Category: tech

The problem with burritos is the non-homogenized nature of the ingredients. You inevitably end up with uniform strata of the varied component parts. This effect is particularly bad when the layers are arranged vertically down the length of the tortilla-tube. Horizontal layers aren’t as bad, as you still stand a fair chance of getting a wee taste of the sum parts in a single chomp (the likelihood of which varies as an inversely proportional relation to the diameter of the burrito). Vertical layers, however, are wholly unacceptable. Taco Bell’s 7-Layer Burrito is almost always layered vertically. This means I may go several bites and taste nothing but tortilla and sour cream, or tortilla and refried beans. It’s just not good. I would like to open a burrito joint where the would-be burrito eater chooses their ingredients, all of which are then placed into a rock-tumbler for thirty seconds before being emptied back into the tortilla and rolled up for consumption. I could call it La Casa del Burrito Uniformemente Distribuida, or something equally catchy.

I’m going to talk music now, you can skip ahead four paragraphs if you’d like.

Several times over the years, I’ve read about Brian Wilson’s “lost” masterpiece – SMiLE. Conceived as a follow-up to the much-acclaimed Pet Sounds album, it was never properly released back in the day. Over time, I’ve read so much about the legendary album, the mystery and tragedy and brilliance of the whole affair. A few years back, I downloaded what was said to be the “definitive” bootleg assemblage of the album, and wasn’t terribly impressed. Then again, I really didn’t give it much of a fighting chance. See, I’ve never been a Beach Boys fan. Like any good music-lover, I can appreciate the songwriting, masterful harmonies, and clever arrangements… I guess I’m just not a “surf music” fan (unless we’re talking Ventures and Dick Dale type guitar stuff). Anyway, I shelved the Smile bootleg fairly quickly and didn’t really revisit it.

Then this year, Brian Wilson re-recorded, or re-assembled, or re0something’d the entire project. Flowery praise flowed in heaps from the critic-collective: finally the masterpiece as Mr. Wilson and Mr. Parks had intended it, as it would have been had he not had a complete breakdown back in ’67. Some even dared to compare to the unequivocal best album of all time, the more swoon-prone of the lot even going so far as to say SMiLE may in fact best said sergeant and his band.

The album was entirely “rebuilt”, largely by recreating existing bootleg versions of his original tapes (which he lost long ago), with re-recorded vocals. That alone is interesting to me, since it’s then fair to say that had not the criminal bootleggers been so diligent in stealing and preserving every snippet of the original tapes – Mr. Wilson may have not been able to complete this project. That’s another thing altogether though, but I guess we know where I stand on archival music (bootleg or no).

Anyway, the point of this what-was-to-be single-paragraph discussion of SMiLE is simply to say: now I know what all the fuss was about. Listening to this recent release, it’s clear this album is amazing. Re-recorded or not… it’s an outstanding effort, complex and lighthearted. It makes me want to bust out that old bootleg version, and hear it as it would’ve sounded back then – when Brian’s voice was still 24 years old and not all funky-slurry sounding like it is now. But still, as a mind-bendingly time-stretched effort, conceived in the halcyon days of the summer of love, and finally recorded in 2004, it manages to triumph despite the odds. Four paragraphs again where there was to be one… it’s just the topic of music… close to my heart. And if you could only hear “Surf’s Up” from this album… you’d know why. Thanks for listening.

OK, I’m done talking music. Back to the other-kinda-stuff talk.

Tonight I finished up digitizing the prank phone calls for the “box set” project. I have a few more random cassettes to encode, but for the most part it’s done. Now I have to split the 45min-long WAVs into individual tracks… which will be tedious. The participating members of the prank call collective and I hashed out details for the eventual production of the long-planned box set. We’re going all out: pro silkscreened CDs, a real “box” of slick glossy cardboard, professional graphics and production, and a collection of period-piece photos and mementos included in the extensive “liner notes.” We’ll each be contributing to a “background” writeup on the calls and music, so when the thing’s done it’ll look like it came off the shelf at Best Buy (at least, that’s the pipe dream right now). Why, you ask, when we’ll only make perhaps 5 or 10 copies? Because to us, the material is worth of the care. Dumb as it may be, I love those tapes… and have always wanted to give them a proper place in my music collection.

Also tonight, I watched bits and pieces of Control Room, a documentary that follows the Al Jazeera and their coverage of the war in Iraq. The main point of the film is to focus on the perception of the war, and the differences in the way different media organizations report things that ultimately effect that perception. From what I saw (I was running back and forth to the back room flipping cassettes over and building a new MAME hard drive for the Pac Man cabinet upgrade project, the latter being something I don’t think I’ve mentioned here yet), the movie looked really interesting. Anyway, a buddy of mine had it at work today so I borrowed it for the 30min it took to rip and burn a copy. Eventually I’ll sit down and watch the whole thing, but definitely check it out if you’re interested in the whole western/eastern viewpoint gig.

Tonight is the Dears show downtown. Glad to see Sacramento pulling a few more good shows of late, I like it a lot better than driving to the city. The last time the Dears were in town, we caught them at a very small club where the audience turnout was absolutely pathetic. A generous estimate would put the entire crowd at about 30 people… so we figured that would be the Dears’ last visit to Sac. For whatever reasons, they are trying their luck again. Hopefully the turnout will be better tonight (Friday), and hopefully they’ll play some stuff of their forthcoming new album (which hasn’t leaked yet… ahem… mp3 pirates… I’m waiting).

Wow, lotta writing today… and you know it’s gonna be a good entry when the 1st sentence is, “The problem with burritos is…” I think it’s time to hit the sack though, 11:30pm here and I’m pretty much hooked on this read-a-few-chapters before bed plan.

Dave out.

Tuesday night and, as promised, I’ll post some pictures of the evening’s goings-on. I did however, fix the images I posted of last night’s thang, making the clicky ones bigger for your viewing pleasure. Nothing exciting mind you, but I gotta stay true to the project. And tonight, the project is good, because I don’t have much to write. So, let’s to it then.

Today I got the new dance pads for the DDR part of the console emulator, so I hooked them up and messed around with Stepmania and DWI. I got pretty decent results, but plan to ask my DDR-freak buddy at work if there are any “tweaks” to getting the pads to register better. It’s not that the steps and beats don’t match up, but there’s a small perception of the timing being just a tad “off.” Oh man, I’m such a terrible nerd… when did I get this bad? Help me… As promised, here are the pictures from this evening. Some descriptions, right-to-left, top-to-bottom: cookies (read below for the full story); me, writing this; testing out the new dance pads; how evening’s here usually end up, with Sharaun asleep on the couch. Yeah, here they go:

In one of the pictures, you can see the cookies Sharaun got mad at me for eating. See, every year, I buy a huge tin of Danish butter cookies from whatever warehouse store I happen to be in. Sharaun hates them, won’t even eat them; I love them, with a glass of milk especially. She always chastises me for buying them, and eating them. So, tonight, when I sat down for an after-dinner cookies and milk dessert – she looked at the three or four “soakers” half-floating in my glass of milk (you sink ’em at the beginning and then get a few extra-soggy treats at the end), and with a level stare called me “disgusting.” Then, her gaze shifted to the enormous cookie-tin itself, and a shocked “Oh my God…” slipped past her lips.

See, that tin, the huge one, is almost empty. Being that she doesn’t eat them, I guess she immediately realized I must be the sole party responsible. She picks up the near-empty tin, turning it around, looking for something. “Three hundred cookies,” she says, glaring at me as if I had eaten 300 babies rather than delicious butter cookies. “Three hundred, David. At four cookies per serving, and 160 calories per serving, that’s like… 12,000 calories.”

In my ears, I hear a steady buzzing, but can’t quite make it out over the loud crunch of yummy butter cookies in my mouth. “You bought that like, last week,” she accuses. “Nuh-uh!,” I retort, “I totally bought these like over a month ago!” The timeline doesn’t really matter, of course, I can’t win. So I just down my last slurp of disintegrated cookie-milk with a smile.

Sitting at my desk today, it came to me that we’ll be aboard a plane bound for the other side of the USA in less than a week. I’m ready. I’m big-time ready. There are a couple things I’d like to do when I go home, aside from the usual family-time and kicking back. I want to try and make my way down to what’s left of Astro, and snap some pictures. I’d like to do the same for Rinker. I think it’d be cool to do “follow-up” stories to a few of my entries… like a “where are they now?” for past post topics.

See how I artfully padded out what is essentially one decent paragraph to create the semblance of a multi-paragraph entry? Yup. Artfully.

Dave out.

I did nothing this weekend, nothing at all. I should have, could have, done lots… clean the garage, mow the lawn, clean the house, etc. But I didn’t. Now it’s Sunday evening and I realize I’ve wasted my days off. How ashamed I am of my laziness.

I did do some “work” on Sunday, but not of the break-a-sweat variety. Sunday afternoon I spent a good deal of time working on plans for my Pac Man cabinet “upgrade.” That’s right, I’m breaking my own cardinal rule and messing with something that’s working fine in an effort to make it work “better.” I’ve always held that it’s a stupid thing to do, make something better when it’s not really bad to begin with – but I have a pretty hefty upgrade planned. I’m going to add a 3rd control panel, with two sets of controls, so that the cabinet can now play horizontal games. Since the original design is true to the old-school cocktail style cabinet, it’s limited to vertical-oriented games. Adding a 3rd panel along the long-side of the cabinet will allow two players to sit side-by-side and play games horizontally on the monitor. Upgrading the cab like this opens up the machine to thousands of new games… two-player side-scrollers, fighter-games, etc.

Must be “video game fever” time for me or something, since I’ve been working on the Pac Man machine and making plans for the future console emulation project I’m planning. The other day I ordered the dance-pads for the Dance Dance Revolution portion of the console emulator, got a good deal on Ebay for two pads. If someone had told me that one day I’d actually enjoy playing Dance Dance Revolution… some silly dance-on-a-pad game, I’d’ve probably laughed at them. That’s no nevermind though, because it’s gonna be part of the emulator now since I love it. Anyway, the console emulator machine will be the next project, and I estimate work starting early next year.

What’s with this Extreme Home Makeover show? If I remember right, back when my wife first starting watching it, it was kinda tolerable to me – showcasing the actual home-modification. I’d sometimes put down the computer to watch the builders frame a wall or run wires or knock down a room. Now, it seems like the focus has completely changed. Suddenly, they only fix homes for families with greater than 10 kids, a certain percentage of whom have to be either addicted to crack, autistic, or afflicted with some other horridly unfair childhood disease. Now it’s more like a Lifetime or Oxygen channel show, where everyone cries at the end because the makeover crew built a touching monument to the dead father or an elevator for the five year-old born without ankles.

Out of time, out of words; out.

Seriously. I mean, c’mon. Yeah. Now, I know it may be hard to trust me – because it may seem like I’m gushing about a new album every few days… but for real y’allz. If someone was describing the new Go! Team album to me, saying things like, “Oh, you know, it’s like this sample-happy beatsy 70s/80s semi-disco electro-pop, with old breakdance and rap samples layered over the top,” I’d probably make up my mind without even hearing it. Just doesn’t sound like my bag. For the most part, you can have the Junior Seniors, Avalanches, and other type bands. But for some reason, be it the fact that I really like their name or not, this band is different. It’s not your everyday album that can make me bounce around in my car seat in my best impression of dancing, or pump my fists to the beat. Just to make an honest man of me, check out this track and see if you’re not happy after listening. Then, check out this brassy number and tell me you don’t wanna go plop down the $11 this thing costs. Enough about music, I think.

I’ve been thinking more and more about making a “complete console emulator” that will live permanently in the living room, attached to the TV. It would be a small form-factor PC with USB ports out the front where I could plug in a bunch of different controllers. The machine itself would be dedicated mainly to video game console emulation, and would do the job of an Atari, original 8-bit NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Nintendo-64, and GameBoy Advance. I’d also install Dance with Intensity for DDR. Along with this would come the most historically-accurate controllers, USB’d originals, and decent pads for DWI. Anyway, looking at some attractive small form-factor systems, and doing a quick mental cost-assessment, I think I could do the whole project for about $800. Not bad… very tempting in fact.

Raining again in sunny California… has been for a couple days now. Spent the whole morning rushing through my routine thinking I needed to be at work for my Mandarin class – it goes for five hours every Friday. Turns out, it’s not even Friday, and even if it was, the class doesn’t start until 9am. So, that sucked. I do that a lot, y’know. Adding to the list I put down earlier this week: I often don’t know what day of the week it is, and rarely know what the date is. A lot of times I’m just on autopilot… thinking about whatever’s monopolizing my thoughts at the moment, I should try and pay more attention to detail.

I went to the freezer to get an ice cream sandwich, but it was just a box that used to hold ice cream sandwiches. Man, what I way to ruin a craving for an ice cream sandwich. Not wholly unexpected though, living with my wife. Dave out.