Month: February 2006

Too good not to blog it: A real-life Transformer!

For those of us in the greater DC-area, here’s to hoping that you have the good fortune of easy shoveling. And for those of you formerly from the DC area, now residing in more snow-friendly environments, not much has changed about how the nation’s capital experiences a snow event. Yep, it was a collective freak-out.

Officially, here at the homestead in greater Silver Spring, we were more in the 15″ range, with several very large boughs on the pine tree down in the backyard.

But no power outages. And a successful first outing with both kids in the sled for the first time. So, a good time being had by all here. Anyone else care to report?

And since you might be intersted, here’s what Wikipedia reports about thundersnow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundersnow.

Now, my lovely teacher-wife gets to start the day-long vigil: will school get cancelled or delayed tomorrow? Stay tuned.

I got sick of wearing earplugs when I sleep during the day. I mean, for what they are, they’re OK, but after 4-5 hours, they start to ache inside my ears, and inevitably I pull them out in my sleep.

Of course, I usually sleep like a rock the first 4-5 hours of my sleep. It’s during hour 5-8 that I’m easily interrupted, and if I get much less then 7 hours in a night, I’m grumpy and stuff. Closing doors doesn’t work because I’ve got noisy kids and whatnot.

I started to price out noise machines as an alternative. Oy, veh! $100-$200 for most of these things! And really all they are is a glorified cheap-o radio with a little playback chip loaded with some loop-able samples. I thought, “I can do better than that!”

So after a great deal of monkeying arouund the other day, I came up with this: a relatively short, not-too-cyclical brown, white, and rain-noise combined loop which seems to do an excellent job at masking most common household sounds. I turn on my laptop, set it beside my bed, and turn on Winamp to loop it. For those not used to Winamp, there’s a little button to the right of the “shuffle” button which turns on looping.

Oh, but one tweak to Winamp to make it loop smoothly (without this, there’s a gap as it loops):

Go to Options:Preferences Plug-ins:Output Pick “DirectSound Output” Click “Configure” button Go to “Buffering” tab Drag “Buffer-ahead on track change” to some reasonable value. I set mine to 500ms. Restart Winamp.

Then the playback is perfect on the noise loop 🙂 No glitches.

I’m thinking of doing some with thunder, louder rain noises, nature sounds, and such. I can’t stand actually having music looping going when I’m asleep, though, as I tend to concentrate on the music and have trouble sleeping.

Here’s the loop: noise_loop1

Let me know if you could use something different. A little time spent with Cakewalk Sonar goes a long way 🙂

(Keywords I was looking for in a product that would do it before I invented my little do-it-yourself solution: sound masking, noise generator, white noise, brown noise, pink noise, rainfall, etc.)

I just realized that basically what I’ve done is turn my $1600 laptop into a $140 noise box. Yay me!

Hopefully, this blog won’t cause the above title to actually accur, but I found this amusing article on Islam and the big cartoon fiasco.

However, if Al Quaida is watching, barnson.org is originated in UTAH, not Maryland! 😉

My $.02 Weed

So I finally broke down and created a Myspace page.

Myspace is a website that you make a personal page on, and so do a lot of others, and then, supposedly people find each other and keep in touch there. I did it because I heard its a good way to network.

Anyhow, It was a fun experiment.. I made two, a Personal one and a music one.. http://www.myspace.com/justintimpane http://www.myspace.com/timpanemusic

What was interesting was that I did indeed find quite a few people I know there. You can search by school and by year – its pretty cool and should provide hours of pointless distraction while I should be preparing for the baby.

Anyone here have a page on Myspace?

So I’m thinking it might be kind of fun to do a twenty-minute Podcast with somebody else on barnson.org. Topic TBD, but be ready with some jokes 🙂

Anybody game? I could set up a Teamspeak server and probably wire a telephone to a sound system so we could interview some telephone “guest”. Could be fun. Takers?

I ran across another interesting tidbit: it’s possible to cook an egg in just three minutes using two cell phones.

My wife and I both have phones, and I work nights and try to keep my schedule (mostly) on the weekends.

New science project for late at night! Yeah!

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: I think my career is ruined!

You know, I came to a bit of a revelation these past couple of weeks. That is that I only seem to be able to juggle a very, very limited set of hobbies. When I look at my time usage, I currently seem to spend my limited free time either online in various forums, working on my planes, or watching Buffy and Angel episodes on DVD with my wife. Exercise has flown out the window, along with composing music, playing City of Heroes (unsubbed this week), Dance Dance Revolution, and others.

Not that I don’t think I can have many hobbies and enjoy them. I just can’t seem to do them all at the same time!

What do you do to manage your time?

Well, its funny how quick you get old.

Today is my ninth wedding anniversary, and I’ve been doing some reflecting on the past and the future. Its weird being almost 30, married for just under a decade and having a baby on the way.

Despite the differences, I still feel like the 16 year old playing piano in a dark practice room. I still look close enough to me that people would still recognize me. I still feel like me..

But the me has changed. We’re cashing out some stock like we did a year ago, but instead of buying a vacation, we’re creating a college fund for the baby. Instead of going out for pizza, its a “nice” italian place, instead of drama, its peace. Some of the changes are good, but its all – well – older.

I think of what the 10th anniversary will be like. We’ll wake up, change the baby, try to get someone to watch the baby for a couple of hours.. but it will neve rbe just an “us” day. And thats fine. I cant wait to meet my kid, but I have just evolved into the last generation when I was so used to being the next.

That being said, its cool to have been married so happily for Nine years.. its cool to have a wife who is as ultra-rad as mine is, and despite my soul searching, I never forget how lucky I am.