I picked up an interesting CD on eBay: Morton Subotnick’s and the butterflies begin to sing for string quartet, bass, MIDI keyboard, and computer. The computer’s part is to listen to the MIDI instruments and processes the notes through an algorithm that controls the mixing and amplification of the other instruments as well as algorithmically performing three sampled instruments. Subotnick’s stuff is always interesting but tends to be hard to find.
Saturday the DPRG held Roborama 01.b as planned. There were a few interesting new robots competing as well as a couple of records broken but, overall, I think attendance was down a bit due to the terrorist attacks. The events for walking robots were delayed a few weeks and may evolve into a seperate contest.
On Sunday evening, Susan and I attended the opening performance of the season at the Dallas Symphony. The original program called for Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso, Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major. In recognition of recent events, however, the Ravel work was replaced by Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
We also spent some time this weekend trying to buy a flag. They’re virtually unobtainable though. Apparently over 500,000 have been sold this week and even places like Walmart have long since sold out of them. Fabric stores seem to be selling out of red, white, and blue ribbon as well.
Last night robots.net got slashdotted for the first time. Mod_virgule held up just fine – in fact, I was pleasantly suprised at how well it performed considering the amount of file I/O being done.
And today it’s back to work churning out more Perl code.
It’s late and raining like mad outside. The windows in my office are leaking again but assorted plastic cups sit on the sills to contain the deluge. The sounds of drips and splashes are fighting with the sound of Blitzkrieg Bop. For the moment the Ramones are winning out.
Friday, Susan and I spent the evening at the Wildflower Arts & Music Festival. It was mostly music. And the music was mostly 80’s bands like the Go-Gos, Flock of Seagulls, The Romantics, and a bunch of others. Overall, it wasn’t a bad deal for 10 bucks. The Go-Go’s did a nice cover of I wanna be sedated “for Joey!”.
Saturday, I was on-site all day with one of our clients who was migrating their internal DNS to a new server.
Tonight, I’ll be watching the season finale of X-Files.
Good news and bad news. The bad news is that Joey Ramone of the Ramones died Sunday of cancer. He was buried Tuesday in Woodhurst, NJ as Deborah Harry, Cris Stein, Joan Jett and assorted other musicians looked on. A boom box in his hospital room was playing the newest U2 CD (delivered personally by Bono) when he died Sunday. Lots of fellow rockers issued statements about the loss of the man behind the band that invented Punk and inspired a lot of the 80’s music. But even though Joey’s gone, you can still Cube numbers along with the Ramones. Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!
The good news is that Cowboy Neal added a slashbox for robots.net yesterday. Thanks Cowboy!
I better post a news update while I’ve got a few minutes free or it’ll probably be another week before I get a chance! Let’s see, last friday night I stopped by a local Colter’s BBQ to hear some live R & B played by a group that included Kenny Stern on drums along with several of his friends. It’s probably the only place in Irving where you can hear a live band and not many people know about it (which is not suprising, who’d expect live music at a Colter’s!?). Anyway, if you’re in Irving some friday night and want hear some live music, check and see what’s happening at the Colter’s on MacArthur.
On Easter Sunday, we joined my sister’s family for a picnic in Lookout Park in Richardson, TX. A fun time was had by all. I brought along a couple of boxes of Peeps hoping the kids would eat them. Where did I get Peeps you ask? Well, with all the hype about Peeps on the web and Susan telling me of her childhood memories of Peeps, I was begining to feel like I’d missed out on something. So I went to the local grocery store and picked up one box of yellow Peeps and one box of pink Peeps. I ate one yellow Peep and decided that one enough for this lifetime. They are awful-tasting things that look and feel like small bits of foam-rubber coated with a large quantity of sugar. The first thing you notice about them is that they aren’t shaped at all like chicks (my niece and nephew thought they were seals). Anyway, having aquired an excess of Peeps, an Easter picnic seemed an ideal way to get rid of them. The kids ate some, we tried to feed one to a passing dog (and learned that even dogs won’t eat them), and we also tested the fire resistance of a Peep in one of the outdoor grills available in the park (they don’t so much burn as melt).
Hmmmm… what else is new? Jesika, a friend who used to work for one of NCC’s clients, is starting a new media production company called manipul8. Work on robots.net is still sucking up most of my free time. And I’ve been listening to a lot of Lalo Schifrin lately because Susan is on an eBay Lalo-buying-spree.