Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

When I finished my last entry, I had a bunch of unrelated things in mind to post about later. Now I can't remember what they were. Reminder to self: better note taking, okay?

Thinking about the PDA "conduit" idea, I'm not making much use of the conduits for PalmOS apps yet, but I'm starting to warm up to the idea. Except that I want conduits that move data around invisibly for me in a "DWISHM" fashion. (DWISHM is the next step beyond "DWIM"; I think it's part of the Babbage programming language spec. It stands for "Do What I Should Have Meant".) If I'm talking to someone on my cell phone and they mention something I want to remember, and I hit the "record voice note" button on my phone because it's already in my hand, I want to go home and find that my web browser is already displaying the Google results of a search on the thing that was mentioned ... or if directions were being dictated to me, I want the transcription to appear on my Visor, already translated to my usual abbreviation style for navigation. When I accept my change from the cashier in the grocery store nand slip the receipt into my purse, I want the prices I just paid to be magically sucked into the HandyShopper database to update the prices stored there, and the total automagically copied to a transaction entry in my checkbook/spending/income spreadsheet at home. When I copy down an email address I want it to propogate to my .mailrc on my file server, my .mailrc in my shell account at my ISP, my cell phone, and my Visor, no matter which of those I was entering the information in to begin with. For that matter, when I receive a pointer update message from a friend, or spot a message from a friend I'd lost touch with on Usenet or a mailing list, I want it to automagically appear in my phone/Visor/.mailrc. That would make the conduit concept useful to me. I've got lots of places data should fly to on my behalf.

Last night I slept for three hours, then found myself inexplicably awake, and never did manage to get back to sleep again. So I was in rough shape all afternoon and evening. I fll asleep a few times at the recording studio, but apparently managed to be awake enough at the times they needed my ears, and came up with a creative solution for getting a particular sound on a part we needed to re-record to fix a tuning problem. But even with the naps it felt like a really long day. Well it was a long day; we were there hours longer than I thought we would be. (At one point I was told I might as well go home, but then I was too sleepy to drive safely, so I waited until I'd rested a bit again. And when I woke up, Mike had finished another set of fixups and was ready for me to make suggestions on the mix for that set). Mike's hoping to get each of the other members of the band copies of the "rough draft" mixes for all the tunes we're currently considering for this album this week. There are two more sets left to mix. These mixes really aren't all that rough as rough drafts go; they're just being called that because there'll be a little bit of polishing left to do, and because the rest of the band needs to give their opinions and feedback which might result in more changes than "a little polishing". Me, I'm really liking what I hear. Mike and Emory have pulled off some really cool stuff here. (They've also had more to work with than on our first album, because we got better/cleaner recordings of the parts than the raw tracks for our first album, due to the different approach we used for recording this one.)

Having the album finished and pressed in time for Pennsic looks extremely unlikely, unfortunately. We're almost that close, but not quite -- and if I understand correctly, the artist is counting on being able to use pictures from the photo shoot scheduled for mid-July. And turnaround at the duplicating plant isn't instantaneous. A shame, because last year people asked were already asking whether we had a second album yet and I'd been looking forward to showing up with the new one this year. Ah well, such is life. These things happen. A disappointment but hardly a catastrophe. I'm too pleased with how it's turning out to let that detail of the timing get me down.

I ran out of Prilosec a few days ago (and as a result ran out of Tums yesterday). Inconveniently, the next few stores I went to had also run out of it! *grumble* I finally got some more on the way home tonight, but could only afford a small box. So I'll be a bit more comfortable for at least the next two weeks (though disconcertingly, I'd had a bit of discomfort in that regard the last couple of days before I ran out. I hope that was a temporary glitch and not a sign that Prilosec is going to stop working for me.)

I've been thinking more about video. I want to play with it, learn more about shooting stuff that moves and has sound. (Half of me wants to use a camcorder instead of the video camera my brother gave me; the other half wants to get two more cameras just like this one, a video-switching/mixing deck, a video-editing deck (I presume those are just two different specializations of the same basic type of device, right?), lights, and assistants.)