Tracks and status

Took the shaker out of "I Wanna Be a Webmaster" -- it isn't needed now that there's a drum part. "Perfection comes, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."

Took some disconnected fragments ("Hold in the palm of your hand") out of Emmy's vocals in "Daddy's World" -- it's not so much that they were out of tune but that they weren't connected. She's still in on the last lines of each chorus, and sounds good. The last repeat is especially sweet.

Moved "Daddy's World" up to after "Silk and Steel". I'll play that on the way to work today and see how it feels.

At this point the only things I'm pretty sure need to be fixed are my vocals on "Mushrooms" (I tend to swallow the first word of every verse; this may be fixable by amplifying the sound that's there), some out-of-tune words in the last two verses of "Little Computing Machine", and possibly EQ on "High Barratry" (which was recorded live).

I still have to get the email out, enter the envelopes from Baycon into the database, and add shipping status (now that some people have been given their bonus disks, mainly at Baycon, and some haven't). That's all scheduled for this evening.

And I still have to do a draft of the insert back cover and the tray card. I know what I want; it's just a matter of execution. Getting it into Illustrator or Pagemaker is another matter, but with track order still up in the air... I may just pay the designers at Oasis to do the actual layout; it won't take them very long if I give them all the data, and it's cheaper than spending a grand-and-a-half on Adobe software that I'll only use once a year at most.

Should Google Go Nuclear?

Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)

Video of a talk by Robert Bussard (yes, that Bussard, as in Bussard Ramjet) about inertial electrostatic fusion. Links to papers, in pdf, at EMC2 Fusion.

(From EE Times, June 4, 2007. Dead trees have their uses.)

Tracks

Fixed a couple of syllables on "Bugs" and "World Inside the Crystal" that were too low. I've gotten a lot better, but these recordings were pretty old. I still do it occasionally.

Adjusted levels on "Daddy's World" to bring up the guitar part relative to the voice. My voice sounded say too loud after "Silk and Steel". I could probably have fixed it by lowering the entire track, which is arguably more like a recorded concert (where the songs clearly differ in volume -- I can see it in my various concert recordings). Might still have to do that, but this seems to work.

Applied a little EQ to "High Barratry", which is the only live track on the album. Basically rolloff below 100Hz and above 10KHz -- an attempt to make it sound a little more like the rest of the album. It's not as bad as the older version from Consonance, where the room was on the hairy edge of ringing during the whole concert, but it still sounds a little odd.

By my reckoning, this leaves only "Little Computing Machine" in need of some new vocals. It's getting close.

The total from Baycon...

... is 16 new preorders plus 19 bonus disks delivered to people who had either already paid or were being comped. That includes a handful of orders taken at work, at our household party, and a couple of Wednesdays.

If you've pre-ordered -- or want to pre-order -- and run into me at Westercon, I'll have disks and envelopes there.

The Bear will now take a bath and fall over. I haven't been sleeping well this week. A con this weekend is not going to help.