Thursday, January 22nd, 2004

Oh boy. More music from Gus.

Ok, it's called Attack of the Killer Organ and it weighs in at 4.8M. Yes, it's another 1-4-5 blues progression. Live with it.

And in case you can't stand the organ, I ripped it out in another mix called Organless which will cost you 3.8M of your bandwidth. That one is just guitar(s) + drums.

ohhhhhhhhhh.

Hey- guess what happened to me today?

I was driving home from work and I hear a little thump next to me. I wasn't sure what it was, but the car was still moving so I just kind of forgot about it... until I got on the highway going 60 mph and all of a sudden the window right next to me slides all the way down. Did I mention it's freezing cold outside as well? And the window isn't going back up.

So there I am, going down highway 55 with my window rolled all the way down and the heat turned all the way up. I'm a human Mc BLT.

Anyway I have to try and find a place to fix it tomorrow morning. The timing on this one really sucks as well, since I'm going to be driving down to TN to visit the lovely Kirstin for the weekend. So instead of taking a half day tomorrow from work, it's a full day off. And something tells me I won't be getting down there at a reasonable hour.

And on one more unrelated note-

Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats - "Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe."

WTF? Why is this not plastered all over CNN? Or everywhere for that matter? We already knew we couldn't trust our government, but... how can anybody get away with this?

-- posted 11:42 pm

Jeff commented to me today that he liked my "Blues in E, No Filter" recording the best- which also happened to be the easiest to make... so I made another one real quick, which is a little bit longer. Well, it's sort of like the last one, but I added some amp simulation to it because I need a little bit of reverb in there and such..

Anyway, here it is in the key of E: Km 2.9M mp3.

-- posted 9:32 pm

For those of you who don't know, in Mac OS X (and lots of other unixen) there is a command line calculator called 'bc'. I use it all the time, it's great. The only thing that bugs me about it is that I can't just type 'bc 4 + 3' and get 7. Instead I have to type bc and have the program load, and then enter it, and exit.

That obviously takes too much time and effort. And as I have learned, for every problem python offers a solution.

Save it named something like "calc", make it executable (chmod 755), and put it in your path somewhere (I like to stick little things like this in my ~/bin/ directory). I can now type: 'calc 4 + 3' and get 7.

It's pretty simple and fairly obvious, and there is probably another built in solution I'm not aware of... but hey- it gave me a good reason to use python's eval function.

Update: Of course there is a better way, and it's pointed out to me in the comments by Harmen. His version is shorter, and it actually has a little bit of error checking and usage documentation...

-- posted 12:46 am

Study: Learning to Juggle Causes Changes in Brain

"Mastering the skill increases the amount of gray matter in areas of the brain that process and store visual information, proving what was not thought possible -- that new stimuli can alter the brain's structure."

Huh. Maybe I should take it up again.

-- posted 9:39 am