The Accidental Weblog

This happened mostly on the plane back from Phoenix. Rough. 4:19. MP3 , Ogg. 4 and 14M, respectively.

How it happened: I got to thinking about Pachelbel’s Canon, and that (yeah, kinda tedious for the cellist) endlessly repeated bass figure, with the variations all above it, and got to thinking: good idea… let’s see what happens when you do something like that with RoseGarden.

… and then it sounded like maybe it needed a piano, and some percussion… and anyway, here we are.

And yes, I suppose I probably should be forced to resign my bow or somethin’ for using synthesized strings when I’ve a near orchestra of perfectly serviceable and very non-virtual instruments in the place. My only defense is: I didn’t have any of those with me on the plane…

(/And what with said plane landing sometime ‘round 12:40 AM local, folk might have objected, even if I had.)

To Jessica Ahlquist: you rock. You just do.

To, apparently, far too many of the rest of the residents of Rhode Island: oh, go die in a fire, ya useless wanks. Could you lot be any more pathetic? Seriously?

In other news: I’m still in Arizona. Got some serious work done, but really, I’ve had about enough of this place, now. Flying back to winter and proper boarding shortly.

Oh. About boarding. I did get up to that mountain north of Flagstaff. Weird experience. Not sure what else to say about it. Wasn’t awful. They did have a few runs open, and 2,500 feet of vertical. And now, I guess, I can say I went snowboarding in Arizona, anyway…

And really, that’s all I have to say about it, for now.

… and in Phoenix. Again. And for some weeks, this time.

It’s not all bad. Phoenix in January is actually not scorchingly hellishly hot. It’s actually kinda nice. 18ish by day, 5ish by night.

Mind you, you can’t so much ski. And I miss my mountain.

… or, okay, you sorta can. As, apparently, there are mountains a few hours to the north, with groomed trails, even. And, in fact, after having had something of a breakthrough in the thing I came down here to get done, I probably could, even, in good conscience escape for a few days in that direction over the next weekend, if I wanted.

… except that by ‘sorta can’ I mean: the snow pack is 24 inches at best, right now, apparently. I’m not sure that’s quite worth the trouble.

Anyway. Had a sleepless ‘n confused night t’other evening, byproduct of long days of travel. And so another one of these happened:



… click, as previously, for legible version.

(/Fun and serendipitous fact: prior to his death some months back now, Keane lived right ‘round these parts, in Scottsdale.)

… in Tremblant over the holidays. A bit under the weather right at the mo, but it’s mostly been pretty okay otherwise.

Oh, okay. And crowded. It’s always crowded over the holidays. And as often happens at such times, there’s also a lot of beginners skating around on the ice, smacking into the ground and other things semi-randomly.

Which, by the way, makes us big guys on boards nervous. As it’s incumbent upon us not to be the instrument of death for anyone small and unwise, even if we’re pretty much just standing there and they run into us…

… I find myself identifying with the trees, on such occasions. Be a hell of a thing to get yourself cut down as a safety measure just ‘cos some idiot blitzed on mulled wine smacks into you hard enough to eject the whole of their central nervous system through their nasal passages… One of these days, I’m sure I’m gonna be that tree. And I’ll be explaining it to the Patrol, telling ‘em, listen, the idiot hit me from behind, and I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. I’m just the tree had their name on it, dammit. Granted, yes, a relatively fast-moving tree. Still: leave me out of this.

Anyway. Having been under the weather and condo-bound a few days, I got ‘round to doing some logistics work. And when I couldn’t find certain useful points on Google Maps (like, say, the North side lot) for working out some navigation stuff (like, say, the best way to get there not involving dirt trails), I figured probably I could fix that.

… and so I did, in my somewhat overdone way.

That’s all for now. Happy New Years, all, and until 2012.

Yeah, I said I wasn’t gonna be doing more of these. But dammit, the laptop was just sitting there. And I’ve missed drawing these two.



(… click, as previously, for legible version.)

ETA: I’m liking this whole no-mess way of getting more or less the same result as I did more ‘n a decade ago. But, oddly enough, I think I may have experienced some form of synaesthesia doing this one. Last night, doing the final assembly, I coulda sworn I could actually smell the india ink. And again, absolutely no real brush nor paper nor ink was involved.

… however, in my defense, c’mon. This laptop here, it has a tablet. On the screen. You can, like, draw right on the thing.

… so what else would you expect me to do but try something like this with it:



(… click for legible version.)

Discoveries: yes, you can coerce the stylus to act a fair bit like a drybrush. Sorta. A lot of those lines are actually built up in multiple strokes, to emulate the effect. But I think with a little practice, I could do a lot more of ‘em in a single stroke.

… and yes, the Gimp and a tablet laptop are a pretty cool combination for doing this stuff. Do your ‘pencil’ rough on one layer, ‘ink’ right over top of it on another, and away we go. Notwithstanding the (also deliberately retro) reference to photocopies, no actual paper was used in the making of this thing. It’s all digital, start to finish. And yeah, it is a fair bit faster and easier than a real drybrush on real bristol… real drybrushes don’t have an ‘Undo’ button.

Still, sadly, yeah, that’s probably going to be the only one I ever do. Faster and easier all the same, it’s still just more hours I do not have in my life.

What can ya do. I’d probably have to live several centuries to find the time for all the stuff I’d like to try, truth is.

So I hadn’t really been in the market for a new laptop. Quite liked the lovely little X41 I already had for personal use. Sure, it was six years old, but it was tiny and efficient and had that wonderful Thinkpad keyboard going for it. And I’d done all sorts of unnatural and perverse things to it, over the time I’d owned it, including, of all things, putting in an equally tiny SSD, making it even quieter and cooler to operate. And it was kind of insane what I could get the tiny lil’ single core to do. So why change? Old is good, in so many ways. Slower, sure, but if you want Linux to behave on a laptop, a little older has some advantages. Given a bit of time, drivers will have been written and refined and smoothed out, issues will have been resolved. Stability, reliability, these are good things. I do like a machine on which when you press power, it just comes up, no issues, no complaints.

But then I finally tripped over its power cord one night, managed to pull it onto a tile floor, and despite the X series’ legendary toughness, managed thereby to crack its screen. And apart from the dead pixels that ensued, well, it developed some odd twitches after that.

Pity. I really liked the little thing. Or make that ‘like’. Present tense. It’s still around, tho’ yeah, suffering. And the logic of replacing the various broken bits in a machine of that vintage, it becomes a mite questionable, when, sure, for the same kind of money, you can buy a fair bit more horsepower.

So I browsed ‘round, started looking at one of its only-slightly-later successors—the X61—as a candidate for taking over its duties. And since it turned out X61 tablets aren’t usually going for much more cash than the non-tablet version, I figured, hey, why not throw that option in, too?

My current verdict is: good call. I’m writing this on just such a thing. And Debian went on with no great drama*, and my kids love using it for drawing in the car—fold over the screen, turn it into a slightly thick circa-2007 tablet, and it’s really a nice little thing for that sort of activity. And unlike so many modern touchscreens, you can rest your hand comfortably right on it while using the stylus—just like writing with a pen—and it’s really only a little larger than the lamented X41. And that extra thickness means you still get a typically awesome Thinkpad keyboard in the deal, ready to go for the more text-based activities in which I do also tend to engage from time to time.

… and 3G broadband on a tethered phone works fine and wireless works fine and with a little effort I even got it to rotate the screen and controls nicely and automatically when you fold it over…

… and you really have to try writing music on a tablet like this sometime, if you’re into that kind of thing. Being able just to point at the staff with the stylus, tap gently, have the notes appear right under the nib, it’s just… geez, but it’s such a natural thing, for those of us also still comfortable with pen and paper.

And speaking of: done exactly that way, in bits of downtime on the X61, mostly while waiting to pick up children from various activities, we now have Test Pattern. MP3, Ogg. 2:07, 2M and 6.2M respectively.

I’m in Tremblant again. Down a dark road, next to a river. This missive comes trickling to this site ultimately over a slow cellular connection.

And what else to do whilst sitting in the dark next to the fire I’m keeping going until morning but to muddle around with a sequencer and some soft synths?

We did get up to the hill this morning. It was pretty limited, with some six trails open, some of ‘em heavily shrouded in the haze from the snow guns—the resort is doing what it can to get things bootstrapped notwithstanding this bizarre late winter—but it was still nice just to get out there, burn through some vertical, blow off the cobwebs.

Anyway. Again. As I am here sitting in the dark, and there’s gear around that can do such undemanding things: Various Heresies. Another RoseGarden thing. 4:13 of electric piano, synth, bass, drums. Ogg here (3.9M), MP3 here (13M).

Julia Galef points out a few things have tended to piss me off, too.

Yes, it’s from Greta C. again. I’d say she’s on a roll, but I’m not sure you can really say that about someone who pretty much always is.

If you don’t believe, shut up about it.

That’s Ophelia B’s piece on an atheist organization’s billboard campaign that got yanked, as does tend to happen, by the billboard company.

… and what’s below started as a comment at PZ’s piece on the same. But I borked some usage in editing, ‘mongst more problematic issues, soooo, here, again, somewhat more coherently, that comment: