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Is it live... or is it Maxwell House?
(18 Jan 2009 at 22:44) |
#1: Steelers win, Superbowl here we come.
#2: Nels and I finished off a new song yesterday and recorded a music video with my new camera (secret project LOMH). It took me longer to put it together than it should have because of unreliable software, and this was frustrating to the max, but now it is ready:
As always, but moreso than usual, I recommend that you click through and watch in high resolution, or even download the original 1920x1080 file. I'm really excited about the quality of the video that this camera shoots, and once I get familiar with using it it's going to be even better.
This is a song about coffee delirium. It is a leading aggravating factor in accidental deaths among young professionals. I'm curious to know whether you understand the joke in the title—it's one of those ones that I think most people from my era and area should know, but I also suspect maybe not like when I dressed as Mikhail Gorbachev and nobody knew who that was. | |
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Attempt to increase frequency
(24 Nov 2008 at 18:56) |
Most of the comments I get about my blog are actually in-person comments about how infrequently I post on it. Isn't that embarrassing? I should do better. Part of the idea of this recent categories thing was that I shouldn't have to worry so much that the posts I make have some level of quality and composition to them. Because if you don't like my posts about XYZ subject you just don't have to add that particular RSS feed to your feed. Ready! Minutia!
Category: Computer Woes made worse by stubbornness On Friday I came back to my computer and I wake the screen and start using the internet or whatever, and then I go to click on something and I'm like where's the damn mouse cursor? Oh, it's stuck in the middle of the screen. Paralysis. So I do all the obvious stuff like reboot and plug and unplug and pray and even sophisticatedly things like BIOS updates and driver updates, all without the mouse mind you, then also the other USB devices are not functioning, like they charge their little batteries but there is no function. Which sucks because (a) I can't install the new iPhone update which fixes some iPhone headaches and (b) I can't draw or make music on the computer and (c) I can't work on one of my secret projects that I was hoping to finish up since it is coming up on its 1 year anniversary approximately and (d) grrr and (e) I'm pretty sure this is a hardware problem so it's not even something I can fix through the powers of troubleshooting or reformatting, i.e. we gotta get a repair dude out here and (f) lots of software is not made for people with no mouses, so I am finding out about all sorts of intriguing tab-orders and figuring out how to write emacs lisp so that I can move and resize the emacs window with brand new key bindings because emacs text editing is one of the only attractive activities when you've got no mouse or joystick or drawing tablet or iPhone 2.2 update, and even in apps that do fully support keyboard navigation e.g. web browsers, there are so many selectable elements that ixnay on individually tab-pressing and so you gotta point your visual gaze at one of the elements and play "focus roulette", whereby you hold down the tab key and watch the selection zip around a few times until you've got the timing down and you release just in time for jackpot! But I actually like this level of creativity in familiar activities, like playing Pacifist Counter-Strike as Edward AK47-hands and (g) I think I actually finished my Pac Tom level 1 project but I can't upload the results from my GPS so that I can make a nice map and share this momentous occasion, so that's a bit of anticlimax for you there. But I tabbed my way to Dell on-line chat support and I was really impressed when I didn't have to walk through any bullshit obvious troubleshooting flowcharts, and in two minutes he was just like, OK I will send you a new motherboard, it will be there tomorrow, and we can send a person out to replace it for you if you want (don't want). Nice! Sometimes it's good to pay for the deluxe service.
Category: Band Level-Up Also: Nels and I played a fairly bang-up open mic night a few weeks ago meaning we felt good about it, and then I was very amused that one of the guys running the open mic thing came up to us right after and was like, "You guys wanna play a local artists showcase?" Which is almost literally what happens when your virtual band is a pretty shitty but not shittiest virtual band in the game Rock Band. So, more positive evidence that video games do in fact prepare you for real life. Anyway we chose the "Yeah, Sure!" option (as my Rock Band buddies will attest I do without even glancing at the terms of the deal) and so we are going to play one of these things in early January and you are all invited of course. Details forthcoming. | |
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Sick Day
(13 Oct 2008 at 08:17) |
Nels and I played a rock concert as Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous at Brianne's birthday party. We were all jazzed up for this one and then beset by a series of runtime failures. Like, in the first song there was feedback (normal, tolerable) and then I got a text message while the song's backing track was playing through the PA off my phone (blunder, but funny) then I broke a string on my guitar, and though I had a spare set of strings I only had the other 5 because I had just replaced that one two days prior. I learned that when a string breaks the whole guitar goes uniformly out of tune (makes sense, since the tension on the neck is reduced); we thought it was Nels so he disappeared to tune and then the next song we were totally not calibrated to one another. But we couldn't give up during that song because that song is about not giving up. We forgot words but that is pretty normal. It was really hot in there too. These are not complaints or excuses, but humorous anecdotes. It seems like it'd be impossible to disappoint these party crowds filled with our friends. In invisible failures: I wasn't recording directly off the PA for the first few songs, and then my guitar mic was off(!) for the rest, so there aren't a lot of usable videos soundwise. This one is just us singin' on the phone:
(Like before, I recommend clicking through to view the HD version or download the original AVI, for maximum quality.) When we are permitted to play a party it is our now publicly proffered deal to write and a perform a new song for the occasion. Usually we just finished writing it so we don't know it and totally blow it in the first performance; this video is our second performance of Unfairbanks. We wrote this for our departing friend George Fairbanks's friend-departing party. It's about the credit crisis. You should know that Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous has a good track record of forecasting financial events. This song was written in May. At the end you hear my advice to "sell the shit out of" your stocks, even if it's after hours. Following that advice could have saved you from the worst week of market losses in history. However, past performance does not indicate future gains. (In truth, our only forecasting strategy is whimsical pessimism.)
The song we actually wrote for this event is called Birthday Control, since it's a birthday party. When I'm linking these up, they are links to recorded versions, sure as hell not our live ones. And then there's our new song Sick Day, which actually is a "live" recording of my favorite of our new songs. Live just means one take in my bedroom in this case. | |
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The giving $43 billion to charity ''blues''
(09 Apr 2008 at 22:33) |
| Pretty much any time we want we can record a tune thanks to the miracle of modern computer digital technology and that is what we did, yielding Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous — The giving $43 billion to charity "blues". | |
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Theme from SIGBOVIK (robot dance party)
(02 Apr 2008 at 23:46) |
Nels and I played as Sick Ridiculous and The SIG Ridiculous at the SIGBOVIK pre-afterparty on Saturday. Other than the stealth open mic night we did last monday, this was my first time ever performing with someone else in front of a live audience including people I didn't know. (Most of them were people I did and continue to know (phew). Thank you for coming. Next time I will announce it better.) The concert was rather last minute—we even bought the PA equipment that very morning—but nonetheless we did have time to lovingly slap together a new song particularly for the occasion. The graphic above illustrates us performing it, I think the "encore" where we remembered how the chorus goes. This is a robot dance party because the song actually plays off my phone in live scenarios, with us just singing and dancing during the robot beeping parts. To engender enthusiasm for the eponymous upcoming fake/real conference, we tonight recorded this tune, and it is of course Theme from SIGBOVIK (robot dance party). | |
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Wanted: CS/Math/etc. puns, attendees
(29 Mar 2008 at 20:23) |
I have once again been asked to create the Random Distance Run shirt and for that I need your bad/great computer science and math puns. Post them here for screen-print glory. For examples see the five (!) shirts in this directory.
Also: Nels and I are playing as Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous at the SIGBOVIK pre-afterparty tonight (Saturday) at 10:30 or 11ish. We have prepared 6 lovely songs including a special surprise. You are invited to come but since it's at someone else's house I'm not going to like post his address on the internet. Find it on Facebook or text/call me for details. | |
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Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous
(15 Mar 2008 at 12:23) |
You may already know this if you read a few other web logs or if you carefully stalk my last.fm profile: Nels and I have a new band and now I fixed the part of my web radar software where I can upload images again and here's a lightly doctored by me band promo photo that my brother Mike took. And here are all of Mike's best photos of us, and here is our totally pimp myspace page which has a few recording test demo songs (you can tell it's a test when I screw up in the first second of the song but keep going anyway). Wallet-size glossies, more sloppy recordings, and a intra-Pittsburgh open mic tour coming soon. | |
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