natowelch

child-free
car-free
debt-free
god-free

loyal to a fault
lazy to a tee

self sufficient
self contained
self effacing
self catalyzing

amaterialist
not the hottest
hedonist
friends first

Technoprogressive seeks peers, allies, friends, and lovers for this day, and those ahead.


--

I reserve the right to have folks I don't like (or that don't like me) on my "friends" list. Being on my friends list doesn't make you my friend, it means I want to read your journal. In corollary, not being on my friends list does not mean you aren't my friend. Don't ask to be "unfriended", and don't ask me to unfriend anyone else. Also note that I have no control over those I am a "friend of", as being on someone else's friends list may simply mean that they also, just want to read my journal. I thoroughly reject the spoon-fed semantics suggested by Livejournal's architects in favor the actual (quite) useful functionality they offer. Finding other uses for technologies aside from that originally intended by the authors is called hacking. I like that.

Reward not the done - but the doing.

I'm in Castlegar, hanging with Crystal, looking at mountains, trees, clouds and bugs. It's pretty.

I'm thirty five years old today.

I'll be headed to Calgary overnight Thursday.

Wreck got canceled Tuesday for the weather. Oh, well.

I'm at Julie's! We are talking "too much". And doing laundry.

Thanks, me friend!

Buttfuck early tomorrow, I will be stranded on a moving bus (stranded, as in without Internet). Castlegar and Crystable awaits.
ore
Some things upstairs got worked on. Things I'm afraid of. Things I don't want as much anymore.

I suppose it is better to be able to explore relationships because you want to rather than out of necessity, even if it robs you of some of their intensity.

The good news is that bad food is starting to feel bad after I eat it. A feedback mechanism has been established, with which I may actually be properly motivated to eat better. Slowly, as with anything.

It's 10am, and I have not finished packing. I am attempting to avoid bringing the monster suitcase. Everything does not, however, fit in my backpack. Compromise is in order. I may be late, but not by much.

I hope this afternoon is Wreck-worthy. It's overcast, but bright here now.

May the reports of your death be greatly exaggerated, and spark no flamewars on local mailing lists.

You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada.

--Wendell Potter, recently retired PR executive for CIGNA, one of America's largest health insurance providers.

I forgot I put a bunch of veggie bullion into yesterday's rice curry dish. I thought I put in the same amount of curry into today's rice, but, sans bullion, it had NO flavor at all. That's too bad.

Carrots always have flavor.


I'll be on Wreck Beach tomorrow, later. Then Tuesday I leave for a trip to Castlegar to see turrelle for my 35th birthday, and then on to Calgary to see walpurg and Flora and the clan over the weekend.

Send money.

Peace.

Curry makes plain rice edible.

Thank you, bloodykitty.

All of a sudden, my brother is married.

Best of luck, bro.

WTF was I whining about last night?

I'm going outside.

My roommate's cat, Mr Fish, as a complete worthless dickhead/shitbag/asshole.

It took the retard a complete week to find out where I moved Smoke's food bowl, but he still doesn't care enough to refrain from doing what he knows he's not supposed to.

Fuck you, you little shit pump. Get dead.

He's been this way since September, when he moved in. Please note it's taken this long for me to lose my patience enough to say such vitriolic things.

I received a surprise package this morning from Vancouver.

Well, thank you for the spices and napkins.

Whoever you are.

I forgot in June, but I am resuming my monthly habit of reviewing my LJ for the month in years past. I'm also digging out information on what I've been up to in general, based on tags and such. At times, I feel compelled to update years-old entries, and link connections between old passages and new, refined, or even poeticized versions of the same thoughts that spontaneously erupt years down the line.

I should think about taking a year, somewhere down the road, and dedicate it to reviewing all the things I've written throughout my life. Call it "A Year in Review". heh.

I have conversations with myself all the time. But when you start chatting back and forth with yourself after you have forgotten, over the span of years, it feels more like an other. It starts actually connecting with my sense of sovereignty, respect, and company, like it could comfort loneliness.

These are just words, of course. Letters across life. Time capsules. But there are other relics to be found: drawings, music, videos. Some I've created, some are mashed up, and some are pulled from others' work. Then, there will be software, like "siteblast", my first perl script for assembling web sites from templates (before I learned PHP).

Even more interesting is the kinds of memories we could create for ourselves in the future. suppose you could build a "home theatre," stocked with robots, that could precisely record and playback performances made years ago? Disney's hall of Presidents in every living room. Your own personal Chuck E Cheese's pizza time theatre. Now wipe the cheese out of your mind, and put your own content in it. Youtube it. Share digital performance files online. Mash them up. And THEN, after all that, archive them, let them gather dust, and revisit them years later, and see what you had to say decades ago. Have a conversation with yourself. Confront your own younger demeanor.

Krapp's Last Video Game.
(Bonus points for anyone who claims the reference without Google)

Imagine sitting in a room with the android presences of yourself, recorded at ten year intervals, as you describe your year. Record how each of you reacts to the others as you go.

Were you ever alone?

The past is looking a lot more interesting than it used to. I often imagine having contact with a multitude of me, with me everytime I imagine having contact with that multitude. A council of myself.

Put me on the record now as not trusting of Microsoft, Apple, or Google.

Doug Rushkoff has a rather convoluted way of saying people are worked up over nothing when worrying about the implications of cloud computing, and of Google's new Chrome OS, just announced yesterday.

Being a long-time resistor of the idea of letting a for-profit enterprise take care of my data and software, I was a little surprised to hear this argument coming from a well-known proponent of openness. I was even a little crushed, perhaps. But then, after some analysis, it turns out he wasn't really talking about me.

While there have been "cloud computing" efforts before, they always ran up against people's (false) notions of computer privacy, virus contagion, and fear of dependence.

Rushkoff is one of those people that can actually make me reconsider and scrutinize my ideas. Were my notions of privacy, independence, and security, really "false"? I scoffed at first, but I decided to at least give Doug the benefit of the doubt, and listen to his argument.

( Unto the knot )

ASCIIpOrtal.

Woot! Ricalope and Samalander got the place! They'll be moving upstairs into 407, jsut two floors above, at the end of the month, or thereabouts.

We're going to take over the building! Mwa.

Never Say "EVAR" Again.

So here's what I think my DJing toolchain is going to look like:

jackd -R -dalsa -dhw:0,3 -r44100 -p1024 -n2 -P &
ecasound -i jack &
cle mplayer -ao jack:port=ecasound -af scaletempo -quiet -slave sometrack.mp3
cle mplayer -ao jack:port=ecasound -af scaletempo -quiet -slave someothertrack.mp3
[...]

JACKd provides the low-latency sound server and signal routing between mplayer and ECAsound. ECAsound will be standing between mplayer and the soundcard; I intend to use it to control the signal routing and mixing between the stereo channels of each mplayer "deck" (of which there can be unlimited numbers, apparently!) and the four output channels - stereo mains, and, of course, stereo headphone monitors. On my cheapo Sound Blaster Live! value, I've got a front and rear stereo surround, so I just split the "front" jack to the speakers, and use the "rear" jack for the headphones. Pie! ECAsound can apply LADSPA effects, if desired (EQs, compressor/limiters, phasers/flangers... etc.) and volume levels, of course, all of which can be controlled in real-time through any MIDI controller.

The reason I'm stuck on Mplayer is because of the scaletempo audio filter, which handles the pitch-moderation necessary to keep a track at the same pitch while changing the playback speed, avoiding the "chipmunk effect". Having it handled at the source, by a native mplayer plugin, instead of having to hack something together later in the output chain should make things much, much easier. Then I can use mplayer's slave mode with a script to control the seeking for cue points and "nudging", and the playback speed for tempo synchronization and beatmatching.

I am pretty happy about this, because I have just put this together and verified that the latency through this chain is TINY, as far as I can tell. I was tapping keys to launch cue points in time with the currently playing track with somewhat better success than I was with Mixxx last night. And I haven't even tried to install OSSv4 or even a real-time kernel. After spending a few hours frustrated by trying to connect bits with UNIX fifos, this is looking good.

I love ecasound. It helped me out a lot when I was trying to peel annoying ads off of Magnatune tracks (which they no longer tack on, thankfully), and it is one of the best-documented audio tools I've seen. Nice for an application with no GUI whatsoever - which actually makes it eminently usable to a hacker, because you can script everything. A GUI is a Graphical USER Interface, but a Command Line Interface is, in essence, an Application Programming Interface at the same time as a user interface. That API accessibility is what GUIs have lost for a long time, and are starting to reclaim with things like Applescript (which is certainly old, but confined to the Mac OS ghetto) and DBus.

People used to be the most important thing in the world.

I used to follow this up by saying "It's a good thing I have one on me at all times."

Now I feel like the only one left that means anything to me with any depth. I know how deep the well can go, though I'm sure it can be deeper.

Otherworld is over. It was a success - but the problem being the was part. I helped create it, make it work, and that's satisfying. I felt loved, and appreciated. And then... I went home, without a plan. It was an event designed for the moment, for the NOW. That's why it's called a burn. Leave No Trace. Temporary Autonomous Zone.

I don't doubt that I need these things. To feel good to have given, to be hugged and thanked, to clean up the mess, and propagate the glow one gets and shares, are all certainly keeping me sane and content. I will doubtless do it again. But there is this idiot intellect inside me that simultaneously wants more, and doesn't know what more is. More what?

MY imagination seems to have outstripped my desire. Maybe this is where boredom comes from. I got impatient, recently, looking at fire spinning photos. If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all.

Is it right, then, to say, that I'm bored of burning?

Could I use some synthetic schizophrenia?

Nobody could have predicted the Spanish Inquisition.