i think it's done
Friday, January 28, 2005
on a whim, i sat down and did the last piece of Sept Song last night. I already had a general idea in mind, so i just had to mess around a bit and find something that fit the idea in my head. anyway, i'm thinking that it may be finished, except some production tweaking that i'll still need to do.
critiques welcome.
I've been thinking about it, and have settled on the name "Esplanade"
hear it here: esplanade.mp3
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Wednesday, January 26, 2005
This is what septSong looks like right now. Sure do like cubase!
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stupid creativity
I feel that i'm on the brink of having one of those days where my creative wits overcome me and i'm left feeling worthless. When i was in high school, the few years in/out of college, etc, if you'd asked me, "what are you?" i'd have said, "artist." Now i suppose i'd have to throw "web designer" out there, but most of the time i don't feel like what i do is design. My work certainly doesn't look like Art School. It looks like code that's made pretty, which is pretty much exactly what it is. I probably get the most satisfaction out of my job when i'm doing css or working on EZversion!, the flash application i've been working on for... forever. But rarely do i feel like what i'm doing is truly designing. And of course, that leads to me thinking that i have no ability to design.
For a while (around 2000) i was really into scouring the web to keep up with what was fresh, what new ideas were circulating, etc. I'd check macromedia's site of the day constantly, not just to see the site of the day, but also to see the site of the designer/team that had created it and what other work they had done. Everything was about flash and coming up with neat little effects. But at some point i realized that the web was going to change, it was going to become about delivering services more than entertaining. (I think this is changing again, but more about that later if i remember to come back to it.) Web design was going to be about creating shells in which business was conducted and not a whole lot more.
I got out of the loop of following all the cool designers, in large part because they all seemed to be working in a big circle of patting each other on the back. They'd create "design magazines" in which they interviewed themselves. They'd create neat little amorphous flash animations that wiggled around according to some forumla. But there wasn't much usable about it, even if they did seem to all land huge sites for clothing designers in new york.
My problem is that i get too competitive, and when i find something that i like, i think "why aren't you doing this, self?" I don't often stop to consider the fact that it's not my niche.
So lately i've been reading all of these design blogs, because you know, blogs are the real internet now or something, and those ideas that haunted me years ago about "why aren't you doing this" come creeping back in. Even though over the years i managed to teach myself things like actionscript, javascript, css. Without prompting. I mean, when i got this job, it was because i was good with photoshop and could animate things in flash. Actionscript was barely even alive. (Flash 3!) No one asked me to start doing html, i decided to do it because i was using dreamweaver for my own sites at home. All of the things that interest me, that i explore, that eventually become part of my job, are a result of my own curiousities, and thus new abilities. Still i read some article that someone writes, talking about all of the intricacies of something that i have practical, working knowledge of, and it's deflating.
Sometimes i look at my artwork and i think "this is trash." But when i put my mind to it, i do this. It's the same thing with my music. My confidence wanes when i'm unproductive and surges when i finish something new.
So anyway, in his "manifesto" Hugh MacLeod speaks of this idea that you don't have to do something phenominal, you have to do something original. This is where i think my last few sophrosyne songs come in. It wasn't something that i was aiming for when i started Lafaye (pronounced: La Fi). But i realized that this was something of a niche, definately something that no one else was doing. It's music that is about as "jason" as it gets. It expresses, at least to me, my love and longing for my home, new orleans. But more than that, it's a manifestation of this idea that i have that even if i'm not IN new orleans, i can still have new orleans here by creating it around me. The last three sophrosyne songs take that idea from something mundane like hanging a picture of a magnolia above the mantle to something much greater. It's more of a true expression of who i am as an individual.
The conflict here is that i've never considered myself a musician. I'm an artist! Uh, i like to draw and stuff. My creative side, where paying the bills is concerned, has manifested itself in being a web designer and part of me has a problem resolving the fact that the place where i seem to have found my unique voice is not in visual art.
Either way, i seem to have managed to ride the fence for long enough today without falling off into the despondency side of things, so i should at least consider that progress for the day. I'm gonna attach one of my favorite pictures of new orleans at the top of this post, then go home. It's of Audubon Park uptown near the Magazine St. side of the park. One of my favorite places in the city. Enjoy. Check out the latest draft of sept song and look at the pic if you please.
ps, i'm not running the spell checker on this.
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The Thought Project
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Was reading rootburn this morning and found his link to the site of Simon Hosberg and a project he's got called, yes, The Thought Project. This is how he describes it:
"Over a period of 3 months i stopped 150 strangers on the street and asked them what they were thinking about before i stopped them. Using a mic and a dictaphone I recorded what they told me, then took a picture of them..."He posts 55 of the results in a pretty nice little interface. It's interesting to read what the people were thinking, as they all seem pretty candid and open about it (as opposed to people in Milwaukee who don't even say 'hello' when you pass them on the street). I think the bigger picture that i see in this, though, goes back to something i've thought about off and on, about the intelligence of people.
When i think about people from hundreds of years ago, it's easy to think of them as being less intelligent. You know what i mean. The things that they believed, the social standards they held, the technologies of the day... it's hard to think of people in the past and not think "stupid." Well, to some extent, it's the same when thinking about large masses of people. Especially from a capitalistic point of view, when you consider some of the things that people buy. How the hell does Jessica Simpson get rich and famous? I used to have a phrase for this... something along the lines of 'collective stupidity/individual intelligence.'
It's hard, especially in america, not to see people collectively as being rather ignorant. But if you pick any one person out of the crowd and speak to them, generally, you will carry on a pretty intelligent conversation. "Pretty intelligent" is obviously subjective, but everyone seems to have their one or two areas of expertise. The Thought Project seems to pull people out of the collective and grab just a snippet of who they are as an individual. No one responds "uh, i was thinking about cheese."
Granted, it's possible that the other 95 people that he left off were total idiots. And it's possible that Simon wasn't completely random and objective in his choice of people to stop on the street. But it's also possible that this is a good example of individual intelligence in the perceived collective ignorance.
As a side note, what do you think of the idea that people (as a society) are only as intelligent as the use of current technology. Or perhaps the advertising that we're sold on. Are we just regurgitations of the media we take in?
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I hate winter in Milwaukee
Sunday, January 23, 2005
This was the view out of my living room window today, looking kitty-corner across the street. It snowed. And when it snows, i have to shovel. I hate shoveling. It's so much worse than mowing the lawn. You mow the lawn once every few weeks. When it snows, you could be shoveling... forever. On top of the difference in frequency, shoveling is much harder. The plows push all the snow from the street into your driveway, often just after you've cleared it, and that snow is heavy and wet. You don't just scoop and place snow, you scoop it up and hurl it as far as you can. Bent over. Lifting and throwing gallons and gallons of frozen water. I hate it. I need to be in a warmer climate very soon.
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I love random
Friday, January 21, 2005
Something about randomness just does it for me. I found this today: a link to randomly search Wikipedia. If you don't know what Wikipedia is, see here.
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song 7
Monday, January 17, 2005
i've been doing a bunch more work on "sept song," mostly mixing and production work to the sound, but most importantly i've got a big chuck of the lead part done in the middle of the song-- the refrains and the main body of the song in between. also shortened the song by cutting the refrains from 32 bars to 16, as well as cutting out 16 bars in the beginning and ending of the song. so it's at about 4:30 now. there are 4 "horn" synth lines now, including the lead part. they vary in timbre, but i was thinking... after the 2nd refrain where the lead part ends right now, perhaps i should change instruments for the last lead part, to the lowest horn (which presently drops out for those last 16 bars). we'll see. perhaps i should change instruments entirely and use a sine wave or something completely new to the song. either way, you can hear it here in its still incomplete form... but getting closer. Send critiques!posted by j. Permanent Link
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mac mini
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Ok, so i'm obviously the only design geek who's not excited about the mac mini. mac cube / 3 = x. x = ? genius? flop? part of me, possibly a vindictive part, really hopes for it to fail. It's a $499 computer that is 6.5" x 6.5" x 2" It's being sold without peripherals. No monitor, no keyboard or mouse. I even just realized that the two existing usb ports are actually intended for the mouse and keyboard, which means none available without a usb hub. Does apple sell pretty little white usb hubs that are 1/4 the size of any other usb hub?
The mac mini is sold standard with a 1.25GHz processor and 256 MB of ram. That's really... not a lot. "You can get more ram for it..." Then it's not $499 anymore. They're trying to use this to push people to convert from windows. You know, use the monitor/mouse/keyboard you've already got! But why would i? Because windows has bugs and viruses? Preventable. Cause osx is so cool? I don't know... i've got this imac here at work with osx and i can't stand it. There may be a lot of bulk involved in Windows, but i can dig way deeper into the workings of the system than i've ever been able to on that mac. Maybe i should buy it because it's got a cool design? Ok. You know, as a designer, i really do have to hand it to apple for trying to push innovative design. I'm all for more aesthetic "lifestyles," even if i do have brown carpet and drapes in my house. The dell that should arrive at my house today! is anything but cute. It's big and bulky and ugly. But it sure is functional. And i have no fear about opening it up and swapping things around and installing a second hard drive and that dvd burner that i'll buy one day, and another gig of ram in three years when i'm trying to keep up with ALL THE FREAKIN SOFTWARE that's made for pc.
I sure can't wait to go home and open my new toy.
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a new machine
Monday, January 10, 2005
Over the weekend i managed to convince Kim that a new computer is in my (our?) best interest. i have a dimension 4100 or something that is about 4 years old and feeling its age. It's 800MHz with 512M of ram, which isn't bad, especially in the ram department, but the time was coming. i managed to find a good deal in the post-Christmas inventory, i think. i was looking at the dimension 4700, figuring it was a good middle-of-the-road, but by the time i had it configured it was coming up to almost $1500, which is pretty unjustifiable at this point. i really want to get a flat 17" monitor to put next to my 19", and the configuration for 4700s with 17" monitors was just too much. Then i noticed at ALL of the 8400s had 17" flat upgrades, so i started playing around with configuring one and came up with a really nice system for several hundred less (including the -$200 mail-in).
so i'm getting this. And it's got a 160G hd. 1G ram, free upgrade from standard 512 (holy crap!) . 17" flat screen. SoundBlaster Live!, which isn't the best sound card, but it's certainly not "integrated audio". I could've gotten the audigy 2 for like $45 more, but whatever. I'm trying to keep it low here to be more palatable to my wife! The only thing that i really wanted that i didn't get was a DVD burner cause that was another $90, but the point is that i'll now have a machine that can handle a DVD burner when i eventually get one.
i'm trying not to be too spastic about waiting for it to come. I know it'll probably take about a week and it's not like i'm computerless in the interim. Hell, i haven't been using my desktop at home much anyway, since it's cold in the backroom. stupid window-unit heater. THE DAMN THING IS FROZED UP! But we've got the laptop that's like 400MHz. heh. It freezes lately when i try to record midi in acid 4. ugh. That thing's not meant to do any work. It's more like an internet machine/media player.
but speaking of laptops, what's the deal with new laptops (at least, all of the dells that i've seen) not having a line-in jack?? i mean, mine is probably 4 years old, a crappy dell latitude CPi, and it's got line-in and mic-in. That right there would be pretty detrimental to any interest in buying a new laptop. Besides the fact that almost everyone i know that has bought a new laptop has had problems with them. All makes and sizes. Granted, most laptops move around quite a bit, so you have to expect some bashing. But still.
actually, my stupid little latitude... every so often the row of keys "8IK," just stops working, which i can only really fix by slamming my fist on the keyboard. i have to say that over the past year or so, this worked remarkably well. But i think i finally managed to do some damage. Now when the damn thing is plugged in (as opposed to using the battery), the headphone jack gets rather hit-or-miss. It either works great or it'll generate this loud BUZZZ, which only goes away if i wiggle the jack just right. great. Hopefully i can open it up and fix whatever connection is messed up.
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Trying new things
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
I've been messing around with Picasa and Hello, trying to figure out new and better ways to keep my daughter's website up-to-date without having to do so damn much html everytime i want to do an update. So far i can only get Hello to post one picture at a time, which is kind of a pain in the ass. But using blogger's image upload tool isn't necessarily the friendliest way.
Now that i'm looking at this from the Blogger side and not the Hello side, though, I don't think that i like the way Hello uploads photos. It creates new directories and inserts a bunch of crazy css stuff in the img tag. Ok, it's not crazy, but it doesn't look like the type of efficiency that i'm shooting for here. Besides, who names software "Hello"? wtf is that?
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