Author: matthew

What’s on your Pandora? Here’s mine.

Let’s see… on my list: * Breaking Benjamin. * 80’s Dance Parties. When you just didn’t get enough of “The Wedding Singer”. * Barry White Radio. Bow-chicka-bow-wow. But I think Barry may be lost on anyone younger than 30… * BT Radio. Sweet techno tunes. * Celtic Woman Radio. White folks singing about white women stuff in the Old Country. * Club / Dance. Black folks rapping about black people stuff in the city. * Daughtry Radio. When you just don’t have enough Nickelback clones in your rotation. * Dream Theater Radio. When 7/8 time just isn’t cool enough to listen to anymore. * Enya Radio. Yeah. I’m a wuss. * Hot Chocolate Radio. See Barry White Radio. * Jim Brickman Radio. Relaxing piano tunes. A bizarre amount of Mormon hymns played on a piano show up on this station for some reason. * John Mayer Radio (which has a LOT of crossover to Michael Buble radio for some reason…) * Linkin Park Radio. In The End, When They Come For Me, The Fallout from What I’ve Done is Burning In The Skies. * Lord of the Rings Radio (when I want some epic orchestral soundtracks!) * The Rippingtons Radio (Weather Channel Music. Don’t ask.) * Salsa Radio. Andale! * The Stars And Stripes Forever Radio. I use this once a year: at my club’s annual model airplane show. * Techno. Because “thumpa-thumpa” music with few or repetitive lyrics makes it easier for me to think. * Today’s Hits Radio. Top 40.

Hope that gives you some variety!

Last night I went to the Utah Helicopter Association meeting in American Fork at the Rec Center. I often miss the meeting, but went this month because I’ve spent some time revamping the Utah Helicopter Association Web Site. The new site sports easy-to-use photo galleries into which members of the club can upload photos, a public forum for anyone (though moderated so it stays on-topic), and a club calendar that — again — any member of the club can update.

I’ve done a lot of work on RC club web sites over the years, and a self-managing site seems to be the future. I try to set it up so that the officers have effective “admin” privileges over the whole site — they can create or delete any content — but that as the webmaster I’m the only one who can modify the layout, code, and modules. This division of labor REALLY helps. It allows me to focus on what I’m really good at: back-end systems integration, database management, and systems administration. The members and officers can handle keeping the content on the site up-to-date as long as I have a few computer-savvy people willing to post updates here and there.

This really takes the workload off a webmaster. If I spend all of my spare time updating content on the site, burnout sets in really quickly. If, on the other hand, I only have to pay attention to FUNCTIONALITY of the site, and other people step in to post blogs, forums, calendars, photos, etc. it’s a HUGE weight off my shoulders. The only really painful thing has been that I’ve had to learn some User Interface things… it turns out that nobody wants to design the layout of the site either, so as the webmaster that really gets to be my job.

It’s been very informational, anyway. With the aid of The Gimp, I can throw up a fairly amateur-looking web site with pro features in a few hours. Which for a Radio Control club is just about the right balance; it doesn’t need to look professional. But if I wanted to make a business out of this, I’d definitely need to improve my graphic design skills. That’s part of the package customers expect: a slick-looking site with professional usability features. And typically content forwarded from their old site, too.

As far as the diet & exercise program goes? Well, had some donuts at last night and this morning. Really need to make sure I’m totally on the wagon. This week has been much more like “start tracking your weight again and eat a tiny bit better” than truly back on my eating plan. And I need to do more lifting than just weighing the bar. On the plus side, I’m building some better habits: stepping on the scale every day, tracking every morsel that goes into my mouth, and thinking about that scale weight whenever I put something down my gullet. On the minus side, I haven’t exercised the restraint necessary to drop the weight yet, and when I look at the nutrient ratios I am realizing that my typical eating plan SUCKS compared to where I need to be to get lean again.

So here I am at Day 3 of my current fat-loss saga. Plus factors: just changing my eating habits already deducted about four pounds from my frame. Minus side: it’s mostly four pounds of “lean” according to my fat-monitoring scale. Which means it’s glycogen storage in my muscles & liver. But hey, at least I’m going from super-saturating my body to slightly depriving it, which is good news for insulin resistance among other things.

Current weight: 246.8lbs, 30.8% body fat.

Got my account updated over at http://www.bodybuildingforum.ie so that I’m a full moderator now. Which is pretty cool, because spam was becoming pretty nasty over there!

Not a lot of spare time today, as I have a very busy day at work, but I made a goal to myself to update every day. So here I am.

So last night my family & I went to see “Megamind” at the local dollar theater together. With a total of 6 in our family, it’s really the only way to go out to a movie affordably. The only cheap theater in our part of the valley is Cinemark Sandy Movies 9. Like most such theaters, they only get the movies very late in the theatrical run. Sometimes they get them after they’ve already come out on video! But there is definitely something about seeing the movie on a big-screen outside the home that is a special experience that the kids remember.

I weighed the pros and cons of the theater:

Pros: * Cheap! From $0.75 apiece for a group of 3 or more on a Monday night or $1.00 for the first matinee of the day, up to $3.50 or so on a weekend night for a 3D feature. * Big screens. * The 3D glasses are the disposable type that are brand-new in sanitary bags, rather than the nasty re-used covered-in-popcorn-grease types used at some other local theaters.

Cons: * Usually out on video by the time it shows up in the dollar theater. * The parking lot layout is terrible. * The sound is mediocre. * The seats are pretty bad. * The bathrooms are small, and the urinals are packed very closely together without privacy partitions… and are all kid-height. * More & longer previews than other local theaters. * Shows sell out quickly, and unless you buy online (paying an extra $1 per seat), you’re stuck waiting in line outside to get a ticket. * Their online listings with Flixster and other services only show up on weekends. * Trying to get showtimes from their FANDANGO-based telephone number is an exercise in listening through advertisement after advertisement while getting nowhere.

That said… the pros outweigh the cons for a big family outing!

This is Day 2 of my ongoing weight-loss efforts. I’ve updated my Google Spreadsheet with today’s weigh-in. No real change from yesterday, but I also cheated in the evening and ate some candy at the theater. It will be neat to watch the trends fall out of the spreadsheet as I keep updating my daily weight & fat percentage.

This morning, I created a recipe on livestrong.com for “glop”, a popular breakfast at my house featuring lots of cinnamony goodness. Turns out a serving is just under 300 calories, has a decent amount of protein, and is tasty to boot. Who knew something so great-tasting could actually be reasonably healthful?

Like many people, I set New Years Resolutions this year. One of my primary ones is to lose the weight I’ve put on since August of 2009.

Those who’ve been around a while know that for about two years (2007-2009) I was really into health & fitness. I worked out at the gym every day, lost about thirty pounds, and felt great. Unfortunately, January through August of 2009 I lived through the most painful time ever in my life, and it became increasingly difficult to motivate myself to keep working out and staying healthy in the face of my overwhelming depression. By September, I’d fallen off the wagon completely, and had actually developed an aversion to the gym.

I stand today having gained all that weight back, plus a bit more.

So this morning I’m starting over. Every morning I’m taking photos, with the goal of creating a one-year composite video of my transformation. I’m also taking daily measurements, and critical to my goal is to record every bite of food I eat, even on my planned days off.

I know from experience that in one year I can drop a lot of weight. I can also put on a lot of muscle. I have the gym equipment in the basement that I picked up last year — thus avoiding the gym aversion — and I’m pretending I’m a weightlifting newbie again: just the bar, please, to start off, and I’ll work my way up from there.

I have created a Google Spreadsheet to track my macro-nutrients, weight, and fat percentages. It’s very helpful to me to have this kind of exacting statistics-tracking; it keeps me motivated.

I found last time that following the programs from Musclehack.com | The Home of Muscle Growth helped me a lot. Mark has several sensible, carbohydrate-restricted eating programs and a muscle-building program that helped me pack on fifteen pounds of muscle in a pretty short time last time around. I’ll be giving that a try again.

Wish me luck!

(I’m working on making the photos easy to post. Gotta do a few tweaks to the web site.)

People often wonder “why should I record a signal as loudly as possible when it risks clipping above 0dB?” Here’s your answer. It all boils down to RESOLUTION, and that’s why 24-bit recording — and soon, IMHO, 32-bit recording and even higher — are all the rage. A friend who is a professional storyteller is trying to engineer his own CD. He started out with GarageBand. It’s an excellent tool for general-purpose dorking around on a Mac, particularly if you’re just getting started. But if you really want excellent voice or other audio recording, not just MIDI stuff, you have to step into the realm of built-for-purpose audio tools. Pro Tools and others are great, but at $250 and up they are not in everybody’s budget.

To start with, I think Audacity might be right up your alley. Free and I think you can run standard plugins with it. The only real thing you need is to monitor for clipping. Talk at your maximum volume into the mic, then adjust your gain on the mic until the clipping monitor goes off. Clear the red clipping light in Audacity, and drop the gain just a little bit. Keep at it until at your maximum speaking voice volume doesn’t trip the clipping light on the track monitor.

You’re a bit of a geek, so I’ll explain the science behind why you want to do this. On an analog tape, you want to use as much of the tape as possible with your voice signal. Any bit of the tape that isn’t used by the waveform is background hiss.

Similarly, you only have 16 or maybe 24 bits of amplitude resolution in the digital realm. The waveform’s sampling rate is the resolution of the horizontal axis of the waveform (with total length of your piece as the total length of that X axis), while the bits are the vertical Y-axis. You want to use as many bits as possible to store amplitude data. When your waveform is too “quiet” (not as tall as it could be), you’re sacrificing thousands or millions of bits to storing silence above the top and below the bottom of the waveform. And if you apply a compressor or hard limiter, you’re “stretching” the waveform vertically, and your resolution doesn’t actually change. Just the volume.

So that means that you lose volume resolution, which with spoken works mainly affects the attack and decay of your voice. It’s part of why CDs sound so “cold” to many people (including me): they lose the high end due to sampling error (44.1KHz sampling rate), and they lose volume distinction (attack and decay are where the human ear can notice it) because there are only 65,536 distinct levels of volume in the waveform. 24-bit gives you over 16 million distinct levels. So if you record a waveform like the sample you showed me earlier that uses perhaps 1/20th of the dynamic range available, you still have as much dynamic range as you would recording in 16-bit in the first place.

Which most people will never notice.

But why put yourself in that situation when it’s so easy to do it right in the first place?

Ultimately, “how it sounds” is most important. And for many types of music where the attack and decay of sounds are not a huge deal, the loss of amplitude resolution recording the track “quietly” or with a low level of resolution isn’t that big a deal. 16 bits is OK for loud rock music, for instance.

But in my opinion, the human voice is one that is incredibly hard to reproduce accurately. Humans are attuned to the sounds of voices, just as we are to people’s faces. We already fight the battle of telling a story through a loudspeaker. A round, vibrating paper plate in a cabinet does not accurately simulate air passing over vocal folds vibrating chest and nasal cavities. Humans can clearly hear the difference between someone speaking near us and a recording of someone speaking near us. Higher sample rates and bit rates take us only so far; a vibrating plate is what captures the sound of the voice anyway. The loss of attack and decay resolution by recording a track “too quietly” just compounds this issue.

Want to know why I won’t vote Constitution party? Well, I believe our nation is a grand experiment in a secular democracy: a Republic founded upon Enlightenment principles. Ours was the first Western nation to believe — and embody in its founding documents — that the power of government springs from the consent of the governed, not from God or earthly institutions claiming to speak for God.

Here’s the preamble to the 2010 Constitution Party Platform:

The Constitution Party gratefully acknowledges the blessing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as Creator, Preserver and Ruler of the Universe and of these United States. We hereby appeal to Him for mercy, aid, comfort, guidance and the protection of His Providence as we work to restore and preserve these United States.

This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been and are afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.

The Constitution of these United States provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” The Constitution Party supports the original intent of this language. Therefore, the Constitution Party calls on all those who love liberty and value their inherent rights to join with us in the pursuit of these goals and in the restoration of these founding principles.

The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens. In such a Republic all Life, Liberty and Property are protected because law rules.

It’s hard to figure out where to start. So I’ll leave it there. What room is there for a non-Christian under a system ruled by the Constitution Party? I’m not an equal partner. I’m a person of some “other” faith granted “asylum” in the land of my birth.

No thanks. Go jump in a lake, Constitution Party. You are on my “Never voting for any of your candidates, EVER” list.

My problem with organized religion is illustrated by a small slice of a speech being given by some dude with an accent on the TV in Utah right now. He used an urban legend as if it were truth to prove a doctrinal point. Religions are based on legends formed from half-truths and inaccurate memories accepted as fact and given a veneer of respectability by the passage of time.

The specific legend he referenced is the “Nasa Space Pen” legend, in an attempt to recommend that people simplify their lives: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp . The “simple” solution of using a pencil results in sharp pi…eces of conductive graphite floating around the cabin getting into astronaut eyes, nose, ears, as well as the spacecraft’s electrical circuitry. Additionally, a pencil is very flammable in a 100% oxygen atmosphere which is a profound safety hazard… which is the reason astronauts today don’t use them.

Meanwhile, the “space pen” — research paid for by a capitalist company, not the government — is safe, effective, non-flammable, and a near-perfect solution to the problem of writing in space. But it is a very complicated writing instrument, used for its safety and versatility over the hazardous but “simple” pencil. And one in use by all astronauts everywhere because it does the job without a safety hazard.

I understand the desire to encourage people to simplify their lives. I agree with the sentiment. But using falsehoods to prove a point poisons the well of one’s entire store of wisdom.

So it turns out that the worst environmental disaster in US history — the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent spill — may be, in part, due to Microsoft Windows systems crashing. Now, I’m not going to straight-up blame Windows for this. Traditionally, BSODs (Blue Screens Of Death) are caused by malfunctioning drivers more than a malfunctioning operating system. But at the same time, to learn that the entire fleet routinely disables these Windows systems due to false-positive alerts and crashes is very, very concerning. Since when is Windows the preferred platform for mission-critical, life-saving, and possibly avoiding-the-extermination-of-all-humanity purposes?

Maybe I’m just being hyperbolic here, but give that massive methane explosions have repeatedly killed almost all life on earth before, just because it’s a 1-in-55-million chance I wish the engineers writing the software for the failsafe alarms had done a more thorough job.

Humanity killed by bad programming practices.

That would be a bad day.