10-31-96. . . . 00:04:55:01[140:4:090]10.Note.Snare Drum.127.29
When you stay awake all the time, how do you know when you are supposed to take out your contact lenses? It's 8 am Thursday now and I guess I can insert one last entry this month. 70% of the performance has been completed and sanity-checked. I just took out my contacts. Almost dropped one in the drain, because my hands were shaking so badly, because I'm at about 44% blood-caffeine-level. I have the chance to update this now because I'm preparing a second disk for data. I think I will name it disk B.
The coffee is doing it's job, keeping me awake. The combination of high caffeine content, awful taste in mouth and sickening burning sensation throughout internals is pretty effective. I may be tired and incoherent, but I can still program and tweak drums, by gum.
Apparently there are people with a rare disease or imbalance that makes their circadian rhythms extremely shallow. these people can go without any conventional form of "sleep" for years. I bet their drum programs always work. Well, formats done. See you at the show.
10-30-96. . . . Musical Trilinear Mop-mapping. Mup.
I get to act talented in front of lots of people tomorrow! Yes, just like in elementary school I can make lots of noise and jump around in front of my peers. Of course, this time there's money involved and other people count on me, and a lot of the audience is on LOTS AND LOTS of drugs... come to think of it, there were certainly a lot of hyperactive kids in my elementary school, too. I guess it isn't that different after all.
Still, I hope all the equipment works. It seems to be traditional now that the most critical equipment will fail at the most critical times. Right now, I am putting the MIDI and drum electronics through a few tests to make sure it's all sane and will remain so for at least 24 hours. Oh wait. I haven't changed my guitar strings for a month. I better do that too.
Gosh, all this electronic equipment. I once thought that maybe all this equipment was dehumanizing us (as a race)(oh god I'm philosophizing) because it was putting us further and further away from the final product of our creativities. (music, writing, art, anything that electronics now assists) Used to be, you hit the rock with the stick, you're one step away from actually creating ther noise with your own body. Now, I hit the pressure pad, it translates the pressure into a voltage, which the drum machine quantizes and records onto disk. The data sits around in a little cold box for ten hours and then I play it back, where it goes through more equipment for translation and amplification. Wow. I hardly am responsible for that noise at all, huh?
Well, there's more to it than that. When we were back hitting rocks with sticks (or hands with other hands) we were restrained by our equipment. If you wanted to make a noise other than "thwak" with your instrument, you were out of luck. Now we are only restrained by imagination. If I can think a noise, there's a chunk of active silicon out there that can realize it. I just happen to think noises that sound a whole lot like chalk bowling balls falling onto the street from ten floors up. This electronically augmented creativity applies to almost any art, I guess. Can you guess that I don't agree that signal processing causes your music to sound "soulless"? well duh.
Hmm. The computer expo was today too. life is full of complicated little boxes.
This is probably going to be the last entry this month. tomorrow is going to be busy as hell. Happy Halloween then. Halloween has gotta be one of the best holidays. Better than christmas. Even though our holidays have been commercialized into... ahh, slagging commercialism is cliche already. you know what I mean. None of our sentimental celebrations are real or mean anything yadda yadda yadda.
Okay. I'm running through the drum sequence torture tests now so I must stop writing. See you next month. Hi Kim!
10-24-96. . . . Thuh, thuh, thuh, thursday.
Well, just for compulsiveness' sake, I've decided to mix case in my HTML tags. Pointless or what? HMmm... It still works, now I have style. And now which is more important, style or practicality?
Today is my first thursday at work. My schedule was recently changed and now I get to be present on the goofy thursdays. It is really weird so far... I guess all the weird people like calling on thursday. Chad said "it's like there's a full moon every thursday.", Ed agrees...eek.
10-23-96. . . . Melt down everything to purify it (P10!)
Right now, the smurf theme song is echoing across the tech room. Ed has apparently started inserting wav files into his page. I guess I can never look at it again.
One of my favorite things to do is to scrutinize the various lumps and cracks in people's psyches. Everyone's got weird little quirks and problems, and it sometimes seems like you NEED to have them in order to have a personality at all. I mean, I have known a few very nice stable people without quirks and they were dull as hell. And I seem to like people with neuroses. I'm not sure why...
Okay, yeah I am. It's because I like conflict. I had better, because things haven't been too calm for the past lifetime or so. Parents divorced when I was in 3rd grade. Moved 5 or 6 times. Mom is crazy. You know, the usual. I can't help but think that if all that stuff hadn't happened I'd be really unbearably 2-dimensional. As it is, I enjoy unbearable 3-dimensionality.
Oh yeah, Band is playing at Sinister Cyn's halloween ball at the Groove, so if you go to the groove on halloween, I'm the one that looks like this. Go ahead and show up, especially if you're neurotic.
10-21-96. . . . Hacker Wacker
Just got mail that I was inducted into the "Open Pages" webring. Why did I request to be added? Why, to gain popularity and influence people, duh. Okay maybe that's not why.
Got a phone call at work today which set all my co-workers to bugging me about my personal life. I guess I don't tell anyone about my personal life. I might tell YOU guys, but I guess I'll think about that for a while. There's a division between the things I can say online and the things I can say in person, and working at an ISP kind of makes those lines hard to hold. Too many people I know wander the www.
In other news, designed a tech support T-shirt today. If you ever see a guy wandering around with a shirt that says "NO" real big on the front (without 'fear' following it) That's Me. or a guy with the same job as me.
10-18-96. . . . Rat in a Hat (P10)
Okay I finally got the Ultra 64. It rocks. It is totally amazing. Get one. Get one. And now I think I am going to do some heavy duty restructuring on my page. Any of you with links to anything but my main page will become obsolete. Come on! Evolve! More when the dust clears.
Okay, done stuffing everything in directories. And I think all the links have been rerouted correctly. I dunno. Maybe I'll stick a mail link on my main page. Yes, that sounds like a terrible idea. I certainly have a lot to think about nowadays. I can totally preoccupy myself into oblivion, thinking about norway. My life is so dang weird sometimes.
10-16-96. . . . So very tired (P10)
I can hear the sysadmins playing music really loud in the next room. Those wacky admins. Always playing really loud music in the machine room. When we do that in the tech room everyone gets annoyed. Especially if it's really loud commodore 64 music. Well, I'm the only one who plays that. There's something about the SID chip and the songs composed on the C-64 which rings of purity. If you hear something in a SID song and you remember it later on, it must have had something intrinsically catchy about it, since the sound quality and instrumentation is bordering on unlistenable. Back when those songs were written, you had to be talented in order to sound good. Nowadays you just need a bunch of expensive equipment.
10-12-96. . . . I make up a new lie today (P10)
I was just starting to wonder why I felt so broke. Well then. A couple of days ago (when I got paid) I discovered a forgotten paycheck in my bag. Now I have a big whoppin load of cash. What am I gonna do with it? Move up to the mainland.
10-10-96. . . . Choking Naked Baker Sandwich (P10)
Hmm. This page is getting cumbersome and slow to load. I think when it passes the 20 or 30K mark I shall break it up into quick-loading, small, adorable mini-pages. I suppose about one page a month should be sufficient. No wait, when did I start this? Oh, 9-16. Yeah, one page a month. Everyone else seems to do it that way, too.
It isn't as if I'm doing it for the masses that are forced to slog through this, but I know SOMEONE'S reading this, because every so often I get email from someone I don't know that says "Go to sleep!". I'm doing it for you pal. For America. Because I'm starting to get impatient waiting for my own page to load.
Speaking of which! I've changed the policy on the ultra page. Now instead of just being a horrible bandwidth-wasting monster, it's going to do the exact same thing as my normal page, only ten times bigger. Also, with lots of graphics drawn by me. Painstakingly. In my own blood. So go load it up someday. But not too soon! If you load it now it's going to be half done and really goofy looking!
10-9-96. . . . De Mentos, the fresh flaker
Well, last night I played a show at the Rendezvous. Band had to change their name to "Dementia" so it would fit with the gothic-ness of the club I was playing (The UNDERWORLD, slaver-hiss-drool). I guess the show went pretty well. DR-660 decided to start flaking out near the end of our set though. I'm gonna replace that guy with an AD5, or whatever the high sample rate drum module from alesis is called.
Anyway today marks the start of Plan-10. "What is plan-10?" It's the plan after plan-9. Huh. It's the massive plan which is going to take up most of my time and resources for a couple months and could possibly determine my life course. Every so often someone should email me and remind me that said plan is in effect so I don't forget. What does it involve? I can't tell you guys. Yet. I must keep it secret from all those corporate spies and CIA operatives that frequent my page (over 100 hits!) for information.
I wonder if I should shave off my beard. Yeah why not. It grows back fast. I'm sure everyone will notice. People will hide their kids from my naked chin. Yech. it feels gross and fleshy already. Well, I'm not leting anyone with a camera near me till i decide it looks presentable.
Oh yeah, and happy 20th birthday 11 days ago Kris. Oops.
10-5-96. . . . The which no sooner...uh...
I got to log in on console today. Boy, what a thrill. Able to crash a $30,000 server with a single mis-keypress. I did this is order to bring the system out of its death throes. (with the help of an admin over the phone) Tech support wins again.10-3-96. . . . Sleep is good
You know down the page a bit where it says that I had been staying awake? Ultra Vigil? Well I finally got some sleep today. I figure I had been awake a little more than is healthy (i.e. almost 7 days straight) so I went to street. Er, I went to sleep. Still kinda woozy. And my glasses broke, one of the lenses fell out, so any time I'm not wearing my contacts, I can only see out of one eye. I'm gonna go put in my contacts dammit.
Okay, well the other new thing is I now have a T-1 class line in my room. That's right, A wire capable of something like 45MBps, right in my own house. This particular T-1, however, is only about 10 feet long, and neither end is connected to anything, somewhat limiting its use. If you know of a high bandwidth point of connection within 10 feet of my room, please email me.
10-2-96. . . . Blue Monday
Okay, they decided to give me my check. Gosh, I guess I'll never turn in my payslip late again. I sure learned my lesson. ANYWAY, I'm not going to get evicted, everything's cool. I've got enough money. Know why? Because the brilliant guys at software etc. didn't hold my Ultra 64 until tuesday, like they agreed to. So they took my name down and said when the next shipment comes in they'd call me, first thing. Yeah. The list they wrote my name on was a long list, too. The manager asked me if I was speaking with a lady when I had made this arrangement. Yup I was. "That's the third time so far" he said. I guess when you run your business like a 10 year old's lemonade stand, you get used to this sort of thing.
But I'm happy. I dunno if it's because I'm finally out of mom's house and I can think straight for once, or if it's because I've been awake for four days and I'd be happy no matter what. In any case, things are looking good. If I can just keep my life this way for the next four or five months, it will stabilize into sweetness and light. Ahhh.
In fact, I'm so happy I feel sort of like being sociable for once. Maybe I'll actually talk to some strangers once in a while. Well, other than the needy, lost strangers I speak to on the phone as an occupation. I don't know too terribly many people on this side of the island, and they seem like they might be interesting to know.
Geez, I would have never said something like that two months ago. Maybe Ed's slipping happy drugs into my food. ha!
