Stephan Paukner :: syslog

Two days ago, the aspiring Austrian rock band Excuse Me Moses did a short illegal rock concert off an updriven truck at Stephansplatz in Vienna as PR for their new album “1st Last Will”. Numerous fans and a handful of journalists had been informed in advance, and many surprised tourists watched their performance. The band managed to play two and a half songs until the police turned off their generator. In the evening they had their album presentation in Vienna’s Birdland club. Here’s a video from yesterday’s TV news (in German); you can see me cheering e.g. in second 12 on the right half of the screen (black shirt).

In November 2006 I hoped to be able to finish my Master thesis during spring 2007, having in eye that summer starts on June 21st, 2007. However, I was still working in January and focus on my thesis since February 2007. Four or five months are not enough.

Now I want to finish the introductory and Frame Theory chapters by the end of June. During July I want to write down the chapter about discrete and 2D Gabor analysis. And during August I want to do the chapter about the Octave/MATLAB experiments. This is my time plan to hand in my thesis in September. The Master exam should be due in November.

Why does everything have to take such a long time?

The following video I found on YouTube shows a bot gameplay of DEFCON, a computer game inspired by the film WarGames. This game is even available for GNU/Linux. It is a simulation of a global thermonuclear war and therefore of my most fearful imagination. The background music of this game is horrible, but in a certain way: Its composer perfectly creates a terrifying atmosphere. The game in this video runs at full speed, whereas it is even more spooky when you try that game in realtime, watching how the ICBM’s trails slowly rise and pave their way through the sky for half an hour until they reach their targets. The impact is accompanied by a creepy close rumbling. Unfortunately, the video is too short for the sounds of a crying woman to come up. Turn up your speakers with lots of bass and consider this:

The Boss RC-2 Loop Station is a compact pedal for recording loop phrases with an electric guitar. The pedal has two bigger brothers: The RC-20XL Phrase Recorder and the spacious RC-50 Loop Station. The RC-2 is ideal for practicing and composing. It has 33 different drum patterns available and can store 11 phrases with a sum of at most 16 minutes. You can tap in the tempo of the drum patterns and even the speed of recorded phrases without changing their pitch! The pedal has an AUX IN to record phrases from an external playback device. This makes it possible to e.g. slow down guitar solos you want to learn. In this case you can use the AUTO recording mode that doesn’t start recording before an audio signal is received. Recordings can be overdubbed arbitrary times, and there’s an undo and redo function for the most recent overdub. Playback can be switched from loop to one-shot, making it possible to trigger recorded samples during a performance.

Boss must have put much brain power into the usability design of that pedal to make it possible for musicians to have a reasonable recording workflow available by just using two knobs, a single button and a single footswitch. I don’t want to go into detail here, but rather show what a typical workflow could look like (without an external footswitch):