Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Motivation is bullshit. If you ask me this country could use a little less motivation. The people who are motivated are the ones who are causing all the trouble! Stock swindlers, serial killers, child molesters, Christian conservatives. These people are highly motivated!

"And anyway I think motivation is overrated. If you show me some lazy prick who's laying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, I'll show you someone who's not causing any fuckin' trouble."

-- George Carlin

"Motivation is bullshit. If you ask me this country could use a little less motivation. The people who are motivated are the ones who are causing all the trouble! Stock swindlers, serial killers, child molesters, Christian conservatives. These people are highly motivated!

"And anyway I think motivation is overrated. If you show me some lazy prick who's laying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, I'll show you someone who's not causing any fuckin' trouble."

-- George Carlin

Despite slightly more comfortable weather (81°F/51%) I'm not having a very comfortable day. Listless, dizzy, achy -- and though I get hungry, I really don't feel like cooking, or even eating; all I want to do is drink, and I don't reall want to drink water. I'm craving large quantities of OJ or Gatorade, neither of which I really ought to be drinking all that much of, and I'm nearly out of Gatorade anyhow. So I'll try to settle for fizzy water (the flavoured seltzer w/o sweeteners) and see whether I can muster the energy to be productive at some point.

Well, I've been sortakinda productive-ish: I just did part of an experiment I'd been meaning to do. When I play recorder on stage, I usually just have one mic on a boom pointing at the window, but I recall having read that half the sound comes out the foot (in a rather narrow dispersion pattern, IIRC, but I imagine it usually spreads out more after bouncing off the floor), and I think I remember that having two mics on a recorder mattered in the recording studio. Since I've started playing with Audacity on my Debian box, I've been meaning to set up a pair of microphones and take a closer look.

I picked my two mics with sounds most similar to each other, pointed one at the window of my tenor recorder and the other at the foot, panned them hard-left and hard-right respectively, played a few notes, then swapped the mics and recorded a few more notes. I need to play around more with exact placement of each microphone (and a less noisy time of day), but so far the results are: where the mic is placed makes more of a difference than whch mic (of this particular pair) it is; and neither really sounds like a good recording of a recorder until they're mixed together. Though I can hear the difference well enough, I can't make out the differences clearly on the waveform plot, but this isn't a very large monitor ... (I can, however, see a slight phase difference between the two microphones).

[ETA: As noted in a comment to a later entry, listening to this recording (5MB WAV) on a different computer in a quieter neighbourhood, it sounded a bit different than it did at home. See the comment for details.]

Doing this with a pair of identical (and higher-grade) microphones would be good too. I should probably just arrange to take my recorders up to Emory's studio sometime... Or ask him if he's got WAV files from a two-mic recording of a recorder lying around to email me.

A harder question is whether this makes enough of a difference to care about on stage (it's clearly something to continue to worry about in a recording studio). Probably not ... though, having flipped past clip-on saxophone and brass mics in a catalog, I'd been toying the idea of a clip-on dual-mic recorder rig that could be moved quickly from one recorder to another. (It would look cool and sound better, but it's probably not worth the added complexity, the need for yet another channel, and the risk of throwing off the balance of the instrument and making it harder to play, given that most of the time a live PA is not exactly audiophile hi-fidelity unless you're playing the Meyerhoff or the Kennedy Center, and the subtlety-of-tone of the recorder probably gets lost behind the guitar when playing live anyhow. I could see maybe getting lead recorder silmaril a second channel in the interest of tone if enough people could hear the difference, but not for my alto/tenor/bass parts.) Okay, maybe that wasn't such a hard question after all.

And other than futzing around composing this journal entry, I also goofed off with a quiz-meme and an "analyze data about your blog" toy:

( How Popular [is your journal']? )

and:

( Which Histotical Lunatic Are You? )

Getting Emporor Norton I for that quiz amuses me a great deal. I've always thought Norton was kinda cool.

Despite slightly more comfortable weather (81°F/51%) I'm not having a very comfortable day. Listless, dizzy, achy -- and though I get hungry, I really don't feel like cooking, or even eating; all I want to do is drink, and I don't reall want to drink water. I'm craving large quantities of OJ or Gatorade, neither of which I really ought to be drinking all that much of, and I'm nearly out of Gatorade anyhow. So I'll try to settle for fizzy water (the flavoured seltzer w/o sweeteners) and see whether I can muster the energy to be productive at some point.

Well, I've been sortakinda productive-ish: I just did part of an experiment I'd been meaning to do. When I play recorder on stage, I usually just have one mic on a boom pointing at the window, but I recall having read that half the sound comes out the foot (in a rather narrow dispersion pattern, IIRC, but I imagine it usually spreads out more after bouncing off the floor), and I think I remember that having two mics on a recorder mattered in the recording studio. Since I've started playing with Audacity on my Debian box, I've been meaning to set up a pair of microphones and take a closer look.

I picked my two mics with sounds most similar to each other, pointed one at the window of my tenor recorder and the other at the foot, panned them hard-left and hard-right respectively, played a few notes, then swapped the mics and recorded a few more notes. I need to play around more with exact placement of each microphone (and a less noisy time of day), but so far the results are: where the mic is placed makes more of a difference than whch mic (of this particular pair) it is; and neither really sounds like a good recording of a recorder until they're mixed together. Though I can hear the difference well enough, I can't make out the differences clearly on the waveform plot, but this isn't a very large monitor ... (I can, however, see a slight phase difference between the two microphones).

[ETA: As noted in a comment to a later entry, listening to this recording (5MB WAV) on a different computer in a quieter neighbourhood, it sounded a bit different than it did at home. See the comment for details.]

Doing this with a pair of identical (and higher-grade) microphones would be good too. I should probably just arrange to take my recorders up to Emory's studio sometime... Or ask him if he's got WAV files from a two-mic recording of a recorder lying around to email me.

A harder question is whether this makes enough of a difference to care about on stage (it's clearly something to continue to worry about in a recording studio). Probably not ... though, having flipped past clip-on saxophone and brass mics in a catalog, I'd been toying the idea of a clip-on dual-mic recorder rig that could be moved quickly from one recorder to another. (It would look cool and sound better, but it's probably not worth the added complexity, the need for yet another channel, and the risk of throwing off the balance of the instrument and making it harder to play, given that most of the time a live PA is not exactly audiophile hi-fidelity unless you're playing the Meyerhoff or the Kennedy Center, and the subtlety-of-tone of the recorder probably gets lost behind the guitar when playing live anyhow. I could see maybe getting lead recorder silmaril a second channel in the interest of tone if enough people could hear the difference, but not for my alto/tenor/bass parts.) Okay, maybe that wasn't such a hard question after all.

And other than futzing around composing this journal entry, I also goofed off with a quiz-meme and an "analyze data about your blog" toy:

( How Popular [is your journal']? )

and:

( Which Histotical Lunatic Are You? )

Getting Emporor Norton I for that quiz amuses me a great deal. I've always thought Norton was kinda cool.

[Feh. Gotta fix the problem my post-to-three-blogs-at-once script has with multi-word subjects..]

This is, I think, a little too important to rick getting overlooked in the trivia and nattering of my previous entry, hence the second post in such a short time...

As a few other people have pointed out (mostly citing Pam's House Blend as where they saw it), Today is Loving Day:

On June 12, 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional all laws forbidding interracial marriage. The case was called Loving v. Virginia (1967). The decision was unanimous."

(I wish I'd realized this in time to pick a suitable QotD for the occasion.)

Ed Brayton adds: "I am still waiting for a conservative originalist to either defend the decision on originalist grounds (without completely contradicting their arguments against similar rulings in other case) or tell us why it was wrongly decided. No one has ever accepted that challenge."

[Feh. Gotta fix the problem my post-to-three-blogs-at-once script has with multi-word subjects..]

This is, I think, a little too important to rick getting overlooked in the trivia and nattering of my previous entry, hence the second post in such a short time...

As a few other people have pointed out (mostly citing Pam's House Blend as where they saw it), Today is Loving Day:

On June 12, 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional all laws forbidding interracial marriage. The case was called Loving v. Virginia (1967). The decision was unanimous."

(I wish I'd realized this in time to pick a suitable QotD for the occasion.)

Ed Brayton adds: "I am still waiting for a conservative originalist to either defend the decision on originalist grounds (without completely contradicting their arguments against similar rulings in other case) or tell us why it was wrongly decided. No one has ever accepted that challenge."

Hmm. I shoulda seen that coming ...

When mirroring an LJ entry to GJ and IJ, if the entry contains an <lj ...> tag (e.g. <lj user="examplename"> => examplename), the IJ and GJ copies of the entry will interpret the same tag as linking to a user of the same name on those sites. And similarly, if I try to link to a GJ member, the LJ copy of the entry will try to point to an LJ user with that name. Oof.

Unless TPTB decide to extend the <lj user=""> tag to have syntax that can point to other LJ-codebase sites (or maybe other OpenID sites in general), and all three sites install that feature, I've got a problem. Maybe I should just forego the convenience of <lj user=""> and <lj comm=""> and use longhand HTML to produce the same effect instead (maybe stick a macro in my .exrc file to help) ... but I think that would break the "automatically fix all your old tags to point to someone's new name when they rename their journal" feature, wouldn't it?

Thoughts? Suggestions? Obvious workarounds I've overlooked?

I'm glad I noticed this before getting around to copying all of my old LJ entries over to IJ and GJ.

---

[Edit: a test of doing things longhand (though I might simplify this a bit from the copy/paste version here, in practive):

• dglenn
• dglenn
• dglenn

This is what the <lj user="dglenn"> tag expands to on the three sites, minus a <span> tag that must reference a CSS style with too many side effects; for simplicity on my end, I could leave off the little symbol that links to someone's profile (note that GJ uses the same icon as LJ) and just do a plain old href on their name ... would folks miss the "this is an LJ/GJ/IJ user I'm pointing to" indicator and the convenient profile link, or does it not matter much?

Hmm. IJ doesn't link from the icon, and links the username to the profile instead of the recent-entries page -- odd. Bug?]

Hmm. I shoulda seen that coming ...

When mirroring an LJ entry to GJ and IJ, if the entry contains an <lj ...> tag (e.g. <lj user="examplename"> => examplename), the IJ and GJ copies of the entry will interpret the same tag as linking to a user of the same name on those sites. And similarly, if I try to link to a GJ member, the LJ copy of the entry will try to point to an LJ user with that name. Oof.

Unless TPTB decide to extend the <lj user=""> tag to have syntax that can point to other LJ-codebase sites (or maybe other OpenID sites in general), and all three sites install that feature, I've got a problem. Maybe I should just forego the convenience of <lj user=""> and <lj comm=""> and use longhand HTML to produce the same effect instead (maybe stick a macro in my .exrc file to help) ... but I think that would break the "automatically fix all your old tags to point to someone's new name when they rename their journal" feature, wouldn't it?

Thoughts? Suggestions? Obvious workarounds I've overlooked?

I'm glad I noticed this before getting around to copying all of my old LJ entries over to IJ and GJ.

---

[Edit: a test of doing things longhand (though I might simplify this a bit from the copy/paste version here, in practive):

• dglenn
• dglenn
• dglenn

This is what the <lj user="dglenn"> tag expands to on the three sites, minus a <span> tag that must reference a CSS style with too many side effects; for simplicity on my end, I could leave off the little symbol that links to someone's profile (note that GJ uses the same icon as LJ) and just do a plain old href on their name ... would folks miss the "this is an LJ/GJ/IJ user I'm pointing to" indicator and the convenient profile link, or does it not matter much?

Hmm. IJ doesn't link from the icon, and links the username to the profile instead of the recent-entries page -- odd. Bug?]

A reminder to all who both care and procrastinate: the online preregistration deadline for Pennsic War 36 is only a couple of days away. Make sure you're counted towards your camp's land allocation.

Now if I could convince a couple of people who I'm sure would love Pennsic to finally make it out there so I can see their reactions, that'd be great.

And as long as I'm on the subject, I may as well link to my (terribly in need of updating) personal page about Pennsic.

A reminder to all who both care and procrastinate: the online preregistration deadline for Pennsic War 36 is only a couple of days away. Make sure you're counted towards your camp's land allocation.

Now if I could convince a couple of people who I'm sure would love Pennsic to finally make it out there so I can see their reactions, that'd be great.

And as long as I'm on the subject, I may as well link to my (terribly in need of updating) personal page about Pennsic.