And we're back

Dunno what caused it, don't particularly care, but we're back and that's good. Life continues.

ION it's my SL self's rezzday today. Gonna pop into SL a bit later when I get home & say "Hi" to a few people assuming they're about. There's a few people I don't seem to see much of these days who I wouldn't mind bumping into. I've not organised any party or anything & I doubt I matter enough for anyone to throw me one (I'm never about anyway - only Sundays) but hey.

Worst case scenario - nobody's there or nobody gives a flying monkey's & I'll just go join Evon over on Argent Dawn RP (EU) where I'm levelling a new NE DK (Blood spec). I haven't done much (well, any!) RP in WoW so far, but my main guild seem to have gone into a lull or trough - nobody's about when I'm on - so I'm happy killing red-skinned Outland Orcs by the half-dozen. Ev's got a lvl 80 hunter on there & has alerted me to various RP addons on curse.com which I've installed. I'm not bothering much with grinding rep till I get to 80 this time - Enkidu's been spending loads of time exploring & all that but with Mitsusuke my goal is plain old lvl 80 asap, and then I'll worry about the rest. I'm staying on orange quests all the way. Should take about a month I think.

Anyway, so, it's gonna be: get home, read kids bedtime story, dig garden if there's any light left (gotta weed it all, or at least get my veg patch weed free), grab a couple of beers if I may, check SL, then:
while SL.party? do
stick about
party
end
while Time.now < 12:00AM
level character
end
sleep

'nuff of this geeky shit now :-)

C*ns*r*d

Fucking hell. Wow.

I dunno quite how to react to this one. A certain IT company has, at a stroke, blocked all personal, social networking, blogging, and pretty well anything else sites from within. This includes the Yammer site that its employees set up in order to facilitate networking within the company.

Now, I've said this before I'm sure - I don't much like censorship at all. I can see the kind of thinking that leads to a decision like this, but I don't agree with it at all. See, on one hand, we have studies claiming that such sites waste valuable time that could be spent working, and that they're a security risk. But then, so are personal mobile telephones. If you trust your employees to have their best interests and the company's at heart, and you accept that you employ intelligent adults, then you have to see that most employees won't use 3rd party apps once informed of the risks. You have to see that these intelligent people that you employed because they are self starters that know how to manage their time and get their work done, are indeed able to manage their time & get their work done. You have to see that they're able to keep their traps shut & not go spouting company info anywhere they shouldn't unless they're seriously disgruntled, in which case blocking access via the internet to these sites is like wearing a handkerchief on your head in a typhoon: it ain't gonna keep you dry & it Just Won't Work.
On the other hand, if you stopped & looked for a bit you might see people networking with other people in the industry, sharing ideas & researching techniques on how to do their jobs better. You might see them finding out about the latest programming languages or design patterns. Maybe you'll get someone to fill that vacancy HR can't seem to find anyone for because they've outsourced hiring to some god-awful agency who know zip about IT and computing, because you notice on Facebook that an old mate is looking for work & you know from reading her blog that she's a world authority on the thing you want done. But no. Let's block the net. Let's tell our employees "Hey, you know what we said about being a self-starter? Well, that doesn't extend to curiosity. We don't want curious people here. We want you to stop asking questions & just do things how they've always been done. Because our competitors don't read up on new tech. Our competitors don't learn new things. Our competitors are so inferior we can rest on our laurels."

Yeah, right. China had one of the most powerful empires in the world, once, but then for centuries they closed themselves off from the outside world, and refused to adapt and change. They refused to allow curiosity & networking. After a while, they were overrun by European colonialists, and it took them about a century to recover. No names mentioned, but you know who you are. Fix it.

*sigh*

I'm quite exasperated with the state of UK politics at the moment. So many things that seem to be common sense, the sort of things that I'm so sure anyone would go for, don't get done, but instead some of the craziest bat-shit stuff happens. The current looming cloud on the horizon is the possibility of a BNP surge in the european elections & then possibly in a forthcoming general election. Far better writers than I have illustrated why voting BNP is the stupidest thing to do - why the BNP themselves are a bunch of unpleasant, racist morons who can't even get 4 genuine supporters to appear on a flyer for them, and who use a Polish Spitfire pilot to illustrate why British people have won some kind of right to lord it over everyone else. Utter piffle, anyway.

There's no way in hell I'm voting either Labour or Conservative, and if I vote BNP or UKIP please check for lobotomy scars. LibDems have by far the best collection of policies, but if that's the case, why am I so exasperated? I'll tell:

Over 10 years ago I used to hang out on occasion with my godparents and their family in Finchley, North London. They were all staunch Labour supporters - the old guard who'd supported the miners during the strike and so on, and who never tired of telling me that it was their tireless campaigning that got Mrs Thatcher out of her seat - supposedly one of the safest Tory seats in the country. I had occasion to help them out, as in those days I was thus far not disillusioned with Labour. These were the dying days of the Major government, going into the heady days of the first Blair term, and we'd not yet had a sufficient dose of Labour to know what a shower they were going to turn out to be. I got to see this tireless campaigning & how it worked, and I have to say it left a lasting impression - a grassroots movement of people who really believed in their party, & who would not give up on it no matter how futile the fight looked. They never took a step back, never baulked. They were brilliant, even if the party they've got in didn't live up to them.

So anyway, fast-forward a few years, and I've written a few times mostly over human rights and civil liberties related issues to my local MP, Siôn Simon. Siôn was elected MP for Erdington in that first heady rush of New Labour good, Tories bad fervour in '97, and ever since then he's hugged fast onto the Party line, no matter how unpopular their policies - we're talking here about all the shite they've done that wasn't in their manifesto. I'm sure nobody voted for war with Iraq, because it wasn't on the table in '97. None of the supposed anti-terror legislation was ever voted upon by the people, and that is why I think people like Siôn need to listen to their electorate in the time between elections, when it comes to issues we didn't get a vote on. After doing this a few times and getting some fairly dismissive re-statements of the Party line I decided that there's no way this guy is ever going to represent his constituency, and as such, he needs to be got out.

I was still never going to vote Tory, and the LibDems' policies, even if they may never win a general election, are the best. They stand for personal liberty and social responsibility, good values. I have to say I do go slightly wistful & sigh a bit at this because I'm a realist & I'm sure they'll not win a general election under the FPTP scheme, because FPTP is a 2-horse race, and the 2 horses are basically the same anyway, New Labour have proved. So I joined the LibDems, thinking, "Right - I know how to get this guy out! Let's do it!".

But then I ran into a block - when I asked about the local candidate for the elections that were coming up at the time, I was told yes, there was one standing in my ward (Stockland Green) but they weren't spending any money or time or effort campaigning for him. What a waste of a deposit! No posters saying who he was, no leaflets through my door or any of my neighbours, nothing. I said I would be happy to put them through myself, but I was told none would be printed, and so predictably they came nowhere in my ward in the locals that time.

A couple of years later & having let my membership lapse, I'm stirred again by the new LibDem leader, Nick Clegg. He's a decent sort, with good ideas, and I desperately want him to do well, so I join up again & I go to a meeting & say about how I'd left before because we'd been so apathetic - well, they had anyway, and if we actually bothered we might have a chance. I read so many blogs from young LibDem supporters & there's a huge energy there, but TBH my local lot have a bit of a problem - they're mostly pretty elderly. When I said I wanted to do leafleting in my local area, I did mean in my local area. Instead, I got a delivery of leaflets for Castle Vale & Tyburn ward, nearly 7 miles away. There's no way I can walk over there quickly of an evening, and it's probably the least salubrious place to be after dark. I knock off at work at 7pm & drive 50 miles home, leaving me exhausted & it's late - 8:30 or so. I cannot do this. I cannot *be* the whole fucking LibDem support in the North of Birmingham. I was told if I couldn't do it I'd get help, but nobody has offered any help, just leaning on me to deliver these. It's just not on.

OK, so now you know - if the LibDems don't do well it's because they Just Can't Be Bothered. Get your thumbs out of your arses & get leafleting. Get canvassing. Have a stall outside your local supermarket, every week. Get signatures on petitions. Represent your people. If you're not yet in the council, be the go-to people to get your council members acting on the people's behalf. Be firebrands! I can't do it all myself.

Ableton frustration!

I'm doing it ALL WRONG, I swear - I must be. I just don't know HOW. I've been trying to warp my tracks as according to innerstatejt's tutorial on YouTube, but it's Just Not Working. All the tutorials use tracks that I'd regard as background anyway - stuff that the DJ showing the tutorial has presumably put together themselves using synth & drum machine & which has a very regular format to it. Public Enemy's "Fuck the Police" by contrast has a syncopated hip-hop beat & that doesn't start at the beginning of the track, so Ableton Live just seems to get it All Wrong, putting in dozens of warp markers all over the place & utterly mis-guessing the BPM so that at first attempt it sounds all s-l-o-w or madlyspeededup depending on the master BPM setting.

So anyway I deleted all the automatic warp markers & zoomed in to the start of the first transient as JT says, popped a warp marker in there & put on a 18 bar loop. Got to the end of the loop & zoom in & like JT with his example track I see that the end of the loop and the start of the nearest transient don't coincide. I click in the wave area & get the vertical line, click above in the warp marker area & make this a warp marker. This is now placed on the transient start & I need to drag it to the loop end like JT does in the tutorial. So I hover the mouse over it & get the double arrow icon, click and drag, and... huh? WTF? Where'd it go??! I zoom out & see that the warp marker hasn't dragged over to the right to the end of the loop but has snapped to a position much further inside the loop, and no amount of dragging will get it to move to the loop end.

I suspect that there must be some kind of issue with quantization but I'm too new at this to know what's buggering it up for me. This is a sticking point for me because I really need to get all my tracks warped & if it's going to take ages & be this frustrating I think I may end up smashing something & take up a life as a rock drummer instead, cos I really could hit stuff a lot right now. Very frustrating.

I didn't have enough time to get it done this morning but I'll upload a YouTube video showing this problem in response to innerstatejt's tutorial - mebbe he or someone can answer & help sort this out?

Children's Week

WOW post:

Right, Children's week started with Enkidu (Feral Druid) at lvl 71. I got the "Home Alone" achievement & wanted to get "Bad Example", where you eat all these sweets in front of your orphan, but having bought them, I then find out you can't eat two of them until lvl 75! Cue massive levelling push. I didn't make it to 75, so cashed in my orphan having done the main quests & got Speedy the Tortoise as a cute pet (gaining "Aww, isn't he cute?" achievement as I did). I did get to 74 & did Azjol Nerub with the guild, which was fun. Hanging out on Ventrilo while questing & doing instances is quite good - makes for a closer-knit guild I think

Initial experiments

Well, it's looking good - I started out last night trying to do a simple beat-match & cross-fade in Ableton, and I chose for my experiment two tracks from a past set that I'd played one after the other. The first was a track called Cold Shoulder, the second a drum & bass track called Eternal Optimist. Initially Ableton thought that Cold Shoulder was 120BPM & Eternal Optimist was 127, and when I played them together it was a crazy cacophony. I read & re-read the tutorials, thinking, is there something I've missed? But no - the basic tutorials don't seem to be aimed at drum & bass tracks - the speed & variation in the drumming obviously threw off the warp's guesstimate of the tempo. So. Eventually I worked out you could alter the track tempo either by typing into the field or by clicking & dragging up & down. I left the master tempo at 120, which was the default, and altered the drum & bass track, dragging it *up* to 180. Bizarrely this seemed to slow it down, but I put the metronome click on & persevered, matching the beat to the click of the metronome. Then, when I had the track tempo at 180, I brought the master tempo up to 180 & found it was able to play Eternal Optimist at normal speed - BUT when I switched in Cold Shoulder it played it way, way too quickly, like a happy hardcore version.

I read up further on this. It seems DJs deliberately choose tracks that are within 10BPM of each other so that they don't sound too weird when you crossfade. With a wide discrepancy like that - Cold Shoulder was actually 124BPM & Eternal Optimist 170ish, you could either play the master tempo as the slower of the two & then when you get to the quicker track it sounds like wading through knee-deep marmite - horribly slow - or you can set it to the fast track speed & the slower track gets speeded up. Or you could find a happy medium & then neither track sounds right!

One option would be to use a short interlude of music or drums to link the two tracks, & do the fade during that, whilst adjusting tempo at the same time - either stepping it up for the new track, or trying to increment it gradually over a longer period, or as I did at the time, having beat-matched the two, I got the master tempo to come up as I did the gradual cross-fade from one to the other.

It's not quite a performance piece yet, more a demonstration of principles so I know I'm getting stuff right, but it's a step towards what I want to do.

Digit extraction time!

Right, if you've been following my Tweets over on Twitter you'll see I've finally pulled my finger out & bought the Ableton Live digital audio workshop software I'd been eyeing up for months. This means that I now have no excuse as a DJ not to serve you up some gorgeous hand-mixed, beat-matched items of delight for your pleasure every Sunday. No longer will there be dead air!

It's going to take me a while to get the full hang of this, but I've just invested £240 in this so I'm damned if it's not going to bear fruit. I'm giving myself 4 weeks to learn it properly & to try & strip the last DRM from my iTunes library (and remember not to buy DRMed shit ever again!), and then I'll be playing my first *mixed* set at the Bushy Beard in Brugge, Second Life.

Previous to this I'd been approximating beat-matching on occasion by trimming the starts and ends of tracks & choosing tracks with similar beats so that I could end one track & start another exactly on a beat, which is about as much as iTunes will allow you to do, but now I can provide a properly beat-matched, cross-faded edit.

It's gonna be grreat!