Foiled

I've been obsessed with Foyle's War. Or, possibly, "addicted".
I'm sort of lucky with my addictions in that rather than a downward spiral to hit bottom I just have to see every freakin' episode and then I'm fine. It's like if there were, say, six seasons of cocaine, and some set number of episodes of cocaine in each season. All I have to do is snort every episode of every season until I get to the end. And as long as they don't make new episodes of cocaine my analogy is completely absurd and I'm just going to stop.
The New York Times asks Is Algebra Necessary?
I have this bad feeling that the reason math is so daunting to most people is because of an internecine argument between theoretical and applied mathematicians. If you're a theoretical mathematician and this turns out to be true, you better calculate how much I'm going to smack you. Oh, you say that would be applied mathematics, don't you? You'll still get smacked.

Peregrin

Childhood friend (whose birthday is today) Ed McNamee has finished Peregrin the Aeronaut, a beautifully illustrated (by Delfino) book.

It's also a musical.

Mentant Patches

How to get "save as" back as a menu item in Apple's simply wonderful OS update (could you feel the sarcasm there? I can't tell.)

Cinefex is available for the iPad. Comically, I don't actually own an iPad but my parents each have one.
Scott Frizzle has some nice (and free!) plugins and scripts for AfterEffects. Like Quaker and Novaticular.

Kris Fremen writes a review on his blog of our movie Battle NY: Day 2.
He has an awesome name, like somebody out of Dune.
Anyway, his opinion of the picture is in almost direct opposition to mine. I mean it's like the 180degree polarity-swap of opinions. The parts he liked (the opening) are, to me, the weakest parts of the movie. I just hate the opening and if I could do it again I would probably just jump off a cliff. Yes, I dislike it that much.
The acting, however, I thought was very good. And I thought the big whirleydoomers worked great and looked very photoreal.
And oh. Look. He sub-heads his blog with "A mentant's ramblings" so... maybe the Dune reference was there all along.

I'm looking at jackets. The Clique Ladies jacket. There's these embroiderable windbreakers. I also dig the notion of lapel pins, or maybe just get some patches and get them sewn onto whatever we want.

Flutes, Switches, Rock Quartets

Do you like to get into fights with flute players? Flute players are a surly, mean, vicious bunch who will straight up knock you out for lookin' at them funny. But if you want to get into a bar brawl with them, tell 'em that it doesn't matter whether they have a full silver, 24-carat gold, or even just a silver-coated flute.
Wipe the blood off your bar stool and come on down for the fun.
I've found exactly one sound library in the world which purports to having a bowed tailpiece sound. One. It's the Symphonic Strings library by Sonivox. It's a thousand bucks. I'm not going to pay a thousand bucks.
What I want is a good violinist to come in and record some sound effects for thirty minutes. Sigh.
Railhammer guitar pickups. I'm perfectly happy with my pickups as they are, I just thought these were interesting.

++++
At the rehearsal studio the other night I played a Mesa-Boogie head with a whole bunch of channels. The channels couldn't switch though because there wasn't a footswitch. So for most of the night I just  used the "hot" setting but with the gain turned down.
And then I discovered that if I set my bridge pickup to be louder than the neck pickup I could switch between a more overdriven sound and a cleaner sound just by switching the pickup switch on my Les Paul.
Now. I realize that most guitar players would have figured that one out about 25 years earlier than I did. But I'm not like most guitar players. I'm much, much worse.
+++
Noteflight is the program I use most of the time I write something out for Tyrannosaurus Mouse. Although I've mostly given up on writing stuff out for TMouse because nobody really wants to read it. Writing out music for a rock band might have its merits but the problem is that our notation system just isn't that great for a rock quartet (and even worse for a rock trio). So I mostly use the program to make "notes" for myself so I remember what I wrote.
Steering away from getting a high-end notation program like Sibelius or suchly, there's MuseScore -- open-source and free. I don't really know that I need something more sophisticated than Noteflight though as I'm primarily just making what we used to call "lead-sheets" (are they still called that? Were they ever called that?)
++

Robots, Clocks, Socks, and Filters

Fast and Furious... but with robots. OMG I want to make this movie so bad...
The big, big news for me is that I got this new clock.

Beautiful, ain't it?

I know you're jealous. You wish you could buy a clock like this for eight bucks too.
In further exciting news, I wish I had softer socks. Swiftwick socks maybe? I honestly cannot figure out their product line to save my life. The fact that they have multiple types of socks and I can't differentiate between them has made it so I didn't buy any.
Has the amount of spam in your spam filter gone nuts today? It has for me.

Goings On in the Machine

I have no good way of determining where we are in post-production. The thing is that we can have 8 out of 10 acts almost locked, but until they're actually locked we can't really see how close we are. We have to be finished in three weeks with Prometheus Trap so it's really quite exciting.

Now that we have our new logo I have to figure out what to do with it. Ha! No really. Here's the black-and-white version of the logo.

And this is a color version of it.
I don't understand Adobe Illustrator, the format, or even the open-source versions of Illustrator. I just don't get it.
We also want to get jackets. Much discussion has gone into what kind of jacket to get. To tell the truth, I've been so freakin' hot for so long now that I can't fathom it being cool enough to wear a jacket. Maybe come Autumn it'll be cool enough to think about it.
I'm rendering out some visual effects as "quickies" or, at least, not quite as "finished" as they ought to be. The advantage to this is that we're able to edit them in and then figure out what they need to do in order to be better. Better is better.
And I have to score the movie too. I'm er... working on that. I wish I just happened to be a virtuoso violin player.

Bowed Tailpiece

Of the many things I have to do this month, feel free to include scoring our new movie Prometheus Trap. Basically the sound we're going for here is Penderecki c.1962.
One of the sounds I'm looking for is the sound of a violin's tailpiece being bowed.

As far as I can tell, exactly one sound library has any "bowed tailpiece" sounds and that's the Sonivox String Collection. But that's a thousand dollars. And actually it just has cello and bass bowed tailpiece sounds although that's probably OK.
The other option I thought of was to get a cheap student violin and bow the bridge myself. Problem is I'm not a violin player and I bet the resonance on a student violin actually does suck to a degree which makes every sound (including "effects" sounds) from the violin just sorta stink.
There's another library called "Violence" (get it?) which has a bunch of violin effects but I don't know if that will do for me what I desire.

Roscoe Sees Self

Roscoe is one of two cats staying in my apartment for a couple days. I believe Roscoe has already done a sweep of things up in high places and made sure they're earthquake-proof by smacking everything not locked down onto the floor.

Notice convenient bell-ringer on back of animal.

Roscoe decided to stare into the mirror. He's sitting on the "Pandora's box".

Roscomatique

Here I am with a cat named Roscoe. Moments before Roscoe had been placidly in my arms. Just as the picture was snapped, Roscoe decided to be everywhere. This is me avoiding the pointy parts of the otherwise very soft and loving little kitty.

2001 2012 version

This re-cut trailer for 2001 is just awesome.

My Dad found it http://www.howtogeek.com/120084/2001-a-space-odyssey-as-a-2012-movie-trailer-video.

Massive Conversation

My sister insists these two cats, Pippin and Niki fight like cats and... well... cats.

I don't see it myself.

I have a Tumblr because, well, I do.
John Scalzi just straight-up admits to being a communist. Or at least someone who thinks things like public education and health care are good.
Same thing.

The Riches

I licensed some of my Prague Spring records to Getty Images. I just got a big ol' check for the last two years for $44.23.
See? Because the money is in publishing.
Which I suppose is true because the only money I've ever made in music was the occasional small check from BMI and Getty.
Thing about Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is that you'd think it would be an "easy listening" MOR record -- you know, just from most of the vocals on it and the sort of "laid back" feel of the bulk of the record. But the fact is that the band just cooks. 
This is a down-tempo tune yet listen to the rhythm section when they kick in. The are rocking out.

Things We Learned

So. Things we learned.
Andrew: "I can persuade you guys to do things but I can't convince you."
Ethan: "That's very astute, actually."
  I've been listening to rock versions of Also Sprach Zarathustra to the point where I forgot whether those opening fifths were each one measure or two. Answer: one.

And the Winner Is

We used 99 Designs to make a new logo for Pandora Machine. We got a whole pile of entries.

3. We liked this design. But we didn't like it enough. However the designer offered to sell the design to us for a significant discount after the contest so we went and bought it. It might be too much like a cruise line.

2. This design by W cent has many things going for it. We awarded it a "2nd place" win just because there are elements in it which are very nice. I was afraid that I was prejudiced toward the image because it's clearly a Waterhouse Pandora, which amuses me. 

1. And the winner was from dieslgl. We like how active this design is and how well it will reduce into a little "bug" on the back of a DVD.