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Archive for May, 2007

Trex Launch

I went live with my Trex site today: http://tripalot.com/trex/

What does this mean?

It means that I am now treating my practice recordings with the same respect as my "official" Tripecac releases. It means if I go and chant "Trex launch, trex launch" twenty times into a dictaphone, I will eventually give that "song" its own XML file, mp3, m3u, and notes, just like I do for a carefully crafted Tripecac song.

Why waste time documenting drivel?

Well, some of that "drivel" is dear to me. Some of those spontaneous recordings resulted in a few seconds or minutes of music which my ears regard as "cool" or at least "interesting". Sometimes, a Trex recording will sound better to me than some of my Tripecac efforts.

So why not just keep the good bits and throw away the rest?

Good question. I guess I just hate throwing stuff away. I've learned over the years that although I don't value something highly on one day, I might become more enamored with it over time. Also, sometimes a bad creation with good documentation (e.g., dates) will help me more accurately and thoroughly place other creations in context.

For example, the fact that I recorded a piano song on a specific date means that I was then in a location with a piano. If I deleted the song for "quality control" reasons, then I would lose that piece of information. This would make it harder to nail down the dates and locations for photographs and journal entries from the same time period.

Okay, but why publish the junk? Why not just keep it buried in your own personal records?

Well, ummm… I think I just like to be consistent. It's easier to be consistent than to have to apply judgments… and the inevitable amendments.

If I were comfortable making judgments about the quality of my music, then I wouldn't bother uploading any of it, not even Tripecac. Heck, I'd probably cut my losses and never record another note in my life. My entire body of music is one big pile of dung compared to, say, Miles Davis or The Fall or any of those "real" bands. So, judgment schmudgment. I'll save that for you guys.

http://tripalot.com/trex/

Happy judging!

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Ubuntu 7.04

Today I upgraded my Ubuntu pc (which I use daily) from 6.06 to 6.10 and then from 6.10 to 7.04. It took forever, but was incredibly easy and so far has gone very smoothly. It was as simple as installing a Windows service pack. I'm very impressed.

Meanwhile, in Vista land… snicker… I've had two crashes/bugs this week which caused me to reboot. One totally froze everything except Windows Media Player. The other wasn't a crash per se, but the Start menu stopped responding to mouse clicks; this is the second or third time that has happened and the only solution I've found is to reboot. The "funny" (ha ha) thing is that the reliability monitor doesn't show anything bad happening at these times. What's the point of having a reliability monitor which doesn't detect fatal errors? It's like having a blind traffic cop. [no offense to all the blind traffic cops out there…]

I am not at all impressed with Vista. I've been using it every day for the past month and a half and still regard it as just a "dumb blonde" version of XP. The security system is annoying. The sluggishness (which makes my brand new pc effectively slower than my 5-year-old XP box) is annoying. The crashes are annoying. Vista is annoying.

Ubuntu, meanwhile, is great. I'm running it on a very old pc, and sure, it's a little slow, but it's reliable. That's what I want in a computer. Reliability. Up time.

Not speed. Not fancy schmancy translucent interface thingamajigs. Not "are you sure? are you sure? are you sure?" whenever I'm trying to keep my apps up to date.

Ubuntu: thumbs up

Vista: thumbs down

Wordpress 2.2

New version of Wordpress. Same old compulsion to upgrade. However, this time, new determination to make upgrade process easier. I created a batch file so that it's easier to upgrade Wordpress in the future. Yippee!!! Now I get to look forward to years of incremental Wordpress upgrades. Snort.

Still don't like the WYSIWYG editor. At least I can see those buttons now, though. Aside from that, I don't see any differences between Wordpress 2.2 and Wordpress 2.1. Should I expect to see differences? Should I expect Wordpress 2.2.1 within a week? More upgrading? Yip. Pee.