-shirts!

2005-02-01T21:50:00.000-08:00

Panic's new t-shirt store is up - panic.com/goods
And a post from Steve (stevenf)

Soooo coool!

Airport woes

2005-01-31T21:46:00.000-08:00

I've done something to my Powerbook in the past week so it no longer automatically reconnects to my usual Airport networks (at work and home). I can't seem to find the pref anywhere - can somebody clue me in?

Help says: "You don't have to select the AirPort network each time you start up or wake your computer." Lies!

Maybe my laptop just wants some attention because it's getting old

UPDATE: ok, seriously, this is really annoying. Anybody have any ideas how to fix this?

Recovering from my overdue cold

2005-01-29T00:56:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of posts in the past week - I've been busy. I went down to LA last weekend to check out the show at NAMM. There were lots of celebrities signing things at the booths - Yngwie Malmsteen, Max Wienberg, Future Man (from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones), Bernard Purdie, Dennis Chambers, and many others hidden behind lines of people so they couldn't be seen. I spent my time running through the software displays and drum companies, which still managed to fill the whole weekend.

I started coming down with a cold on my way back up, which then took over my week. And with that I haven't gotten much else done... time to catch up online

ISUMUG is no more

2005-01-18T00:40:00.000-08:00

It's finally happened - they changed the website over so now isumug.org redirects elsewhere, and amesmug.org is the new URL. It's sad to see the old thing go, but I can still see bits of html that I whipped up in Cyberstudio hanging around in some of the pages :)

Site changes

2005-01-17T23:37:00.000-08:00

I'm rearranging things on the site - let me know if there's anything you'd like to see, or if it gets too annoying.

Gmail POP access

2005-01-15T00:18:00.000-08:00

At some point after the first of the year I setup Mail.app to check my Gmail account via POP, which saves me from logging into their web version each day. I have all of my blog comments sent there, so hopefully I will be able to respond faster to all the urgent posts about the really important topics that I talk about :)

I also have a bunch of Gmail invites, if anyone needs any. The last time I mentioned this there weren't many takers, but maybe the POP access will get you interested. Post a comment or email me if you want one...

Ah, rumors

2005-01-09T14:05:00.000-08:00

To head off all the questions - I still have a job. Of course that answer will prompt more, but that's all I can say. :)

So _THAT_ is what Ethan has been doing...

2005-01-09T02:20:00.000-08:00

I was going through my list of feeds on bloglines tonight, and I realized that I had one feed for Ethan, but not his coffeefog one (which was the first blog I ever read). Looking back through the posts, it looks like it got lost somewhere back around August... and all this time I thought he had just gotten quieter.

1, 2, 5!

2005-01-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if they are doing it on purpose, but I find it funny that BBC America is having a Monty Python marathon, given today's date.

Loaner cat

2004-12-19T23:10:00.000-08:00

We're taking care of a cat while a friend of ours is away - it's here at the house for the next couple of weeks. It's fun having another thing running around, although it's already served as an unwanted alarm clock this morning :)

I'll post pictures eventually... (it's soooo cute! heh)

Winter Percussion line is set

2004-12-16T00:54:00.000-08:00

As of late Tuesday we made the final decisions for our winter percussion group members: 3 snares, 2 tenors, 5 basses, 4 cymbals, and 10 pit. It's a really good group of kids, and it should be a good year for us.

We're playing "Country Band March" as our main tune, which is an amazing piece. I wish I could have played it in a group at some point :) I need to be writing the music for it, but so far I've been procrastinating. Part of the reason was to see what the players would be able to handle, which is why we spent December doing auditions for the kids, and the other part is that I've been playing too many video games :)

We rented the Incredibles game for PS2 the other week, which was pretty fun. It's the first 'action' game I've played for a while - Lisa and I play a fair amount of Frequency and Amplitude, but they are very different from a standard action game. I bought it for our computers, but we haven't played yet because.... we're playing a lot of Katamari Damacy, a very cool, addictive, fun, (and very Japanese) game that we're borrowing from Justin. In the game you control a ball where things you roll over stick to it, and you try to increase the size of the ball as fast as you can, or grab certain types of objects. It has what I call "tank style" controls, where you use the analog buttons to move - pushing both forward moves you forward, one forward and one back rotates, etc. The controls work decently well once you get used to it. It may sound pretty weird, but I haven't met a person yet that has played the game and didn't like it. Check it out if you get a chance.

Ok, back to thinking about percussion music...

Experiences with Subversion

2004-12-13T00:58:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to setup a CVS server on my machine for my programming projects, and this weekend I finally got around to it. Well, actually I set up subversion. I started on Friday night, got it working on Saturday, broke it, and got it working again tonight. So far it has been broken more than it has worked :)

I posted a couple of links to del.icio.us that I used, if you're interested. I started by grabbing the disk images from Fred's iDisk. I was a little surprised that you have to install them all, but that turns out to be the case. I followed bits of the instructions from the other links, and I got it to work after lots of fumbling about.

I created a repository for a project, checked it back out, setup Xcode to use it, and did some modifications. At some point after that my powerbook decided not to wake from sleep, which has happened a few times since I've gotten it. And after that Xcode was reporting every file as a conflict, and any terminal commands were acting strange. After poking around in the documentation and searching on the web, I figured I should try repairing the repository. After that I needed to re-fix the permissions on the database to get it working again.

I'm not all that encouraged by my experiences so far, hopefully I've worked through my share of problems for a while. Let me know if anyone else has any interesting experiences with it...

LiveJournal account

2004-12-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

I just created a LiveJournal account because I'm tired of not being able to comment in Fraser's blog :) (he has anonymous posting turned off). I bet you can't guess what the name of it is. If only there was some way I could give you a hint.

Having the account also has the added benefit of letting me read "friends" posts from people on LJ (at least that's how I think it works). I don't plan to post anything over there, so don't bother ever checking it :)

Trying out ecto

2004-12-10T00:42:00.000-08:00

I'm trying out ecto for my blog posts now, starting with the previous one. The trial period for MarsEdit ran out, and I'm not too compelled to spend money on an app if I still have to log in to blogger to set the title (the MarsEdit website says it will support it "eventually", I just wish I knew when that would be).

Anyway, we'll see how it goes in the next couple of weeks. What app(s) are other people using to post these days? Anyone? Ethan?

Amazon rules!

2004-12-10T00:34:00.000-08:00

I just got a email from Amazon about the Nirvana boxed set I got Lisa for her birthday. After ordering it online I was disappointed to see it quite a bit cheaper at Target a couple days later, but it was too late to cancel it at that point. I was a little disappointed that I paid more for it, but worse things have happened.

But in this email, they mention that they now offer the set for a lower price, and they are crediting me the difference - without me having to bring it up. That's really cool!

In IA for Xmas

2004-12-07T23:56:00.000-08:00

I forgot to mention the end result from my last posting. I'll flying on the 22nd and 30th, and I should be around town most of the days in between. Drop me an email if you'll be around.

Buying plane tickets online (sucks!)

2004-12-06T00:19:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to buying my plane tickets for Christmas yesterday, and because of that I plan to avoid buying tickets again for as long as possible. (Here comes the rant)

Now I know I should have bought these tickets a while ago, but it just didn't happen. The time was...

3pm - I searched around trying to find a ticket that would cost less than $900 and wouldn't require me to be in IA for half of December, and... it wasn't easy. My dates to get back home were pretty flexible, so I tried a bunch of different combinations to see what would be a good fit. This took a while, but I expected that. It's too bad there isn't a tool that can give you that sort of info faster... searching with the "my dates are flexible" button on websites never seems to give me any good results...

3:15 - I've plotted all the prices, figured out when it is cheap enough that it would be worth flying out of SFO, and pretty much decided the dates - within a day or two. I'd heard that buying tickets directly from the airlines was sometimes cheaper, so I found my flight on travel.yahoo.com and then searched for those days on American Airlines' website (I'm not going to link to these, because I'm still pissed about the whole thing). American's website had tickets for those days for about $150 less, so I was happy and started the process of buying them. By the 3rd step in their six step process, things weren't looking good - it was asking me to enter my passenger info, but it wasn't showing any fields for me to use. After trying it a couple of times, I figure there's a problem with Safari - so I load up the same thing in IE. I get the same tickets at the same price, and when I get to the passenger info page, it wants me to log in. Of course I don't have an account, so I have to create one. It takes about 5 minutes, and when I'm done it doesn't take me back to my flight info.

3:30 - I search again, and... oh look - the price just went up by $50. Great. It's still cheaper, so I continue entering my info... credit card info, billing info, ticket delivery, etc. I click 'continue' after entering the things in step 5 (note: step 6 is 'finished). The browser takes a long time to reload things, and when it's done I'm back at step 1, where it says "there was an error booking the flight, please choose another". Grrr.

3:40 - I search again, and find the same flight. Maybe it was just a server error. I go through all the steps again. Step 5 leads directly to..... step 1. Same error.

3:50 - (this would all be faster if their websites would rerender the next page in less than 30 seconds. Using IE wasn't helping). I search again, and find the same flight. But I don't choose that one. I found another flight for about the same price. Repeat all steps. Unfortunately, that included getting the same error.

4:00 - OK. Maybe it's a Mac browser/java/voodoo thing. I try it on Lisa's PC.

4:15 - Nope. Same problem there. I try it again while I call American on the phone. I'm initially impressed by the voice recognition software that asks me for flight info, and actually gets my responses right. It says I can say "agent" at any time to get out of this system, but it was working fine so far. Until it asks me for my account number, and gets 50% of the characters wrong. I try again, still gets it wrong. Again; wrong. "Agent"; "I didn't understand your response". "Agent"; "I didn't understand your response". "AGENT!!"; "One more time... I didn't understand your response". I silently fume. It puts me on hold. Around this time the website gives me the same error again.

4:25 - I am on hold. Some lady gets on the other end of the phone, and tries to find the flights I wanted. At some point I mention that these are United flights that were listed on the American website. The only flights she can find for me are $900+, and all the cheaper flights are booked. She can't find the flights I mentioned, since they aren't as easy to find in their system. She recommends that I try United's site, since American evidently has bad information about the United flights, despite the fact that they are listed on the American website. She offers to transfer me to tech support for the website, but I can't imagine that would get me any closer to a flight. I thank her for trying, since it isn't really her fault that their system sucks.

4:40 - I've given up on American Airlines website (and phone number), and I'm back to travel.yahoo.com. It will be more expensive, but at least it should _work_. And after a short detour from my forgotten password, it did, and I had my tickets by 5pm.

The internet. Making our lives more pleasant every day.

Programming poll #1: Archiving

2004-11-29T01:18:00.000-08:00

I spent a good portion of the extended weekend coding up some stuff that I haven't had much time for recently, and it was pretty fun (and frustrating... as usual). I was working on the saving code for a project, and it took me a while to come up with a solution that worked well - so I'm interested in hearing what other people do...

My old program saved my document to disk via the 'archivedDataWithRootObject:' method from NSKeyedArchiver - where I would take all of the objects I cared about, add them into an array, and pass that array as the root object. That was ok originally, since it was just me dealing with the documents, but I'm trying to be a little more 'future-proof' with this. I realized that I wasn't getting any of the keyedarchiver benefits, so I set about trying to make my document archiving better.

It should be noted that I've done a whole bunch of little programming side projects to learn parts of Cocoa, but very few of them dealt with saving or opening archived data that I created... so this is all a little unfamiliar.

My initial thought was to add the usual 'encodeWithCoder:' and 'initWithCoder:' methods to my NSDocument subclass, but I didn't really get that to work well. I ended up creating my own NSKeyedArchiver/Unarchiver objects within my 'dataRepresentationOfType:'/'loadDataRepresentation:ofType:' methods, which is working so far. It just seemed weird to actually allocate the NSKeyed objects, since the class methods usually do the trick.

Any thoughts from other people that have done this? I didn't find anything useful in the developer examples (Sketch seemed a little overly complex), and usually I'd check my Hillegass book, but Ethan has it at the moment.

Thanksgiving weekend

2004-11-29T01:10:00.000-08:00

Hooray for the extended Thanksgiving weekend! Travis was back in town, and we had our share of traditional and non-traditional Thanksgiving meals. It was also a good chance for me to do some programming (more on that in another post). Now it's all behind us, and we're left with a bunch of dirty dishes in the dishwasher and the realization that we need to get back on a work schedule again... we've been staying up until 2am, and we seem to be on track for that again tonight... :)

Some time off

2004-11-24T23:27:00.000-08:00

Marching band finished last weekend - we ended up getting 10th place out of the 34 bands that were there. We have this week off, and then start up with auditions for winter percussion next week. It'll be nice to have a weekend off, especially since we get two extra days. Mmmmm, turkey.

You know a t-shirt is ugly...

2004-11-19T21:00:00.000-08:00

...when they give them to a bunch of engineers, but none of them wear it.

Marching band winds down

2004-11-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

We're almost to the end of the 2004 marching band season, and it's been an interesting one. When we were talking about show ideas back in the day, I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of playing jazz. I got over it, figuring it would be a good learning experience to write an instrumental jazz show. Then I found out it was going to be Frank Sinatra music, and it took a while to come to terms with that :) It ended up being some really great music - I haven't tired of it like last year's... although I expected it to get old after the first month. Unfortunately jazz is really difficult to play, so it's taken us a while to teach the style to the kids.

We started out with 14 percussionists, then lost two, gained two, and lost one (of course each of those was a longer story than that), but we've ended up with a great group of kids. I figured that I had written too difficult of a show for most of the season, but it has all come together pretty well here at the end, and I didn't need to simplify too many parts (I wrote things that were too hard for my section in ISU drumline back in the day too, so these kids shouldn't feel too bad).

I've mentioned before that it's good to get positive feedback about the percussion writing and the teaching that you do for the kids - but this show hasn't been as kind to us. Learning jazz is difficult in a standard jazz band - just because the music is challenging. Learning jazz in marching band is crazy. Triplets are a little bit unusual for your typical high school freshman, and the feel of swing just isn't in their blood. In a regular jazz band you have a bass that plays all the time, the drumset and piano (and maybe guitar) that play almost all the time, and the other instruments that play as needed. In a marching band you have to split all of this between 30 or so different instruments, and the hardest part from my point of view - splitting up the one drummer into a dozen or so percussionists.

Jazz and rock&roll shows are difficult things to pull off on the marching field (in my opinion, which is why I wasn't excited about playing jazz), because the non-marching version of the music has a repetitive beat that one person can perform. When you split that between multiple players you either end up with a complex beat that may be difficult (or impossible) for the players to perform, or you have a beat that is very simple and/or boring. The snare drum on 2&4 is essential to most music these days, but it's only interesting because the player is also playing other things (bass, cymbals..) - if you have a marching snare drummer play 2&4 through the whole show, they would get extremely bored. The other challenge is keeping things together. A single person playing a drumset isn't going to have too much trouble keeping the bass drum in time with the ride cymbal - sure, they may play a part out of time, but there is always one idea of where the beat is. With multiple players, each person has their own idea of the beat, and it's even harder when the players are spread out in different places around the field.

Well the judges this year have marked us down because we don't have a drumset sound throughout the show. Well, as far as I'm concerned, we do. We have drumset swing beats split between all of our different sections, we just don't have the same boring ride pattern going the entire time. I guess I'm just venting because the kids have worked hard and are probably learning more than they would from the simpler parts, but they don't get the credit for it. Aside from the judging part of it, the kids seem to like their show, so things are going pretty well overall.

Ahhh, that's some good blogging therapy :)

Virtual Drumline 2

2004-11-11T22:29:00.000-08:00

Holy crap - this looks awesome: Virtual Drumline 2

Audion goes to Florida

2004-11-11T21:40:00.000-08:00

Steven blogs about Audion's retirement and Cabel writes about Audion's history. Maybe it's my headcold talking, or the massive amounts of OJ in my system, but the article really got to me. It's been a while since they've posted anything like their big essays that I read and enjoyed back in college.

I'm really happy that Panic continues to do well, and it's cool to hear the story behind all of this. All of the links above are good reads, even if you're not a coding nerd (it helps to be a mac nerd though :)

Sick Day

2004-11-11T20:52:00.000-08:00

I was home sick today with the cold that everybody seems to have these days (no, not Halo2-itis, as one of my coworkers joked - I have no Xbox). I've been busy with work, teaching, and my parents being in town last weekend - and my body can't seem to keep up.

Hopefully the extra sleep will keep me healthy for a while, since we have two more weeks of marching band out there in the "cold". Yes, California has made me soft.

Hail and flickr

2004-11-07T23:03:00.000-08:00

As Daisie mentioned - it hailed a few days ago, so I'm pointing you at my pictures of it. I heard it while at work, but I didn't see any accumulation - but as you can see, there was quite a bit around the house.

The nicer photo is from my regular camera, on the day it hailed. The other two are from the morning after, with my camera phone. I've been using flickr to post my cameraphone pictures, since it's pretty easy to post single photos quickly. I still plan to use my .mac account for larger sets of photos, but I don't seem to take as many these days. Now that I have a phone in my camera I don't take my full size camera around as much, and so I end up taking fewer photos. Not quite what I intended when I got the phone :)

Voting

2004-10-31T22:41:00.000-08:00

OK, this is my one post about voting... hopefully. Enough things have happened recently that I feel it's worth a post.

I've been pretty interested in the election this year, but unfortunately I waited pretty late to get my voting registration transferred to my new address. I finally looked online to try and get it changed last month, and was disappointed with the "online process". All it really did was take your standard information and put it into a pdf that you could either print and mail, or that they would mail to you. Not quite the easy and quick solution I've come to expect from the internet :) I finally got my notice this week that my registration got changed, and it turns out that my voting place is in someone's house a block away - it's pretty cool that I'm going to walk down the street to vote :)

We finally watched the SouthPark election episode this weekend, and it was ok. It seemed a little less focused than some of their better episodes. If this election is any indication, we have a whole bunch of politically motivated shows and movies to "look forward to" every four years... meh.

My parents sent me a forward of some information about how much Kerry has cut spending and would be a worse leader, which just got me angry. I hate forwards, and I'm disappointed that my parents feel the need to try and change my mind (and maybe think that they can change my mind) about my political beliefs.

OK, I'm done venting... don't forget to vote :)

Creative TV

2004-10-31T21:25:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we forget to fast forward through the commercials with our TiVo, and tonight it blessed us with some profound lyrics:

If you want it
And you need it
Just ask us
And we'll get it