The Mandelbear's Musings

Music: Have spent most of the last hour and a half marking and splitting up Monday's and Wednesday's practice session. And I still need to move the DNS for tres-gique.* over to Dreamhost, and renew a couple of currently-little-used domains.

My idea for a single of Quiet Victories never materialized, obviously. But I noticed a rather inexpensive disk duplicator at Fry's... If I can find a printer with enough throughput it might be worthwhile. Otherwise, I'll have to settle for whipping the website into shape and printing booklets, which might be better anyway.

Health: The Ace ankle wrap seems to be working well; I think I can get through a weekend on just one pair of low shoes if I have to. Hopefully I won't have to in most cases, but it's good to know for air travel.

I seem to be getting enough sleep on a midnight-to-6am schedule, as long as Colleen isn't too restless.

For the last month or two my weight has been stuck stubbornly within a pound or so of 185, in spite of what I fondly hope has been a low-carb diet. May have to get more aggressive on that score. At least it's been on the low side of 185 for the last week, rather than on the high side.

Neighbors: Had a good talk with the next-door neighbors yesterday evening. They seem to be bearing up well under their losses, but between water and smoke damage they've apparently lost almost everything. The house appears to be structurally sound, though; repairs will be comparatively inexpensive in that direction. The fire was caused by an exploding part on the controller board in the washer; Belen had started a load just before she left. It's a good thing she did leave, though; apparently the next thing to catch was some plastic part in the washer, and the combustion products were highly toxic. PVC, probably. Maytag front-loader. Same kind that we have, though they've apparently been having lots of trouble with the controller, and we haven't. Knock wood.

For a couple of weeks now I've been getting even less done than usual on all the various projects I've been working on. As little as six months ago I'd had hopes that I'd have most of the work done for my next album by now; I'll be lucky to get the first one or two scratch tracks done today. There are organizing projects and carpentry projects scattered all over the house; software projects and writing projects and web projects scattered all over three filesystems.

Last night I realized how much more of my time is going into my improved relationship with Colleen, staying in touch with the Wolfling, and even chatting with the Younger Daughter, who is rapidly transforming herself from a child into a young woman. Have I mentioned that I don't multitask well? Not too surprising, then.

It's a good trade-off. I'll take it.

Meanwhile, though, I have a tendency to stare at my lengthening to-do list and feel paralyzed and powerless, rather than pick an item -- any item -- and damned well just do it.

*sigh*

Spent some time last night finally re-arranging the recording directory: it now looks like yyyy/mm-event/ where "event" is either a convention, a day or day range, or something like that. If I'm going to be recording practice sessions I should get in the habit of using day ranges -- and perhaps make each month a subdirectory -- for conventions just so things will be chronological.

Naturally, having done this, I had to test it, so when I came out to the living room to do some practicing I set the H2 on the music stand and recorded it. Very rough, and I haven't even listened to it let alone tried to do a normalize-and-split. But I will, because I want to have it done by Thursday. It was all stuff that I need for the album. Added a little more this morning.

I also need to get this onto the web, as the start of the collaboration area. In particular, this session has "The Toolmakers" and "The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" in their correct keys.

I'm going to be a busy bear this week.

This is the first of what I expect to be an increasingly frequent series of status posts about Amethyst Rose, the album currently in production.

My production software is currently something of a shambles, and the web pages are something of a mess. About all I've done so far today is upload the latest tentative track list. I think it's getting there; I added The Queen of Night (which is a space song, but I wrote it thinking of Colleen) and Daddy's World, which is on the last album but is a family song as well. I'll happily take comments on the selection.

Track order is completely undefined at this point, except that I think the first and last songs are in the correct places.

With sales taxes due at the end of the month, and a week of travel impending, it's a Good Thing that I was finally able to get started. I was able to get the data-entry for pre-orders done by starting with my shipping-label address list and editing in the somewhat smaller number of entries from my paper list. Sales to dealers, and non-preorder sales, were easy enough to add up by hand.

I have yet to break down sales by location for sales tax purposes, but that's all I have left to do this weekend. The bottom line is 390 albums out the door, and a gross take for the year of 4665. 80 out of the total were contributor, promotional, and gift copies -- anyone out there know how I treat those for tax purposes? There were a total of 195 pre-orders, meaning that there are 61 signed, numbered pre-order packages still available. All-in-all I've definitely made a profit on the project, so I'm a happy filkish bear at the moment. I may have to leave off some related expenses in order to convince the IRS that I've made a profit, but that's a problem for another day.

The shortest day of the year is also over, and I'm home for the holidays. Whichever set of seasonal holidays you celebrate, and wherever you place the New Year, it's a time for family, friendship, and fresh starts. There was a beautiful, nearly-full moon hanging low in the twilight sky on my way home.

I've finally started to come off a long productivity slump that started somewhere in late August after the album came out. It's too early to say that I've really gotten back into the groove, but it's a start.

I've actually been getting a few things done on the music front.

1. Went down to Stanford to see who to talk to about selling albums. Most college bookstores have a section for works by alumni. Stanford doesn't: it's owned by some chain that doesn't give a damn. I pledged them $50 this year; next year I'll just send that much more to Carleton.
2. Essentially finished with adapting the various make rules and perl scripts to the new directory layout. Track working directories now live underneath the corresponding album working directories.
3. My TrackInfo script is now capable of computing total time for a list of songs, so it can take over much of the work of the Setlist script. Eventually it should allow me to integrate setlists and the corresponding concert recordings.
4. Did some tracklist planning. There are definitely three albums in the queue now. Stop laughing.

I expect to have a web page with a tentative track list up by Monday, along with a couple of new scratch tracks.

We went to the Dickens Fair today -- all but the chaoswolf, who had a job interview scheduled at Macy's. Apart from the Y.D. getting bored and a little whiny after only about 2 hours, it was pleasant. The flower_cat and I could easily have stayed all afternoon listening to the music.

My largest purchase was a tail coat, since that's what the Wolfling wants me to wear for the wedding. Also picked up some CDs from Glenn Morgan. Had a bit of a chat about CD manufacturing -- he's one of several musicians I've met recently who have started burning and printing their own disks. I gather it's about half the cost of pressing, and of course you don't have the inventory. I probably don't want to go that route, though.

Spent much of the morning tracking down and formatting a good version of Froggy Went A-Courtin'. Getting it up on the website involved a little makefile debugging -- I've moved things around quite a lot trying to get to a saner distribution of files on the internal server.

Felt very sleepy driving home. This may be due in part to having been awakened abruptly at 6am by the Cat mistaking the coffee grinder for the phone ringing. What the Wolfling was doing making coffee at that hour, I don't know, but I wish she could do it on weekdays when I have to take her and her sister to school.

Not to be confused with the day of rest, which it wasn't particularly.

A pleasant walk drive, a pleasant talk, along the briny beach... Went for a long drive with the flower_cat; we spent almost all of it talking about furniture. The plan is to swap the positions of the couch (moving it from the living room to the "dining room" portion of our L-shaped living/dining room) and the dining table. This will free up a bit of space in both places; the dining table and its six chairs will eventually go to the chaoswolf.

The real advantage of this move is that we can install curtains to close off the "dining room" area when guests want to sleep on the couch (which turns into two single beds or one king-size, as needed). The Cat also wants to clean out the sewing room and put in a single-bed-size chaise lounge/futon. The sewing room is tiny -- we should have made it bigger, but it's too late now. It was fine for the kids when they were babies, so it seemed like a good idea at the time...

After coming back to a delicious lamb stew that the Cat had set to cooking (in a cast-iron pot in the oven, at 300 degrees) before we left, I spent a couple of hours printing up the final batch of About Bleeding Time inserts, and putting together another 15 two-disk sets. Because I foolishly ordered only 250 blanks, and have turned a few of those into coasters, I'm going to end up a bit short of the run of 256. But since I'm unlikely to sell out any time soon, I'm not going to worry about it much.

Public Service Announcement: Anyone who wants to place an order (for $20 sets, or a wholesale order) to be delivered at OVFF, just comment. Most of the range between C8 and FE is available; the interfilk set will be CO and DE. If you just want a disk or three, order from CD Baby -- it's much more convenient. They have 10 in stock, last time I checked. I've been very lazy about contacting dealers. Stupid bear.

Went out for dinner at Buck's, followed by a BroceliandeBroceliande concert at St. Bede's in Menlo Park. About a five-minute walk from where I work, in other words. We took chipuni along -- he had taken the chaoswolf out to lunch and had never heard them.

It was a good concert. The church had fantastic acoustics, and looked striking as well. The walls were paneled in dark-stained marine plywood (I could tell because that's the only kind of plywood that comes in 13-foot panels.) The ceiling was an equilateral pyramid. As I said, striking.

Had a good talk with Kristoph at the reception afterward, mostly about recording and editing software, and gave him and Margaret a copy of CC&S. I've taken voice lessons from 'Stoph, and he's provided a great deal of encouragement and advice over the years. (By the way, CD Baby has it in stock -- just follow the link.)

At this point I've packaged up all but about a dozen of the pre-orders -- mostly the international ones, plus a handful that came in too late to get into the database. Hand-delivered two yesterday, and sold a couple more. I have a few out with the chaoswolf in hopes that she might sell a couple at the BASFA meeting. (9:42 she sold 2 sets and a single.)

But there's light at the end of the tunnel -- I'll have the rest shipped by the end of the week. I've built sets numbered through BF plus a scattering of requested or special ones past that, and have started burning my last spindle of 50 blank ABT's. (I only ordered 250, which was probably a mistake, since it's supposed to be an edition of 256 and a couple ended up as coasters. I'll have to label a few blanks myself if I ever sell that many.)

Not that I've done much else today, apart from a 4-mile walk and a shopping expedition to Sears, which netted a pair of folding plastic sawhorses, a power sander, and a canister vacuum cleaner. The latter was the main reason for the expedition: it was top-rated in Consumer Reports, and it was on sale this weekend. (Actually I got the next model up for the same price I would have paid for the one CR tested.)

Made up another 16 pre-order packets this morning; mailed 8 before my walk (3 miles by Los Gatos Creek).

Went out shopping with the chaoswolf for shelving (the Container Store is having a 25% off sale) and a floor lamp. Mission accomplished.

Shipped 7 packages this evening (two were multiples). This brings me up to 9F on the pre-orders. After that it starts getting interesting, because some of the letter combinations will want to get saved out for specials (BA+BE, CA+FE, DE+AD -- I'll happily take suggestions).

There are a small number of low-numbered sets that I reserved, a handful of undelivered envelopes (some of which will get hand-delivered over the weekend) and a couple of unsold sets sitting around. But this means I've packaged up and shipped about 150 pre-orders, with 23 left in the queue. Several of those are "interesting", mostly meaning international orders. But I'll probably finish mailing them by early next week.

So there are still 60 or so sets left in the signed limited edition. And if you just want a copy or three of Coffee, Computers, and Song! to listen to, they're available on CD Baby.

If you've already gotten your CDs, let me know how you like them. And what I can do better next time.

... not gone yet, but getting there. Even as I type, a stack of 50 address labels is slowly grinding its way through the print queues (and getting stuck somewhere). They'll need to be checked against the lists to make sure I haven't already shipped them or handed them out in a con (I know one or two slipped through). Then I have to go back through the list to make sure I didn't miss anyone (and I'm pretty sure there are one or two recent PayPal payments I haven't processed). And I have to compare them with the list of signing instructions and quantities.

They were generated using a sequence of egregious hacks, but thanks to perl, emacs, and glabels, they just might get printed. (OTOH there seems to be some problem with the print server, which is admittedly underpowered for the job. I'll deal with it tonight.)

But I expect I'll have the rest of the pre-orders shipped by sometime next week.

Saturday is the busy day at ConChord. I skipped the TTTR (Totally Tasteless and Tacky Review) in favor of conversation in the dealer's room and con suite, and ended up spending a fair amount of time pointing incoming wedding guests in the right direction, plus a certain amount of light schlepping for the flower_cat who found herself gift-wrangling.

Went to Devon and Richard's wedding, of course. With Joe Bethancourt and Leslie Fish on stage as best man and maid of honour respectively, you can bet that music was a big part of the ceremony. The Cat and I were both taking copious mental notes: we're next.

Spent the time between the concert and Tom Digby's presentation (can't really call it a concert) up in cflute's room with her and tibicina getting ready for our concert tomorrow this afternoon at 3:00.

Tom Digby idea_fairy) is indescribable.

Dinner was Chinese; since we discussed our concert and the next two CDs, I paid for it.

The evening concerts were excellent: InterFilk guest zencuppa and GoH andpuff. The InterFilk voice auction came in between; my 2-disk package went for $95 (IIRC), which was pretty good considering the small number of people at the con.

I left the open filking about 3am. Songs included "Vampire Megabyte" (also done in the vampire circle Friday night), "Little Computing Machine", "The Last Train" (Janis Ian), (one or two others I've forgotten), and closed with "For Amy" (and a plug for the next album).

Talk about a long, strange trip. In about a month I'll be starting work on my next album, which hopefully won't take nearly as long as the first one has. It will be called Amethyst Rose.

The album after that will be called Hacker's Heaven, and will be mostly a mix of computer and space songs.

Worked on "Silk and Steel" -- it was less trivial than I expected, since I wanted to get the guitar right on this one, and it was already well above average. Working as much from the spectrogram as from my ears, I think I finally got the guitar part where I want it. Only question, really, is whether I should have brought up the bottom dropped D string as much as I did. The peak was 20dB down, I think because of the previously-applied EQ. So I lowered the other notes on the bottom two strings, but raised the D about 10dB to compensate for the earlier indignities. Opinions? [ogg] -- I suspect the mp3 is too lo-fi to tell.

Before going out for my walk I cooked up suitable license boilerplate and applied it to the programs and makefile templates in my tools directory, in preparation for burning it onto about a hundred CD-ROMs starting tomorrow. Spent the last hour or so debugging the scripts that process my song lyrics -- I'll have to do some editing tomorrow to put the copyright notices in the right format. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After my walk (4 miles by Los Gatos Creek) I went to Office Max and scored 200 slimline jewel cases in a 2-for-one sale, which made them a mere $0.15 each. Came home and created the glabels templates for the single-page inserts, composed the labels, and printed a couple of test copies. It turns out that the Memorex and Avery blanks are somewhat different in their spacing (and totally different in their layout if you want to do tray cards), but I now have templates for both.

The Gnome label-maker, glabels, is a major win.

After the flower_cat and chaoswolf got back from their seemingly-interminable Baycon meeting we went out for Chinese at Jasmine in Los Gatos -- it's been one of our favorites for at least 25 years. Discovered that selkit has a copy of Adobe Illustrator with him, so I'll bribe commission him to do the layout for CC&S. After Baycon.

I've moved over to Trantor, the new workstation, almost completely at this point. It's still running in 32-bit mode, but it's more than fast enough for what I'm doing, so I'm not going to worry about it for a while.

The pre-printed disks for About Bleeding Time are in process. I found out when the proof came back that I'd sent them an older version of the artwork, minus the cool HyperSpace Express logo and link to the (currently nonexistent) HyperSpace Express website. Approved it anyway -- I'll put the logo on the insert, and the site isn't up yet anyway. One less thing to do before Baycon.

Spent wasted the entire rest of the day trying to make a cd-extra -- that's a two-session disk with audio in the first session and a CD-ROM data file in the second session. Doing it the documented way from the command line gives me a CD-ROM that appears to be empty. (See my post in linux for details if you think you can help.)

Nero for Linux writes a CD-ROM with directories but no file contents. I was pretty impressed that it even existed, but it's clearly seriously broken. Just as well -- you can only use it from the GUI, so it would be a major disruption of my script-heavy workflow. Not only that, the GUI is annoying and clumsy -- there aren't any keyboard shortcuts for adding a file to the disk, there's no way to get CD text from a file, and the audio tracks all default to copy-protected. Blerg.

Tomorrow I may make an attempt to use k3b; otherwise I'll just fall back to a CD-ROM with audio tracks, which I know works.

This is not a happy bear.

Spent some time this morning looking at what remains to be done for ABT and realizing that, no, there's no fscking way I can have it done by Monday. And besides, I want the versatility of being able to have a mix of CDROM, CD-Extra, and pure-audio disks on hand. So I fired off an RFQ to proactionmedia.com (they're not open on weekends). Wish there was someplace local that did inkjet printing on CDRs.

After the usual weekend 4-mile walk I stopped by Staples, because I'd seen them on a web search for CD duplicators. What the heck; if they had the DupliQ I might just buy one. No duplicators, but they did have a shiny new HP D5160 that (wonder of wonders) prints on CDs! Apparently somebody's patent has expired, because it used to be an Epson exclusive. Filed the information away for future reference, and headed across the street to Fry's to see whether they had it for less.

It was the same price, $89, but there was somebody there from HP who, in response to my query, said that it worked fine in Linux. HP has been pretty good about Linux printer drivers, while the latest Epson (the R260, successor to the R200 that's been giving me grief lately) is listed as a "paperweight" in the linuxprinting.org database. That clinched it, and I brought it home just in time to spend the next hour trying to find some way of printing a character sheet for the Y.D. Turned out that not only was the Epson suffering from clogged jets, but the cheap print server it's attached to appeared to be hosed (or at least unresponsive, even after a power cycle), and the SMB server on Nova appears to be inaccessible to the Windows machines. Again. GAAAH! And in spite of having what I thought was a reasonably complete set of fresh ink cartridges, I was suddenly reminded that I couldn't find a magenta cartridge the last time I went ink shopping. Guess which one I need. Finally put the page on my keychain drive, hauled it over to the Linux workstation, and printed it on the laser printer.

There are lots of reasons why I do most of my reading on the screen these days, but a well-founded loathing for printers and printing in general, and Windows printing in particular, is right up there.

Still haven't installed the HP -- no useable print server at the moment -- but I'm hopeful. I've never had particularly good luck with HP equipment, but I really like the fact that their ink cartridges include the nozzle assembly, so that even if you haven't used it for months, all you have to do is change the cartridges to get a totally new, clean, print head. Unlike the Epson.

Spent the rest of the afternoon fixing ABT's Makefile to correctly (I hope) write cd-extra (pressed-multi-session) disks, because although it's perfectly feasible to add audio tracks to a CD-ROM, I don't think most of my customers will be amused by 20 minutes of silence on track 1.

Note: I'm terrible with phone calls. I put them off for weeks, sometimes. If I don't have everything written out ahead of time, I don't remember what to ask, and leave out important stuff.

Note: I'm calling discmakers, shortstacks, and Oasis; I'm mainly interested right now in printed blank disks and short-run CDROMs with added audio tracks. Any other recommendations?

Yesterday was pretty busy, actually. Started the day by rebooting the fileserver without the old IDE drives, though I left them in the case just, um, in case. Took a little longer than expected to get all the glitches out of the grub and /etc/fstab setups, but I never needed a rescue disk. Got a start on updating the daily mirror script for the new partitioning.

Measured the distance to the Younger Daughter's school -- it's about 1.7 miles by car, so maybe 1.5 by the obvious walking route. An easy morning walk for me, thought I don't think the Y.D. is interested. Would do her a lot of good, though.

Spent most of the morning at work reboooting the computers in my office and making sure things were still ok after Monday's power outage. Everything was fine, except that I missed a meeting because my reminder software runs on my desktop. Oops. Had a good idea in the afternoon that elegantly solves a nasty cross-site-scripting vulnerability, at least in the most common case. No, I can't say anything else about it yet.

Three mile walk, with hills. I needed that.

Spent some time in the afternoon researching short-run CD-ROM prices. I think I can get the bonus disk, About Bleeding Time, to a duplicator sometime this week, which means it should be ready in time for Baycon, in (urk!) a little over 2 weeks. I was originally planning to just get them printed, and burn them myself, which would give me the freedom to burn plain CDs or CD-Extra's for those who need them, but it's possible that CDROMs with audio will work for almost everyone. Depends in part on whether I can fix the remaining level problems by Friday.

When I came home I bounced the fileserver again to install the second 400GB drive for the mirror, formatted it, and finished rewriting the mirror script -- with some sanity tests in case I didn't finish the initial copy by the time the script had to run. Which I haven't -- I just started transferring the big partition this morning, and it looks like another hour or so to go. (8:24am: it's done now.)

Then, in a fit of productivity seldom seen in this decrepit old fractal, I added the missing bit of goodness to my TrackInfo script to look in the current directory for a secondary metadata file. That means that in albums like About Bleeding Time that have multiple versions of the same song, I can actually give them different descriptions in the liner notes. Yay! So I did that, too, burned a test disk, and took the flower_cat out for a test drive. Reluctantly gave up on putting in the version of "Silk and Steel" from Consonance -- the 5KHz feedback was never entirely suppressed, and it made the guitar sound twangy, too. Too bad -- it was a much better performance.

At this point the home network is in pretty solid shape, and shouldn't need much more attention until the time comes to move hosting for theStarport.org and its email, at which point I'll be able to dump my old DSL line. Repackaging the gateway and upgrading my workstation hardware are also on the short list, but aren't particularly urgent and won't require much in the way of time or planning.

With last night's midnight mixing mania, the album is in a state it's never been in before: as far as I can tell, none of the tracks make me cringe to listen to them. That leaves the following work:

• "Vampire Megabyte" still needs spin-up and head-crash effects.
• Final mixing -- delete unused tracks, clean up any problems that turn up in the next couple of days.
• Tray card and booklet layout. If necessary I suppose I can do the layout in Photoshop, but I'd rather use Illustrator, Pagemaker, Corel Draw, or Quark. Suggestions? I may try to do the preliminary work in Inkscape and export SVG.
• Paperwork
• Label printing, some experimentation, and home burning of the bonus disk. In particular, I'm still not sure of the best way to make a mixed CD/CD-ROM out of it. Bonus disks, at least, will be available at Baycon.

I'm currently planning to take tomorrow off to do as much of this as I can. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to give the current mix a good listen and make comments, I really need another few sets of ears on this one. Email me (my LJ username at livejournal.com) or comment below for a pointer to the secret link. (Or hack it -- this is an album about hacking, after all. The URL is on a disk label image linked from this page. It's really meant as a bonus for people who pre-order, so feel free to do that, too. There are still plenty of pre-order packages available.

... but it looks as though I'll be starting one anyway. this post by catsittingstill got me thinking about tweaking my CD and website build tools (edit to fix broken URL -- how did it end up being "starpnetort.com"?) to make them more generally useful. Right now they're specific to me, my website layout, and the idiosyncratic file format I use for lyrics. But it wouldn't be hard to generalize them, and I think a lot of people, especially in the filk community, would have a use for what amounts to a singer-songwriter's web toolkit.

I'm not going to do more than think about it between now and whenever my CD is finished -- hopefully Baycon.

Worked on "Little Computing Machine", "Silk & Steel", "TEOTWAWKI", and "I Wanna Be a Webmaster". That last may have to be scrapped, though. That would leave me with 5 tracks that need to have both guitar and vocals redone (separately). Fortunately I have nice clean scratch tracks to work from, so it'll be quick. He says.

Part of the problem is that a lot of the older tracks have a very bass-heavy guitar track; my fancy finger-work on the treble strings ends up totally swamped. But if I filter out the low frequency and pull it up, I end up amplifying the bleed-through from the vocals that was picked up at the same time. Since there's roughly a 2ms delay, it sounds like I'm singing in a sewer. So it has to be fixed.

Was going to do some actual recording, but the Y.D. is having a birthday party (one day early), and they've been playing just outside the bedroom studio window. This evening and tomorrow.

At least it's now feasible for me to edit in the office without moving the recording machine back and forth. Yay for Linux and X, which make it possible to have a program (Audacity, in this case) running on one machine while displaying on another. It actually improves the performance because the work is split between the two CPUs.

Why do I have the feeling that Hackers' Heaven might end up being a Tres Gique album rather than a solo? How did it get to be so close to tax day? Where am I going, and what am I doing in this handbasket?

My upcoming CD, Coffee, Computers, and Song!, is still available for preorder by snail-mail or PayPal. We are now looking at having it ready sometime in April. I made pretty good progress over the weekend, with more than a third of the tracks finished and only a handful needing additional fixup recording. Now that I'm over my seasonal cold, I should be able to take care of that over the weekend.

I now have both my concert at Consonance, and most of the preceeding concert by cflute and tibicina, up on the web. I missed a few songs in Callie and Rebecca's due to fumbling with the Mac's choice of defalt input devices; if anyone else has a copy I'd be grateful, especially if it includes "Lullaby" and "Nuts from the Hazel Tree".

Grand Central Starport is holding its annual "It's Green!" potluck party this coming Saturday, March 17th. This year, in addition to St. Patrick's Day and a slew of birthdays, we're celebrating the chaoswolf's engagement to selkit. No need to RSVP; just show up.