Category: Uncategorized

Spring seems to have come at last, albeit a mainly cold and wet spring. Saturday was torrential rain and yet another round of car shopping. Sunday the weather turned nice and I got to do a few seasonal things outside. (Sorry, but this is all really boring suburb family kind of stuff. No base jumping or even mountain biking, although I have been out on my rollerblades a few times now.) Lawn mowing season is on, and my lawnmower started on the first pull. Woo-hoo! Also washed and waxed Jeannie’s car. (We’re skipping doing the Jeep this year cuz we’re about to get rid of it.) Jeannie’s car is only six months old, but irony of ironies, I had to do some touch up painting on it already. She got hit while parked in front of the bank, going to get a bank check for the Jeep’s replacement. It was a mere scratch, and she had mercy on the 19-year-old girl who hit her with her mom’s car, and decided it’s more trouble than it’s worth to go thru insurance and get it properly fixed in a body shop. These modern plastic bumpers are made to scratched up anyway. So I literally glossed it over, which is fine if you don’t look too closely. I guess you could say the car is broken in now.

Once again it’s time to submit entries for Origami by Children for the OUSA annual convention. This year both Lizzy and Michelle came up with some cool stuff. Lizzy made an original pureland Fancy Picture Frame and folded the Octahedron for John Montroll’s Plethora book. It’s an interesting model in that that it’s unlike most of his later polyhedra, which optimize for size and clean surface layout, this one goes for easy of folding and the general approach echoes the classic waterbomb model. Michelle folded a classic kite base Cat (I have one that I folded years ago but can’t remember the creator; maybe it’s Yoshizawa) and a Candle from Montroll’s Christmas book.

I recently completed new version if the music player for my friend Erik and his music production studio GE Music. You can see it live here:

http://producerstoolbox.com/ProducersToolbox_Music/geMusicPlayer44.html

This version has numerous improvements over the previous one. It is much more flexible in how it handles music libraries, allowing for multiple library files of several formats and multiple mp3 directories at arbitrary server paths, all driven by config scripts for easy library updates and management. There was also a major behind-the-scenes refactoring of the code base and a slew of minor bug, so overall the app is much more robust. Also, it now displays album cover art for each Playlist, dynamically loading the album images.

I’m happy because the app has needed some attention for a while, and also because this was my end of the software-development-for-studio-time arrangement I worked out with Erik.

Over the weekend I began converting my ProTools projects from PT7 under Windows to PT8 on the Mac in preparation for brining the songs over to his studio. This meant rendering out all the MIDI instruments (mostly the drums) one track at a time as audio and flying them back into the project. Kind of tedious but not too bad. The one snag I hit was that I double-tracked the snare drum, using two different samples from two different kits. The bouncedown must not be sample-accurate because the resulting audio of the two snares phased against each other and produced a flanging noise. So I had to re-render the snare with the two samples playing at once, and that sounded fine, although I loose the option to mix between the two sounds going forward.

I’m scheduled to go into the studio later this week. I’ll let you know how it goes.