Barnson.org

It’s pointless, but so am I: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1770138

(Safe for work, requires audio)

I may need to find a new way to work(ugh) The safety that i have felt against the new fine laws in VA. seems to be quickly coming to an end…

A judge has thrown out Virginia’s odious new speeding fines on equal protection grounds—the fines only apply to motorists with Virginia license plates, not motorists from other states passing through or visiting. The fines, you may remember, range from $1,000 to $3,000, and can be applied for as minor an infraction as an improper signal, or driving 15 mph over the speed limit.

Typically, House of Delegates Speaker William Howell and Gov. Tim Kaine have responded to the ruling and to mounting public criticism by promising to address the fines in the next legislative session. Unfortunately, both have said they don’t plan to revoke the fines or to make them more reasonable, only to apply them to all drivers, not just Virginians. Meaning they plan to address the public outrage by applying the fines to more people, not fewer.

Also on topic, Tim Carney explained in the D.C. Examiner this week the role private developers have played in pushing the fines into law.

Meanwhile, despite the backlash, the man most responsible for the fines and who probably stands to benefit from them more than any other individual—Del. David Albo—has no opponent in the November election.

Supporters of the measure will use the Minneapolis bridge tragedy to explain why the fines are needed to shore up Virginia’s infrastructure. The state announced a few days ago that 400 of its bridges aren’t up to snuff.

Just in case you are wondering what your computer does while you are away:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvdkuyp/flash/see.htm

(Note: sound effects, safe for work, but noisy.)

So.. I sent my CD to XM. They liked it! They really liked “Presidentialized” (my geek-rap social commentary)! So its going out over the XM airwaves NATIONALLY! And YOU can listen (even w/o XM)!

So…

Its going to be on XMU (which plays unsigned bands) on the RADAR report which is on at10pm ET. (Adjust for your timezones). Sometime during the show, you’ll hear my fun little ditty! (The show repeats every Friday at 2pm ET and Every Saturday at 6am ET)

It will be on XM channel 43 Direct TV channel 831

or..

you can listen online for FREE! here’s what they sent me..

“If you don’t have XM you can listen online with A FREE ACCOUNT simply go to http://xmro.xmradio.com and use the following code: XMB4MD

The free account is for 14 days, so you should tell your fans about that as well. Tell all your fans to tune in on Thursday night to hear you on the show! If they sign up today, they can listen all weekend for free with no credit cards. All you need is an email address. ”

FINALLY.. The CD is for sale now at CDBaby if you don’t have a copy, and you can preview every track there http://cdbaby.com/cd/justintimpane

AND- I’ve changed my myspace profile to include full verisons of some songs, (including Presidentialized) , and the library is growing.. www.myspace.com/justintimpane

but mostly.. LISTEN TO XM!!

Woo hoo!

http://www.abc4.com/mediacenter/local.aspx?videoid=72570

John Voight discusses the upcoming movie September Dawn. I’m very interested in seeing this movie, though I have heard it’s simplistic in its portrayal of the motivations of the organizations and individuals installed. And I’ve been in WAY too many online debates regarding the culpability of certain individuals in the tragedy. I must remember the wisdom of arguing on the Internet…

Well, they figured out how to make invisibility cloaks (though it’s a long way off) in theory… now they turned their minds to levitation, and solved that, too. How long did we go from E=MC^2 to the atomic bomb? Yeah, about that long from practical levitation for very small devices.

(Yes, I understand the Casmir effect has a range in tens of nanometers. Still doesn’t mean it’s not cool though.)

One thing that gets very, very interesting to me is the presence of “virtual particles”, indicators that Nature relies on evolution to figure out the interaction of matter at even the most basic level. Very cool stuff. For a better description of the process involved, see http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/levitation.html .

All of you who wasted way too much time playing first-person shooters on your PC? Your Time Has Come. Yep, you can now go to Iraq and hunt down real-life enemies on an LCD screen, controlling a robotic soldiers which can be equipped with a wide variety of weapons. Of course, there are only 3 in service in this capacity right now, and I bet the support is a pain (short runtime from the batteries, recharge time, slow deployment, etc.).

I think there’s an ethical question here, though. One of the proposed uses — as demonstrated in the video — is hunting down a sniper. When you can deliver pinpoint-precision bursts of fire at 300 yards and feel removed from the act of killing by a video screen, I wonder how that affects how easy it is to kill? I feel no compunction at mowing down virtual opponents in video games. Would this be similar?

And then there are the technical issues. If the enemy can figure out what frequency you are using, it’s trivial to create a RF jammer with a range larger than 1000 yards. Of course, your average terrorist isn’t going to have one lying around his home and they take some time to make. That said, I’ve made one accidentally using an electric guitar and a malfunctioning distortion pedal. It was cool broadcasting my guitar through my radio 🙂

Obviously, they will be using some sort of encryption with key negotiation to prevent a takeover of the machine. Heck, I use that sort of technology when flying my model airplanes; the only way to “take over” my plane from me is to gain physical access to it, put a jumper on a pair of pins on the receive, and use a sequence to bind it to a new transmitter. I’ve seen enough R/C aircraft go down, though, to think that we need to be pretty cautious.

Pete Dunn is doing a retrospective this week on his trip down the Colorado River. He’s working so hard that I don’t want to. Here are the first few chapters:

• Pete Gets the Invitation
• Might Kill Him
• On His Way
• The Return of the King…. er, Dude
• It’s Hot. It’s so dang hot I could cook in my shorts… a little crotch-pot cookin’.
• The Servant waits while the Master baits
• Gearhead gearing up
• Hey, it’s Eddie Vedder on a boat with some actor!

Hope you enjoy. I know I have, and he still has more to come!

As you may know, I’ve moved to a “new” (to me) home in Riverton, Utah. I now have at my disposal a 1000 square foot garage. Well, I’ll have it once I clean all the crap out of it, that is. We’re storing a ton of stuff out there, and I just can’t navigate the darn thing without tripping at the moment. Anyway, I want to build a new home recording studio in my huge garage, inexpensively, while preserving space for usual garage-ey things like fixing cars, building model airplanes, and the average noisy or smelly stuff.

I’ve made do for the past fifteen years in very tiny shared spaces where I couldn’t make much noise after hours. I couldn’t record without background noise and distractions during the day. This really limited my opportunities to record voice and other live instruments, so I restricted myself mostly to synthesizers and line-in guitar feeds. I did after-hours vocals on recordings, but my shouting in the basement aroused the ire and questions of my children more than once.

I now have the opportunity to build myself a great studio, within a rather limited budget of course. The garage is a huge two-story affair. The previous previous previous owner (yes, I meant to say that thrice) helpfully built a stable inside, which was then closed off by the next owner for storage. This stable is approximately a 10×10 room.

I like the possibilities. It’s indoors, I won’t disturb my family or my neighbors if I’m noisy (though playing the drums at 3AM, even on an acre of land, might elicit some unhappy phone calls), and I can start small using what’s already there without breaking the bank.

Here’s the preliminary to-do list. Ultimately, my goal is to have a professional-looking studio back there, a few hundred dollars at a time.

1. Get a handle on indoor and outdoor lighting. Right now, I have just a single 100W lamp illuminating that space. It’s very, very dark at night! I’d like to have some floodlights inside (since it’s a working space anyway for other projects), lighting outside at the doors, a very electrically-quiet lighting setup inside the stable (probably just an incandescent lamp or two and a portable light for music stands), and a few homey lamps and stuff around near the couch outside the booth for hanging out when the weather is nice.
2. Figure out heating/cooling for the stable. I already own a window air conditioner which would be perfect for this small space (it will be turned off while recording, of course), and a small space heater would do for the other times of year.
3. Insulate the stable. Insulating the entire garage would be way cost-ineffective right now. Which, of course, means mid-winter hanging-out in the larger garage is out of the question for the time being, but the booth itself will be the right temperature regardless of the time of year.
4. Do some modest soundproofing for low-frequency sounds. I think what I can do in this case is hang a second wall of sheetrock inside the isolation booth to absorb more of the low-frequency vibrations from drumkits. If you have suggestions for getting a 60-70dB reduction immediately outside the room, I’m all ears! The key for low-frequency vibration absorption is just lots and lots of mass… concrete walls would be ideal.
5. Figure out an engineer’s window into the sound booth. I think it should be double-paned with dead space, and there are schematics online for several options.
6. Outfit the engineer’s area with a couch, old stand-up style arcade system, old throw rugs, and everything else to make it as comfortable as possible for people to hang out while others are recording in the sound booth. Or just hanging out, period. I have lots of spare rugs, chairs, throw pillows, and other accessories from combining two households.
7. Build a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and figure out the wiring into the sound booth so that I can do most of my work from inside that heated/cooled space. That’s a topic for another blog post, but I want it to run Linux with Audacity/Ardour/JAMin rather than keep treading the Cakewalk Sonar upgrade bandwagon… and many of the commercial plugins work fine with Audacity, which means some of my investment there won’t be lost. I also want a dedicated workstation because using a family system that gets upgraded regularly results in a system that’s broken for audio work more than half of the time.
8. Build storage cabinets for the audio gear. I have lots of spare microphones and cables I won’t be using all the time.
9. Build a KILLER monitoring system. Just make it absolutely beautiful to listen to.
10. Work on improving the rest of the garage to make a comfortable all-weather working space.
11. A toilet. This is low priority, I can just use the one in the house, but would be a nice addition to the working space.

So what else would I need for a really nice budget studio in a brand-new space? Once I have a dedicated location to do my recording, where kids won’t get into it and I won’t have to fight to get a quiet space alone, I’ll be able to finally do as much recording as I like.

Addendum: I realized I was probably going to get a number of questions regarding my move from Windows XP and Cakewalk Sonar to Linux and Ardour. The simple fact is, the stuff works now and is much more flexible and stable than the Windows alternatives. The downside is, you have a smaller hardware compatibility list, so you can’t just buy random hardware X and expect it to do the job… you have to research first and choose one that’s supported. Low-latency audio has been around in Linux for years, and there are enough musicians using it on a regular basis for it to be a serious choice for the semi-professional musician.

It’s really not about the money. I won’t talk about how much money I’ve spent on audio recording stuff over the years because it’s depressing 🙂 It’s really about having a reliable, stable, flexible system that will get the job done competently. After losing a week of audio work last year due to a Windows XP file-handling glitch, I want to be done using it.

Another advantage of Linux is that I want to go 64-bit with a very large memory allotment for this workstation. If I can avoid hitting the hard disk at all for most of the audio streams and samples, I’ve eliminated a huge bottleneck and freed up a lot more CPU cycles which would have been consumed with I/O otherwise. With the extremely cheap cost of RAM, I could go for 16GB of RAM on my DAW when I build it later this year. Most of my existing projects are 16-bit 44.1 or 48KHz, and only occupy perhaps 2-10GB total for a given project. Moving to 24-bit at twice the sample rate means an increase to 6-30GB per project.

Do you guys have an estate plan set up in the event both you and your spouse were simultaneously fatalized? From something like a plane crash? Or car accident? Or, perhaps, coming across a bear in the woods?

Let’s play an imaginary game we’ll call: You’re Walking Along A Trail In Alaska When You Come Across A Bear. Pretend you’re standing in the middle of a hiking trail in the woods. A pretty blue sky and white glaciers melt around you. The sounds of the wind in the pine trees and the burbling of a meltwater creek mix sweetly nearby. You are happily trekking along, making the proper amount of noise with Wife Unit, in the half-joking spirit of warning bears of your presence. You don’t really think you’ll meet up with a bear, but there’s been enough fearmongering delivered aboard the cruise ship that you’re not taking any chances. Just then, in the midst of your assured state of we-may-be-puny-humans-but-we-have-guns confidence, a bear happens to emerge from the woods and cross your path.

Now, prior to this instance, I did attend on the cruise ship two environmentalist presentations on the varieties of bears. There of lots of bear types. Some big, some small. The bear that came out of the woods definitely wasn’t one of the largest bears on the planet. But let me just write you that at the moment of first contact the diminutive brown bear was playing the lead role of Ursa Very F*****g Major.

The picture is not doctored in any way. That’s how close we were to Mr. Kill The Tourist Bear.

EDIT by matthew: Created smaller image.