Bullets

• Why are microphones with a really narrow pickup pattern called "Shotgun" mics? Shouldn't they be rifle mics? The NRA has a lot of work to do in the sound design community.
• Yay! 500 hits
• For those of you keeping score at home-- the appliation is no longer online. Now the truly painful waiting begins.

and...

• HAPPY BIRTHDAY DANA!!!

Wine Snob

Fun fact for today:

AP - Paris "Critics who praise the "complexity" of red Burgundy and Champagne are on target.

A team of French and Italian researchers has mapped the genome of the pinot noir grape, used to make bubbly and many red wines from France's Burgundy region and around the world — and it has about 30,000 genes in its DNA. That's more than the human genome, which contains some 20,000 to 25,000 genes."

The Boys from Syracuse

Today I start assisting at the Public on Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. It's a play about a guy from Syracuse lost in a strange place...... hmmmm, fitting.

In other news, last night there was some enjoyable craziness. Tequila and Wii were involved... okay-- Tequila, Wii, and one REALLLLLY drunk friend. It was spectacular.

Long Distance Dedication

I wonder if it makes me extremely odd that I can look back on certain events, some seemingly minor, and note that they were a major turning point for a part of me.

Case in point-- the last day of my freshmen year at college Chris Rummel (shout-out) gave me his sound design mix-CD for the show The Shape of Things along with another CD, simply titled The Inspiration. Tonight I shared some of my favorites from those CDs with a friend and realized that those CDs changed my taste in music. It didn't happen all at once, or even noticeibly, but that's clearly where the inflection point lies in what I listen to. Another small change happend a couple years after that when Talene (shout-out) less then subtley began a music education program for me.

It probably has something to do with my unique blend of nostalgia, snap-shot memory, and overly cognitive personality. What I do know is this, there's something special to me about music I've gained through my friends. From "New Music Delivery" in the middle of a Syracuse winter to "SU Mix" on the long journey back from UMass Amherst, I have a photo-album of music and the memories of the close friends I first heard it with.

Bullets

• Fortune Cookie yesterday: "Be prepared to be spontaneous tomorrow." Now, I ordered the food at 10PM but didn't open the cookie until 12:30AM, so does that apply to today or Monday?
• Does anyone else find it really strange when people 'come out' via the Interested In line item on facebook? What kind of society are we living in?
• I finally got to re-watch Gattaca. Great movie.
• Immediately after Gattaca, to get in the Halloween mood, we tried to watch Open Water 2 on FEARnet (Comcast's free horror movies on demand). Needless to say it was horrible, we ended up watching the majority of it in fast-forward, only stopping long enough to watch the hecklible parts. If you've never seen anything on FEARnet it's truly incredible how much of the screen is taken up by gigantic branding graphics every 7 minutes.
• I reread part of a book I have, Modern British Playwrights, which includes the sentence: "Both playwrights are indebted to the groundbreaking contribution to world drama that the Irish playwright and Nobel Prize-winning Samuel Beckett made in combining existential philosophy-- an ontological vision of life as solitary, random, and absurd-- and an antinaturalistic concept of dramaturgy, the prime example of which is Waiting for Godot (1953)." Which clocks in at 51 words. Damn.
• Google's spell-checker doesn't recognize the word dramaturgy . Sad.

Salvation lies within

Great quotes from Shawshank Redeption

"Andy Dufresne, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side."

"Same old shit, different day "

"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it."

"You could argue he'd done it to curry favor with the guards. Or, maybe make a few friends among us cons. Me, I think he did it just to feel normal again, if only for a short while. "

"I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright and when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice, but still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend. "



Shout-out to Goose (even though you don't read my blog)-- I miss ya buddy.

AutoCAD Audio

So I'm sure someone who knows more about sound than me will tell me that either a) this is a completely rediculous idea or b) they thought of this 15 years ago... but until then I want to believe that I've stumbled upon something mildly brilliant.

Today in Sound 1 we were going over sampling and bit rates, and how they're basically the x and the y, respectively, of a plotted line graph of a waveform. Having gone over this before my mind drifted to the work I have left for my AutoCAD class. At a certain point I was thinking about a 3D extrusion path I have yet to draw and the spline I would have to make for it.

It was at this moment that I realized the way we currently capture digital audio is no longer efficient. Imagine a spline in AutoCAD, the spline is constucted by certain specific points and a "curve of best fit" between them. So-- what if instead of a matrix of positional values (x,y) to replicate a sound wave we use vectors instead? Gone would be hard, articifial caps on frequency response as well as the course jumps between values because now a true unbroken linear waveform has been created based on a mathmatical model. Better still, we can enhance the model based on decades of work in calculus, which for those of you (ok, all of you) who aren't as dorky as me is the study of the rates of change of curves.

Okay, let the flamming begin. In a related story, the "J.Read is a huge nerd" t-shirts go on sale soon.

For the Record

Just for the record, for those of you who made fun of my, uhhhhhh, bachelor-lery eating habits at SU (especially you folks from back at 1021 Madison)........

Last night a friend of mine made himself a grilled cheese AND hot dog sandwich.

That is all.