Archive for July, 2004

On vacation

Published July 29, 2004 Other Closed

I’m on vacation in the UK this week, visiting my brother (the Public Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in London – not an easy job these years) and other family and friends. It’s interesting that a bunch of folks I know have ended up living and working in London – underscores the global nature of the mobile, connected, workforce.

London is, of course, an endlessly fascinating and energizing city, and it’s great to see it accompanying a six-year-old. We spent most of yetsterday visiting the Tower, and it’s been a long time since I saw someone so delighted at displays of armor and swords!

At any rate, expect light (if any more) blogging till late next week.

Last weekend’s Vancouver Folk Festival

Published July 23, 2004 Uncategorized Closed

I just realized I hadn’t yet written anything about the Vancouver Folk Music Festival last weekend.

Well, it was another glorious summer weekend in Jericho Park, one of the most spectacular settings for a festival on this (or probably any other) continent. The lineup was as terrific as always.

Some particular favorites from the weekend (though there was much I wanted to hear that I didn’t get to -

The Wailin’ Jennys – three women from Winnipeg who sing wonderfully together, write and/or pick great songs (like their cover of Neil Young’s Old Man), and project a warm, competent yet not-too-serious persona on stage. Their CD almost captures the magic of their in-person performances.

Fiamma Fumana – an interesting quartet from Italy featuring a combination of traditional instruments with electronica. They had the audience really up and hopping at the workshop I heard them at. Plus how could you not love a band that features a woman who plays bass and doubles on flute and Italian bagpipes?

Oliver Schroer and the Twisted String – Oliver is a Vancouver fiddle player with more energy than any three people I know. He’s played with almost every artist in Canada over the last few years. This year he brought a large (like twenty people) group of kids (high-school age mostly) that he’s been working with in a couple of provincial towns in BC to play at the festival. They played an assortment of his challenging new-age fiddle music (with titles like Fireballs of the Eucharist, you know these aren’t your father’s fiddle tunes). Their energy was completely contagious all throughout the festival!

Kaki King – A wonderful young acoustic guitar player, Kaki King wowed us all with her tecnique, compositions, and dynamics. As it says on her web site:

Thumping bass lines, tapping melodies, and slapping percussion on her guitar, Kaki King is a one-woman force sent to wreak acoustic havoc. At 24, she is already a riveting performer, combining jaw-dropping technique with unique compositions. Though her style and tunings are suggestive of Michael Hedges, Kaki is more about the L train to Williamsburg than placid landscapes. Her playing has a passion and an edge that keeps her tenuously balanced, one foot in the acoustic world, the other in rock’n'roll.

A great weekend, and I look forward to next year!

Duke University Giving iPods to Freshmen

Published July 21, 2004 Gadgets & Gear , Learning & Teaching Closed

Is it too late to go back to school? From Wired News:

Duke University will give each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen a free iPod this fall as part of an initiative to foster innovative uses of technology in the classroom, the school said Monday. Duke wants to experiment with creative academic uses for the devices. The school will preload the 20-GB iPods (retail price, $300) with freshman-orientation information, an academic calendar and even the Duke fight songs before handing them out to the incoming class Aug. 19.

Students also will be able to use the devices to download course content, recorded lectures, foreign language lessons, audio books and music from a special Duke website modeled after iTunes. The school will supply voice recorders for some classes, enabling students to record notes while working in the field.

That Tracy Futhey is one forward thinking CIO!

Duke University Giving iPods to Freshmen

Published July 21, 2004 Uncategorized Closed

Is it too late to go back to school? From Wired News:

Duke University will give each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen a free iPod this fall as part of an initiative to foster innovative uses of technology in the classroom, the school said Monday. Duke wants to experiment with creative academic uses for the devices. The school will preload the 20-GB iPods (retail price, $300) with freshman-orientation information, an academic calendar and even the Duke fight songs before handing them out to the incoming class Aug. 19.

Students also will be able to use the devices to download course content, recorded lectures, foreign language lessons, audio books and music from a special Duke website modeled after iTunes. The school will supply voice recorders for some classes, enabling students to record notes while working in the field.

That Tracy Futhey is one forward thinking CIO!

In the recording studio

Published July 21, 2004 Music , Technology 1 Comment

Last week I spent a day working with my trio at Audio Logic recording studio. This was the first recording we’ve done in almost five years, and I was struck by how the recording process has changed since I first started recording in the early 1970s, both for the better and the worse.

One of the biggest differences, of course, is the digitization of the recording process. One of the dominant features of any 1970s or 1980s recording studio control room was the big multitrack tape machine. This time in, I don’t think I even saw a single tape machine in the studio. And while the mixing console still has the recognizable sliders and eq modules, much of the control of the actual recording process is now done from a PC keyboard and mouse (wireless, of course). The recording is done onto a bank of hard drives that is hidden from sight – no muss, no fuss.

The current studio is superbly set up for the modern style of recording popular music – a combination of digital instruments and regular instruments (whether acoustic or electric – perhaps we should call them “analog” instruments) recorded primarily one at a time, building up tracks as you go, editing digitally, adding samples, etc.

But it’s clear when you work in a modern studio that the studios and the engineers themselves are no longer set up (for the most part) to record a group of musicians playing non-digital instruments in real-time together. If you look at photos from old recording sessions (say up through the 1960s) you’ll see that for the most part musicians recorded together in the same room, and that the studios had all sorts of movable baffles and half-height walls (known in the trade as “gobos”) that allowed for acoustic isolation between instruments (better for recording each instrument optimally) while allowing the musicians to see each other. Current studios accomplish the same thing by isolating the different instruments usually in different rooms, with double-pane glass windows allowing for site lines. The problem with this approach is that it requires the musicians to hear each other with headphones, which is very different than generating the kind of feeling you get playing together in the open air in the same room.

When you tell a young recording engineer that you want to record all together in the same room, and you want to do it directly to a stereo mix, meaning that you’re unable to go back and fix things (either in the performance or the recording) later, you’re likely to get stares of incomprehension, followed by a look of stark terror. Jay Kenney at Audiologic is not young enough for that response (sorry, Jay!), and he did a fine job of getting a respectable jazz sound for us, even if it wasn’t quite the Rudy vanGelder classic sound I had imagined – hard to say whether that’s because of the studio or the players…if you know what I mean.

There are some photos of our studio adventure here, and drop me a line if you’re interested in hearing the results when we finish editing them.

New (and less expensive) iPods

Published July 20, 2004 Gadgets & Gear , Music , Technology Closed

Apple announced new iPods – the best news is that the 20GB and 40GB models are both $100 cheaper than they were previously! Might be getting just close enough for me to buy one….

http://www.apple.com/ipod/

Ecto working again

Published July 20, 2004 Technology Closed

Upon reading through the Ecto FAQ, Question 11 pointed me to installing SOAP Lite, which seems to have fixed things.

My advice is to be careful about upgrading Movable Type!

Can’t get Ecto working again

Published July 20, 2004 Technology 1 Comment

Since I upgraded Movable Type to v 3.01, I can’t get Ecto working – which makes me realize just how much I’ve come to depend on it for authoring my postings.

It’s strange, though – I have MT 3.01 set up as a clean install in another directory, and Ecto works fine with that install, so it doesn’t seem to be an Ecto problem.

The error message I get back (reproduced below) is the same kind of message I get when there is a cgi module that can’t find where perl is installed. But I’ve checked all the cgi modules and they all point to perl in the right place. And I’ve tried copying the mt-xmlrpc.cgi file over from the working version, to no avail. All help welcome with this one!

The server encountered an error attempting to retrieve the requested resource. Please notify the owner of the problem.

Error notes: Premature end of script headers: /hw54/d90/oren/weblog/mt-xmlrpc.cgi

Comments back on, but moderated

Published July 19, 2004 Technology 1 Comment

I’ve upgraded my installation of Movable Type to version 3.01.

I’ve turned comments back on, but I have used the new feature which allows me to approve or disapprove each comment before it’s posted. So please go ahead and comment at will, but don’t be surprised when your comment isn’t visible right away.

I’ll be working on getting TypeKey authentication and authorization for comments going, but it may not happen this week.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize until after I had upgraded that Jay Allen’s excellent MT-Blacklist software doesn’t yet work with MT 3.0 and up….sigh – now I’ve got to go delete all those spam comments one by one.

Comments turned off due to spam

Published July 16, 2004 Other Closed

In the last couple of days my weblog has been deluged with hundreds of spam comments, so I’ve temporarily (I hope) disabled comments.

I am completely enraged by this flow of spam – I feel as if somebody has deliberately set out to ruin my neighborhood. It used to be such a nice network before the riff-raff started using it. I hope the people who engage in this spamming overdose on their own cheap prescription drugs.

subscribe

xml

Pages

Latest tweets

interesting links

What I’m listening to

July 2004
M T W T F S S
« Jun   Aug »
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.