yelyah

yelyah - “cold pool 20111103” piano improv I...

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:12:40 -0600

yelyah - “cold pool 20111103” piano improv

I flipping hate daylight savings time. All day I’ve been running around feeling like I don’t know which way is up.

For the record, I’d be thrilled to drop timezones in general as well. We’ll just all move to UTC and then our days just will start at different times rather than say, the tradtional 8a.

DEAL WITH IT.

Wow, up to nearly 50,000 felt-it reports on the USGS for the 5.6 magnitude earthquake in...

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:35:14 -0500

Wow, up to nearly 50,000 felt-it reports on the USGS for the 5.6 magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/events/us/b0006klz/us/index.html

I wonder if that’s some sort of record for responses.

For a comparison, a recent San Fran quake had 2,667.

yelyah - “too damned cold 20111102” piano...

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:45:08 -0500

yelyah - “too damned cold 20111102” piano improv

Because apparently it was too damned cold that day.

Yet another reason I should really catch up on the uploads.

yelyah - “binary days 20111101” piano...

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 22:13:12 -0500

yelyah - “binary days 20111101” piano improv

Obviously, I need to catch up on the uploads because it’s weird having to clarify that, it’s not the first, it’s the fourth.

And my bad Friday streak is back.

Granted, last Friday wasn’t as bad as the 4 bad Fridays in a row, but combined with today’s whopper, it represents a new streak.

Someone stole my credit card number (just the number, not the card) and racked up nearly $350 in iTunes purchases. It makes me wonder why they stopped there. Maybe at $500, it ends up as a felony.

I have a guess as to where the number got compromised based on the time of one online purchase versus when the first of the iTunes purchases came in, but mostly, I’m trying not to agonize over it because the cat’s out of the bag and all I can do at this point is just start checking statements religiously to ensure it gets caught if it happens again.

Frankly, in some ways I’m surprised that this is the first time I’ve ever been identify thefted given how long I’ve been using credit cards on a regular basis.

I have to hope that everything goes smoothly from here in fighting the $350 in charges. I’m definitely going to be looking into virtual numbers going forward. Not that it would’ve prevented this problem, but it would’ve at least made it way easier to tell where the compromise came from (unless I was thefted by someone who temporarily had access to my physical card).

Yeah. I’d say it hasn’t been my month, but October wasn’t my month either. Nor was September. And so on and so forth.

There is a conclusion I’ve come to about everything. In the same vein of “if you want something done, give it to a busy person”… “if you want something to hurt less emotionally, give it to someone who’s already overburdened with misery”. Because, there seems to be a limit to how much misery you can feel. After a point, it just kinda all blurs together.

Enjoy the haze.

yelyah - “tax day is coming 20111031” piano...

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:52:59 -0500

yelyah - “tax day is coming 20111031” piano improv

On the 31st, I was touched by the thought of how close the tax deadline was.

Yes, that’s the f*cked up American tax system for you. It can tense you up a whole half-year in advance.

Because, every year, it’s the same. Procrastinate procrastinate procrastinate. Holy flip, it’s nearly tax day. Throw stuff together at the last minute. Done.

The IRS can go sod itself.

yelyah - “deadlines ahead 20111030” piano...

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:24:27 -0500

yelyah - “deadlines ahead 20111030” piano improv

How prescient.

It’s the 2nd here and my daily November goal already has driven me to staying up until the wee hours of the morning.

I’m attempting to do a screencast a day in addition to the weather screencast. A deliberate screencast, if you will. So things end up getting slightly scripted, things get post produced.

Let me tell you. It’s far far easier to just do it off the cuff, even when that means starting over several times.

Day 1’s screencast (that got uploaded this morning) already has created a todo list of its own of things to fix and then upload again later. But at least one of them is online. It’s how to make a karaoke album from the command line using sox.

In reality, it could’ve been a 30 second screencast. Here’s the command, boom, you’re done. But for good or bad, I keep coming up with these short screencast ideas that just blossom into, “well, what if I did this. And that. And that too.” And suddenly I’ve spent probably 8 freaking hours on something that would’ve taken like probably 30 minutes at most if I’d just stuck to the original idea.

And there’s the sad thing. I probably did spend at least 8 hours on it. It plays for less than 5 minutes. The thing I have to keep remembering is that I learned a lot in those 8 hours. And it will be way quicker the next time.

And of all the things, audio on the video is driving me nuts. I fell into the loudness wars and was trying to match the overall volume of other common youtube videos I listen to, since the original video was way way quieter than everything else I compared it to. But by doing that, it really brought out the “shouting informercial voice” that I apparently had that night. I still haven’t really figured out how I’d take care of that.

But time to wrap this up, because I have to do another screencast before I go to bed (see, for me, so long as I finish it before I go to bed, then it’s not really tomorrow yet).

yelyah - “yam sandwich 20111029” piano improv This...

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:13:55 -0500

yelyah - “yam sandwich 20111029” piano improv

This post is a lie. It’s the 31st here, not the 29th.

November is gonna be my month though. Getting sh*t done. Like catching up on my mp3 uploads by implementing amazon s3 support in my scripts.

See, unlike most of the population, I get 12 New Year’s a year because I often look at the 1st of every month as a blank slate.

So November is gonna be a GSD type of month for me. I often say that though.

Nanowrimo baby. I wish I were still writing fiction. Dayum, I miss that part of my life (to be more specific, I miss who I was more so, as I no longer feel compelled to write fiction these days). I’m thinking of spinning the nanowrimo challenge into a 1667 word/day challenge either on one major effort or trying to write random content that totals up to 1667 words/day.

But really, my big goal is to put together a screencast/day. Well, in addition to the goofy daily weather screencast I do. The screencasts are supposed to be tutorials for the most part, with some focus on post production (as compared to the weather screencast which is done in 1 take with zero post production).

A couple of weeks ago, I really wanted to learn web design. This week, it’s video production.

In my eyes, I dream big.

It’s just that the dream keeps changing.

yelyah - “roll with the punch bowl 20111028” piano...

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:23:11 -0500

yelyah - “roll with the punch bowl 20111028” piano improv

What the networks don’t seem to understand is they’re not really competing with cable/OTA access providing a service for people who forgot to watch a show. They’re competing with piracy.

Let’s see:

piracy

no ads
I can watch the show on any device
I can download it once and be assured that it will play all the way through without needing to buffer
I can watch the show mere hours after it’s premiered

the networks (Hulu not included)

Some of them have sites and media players that are downright hostile.

Visit Fox’s site (without even loading a show) and they automatically play a commercial. Any site that auto plays anything with sound should be shot. Playing an ad with sound and you deserve a special place in hell.
Commercials that are way louder than the content. I’m pretty sure there are laws against this for actual broadcasts. Apparently, the networks don’t think they should have to do this online.
Playing the same commercial at every single commercial break (Parvati Shallow: I have no idea who you are, but I already hate you).
Constantly kicking you out of fullscreen mode (I remember ABC’s player used to (and maybe still does) do this). CBS kicks you out of fullscreen if you dare pause the video.
Heaven forbid you should need to reload a video on CBS’ site. First, it doesn’t remember where you were, but worse, you get to sit through several different commercial breaks since their player isn’t smart enough to realize that you just fast forwarded, ergo, you shouldn’t have to rewatch every single commercial break again.
Fox, who are you kidding with your 8 day delay?

Hulu is the only site that’s gotten anything right, though they themselves are subject to the networks’ stupid delays.

I’m done with CBS. Their media player is a POS and my time and patience are more valuable than the entertainment value I get out of their shows (The Good Wife being the only exception).

For me, despite how easy piracy is, the networks are actually competing with my laziness. Streaming means I can give random things a try because there’s not much to lose. Downloading something means I have to deliberately decide to watch it. For me, this generally ends up meaning that I don’t watch the shows at all (or I end up waiting for it to come out on DVD and snag it for free from the library).

Writing this, also reminded me that I had once ranted about the total destruction of “Harry’s Law”. And it made me realize that I haven’t thought about that show ever since I wrote the rant. So when I say I’m giving CBS the boot (cough, good wife), I probably mean it.

Bye bye, CBS.

yelyah - “not enough sun 20111027” piano...

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 02:34:35 -0500

yelyah - “not enough sun 20111027” piano improv

I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for screencast tutorials that are short.

Basically, because I don’t want to work on something overwhelming at this point.

So I end up coming up with these ideas that seem like they’d take about 30 seconds. And then once I start thinking about actual content, all of these little ideas pop into my head. Ideas that would be great if it weren’t for the fact, that I just want short-short stuff right now.

Like a tutorial on the mac’s “say” command. Surely, just enlightening some people as its existence would be enough (which would take 30 seconds). But no, my brain comes up with “hey, let’s do a song where the computer is the singer. Oh yeah, and let’s see if we can autotune the computer too!”

So suddenly it’s no longer a 30 second tutorial, but instead something that would probably take a week to put together (like, currently I have no idea how to do the autotune effect on speech). So much for making it under whelming.

yelyah - “red mist parade 20111026” piano...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:15:42 -0500

yelyah - “red mist parade 20111026” piano improv

Ideas are just so much better UNrealized, aren’t they?

Actually work on them and they start to fall apart.

Me here, I’ve fallen in love with Bad Lip Reading and would love to do one of my one.

Unlike the BLR guy who’s bad at lip reading, I’m finding I can’t even bad lip read. I just can’t lip read at all.

I shouldn’t be surprised, I’ve never been able to lip read up to this point. Of course, I haven’t really ever practiced it either. But 15 minutes of looping parts of this video back and forth, apparently wasn’t enough time to magically give me any lip reading skills.

Part of the problem might be that I know the source material. So that clouds my ability to see alternate words.

If you’d like to try this on your own, here’s the advice I can offer:

MUTE (obvious of course)
get software that can scrub/skim (if I don’t have the right word, it’s the ability to easily play back tiny bits of a video)
skim over a section at different speeds to try to pick out syllables
play it in reverse too because maybe you’ll find magic there

And of course, take all of this advice with a grain of salt as I can’t even figure out ONE SINGLE LINE using this method.

yelyah - “sneeze and you miss it 20111025” piano...

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:40 -0500

yelyah - “sneeze and you miss it 20111025” piano improv

Every so often there’s an improv show stopper.

Usually, it’s from me. I do something stupid and then my brain freezes and then I just say eff it (but sometimes I crash the improv car and keep driving instead).

Sometimes it’s a cat jumping onto your laptop.

And then there’s days when it’s a blow-your-brains-out type of sneeze.

Lucky for me, this one creeped up at the end so you probably won’t even know. But dayum. Why can’t I sneeze like normal people?

yelyah - “blurred borders 20111024” electronic If I...

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:26:41 -0500

yelyah - “blurred borders 20111024” electronic

If I write about it here I’m sure to not actually carry out the plan, right?

I want to do an overdub of Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) for comedic purposes. Whether it will actually be funny remains to be seen.

Step 1: what are they actually saying?

Yeah, I’m currently kinda stuck on that one.

yelyah - “sidetracked 20111024” electronic The 1...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:44:27 -0500

yelyah - “sidetracked 20111024” electronic

The 1 mp3/day thing on Tumblr always seems to come back to bite me.

What’s more common is that I miss the midnight deadline and then end up having to do a manual upload to s3 in order to “catch up”.

But then there are times like these where I have more than one track in a day to upload and so I’ve created a bunch of extra work for myself. Because frankly I’ve spoiled myself here. I copy an mp3 locally to a specific folder, make this blog post locally, and then a ruby script takes care of uploading it to tumblr and formatting the post.

But anytime that I miss the deadline or have more than 1 mp3 a day to upload, I have to go through (what feels like) this huge manual process of uploading the files to amazon s3 and making the tumblr post by hand.

Plus, tumblr is not really all that appropriate as a place to showcase music since reverse chronological is how all of the posts are displayed (doesn’t work well when you wrote your best music ages ago).

And then there’s the spam. Perhaps I’m spoiled here because tumblr was so pristine for so long but it’s become more and more of a problem.

The “X notes” thing on tumblr posts is now basically worthless since it never updates the total once the spammers have been blocked. Makes it basically impossible to tell if a human actually found something valuable or not.

And sadly the spam can be quite a depressing reminder that I’m unlikely to reach that number of likes through actual, real people.

So to tie this all up or something, some days it feels like tumblr isn’t worth the hassle. Things that used to be big pulls for me personally, like free custom domain hosting and free space for mp3s, are all stuff that I’ve since figured out how to do on the cheap (like with amazon s3, I can pull this off for literally pennies a month).

And plus, yelyah.com seriously needs to be updated. It’s basically running off the same raw files as this tumblr blog, but it hasn’t seen an update since March. Why? Well, basically, I figured out a way to use tumblr’s free mp3 hosting on my external site. But it means that I have to go through the HTML source of every post and find the link to the mp3 file that tumblr uses. Here’s an example:

http://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/400065042/tumblr_ky4nijWMIe1qzo4ep

Point here is it’s not named in a predictable way like “half past midnight.mp3”. Granted, I could write a script to go through and grab all of these links and then update my metadata, but that would require work and given all of the problems I have with tumblr’s 1 mp3/day limit, just deciding to switch everything over to amazon s3 starts looking like the preferable option.

Will I ever actually get around to doing any of this though? Given my track record, probably not.

Or probably tomorrow.

It could go either way really.

yelyah - “carbon fiber 20111023” electronic Attempt...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:42:11 -0500

yelyah - “carbon fiber 20111023” electronic

Attempt #3 at a theme for the severe weather outlook.

This one actually worked out fairly decently since I came up with a shortened version (which is not the version heard here).

yelyah - “mitten in der nacht 20111023”...

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 22:28:31 -0500

yelyah - “mitten in der nacht 20111023” electronic

This is attempt #2 at trying to write a theme for the severe weather outlook screencast and another failure in that it’s way longer than it’s supposed to be.

By my standards, this was written yesterday, but by everyone else’s standards of time, it was written this morning (it’s not a new day until I go to bed see).

I’m sure I goofed something up with the German title. I wonder if “Mitten in der Nackt” would mean amidst the nakedness.

yelyah - “feels like rain 20111022”...

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:58:00 -0500

yelyah - “feels like rain 20111022” electronic

Officially, we can call this one the first thing I did with Reason 6.

Unofficially, I’ve been having fun messing with the audio effects for the daily weather screencast I do. Ya know, useful stuff like noise gating out the box fan (it actually works surprisingly well) and then goofy stuff like turning my voice into a synth.

My original goal was to write some intro music for the weather screencast and on that front, I failed miserably since the thing weighs in at nearly a minute and a half. I was aiming for like 5-15 seconds.

Tech notes

My studio still runs Reason 4 / Record 1.0 (and literally 1.0 since I never installed the minor updates) so this one was actually done on the computer I program on.

I used this ancient 25 key MIDI controller made by Midiman (who you probably know as M-Audio) to play all of the parts (no loops on this one).

Everything is “stock” patches:

Additive Pad
Hybrid Strings - Mod Wheel Gator (serves as 3 different string parts - low, high, and the one with the rhythmic gate (controlled by the mod wheel))
Nashville Kit
Pool Shark Upright Bass

Music notes

The most difficult part I’d say was the drums. I ran into this weird situation where I couldn’t figure out where to start the fill that leads into the main beat.

The problem came down to that it sounded out of place depending on how much context was given…

See, I’d start the playback about 3 measures before I was going to play, and then I played it live where it felt right.

But if I started playback earlier in the song and listened to it from there (so more context), it always felt like I was coming in too early. It made it very difficult to troubleshoot because, to me, it sounded very different depending on where I started playback.

I think part of the issue was also that I was recording to the click track, but listening back without it. The theory being that the click track provided a rhythmic grid which made the fill sound like it was in the right place.

Thinking about the click vs. no click thing led me to the solution I ultimately used to “fix” the timing. Instead of going straight for this tom pattern, I play some hats a measure before hand. For me, it seems to have fixed things.

I’d still like to figure out how to write a proper intro for the weather screencast. Maybe tomorrow.

yelyah - “freitag 20111021” piano improv Friday...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 21:42:00 -0500

yelyah - “freitag 20111021” piano improv

Friday isn’t quite over at this point, but dare I say it?

My Friday curse is apparently broken.

So here are the stats:

4 Fridays IN A ROW something really bad happened
3 out of 4 were caused by things I had no control over
none of what happened had even been something I had thought of previously

And the last bullet point led me to this bizarre game of my trying to guess every negative outcome (for instance, in deciding where to eat, I imagined that the place would get held up at gun point while I was there).

But see, because all of the other Fridays involved bad things that I never would’ve foreseen, by predicting all of these bad things today, it meant they wouldn’t happen… because I had already thought of them.

And by those very laws, it also meant that I was safe from having a heart attack or being diagnosed with a brain tumor.

All bets are off tomorrow though.

yelyah - “the other world 20111020” piano improv I...

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:56:00 -0500

yelyah - “the other world 20111020” piano improv

I suddenly got in the mood to listen to some of my old stuff and it brought up the following question.

Am I really that flat or have I just been listening to too much autotuned crap?

Obviously, I must be somewhat flat to notice it at all, unless I can blame it on my being hypercritical of my own voice (a lovely thought in a way).

Autotuning kinda begets more autotuning. That’s the problem.

If I remember correctly, I’ve only ever autotuned my voice on one song. Part of it was convenience: I had inconsistent access to the software. And then part of it was that in 2009, I actually put it on my yearly goals to not use autotune all year long.

But on the one song I’ve used it on. The non-autotuned version… just ewww. It sounds lifeless and unenergetic. Dead. Something.

And so that’s the begetting problem. The more you use autotune, the more you expect autotune.

But then again, what about musical styles? Like, if we were to look at genres that focus on real instruments versus those that are synthesized. Theoretically, a “normal” vocal is gonna sit much nicer with real instruments because those instruments aren’t necessarily going to be pitch perfect either.

And even with electronic music, back in the pure analog days anyhow, there could be pitch differences from somewhat fritzing hardware or tape malfunctions.

But is autotune maybe almost mandatory in the days of synthesized, perfect-pitch music?

And here’s a side question, if I can tell I’m flat when I play something back, then why can’t I tell I’m flat when I’m actually singing and could do something about it?

I have perfectly good ears. Apparently it’s just that my brain shuts off when I sing.

Yeah, that’s my theory.

yelyah - “hello winter 20111019” piano...

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:13:58 -0500

yelyah - “hello winter 20111019” piano improv

Winter is here.

I woke up this morning and my bedroom was in the 50s.

THE FIFTIES.

For reference, I kept the house around 60 last winter and was absolutely miserable. 50s are off the chart on the miserability scale (my spell check tells me I’ve made up a word).

I at least know something I didn’t know last year. It’s the key to surviving frigid indoor temperatures. Fuzzy blankets! And lots of them.

The problem of course is that then the only comfortable place to hang out is in bed. All winter long.

Why can’t humans hibernate?

yelyah - “musical noise 20111018” piano...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:27:39 -0500

yelyah - “musical noise 20111018” piano improv

Winter is coming.

I remember that I was still hanging on to trying to wear shorts all through October last year.

I’m pretty sure winter is coming way sooner than last year. One of these days I’ll actually figure out where to get some historical temperature data.

Until then, all I can say is dayum it’s cold!