Painted space money this morning, early. Dubbed LaunchPad 9/27 Swarm to DVDRs. Yesterday dubbed from cassette to wav file & then emailed mp3 of last Some New Thing jam. I really think there is a new song there. Listened to a bunch of Human League last night at home, and Mrs. R liked them. I think both of us only remember the big hit. This week so far at work I’ve been listening to the likes of Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, The Jesus Lizard, Unsane, Sonic Youth, Talk Talk, and a couple others I can’t remember right now. Speaking of TJL, I’m excited that I’m going to see them later this month in Portland! I’ve been trying to get back on a more strict health regime, including walking to work when I can, and biking when I can’t. Climbing Pisgah with Mrs. R. Eating more whole foods, less refined foods. Etc. Speaking of food, I made Melanzane al Forno last night, from the Veggie Ep 2 recipe. We’re getting a bunch of work done on our car, hopefully getting it back this afternoon. Money! Plums are pretty much done. Thanks to a loaner orchard ladder, we were able to get to more of our tree than we’ve ever been able. Hoping to score an invite to the preview edition of Google Wave today. I would be 1 of 100,000 ppl they’re supposedly going to invite. Time to finish coffee and oatmeal. I think we’ve got some rain today. I’m okay with that.
Walking to work, 9/15/09
The past few days have been eventful, with ups and downs. My heart goes out to the ones who lost their old cat friends. My mom lost her kitty Lady on Saturday. Old and very sick. And my friend Stardust lost her Oscar yesterday. Our cats are like a combination of friends and children because we are responsible for them and we become very attached to their companionship and personalities. It is very painful to lose them. I wish healing and peace for you who have.
I had a lovely time at Black Forest on Saturday night with friends and rockers Hot Drama, Alpha Dahlia and The Decliners. It’s been awhile since I’ve rocked out at Black Forest. Fun!
It was Mrs. R’s birthday yesterday, and she wisely gave herself a day off to relax. We went out to dinner at Zenon. Our first dinner there ever. The pecan-encrusted salmon special with chanterelles and peach-brandy sauce and deep fried spud cylinders was awesome. The seafood linguine menu item not so much. From our brief research I’d say avoid the pasta dishes and go with other things.
Hopping around temporally…. Sunday morning Mrs. Random, Stardust, and I hiked up Mt. Pisgah. Thoroughly pleasant, the air was still cool and the fog was just dissipating when we arrived there to climb. I love the practice of putting your parking stub back at the fee station for another visitor to use. But it IS communism, just so you know. And I’m sure the Dept. of Homeland Security will soon be investigating these shenanigans.
Sunday afternoon Some New Thing had an awesome band practice. Our songs are coming along, and there are new ones on the way. We are to the point where we need a regular drummer. The glorified metronome that is the drum machine is not satisfactory for advancing the songs that are more completely developed. This is good!
Okay, there’s enough blog for you for now I hope.
Some New Thing skipped practice tonight because Stardust needed the evening to prepare for Pony Prance’s gig in Medford Friday night. So I practiced my bass and painted space money and read more of the Lovink book (ref’d in earlier blogging) and took a nap. We’re planning a Sunday afternoon practice instead.
Mrs. Random is nearly finished with her week of working a later shift. The cats and I will appreciate the company as we’ll all return to sharing a more matching schedule next week! We’re planning to hike Pisgah on Sunday. We both want to get back into that routine. I’ve been walking more. We’ve been eating more in line with the “new regime” we started two years ago or so, when the doc said I was pre-diabetic. Been a little slack. Last week halfway through my shift at work I noticed that I’d forgotten my belt. It’s not okay to not notice I forgot my belt! When I bought the pants I needed the belt to keep them from slipping down. Now I don’t need a belt. Unacceptable!
Fleur is being very cuddly and in the way right now. The kittens turned 6 months old last week. Griffin is much larger than Fleur. G and the other two boys, who now live up in the southwest hills of Eugene–Zeb (formerly codenamed Pascal) and Jet (Torpedo)–are all now larger than their mother Dr. Tiny Cat. Fleur is significantly smaller than all of them. But she’s probably got more Alpha in her than most of the others do. When she’s wrestling with Griffie, she attacks first and throws her whole body at his head. He just fights with the upper half of his body sometimes because he’s so much bigger. She may be a Micro Cat, but Fleur is healthy and full of vim/vigor. Right now she’s a total purrbody loveykitty stretched on my lap.
Fleur behind Griffin
Friends just bought a house and are going to paint over the current colors. Here’s a sample. It’s being called the M&M theme:
I decided I wanted to blog more, nihilistic though it may be (see Geert Lovink book summary in previous blog entry). Mrs. Random blogs almost daily. I used to, long ago. Now I tweet and facebook almost daily. So do a lot of you, I suspect! Right at the moment I’m on the netbook at the dining room table, and we’re about to start making dinner which is couscous feta chickpea salad. R’s birthday is coming up. I did some e-shopping today! That was fun. Will do some local shopping too.
lelu traded me a Yamaha DD-6 for a broken keyboard. What a deal!
Yamah DD-6 Drum Machine
It’s got a built in speaker so I can use it for practice along with my acoustic bass guitar.
Ibanez Acoustic Bass Guitar
And I use print outs of blank bass guitar tabs to write down note sequences, from www.blanksheetmusic.net. And to document timing, rhythm, etc., I use a little mono cassette recorder.
Sony TCM-200DV Cassette-Corder
The dinner salad was wonderful, and now I’m drinking whiskey.
I am sitting at the dining room table, oatmeal cooking on the stove over in the kitchen. Mrs. R has a later work schedule this week, covering for her assistant who’s on vacation, so I’ll likely be leaving for work before she gets up. The cats are up, though. I’ve got the gas stove in the living room on for Daphne, although it’s not really cold enough to need it. Her old bones appreciate the heat.
I keep tripping over how much has changed Online since I started blogging in December 1999. For one thing, the identity of “blogger” is not something I wear actively anymore, it seems. It used to be unique and interesting to be an online person, to be a blogger, a Netizen if you will. Now most of us seem to be living online, checking our social networks several times daily. Being constantly connected to a global communications & micropublishing network has become the norm for many these days. Mobile is growing fast. Netbooks too.
I am reading a book by Geert Lovink called Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. Summary on Amazon:
In Zero Comments, internationally renowned media theorist and ‘net critic’ Geert Lovink upgrades worn out concepts about the Internet and interrogates the latest hype surrounding blogs and social network sites. In this third volume of his studies into critical Internet culture, following the influential Dark Fiber and My First Recession, Lovink develops a ‘general theory of blogging.’ Unlike most critiques of blogging, Lovink is not focusing here on the dynamics between bloggers and the mainstream news media, but rather unpacking the ways that blogs exhibit a ‘nihilist impulse’ to empty out established meaning structures. Blogs, Lovink argues, are bringing about the decay of traditional broadcast media, and they are driven by an in-crowd dynamic in which social ranking is a primary concern. The lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or ‘zero comments’.
Lovink explores other important changes to Internet culture, as well, including the silent globalization of the Net in which the West is no longer the main influence behind new media culture, as countries like India, China and Brazil expand their influence. Zero Comments also looks forward to speculate on the Net impact of organized networks, free cooperation and distributed aesthetics.
Okay then. There’s that, and then there’s this hot oatmeal I’m eating and I can feel the heat traveling all the way to my belly with the first bite. Newman’s organic California raisins and organic nonfat plain Nancy’s yogurt! The oats are Bob’s Red Mill organic extra thick rolled. Were those placement ads?
I am heavily deeply into music. Every time I play with LaunchPad, it feels better and more interesting. We’re a five-year-old improv noise dance band, if you will. Always exciting! Maybe we can play some gigs soon.
Some New Thing (my new project with Stardust), a band consciously influenced by the likes of Joy Division, New Order, The Cure, among a few others, is making consistent and excellent progress, factoring in the fact that we meet once a week. We are still embryonic, with fewer than a half dozen partly-finished songs. But every week we advance, fleshing out more of our songs and figuring out how we want to be as a band. Her roommate John drums with us when he can, which is awesome. I am spending lots of time at home playing bass guitar, trying to improve my chops and knowledge, as well as composing new bass lines.
Pony Prance plays at Sam Bond’s on Saturday (8/22), opening for Yeltsin and Wow & Flutter. Very much looking forward to that show. On Friday my duo band with tHE bOY plans to get together and make sonic mayhem. First time Frantic has done anything since April. On Sunday our normal Apollo space capsule of a Swarm will probably feel more like a Space Shuttle mission, with 2 extra musicnauts joing the fun, and wishing Kem a goodbye farewell for a few months to NY state. I like making podcasts. Not sure I’ll be able to keep up the pace. Looking back at the record, August is often when I go into uber-mode with posting creativity. There, I blogged.
A flow of sounds is happening this week at my podcast page: http://radionot.wordpress.com.
The weekend was good. Friday lelu came over for G.U.L.P. and we picked out postable pix of LaunchPad from my Flickr sets. Saturday night Mrs. R and I went to a birthday party and then I went to band practice. Some New Thing had our first practice with a live drummer, which felt really good. Spent most of our time on Ceremony, but also worked on transitions in our work-in-progress codenamed Song 3. Sunday included a Pisgah hike and helping a friend by moving some stuff across town.
We’re getting our new couch today! May this one last longer versus the kitteh klaws than previous models.
The Space Money mint is active again. I love to paint!
My 10 year blogging anniversary is coming later this year. I started blogging in December 1999, almost immediately after seeing my first blogs. Some of the people I had on my blogroll back then are still at it. Including Garret at Dangerousmeta, who tweeted at me last night about the Mixtape I posted.
I’ll try to blog even though I’ve a kitten on my lap–Fleur is washing up after breakfast.
Random…
–I am loving my acoustic bass guitar. Makes it so easy to do spur of the moment practicing. Was playing along to the stereo last night, Ceremony and Reptilia, two songs Some New Thing are learning to cover. No plugging in the amp, etc. Just pick it up and play.
–Lumps we found on kittens, where they got their rabies shots: the vet thinks they are just tissue reactions that are fairly normal and should disappear in a few weeks. Still worrisome to me! She did say to keep an eye on them.
–Recordings of LaunchPad’s two recent gigs are mixed and ready to listen to. Cornucopia and Whiteaker Block Party. Wondering if there would be any interest in them as podcasts?
The older I get the less I know for sure, but the more I feel that it’s better to take responsibility than to accept victim status. Whatever the “reality” is about what’s happening to one, the responsible stance is a much better pose than the victim stance. There are more and better possible actions from the responsible position than from the victim position. Victimhood easily opens one to blaming other people, blaming the system, which are both possibly quite valid because there ARE bad people and bad systems. But that doesn’t get one anywhere. And it tempts one to “get back” at people, to take vengeance, to hope for other people to suffer. And that is just a poor way to use one’s energy and time. Not to mention, it’s dangerous and attracts more suffering.
I told someone I would blog about the Whiteaker Block Party. It was awesome. Mrs. Random and I took a bunch of pictures and I’ve posted them on my Flickr. The Rocker Central stage was a great place for LaunchPad to play. Thanks J*Star! You rock! So great to look out and see a street full of smiling (and some dancing) people watching and listening to us. Maybe when I have more time I’ll blog more, but maybe not, because as soon as the weekend was over, and the temperatures dropped a bit, I have launched into other projects.
Griffin (L) and Fleur (R), the Tiny kittens, 4.5 months old.
I got up at 4 this morning. It’s nearing 5 at the moment. We have doors and windows open, fans going. Inside temp is about 80 degrees F, but hopefully that will come down closer to 75 before we close the house to protect our “cool” air. I like hot weather, but when it gets into the high 90s and low 100s, my brain slows way down, along with the rest of my body, along with everybody else in un-air-conditioned conditions. I’m not really a big fan of air conditioning (so to speak), but it has its temporary emergency uses. I have A/C in my Chamber of Randomness upstairs, so I could hole up there during the evenings if I absolutely had to use my brain in any functional capacity, but somehow, lounging languidly in the backyard on the hammock with a foot in the wading pool, sipping an iced beverage and reading… that sounds better.
Harry Potter is the current main reading project/obsession. I’ve started on Book 4. Depending on my location and ergonomic situation, I alternate between reading on my Palm PDA and my Dell Mini netbook.
A side interest is War Surf by M.M. Buckner. I’ve been reading really impressive hype about Buckner, and tried to find a sample of her writing running wild on the open internet (that is: a pirated ebook)–but FAILED. Therefore I took the extraordinary step of registering an account at Fictionwise.com and BUYING an ebook. Nine frickin’ bucks for a text plagued with not just a few obvious OCR errors (does the PRINT version suffer this badly?).
On the other hand, because I bought Fictionwise’s “multi-format” version of the Buckner ebook, I can download and re-download War Surf in any or all of a dozen file formats, unencrypted. I.e. in contrast to Amazon’s Kindle ebook program, where Amazon can reach into your Kindle machine via its wireless network and DELETE books it wants to, I actually OWN my ebook versions of War Surf. I could email a copy to you right now. (Although that would be a copyright infringement, of course.)
LaunchPad meets today at Chez Random. First plugged-in Swarm in 6 weeks. We were acoustic last time and of course at the OCF. LP has two gigs coming up: Friday 7/31 at the new Cornucopia on Pearl near 5th, across from Steelhead, 10pm, free, 21+; and the next day, Saturday, 8/1, at the Whiteaker Block Party, on the “Rocker” stage across from Territorial Winery, sometime near 5pm. We are still confirming exact stage time.
The kittens seem to have fully recovered their vim and vigor after getting “fixed” last week. It’s great to have them careening around all crazy-go-nuts again. What good are vimless vigorless kittens anyway?
Harry Potter has me hooked. I’m over halfway through book 3. I think I got as far as the third book years ago, but I’m ready to plough through the whole series now.
From the past week or so, my Scobert Park concert pix: Alpha Dahlia (7/24) http://bit.ly/NCPTG | The Underlings (7/22) http://bit.ly/a4PGR | Pony Prance (7/17) http://bit.ly/zNdgA.
I drank wine last night, several glasses of cheap white, ending or at least punctuating the drinking hiatus I started on April 17. Kinda bleary this morning, but it was good to do. I don’t know what my drinking status is now. Day to day. That was the second 3-month hiatus in two years. Everybody has to manage their own vices in their own way. It’s a matter of balancing energies, I think.
My Tumblr Feed:- Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
- Cody Brown - A Public Can Talk To Itself: Why The Future of News is Actually Pretty Clear
- "Building microscopic critters via genetic tinkering was confined to the world’s most..."
- America’s (newest) largest solar plant set to go live in...
- Happy Wonder Woman Day! - Wonder Woman - io9
- A coming new obsession: how to handle a smaller print-book business – The Shatzkin Files
- Crazy Or Brilliant? Plan To Build Giant Floating Airport Off...
- "Business representatives from a South Korean company were in town Friday negotiating to buy the..."
- Memory and forgetting in the digital age - opinion - 24 October 2009 - New Scientist
- Scan of Internet Uncovers Thousands of Vulnerable Embedded Devices - Self Generated Content
- The Futurist: The Dawn of the Postliterate Age: Information...
- mr_random on Twitter:
- .@b4ur If you're shopping for a netbook, I recommend @sascha_p & @netbooknerd. Also @NetbooksReviews looks useful.
- Nice article. Yoko's awesome. RT @Chikuwa464 Yoko Ono, forever a force for peace | The Japan Times Online: http://bit.ly/3YpSLu via @addthis
- via @MyEugene "lesson for the Obama Admin: it shows what can happen when U.S. fails to abide by the values it espouses." http://bit.ly/fe2F
- I say let's just advance via sublimation to gaseous post-futurity ;)
- re prev tweet (re @hrheingold).. actually he's quoting Wiki article on Zygmunt Bauman
- Reading @hrheingold's last few tweets just now quoting Zygmunt Bauman on "liquid modernity"--uncomfortable but insightful.
- OH on FB "The solution 2 continuing Moore's law,apparently, is to replace electricity w/tiny,black, arrowheaded sperm." http://bit.ly/2MOt3u
- RT @lewisshepherd NanoMEMS! RT @scienceRSS New Digital Electronics Concept Could Continue Moore's Law: http://bit.ly/2MOt3u
- RT @bruces *Why do you ask, White House? RT @whitehouseostp #TOTD (POLL) Is Earth ready to meet an alien civilization? http://tiny.cc/Eexvh
- RT @CapellaMarket Here's a photo of that Fat Tire Bike we're currently raffling for $1.00/ticket: http://bit.ly/1Ew6kb
- Lawrence Lessig calls for copyright rebellion: http://bit.ly/2az1HM (via http://teleread.org)
- RT @Bill_Romanos RT @d114: RT @pkedrosky Wow! RT @jamesoreilly: Have a look at this truly amazing Live Ships Map http://tinyurl.com/2uyct5
- Thanks for the #ff mention and compliment, @integralmath!
- @ashalynd @troyrhoades Advantage of netbook/laptop=>can read scanned (non-OCR'd) PDFs; not sure if they work so well on current e-ink units.
- @ashalynd @troyrhoades I use a Palm m515 too, but that's even smaller. Fits nicely in pocket, tho. Waiting for next years crop o' readers!
- My Most Recently Created Pandora Stations:
- The Jesus Lizard Radio September 25, 2009
- N.W.A. Radio August 4, 2009
- Cursive Radio July 14, 2009
- Black Grape Radio July 6, 2009
- Siouxsie And The Banshees Radio May 6, 2009
- The Durutti Column Radio April 6, 2009
- The Transmitters Radio April 3, 2009
- Mary's Danish Radio April 3, 2009
- Dash Rip Rock Radio April 3, 2009
- The Funeral Party Radio April 3, 2009
- Metric Radio March 16, 2009
- Sound Tribe Sector 9 Radio February 25, 2009
- Meat Puppets Radio January 20, 2009
- Isis Radio January 7, 2009
- Stiffed Radio December 18, 2008
- Salt-N-Pepa Radio November 28, 2008
- Yob Radio October 29, 2008
- A New Kind Of Army Radio October 29, 2008
- Melt-Banana Radio August 27, 2008
- Don't Say(I Told You So) Radio August 1, 2008
