I'm not a morning person...

Honest! Given my choice and a completely clear schedule, I'd go to bed around 3am or later, and get up at 10 or 11. Did that a lot during grad school.

I can't do it now -- I have kids that have to be up by 6:30, and I seem to be the only one in the house who reliably responds to an alarm clock no matter what the hour. (The kids, especially chaoswolf, seem to be learning to do it, and the flower_cat can do it if I'm off on a business trip.)

But I've come to appreciate the hour or two in the morning when the kids are gone, the Cat's asleep, and there's just me, the radio, and the Web.

Not that I'm getting much done at the moment. I need to cut back on something, that's for sure, and get back to working on my too-many-projects-to-list.

Mid-afternoon on Monday

As usual on a long weekend without a convention, I'm left with the lingering feeling that it's Sunday again and I haven't gotten anything done.

I did manage to go for a walk this morning, and went to Peet's to buy two pounds of coffee. Since that particular Peet's is on Bascom, that meant that in order to get home I had to go past Guitar Showcase. Bought a guitar stand (since the one I have, though it folds up quickly and is very nice for travel, isn't particularly stable) and, after some internal debate, dropped $100 in their consignment shop for an AKG C1000S microphone. That's about half the street price of a new one, and means that I now have a stereo pair if I want to do some field recording.

Meanwhile, since I didn't manage to get any recording done at ConChord, I've been thinking about remote recording sessions. An Audacity project consists of an XML file and a directory full of 1MB data blocks. It uses floating-point samples, so that's about 10MB per track per minute. 100-200 MB for a song doesn't seem to be unusual. Since adding a track doesn't change the blocks that are already there, collaboration could be done using rsync or a version-control system like svn or cogito.

For initial distribution, one could put a song or three on a CD with room left over for a stripped-down DeMuDi Live, or a whole album on a DVD. I'm starting to think about mix-it-yourself singles.

Folksongs are your friends

From kayshapero on filk; claims to have ganked it from ataniell93:

Things I've learned from British folk ballads

Weekend Geekly Wrap-up

Did I mention that I got DeMuDi installed on the flower_cat's computer? Maybe not. I'd installed Xandros initially, because it's one of the few Linux distros that knows how to resize an NTFS partition, but it's not what I like to use -- too different from a normal Debian install.

Also fixed the firewall policy that kept the chaoswolf's laptop from connecting to IM via wireless. This ends up making it accept just about any connection starting from inside, which is arguably wrong but simple. I am blocking mail and a couple of other obvious protocols.