Or rather, Ultra Mad Men. G’wan, clickie, you know you wanna.

Also, another day mostly out. This time not as cool; allergy re-testing, the kind where they put a grid of needles on your arm. YAY! By which I mean boo.

Not around much today, I’m afraid – I’ve got some meetings that’ll keep me offline, and also, I’m playing catchup after spending Sunday getting our mail server put back together – okay, mostly rebuilt from new parts – after the windstorm on Saturday not only took it down, but broke things. Big shout-out to Andrew “Traest” Grey who knew what fuckery was keeping us off the net after coming back up on the new hardware, and even more for helping us fix it.

I did take some time off Saturday night and go to Betsy Tinney’s CD release concert, though. I supported her kickstarter for her first solo album, and if you like instrumental material, particularly adventurous cello music, go give that a listen.

Sometimes, late at night, I discover things. Sometimes they are hilarious things. Sometimes they are hilarious things that are awesome and end up on albums.

This is one of those times.

And everybody is in bed and I have nobody to play it to, and I can’t post it, because unfinished project (because, oh yeah, this is going on the soundtrack album) so I won’t link that in public.

Dammit.

Solarbird: I ordered a metal aluminium NO Solicitors sign for the bottom of the driveway. $27.
Solarbird: Because we just got another one and do not want
Solarbird: And it has a stake and I imagine that if it’s at the bottom of the driveway and they see that sign and look up the climb to our front door they’ll go, “…yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah… okay.”
Taliesin: They’re climing all the way up there just to bug a known supervillan?
Solarbird: I just had to disintegate another one!
Anna nodnods re: sign. Good.
Anna: (And yeah, disintegrating solicitors, while fun, DOES distract from disintegrating MORE annoying targets!)
Solarbird: Plus it drains the capacitor and then I have to recharge it.
Taliesin grins.
Solarbird: and it’s a BIG capacitor.
Anna nods wisely.
Taliesin: So that’s what that annoying whine I’m hearing is?
Solarbird: Are you kidding? Hell no. Silent. You think I want that kind of noise pollution near my studio? I’m this close >< to using the magfield generator to move airplanes out of my sky. I’m not adding to the problem!
Anna Hee
Solarbird . o O ( and since they’re all aluminium and composites these days, that means I have to move it by moving the _people_… )
Anna stage whispers to Tal, “I’ve had to remind her to NOT use the heat ray on the neighbors.”
Solarbird LIES
Anna: (Most of whom are ooooooooooooold, it’d be like shooting fish in a barrel)
Solarbird: okay that much is true but it was not _me_ who wanted to liquify the people in the 80s house down the street after _somebody_ locked themselves out and _they_ wouldn’t let her use their phone.
Anna: Now see THAT would have been justifiable disintegration!
Anna: It is not justifiable to disintegrate your neighbors over hedge wankery XD
Solarbird: No, that is the BEST time. I would be a neighbourhood … hero.
Solarbird: Okay you have a point.
Anna: If however you choose to use the ray on the HEDGE…
Anna | *ZORCH* THERE! PROBLEM SOLVED!
Solarbird: Nah, that’s just taking a side at that point. I’d have to take out the hedge AND the trees AND the rockery. And I like trees, mostly.
Solarbird: _Mostly_.
Solarbird: Some of those guys along the north property line? Total fuckers.
Solarbird: But in general, they’re a good lot.
Anna: That’s TRUE.

Paul found this and sent it to me. Basically, somebody made me a movie. Enjoy!

Hey, if you’re going to Conflikt, in Seattle, in a few weeks? I’ll be hosting a songwriting workshop. Details are in their latest progress report; it’ll be based on the one I did for VCON, last October.

It went over well in Vancouver – well, okay, technically, Richmond – so hopefully it’ll go well here, too. See the link for details, but sign up early, and if you have something in advance to workshop a bit, get that to me early.

Hope to see you there!

Over the last couple of days, Anna and I have been rebooting the online presence of the Emerald Forest Filk Society. They’re a Cascadian filk music (geek-folk) society that’s been around quite a while; we co-run a small co-op ISP as a hobby, and have the resources for this sort of thing. So when they came saying “HELP!”, we of course said yes.

We’re pretty pleased with ourselves, to be honest, particularly over the timeframe. They had a fairly simple static web page before, and a mailing list (with extensive archives). In a little over a day, we’ve ported the domain and the mailing list, and have repaired the archives and uploaded through 2007 already. The rest are a matter of another hour of work, tops; they’ve already been repaired.

Better, we’ve also built a completely new site for them, one that’s easier to maintain, because it’s WordPress. Two people have already volunteered to write things for it, so it actually gets updated with news and events. We’ve built presences on Twitter and Facebook that are automatically updated as the website’s multiple miniblogs are updated, and replies on those services go back to the website, so it’s tied together like it should be.

There are still details to manage, but all the heavy lifting is finished.

Web tools make this so easy now. In 2005, that would’ve been a month of work, possibly for a crew. Now two people can pull it off working part-time in a day.

The future is cool.

The Emerald Forest Filk Society has been on the same web and mail platform for a long time, and the administrator really wants to shut down that machine, so Anna and I have agreed to take on hosting. This URL will always work, if badly, despite being non-canonical. There’s also a Twitter feed and a Facebook account, because I am dragging this into five years ago, no matter what! XD

Anna found this WordPress plug-in called Social that I’m trying out with this post. The best thing about Social is that it transfers comments back and forth too, so, say, if you comment on a replication of an EFFS post on Facebook, the comment also goes back to the home website, and that is epic.

So this is mostly an excuse to see if it works. But also I’m publicising the EFFS’s new homes. LINK ALL THE THINGS! XD

I made another one of these mic cases out of a pistol case. This one is claimed to be a two pistol case, but it holds my three M-Audio Novas nicely.

It’s a pretty good case for mics but I don’t think it’d be a great pistol case because the egg crate foam doesn’t line up the way it should, and they seem to know that, and left space to compensate. That’s fine if you’re dealing with big microphones, but not good for small mics or pistols. My other cases, the foam lines up right, so you could use them for smaller mics.

The last few days, I’ve been working on recovering some recordings of a ten year old interview with Buck O’Neil, of the Kansas City Monarchs of the old Negro American League, during segregation. He lead the effort to establish the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and has several other firsts; Ken Burns used him quite a bit in his documentary on baseball.

The recordings were made on a pocket microcassette recorder, ten years ago. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these things, but they were one of the smallest tape factors ever made, moved really slowly, and did not age well.

Even optimally, they could record about 50hz to 4000hz – less than a fifth the range of modern equipment – and are prone to noise, hiss, and other problems, all of which this recording had. Plus, the recording was made handheld, via a PA, which itself had feedback issues causing ringing on emphasised words, all at highly variable signal levels.

So it’s been quite a learning experience. Knowing much more about this from theory than practice, I was glad to get a chance to try out some of these tricks.

I used a repetitive-noise pattern-matching filter to etch out the worst of the repeating noise profile. Then a low pass filter to get rid of everything above 4000hz and a high-pass filter to get rid of everything below 50hz; since those are beyond the capability of the format, anything in those regions was playback harmonics or noise.

Then a collection of notch filters to get rid of primary feedback tone and two common harmonics of it, variable-band equalisation filters to duck out what I could of the recorder’s noise and some in-room sound, and some very careful but high-ratio compression to bring it all to a vaguely consistent level. In some areas, this exposed or exaggerated sibilants, which I filtered out. Then I threw on (in some places) a tiny touch of reverb to hide the worst of the tape-jitter distortion and make it all understandable, followed by a final equalisation round to try to throw a little life back into it, and another round of compression.

The result isn’t something I’d call good – you can’t get there from here – but it’s reasonably clear, has a lot less noise, and listenable, whereas the originals range between better than you’d expect and inaudible, with a deeply fatiguing feedback ring.

I may be able to link to the result, eventually. If you get a chance to hear a recording of Buck O’Neil at one of these sorts of events, you should; he’s got a million stories from segregation and baseball, and they’re all interesting.