Moog 2020.
Monday, February 17th, 2020
Spent some quality time this afternoon with nephew the elder, who is taking an undergrad course in Music Synthesis and Recording. This means he’s using technology to capture performances, to edit and quantize audio tracks, to layer beats and rhythms into something we’d call music.
He said today that the course started with early electronic music recording and his dad said “ah, like the gramophone?” And he got a blank look in return.
No, the early history of electronic music starts, well, in the late sixties early seventies, with those Wendy Carlos-operated cobbled-together systems (like the Moog synth), laden with patch panels and dangling cords and lots and lots of knobs, all to emit very very rudimentary tones. Sine waves and sawtooths at play in the garden of Mozart’s delight.
And, appropriately, the plug-in-rich music creation software our nephew’s learning on has some modules that actually emulate that functionality, right down to the simulated rack mounts and patch cords.
VCV Rack’s VST Bridge, explained by musicradar.com. Patches!
He’s learning a jargon and techniques rich with allusions to the past old ways, and I sure find it entertaining to see him start to pull past tech and present tech together to create his future.
A day in Grit City.
Sunday, February 16th, 2020
I’ve been through Tacoma, Washington many times, at speed, on Interstate 5, where it seems like an industrial blur fronted by a Jupiter 2-shaped building called the Tacoma Dome perched on the edge of the freeway.
But today we went into Tacoma proper, to the Museum of Glass, a modern building with a conic cylinder of glass and steel along the waterfront. Really nice museum, with a ‘hot room’ (right in the conical part) where trained artisans pull molten blobs out of furnaces and shape them into decanters and pitchers and elegant glassware.
And in their very fine gift shop, where you can buy decanters and pitchers and elegant glassware and earrings, they had copies of Grit City Magazine for sale, shown here.
So…Grit City? Is that really what Tacoma’s called? Turns out it’s a long story, and this Grit City Magazine article tells it well, and, spoiler alert, it has nothing to do with cornmeal.
Points Nordic.
Saturday, February 15th, 2020
I had heard from, well, the internet and social media and all the modern ways that people “hear” about things, that the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle had a museum of all things Danish, Norse, Swedish, and Finnish…a veritable Nordic Museum, the National Nordic Museum, in fact.
The clean-lined modernist structure in Ballard held a collection of artifacts and stories of those who immigrated from the northern latitudes in Europe and found themselves scattered across the American landscape but (as one of the stories on the museum’s screens told), many were especially happy to end up in the Pacific Northwest, with all of its familiarities: climate and landscape and ways to make a living.
The museum’s neighbors include a lot of businesses and infrastructure that connect, directly and indirectly, to the sea, and that’s still a part, although a lesser one, of modern Seattle.
Seattle in 2020 is a more interesting and diverse city, with immigrants arriving from more parts of the world, and it was interesting to browse a presentation of what is just one immigrant group’s stories that forms the American mosaic.
Also, where else would you see a nyckelharpa on exhibit or see the dubious claim that rabbit-ear antenna was invented in Sweden…or is it Finland…or Denmark?
Cheesy.
@jcburns February 13, 2020 at 11:17 pm
The fine people at Tillamook dairies have what appears to be an annual promotion that involves tweeting on National Cheddar Day (hope you celebrated.) I retweeted the specified stuff and two hours later, a DoorDash person handed me a fancy insulated bag full of cheese.
I guess this is how the internet is supposed to work.
@jcburns February 12, 2020 at 3:17 pm
So the fictional District Attorney of New York from 1990 to 2000 on Law & Order was named…Adam Schiff?! That seems like quite the collision of coincidences.
Real numbers from a small state.
Tuesday, February 11th, 2020
Even in an age where it’s much easier (and in fact possible) to do so, I don’t spend a lot of time listening to candidates’ stump speeches. They’re designed for a certain effect and past a certain point they sound somehow…pat.
But I listened to Amy Klobuchar’s “we did well in New Hampshire” oration tonight and, in her success, she delivered a lot of the stump speech content, but managed to speak to working-class Americans in a deep, somewhat sad, party-independent way.
And I listened to Joe Biden, who had already decamped to South Carolina, where he could be surrounded by energetic people who weren’t as pasty-white as those in New Hampshire and Iowa. He seemed tired, spent, and a man full of heart, but not much gas in the tank. He has a story, but it’s a story based increasingly in the past. He didn’t do well.
So tonight, the New Hampshire Primary. Play the politics music! Fire up the big boards!
And, because it’s 2020, fire up Twitter on a convenient device and the people (and/or bots) you’ve chosen to follow will give you their quickly-delivered takes.
MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki around 10:30pm. The forehead of Joe Biden indicates how far down he is.
Updating at 10:55 pm: Buttigieg is speaking to his supporters. Why haven’t I noticed before that his cadences can get very Obama-y?
Recanvassed.
Monday, February 10th, 2020
Apparently enough people enjoyed the wet and cold weather system that inundated the Southeast last week—we’re getting a rerun this week. Weather is determined by a popular vote, right? Starting at midnight in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire? Maybe I have my news blips and bleeps confused. Maybe a caucus is involved. Or…polling.
All I know is: it’s wet, very wet outside.
Two skylines.
Sunday, February 9th, 2020
Atlanta seen from midtown in 2017 and 1979. Photos by me.
I should say that the topmost image is from three years ago, before another spate of building. You probably couldn’t see downtown from this spot now. (Also, the Georgia Dome is now gone.)
And if you pulled back—further north—about a half-mile, the forest of midtown buildings would make the center of Atlanta seem somehow secondary.
This is also an indication of why I vastly prefer digital to film. The detail, the detail.
Instasquares.
@jcburns February 9, 2020 at 12:59 pm
Sometimes I use a script to make a mosaic of my Instagram pics to try and figure out exactly what life I’ve been living the past few months.
For all your digging needs.
Saturday, February 8th, 2020
I don’t know anyone else whose initials are those of a noted British company that makes excavating machines, tractors, backhoes, and the like.
But I’m oddly proud that mine are. I guess if my name was John Deere or Edward Caterpillar I’d have much the same reaction. (No, don’t bother looking, I just made up Edward Caterpillar.) Deere, however, was a real guy.
Wikipedia says:
JCB was founded in 1945 by Joseph Cyril Bamford, after whom it is named; it continues to be owned by the Bamford family. In the UK, India and Ireland, the word “JCB” is often used colloquially as a generic description for mechanical diggers and excavators and now appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, although it is still held as a trademark.
So…not just a predominant set of initials, but the Oxford Dictionary says when you’re talking JCB, you might as well be talking about big’ol yellow digging machines.
I’m so proud.
Embracing the new.
Friday, February 7th, 2020
You may know that most of the smartphones and other digital cameras out there take a picture in a format called JPEG. It’s one of a couple of predominant file formats—the way the ones and the zeroes representing a picture are written to and read from hard disks (and flash drives, and floppies, and are sent from one place in our networked world to another.)
Dogcow (moof!), pixels by Susan Kare.
People—the folks charged with making operating system and application software better and better—have constantly tried to come up with better solutions for files than JPEGs and GIFs and even the more professional, almost uncompressed PNG and TIFF formats. These, by the way, are called bitmap file formats, where basically every pixel can be different…a recording of the real world. Vector file formats are another thing entirely. Don’t get me started.
But bitmaps, the stuff of photos. There are so many of them out there now.
They’ve put new proposals our for possible embrace and elevation to the level of “a standard”: ever hear of JPEG2000? I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t. DjVu files? MNGs? Yeegads.
So I spent some time today as part of my continuing education as a designer reading about FLIF—the Free Lossless Image Format. And in so doing also skimmed through stuff on JPEG XL, the latest from the JPEG people. Oh yeah, that’s an acronym too. The Joint Photographic Experts Group started work in 1983 that led to the ubiquitous JPEG format. Seriously. It’s everywhere. Most of the visual stuff you see on a web page is JPEG. And when you compress it even a medium amount, you see these undesirable compression artifacts, the so-called “mosquito noise” that makes a heavily compressed JPEG look like crap.
The thing about a standard is…you can’t just declare it by imperial fiat. (Seriously, Mr. President, don’t even try.) You have to get it out there and convince a critical mass of developers and users and browser manufacturers and camera manufacturers to embrace it. And as some formats evolved, they were entangled with patents and royalties and other means of turning intellectual property into money for…well, someone.
That’s why Apple’s choice of HEIF/HEIC, which has been defined and embraced for four or five years now, was such a big deal. It’s easy for them to declare that all their latest cameras (which will sell in the millions) will use it (in addition to JPEG), and when files created with it are something like 50% smaller than JPEG for the same quality, it’s not a hard decision.
So people who work with images (and moving images, again, a whole other kettle of fish) these days have to keep up with the new types of files, and stay familiar with how one reads, writes, and processes these throughout all steps of a modern workflow.
So a day like today for me was a lot of this kind of reading. Just trying to keep up. Do I get what they’re doing? Can I open a file created in one of these formats? Can I create one? Can I see the visual difference…the color reproduction, sharpness, and presence or absence of artifacts? Am I missing something?
Do I have a horse in this race? Or a dogcow?
Messes tracked.
Thursday, February 6th, 2020
Atlanta is having one of those winters where we get a lot (and I mean a lot) of rain, often as part of a pretty powerful cold front that spins off high winds and tornadoes and Severe Weather Update Bulletin 3D Doppler Special Coverage that tracks the system as it comes in (inevitably) from Alabama, causes havoc big and small, and then, leaves to cause more messes first in Athens, Georgia and then in South Carolina or the Smoky Mountains.
Reporters are then deployed to say “look at this flooded road” and “look at this huge tree on this house.” Take a look from News Drone Severe Flying Doohickie 2!
Yeah, trees, floods, seen those things before.
Flooding in Northwest Ohio in January 2008.
We had that today through a big chunk of today, and at the end of the day, I can barely remember much of what we did except that it was done on top of a very drippy very rainy backdrop.
I’ll sleep better tonight, I think.
Chippy, now drippy.
Wednesday, February 5th, 2020
I spent a lot of today staring at text on my screen, deep within the tortured logic of obscure API calls, delving deeply into the way images are served on web browsers (like the one you’re using to read this now)…and listening to a second day of wood chipping not far outside my front door.
And I thought leaf blowers were annoying.
An image I tossed up onto the Instagram in July of 2011. For no good reason.
The guy across the street has taken—well—he’s commanded people to take two major and unruly entangled trees out of his back yard, along with a vast amount of plant material that grows up, over, around, and within these trees. It’s one of the reasons Atlanta was a city of trees before it became a city of mixed-use development. Stuff grows here. Boy, does it. This removal has been a major operation, with 4 or 5 vehicles, ropes, ladders, and the aural star of the show, a large Vermeer (ask for it by name) wood chipper, and, surprise, several loud gas leaf blowers to tidy up the detritus.
But I think they’re done for now. At any rate, a large amount of rain is supposed to wash through overnight, and I hope the rain and accompanying cold front marches through town with as little drama as possible. Sounds drippy outside.
Sometimes nothin’ isn’t a real cool hand.
Tuesday, February 4th, 2020
Last night I hadn’t planned to watch that much of the coverage of what were supposed to be the Iowa Caucus results, but I was compelled, trainwreck-style, after hearing Brian Williams say to Rachel Maddow “we got nothin.” Well, he probably pronounced the ‘G’, but he was paying homage to his New Jersey origins. So if you have nothing, what do you do? I remained tuned to see.
So I stayed up late and watched the pontificators try to come up with new ways to say that the results weren’t being reported, but for me, the novelty soon wore off. And then, the politicians realized that empty lecterns were sitting there on live cable tv news channel screens, waiting to be filled, and sure enough, Klobuchar came out (first) to fill them with a vague take on what I’m sure was her stump speech. Then, Biden and Warren started doing much the same, almost simultaneously, and the cable nets made a dubious choice and stayed with Biden, as MSNBC’s Maddow promised “we’ll get Warren’s speech cued back up and show it to you right after Biden.”
No, no they didn’t. Neither did CNN. Instead, Bernie Sanders moved lecternward and because the rule that a live something, anything must be aired—a TV rule I’ve never embraced—they covered Sanders. I went to bed. If they made it back to Warren it was in the wee, wee hours.
Doesn’t seem fair to her, really.
And tonight, well, Sammy and I stuck with fiction and didn’t get anywhere near coverage of the real world. I had enough politics and I sure had enough of Our Imperial President.
If I’m disciplined, I won’t even flick through tweets in bed. Well, we’ll see.
@jcburns February 3, 2020 at 11:22 pm
Inspiring. Groundbreaking. Trustworthy. Missed. (and now, honored on postage.) #gwenifillforever
