Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers

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I just got back from wandering around outside in the sun (I may be feeling a bit sick, but I didn’t want to miss out on a nice, warm spring day!) when I got a quick heads-up from Phil…

Phil: Have I got some weird shit for you, if you have a moment.
Phil: Pop open iTunes, go to the iTMS, and do a search for “Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers“
Phil: I’ve heard of music using “found sounds” but this is ridiculous ;)

The album is twelve tracks long, and they’re all exactly what you might expect from a project with a name like this: ‘songs’ constructed using the sounds from a working dot matrix printer.

As it turns out, the Symphony is a music/art project by The User, commissioned by the Fondation Daniel Langlois and Hull Time Based Arts, and it sounds like something I’d love to see in person.

Dot matrix printers are thus turned into musical ‘instruments’, while a computer network system, typical of a contemporary office, is employed as the ‘orchestra’ used to play them. The orchestra is ‘conducted’ by a network server which reads from a composed ‘score’. Each of the printers plays from a different ‘part’ comprised of rhythms and pitches made up of letters of the alphabet, punctuation marks and other characters. [The User] uses ASCII textfiles to compose, orchestrate, and synchronize sonorous and densely textured, rhythmically-driven music. During the half hour performance, the sounds are amplified and broadcast over a sound system. The audience is also presented with live images of the sound sources: the motions of the mechanisms, rollers and gears are captured using miniature video cameras installed inside the printers and projected onto large screens.

There’s another project by [ The User ] that sounds worth investigating (and also has an album on the iTMS): Silophone, in which they use the acoustic capabilities of an empty grain silo to produce sounds…

Silophone makes use of the incredible acoustics of Silo #5 by introducing sounds, collected from around the world using various communication technologies, into a physical space to create an instrument which blurs the boundaries between music, architecture and net art. Sounds arrive inside Silo #5 by telephone or internet. They are then broadcast into the vast concrete grain storage chambers inside the Silo. They are transformed, reverberated, and coloured by the remarkable acoustics of the structure, yielding a stunningly beautiful echo. This sound is captured by microphones and rebroadcast back to its sender, to other listeners and to a sound installation outside the building. Anyone may contribute material of their own, filling the instrument with increasingly varied sounds.

I love bizarre stuff like this. I’ve purchased both of the albums from the iTMS, and have been enjoying what I’ve heard so far — in many ways, these projects remind me of some of the songs that first got me into the industrial genre, with Einstürzende Neubauten running around inside empty water towers and banging on the walls to create a rhythm track or throwing forks at an electrified shopping cart to see what noises would result, or local Anchorage industrial band Fsunjibleableje crafting an entire performance around rhythmically destroying an old abandoned car with sledgehammers.

Okay, so it’s not for everyone.

I think it’s cool, though.

iChat just went bye-bye

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That was more than a little odd. I was just in a conversation with Phil, and wanted to blog some of it. Normally I use iChat in “cute” mode (pictures and bubbles), like so:

iChat's 'cute' mode

When I want to blog a conversation, I’ll switch it to “text” and “show names”, which works much better for a copy-paste into a weblog post:

iChat in text mode

However, for some reason, iChat just went all wierd on me. When I switched it into text and names mode, everything in the chat window went blank. I could see what I was typing in the text input field, and hear when messages came through by the “bloop” sound…but I couldn’t see anything!

iChat goes wonky

Thankfully, closing out the window and starting a new chat session cleared it up, but I was quite amused for a few moments there.

iTunes: “Pink Potassium” by Radioactive Goldfish from the album Rhythm and Rave (1992, 4:46).

Gmail and Safari

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So I got curious about Gmail, Google’s new e-mail service, and thought I’d stop by to take a look.

Safari not supported

Somehow, I’m not very impressed so far.

Update: As it turns out, they’re in a closed beta right now, so I couldn’t have signed up in any case. Still…the lack of support for Safari — the default web browser on all new Macintosh computers — hardly leaves me with a good first impression.

iTunes: “Run to the Sun” by Erasure from the album I Say I Say I Say (1994, 4:25).

Kinja

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So all the buzz over the past few days (aside from whether or not Google’s e-mail service is an April Fool’s Joke or not) has been Kinja. Essentially, Kinja is yet another web-based news aggregator, this time with the stated goal of exposing more weblogs to people who aren’t already sucked into the weblog world.

Of course, I’ve signed up, added all the feeds I subscribe to (hooray for data export and import), and made my Kinja page public so that anyone can stop by and get an idea of what I’m pumping into my brain each day.

Being a long-time NetNewsWire user, I’m a bit underwhelmed…but then, Kinja wasn’t made for people like me, but rather for the “unwashed masses” who still think that USA Today and Fox News are the best places to get all of their reading material. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.

iTunes: “Open Arms” by Journey from the album Pop Music: The Modern Era 1976-1999 (1981, 3:20).

The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire

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Ellenoir pointed out a fascinating page that I’d not seen before: The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire, one person’s response to being constantly harassed by missionaries of one faith or another trying to “save” or “convert” him.

The Heirophant’s Proselytizer Questionnaire is a series of offensively phrased questions that explain my problems with and objections to the various Christian churches. I originally wrote it in 1997 as a tool that I handed out to the too-numerous proselytes who were crowding at my door, explaining that I would consider entering into a dialogue with them if and only if they could answer each and every question to my satisfaction. …Though I have received numerous responses to the Questionnaire since I wrote it, none has satisfied me enough to tempt me back to Christianity.

The questionnaire itself is a list of 153 questions for the proselytizer to answer before discussion can continue. The author admits in the FAQ that the questions are written in a very aggressive, possibly offensive style…

…It’s meant to be really offensive. If you look at the reasons why I composed it in the first place, you’ll see that my primary motivation was, quite simply, to get proselytes to fuck off when they wouldn’t do so any other way. By setting a condition for them to fulfill before I’d engage in a dialogue with them and by making the condition more trouble than it was worth to most of them, I wound up able to sleep later in the mornings than I’d been able to when I had a constant stream of preachers on my doorstep. Ensuring that the phrasing of the Questionnaire was confrontational and offensive was an integral part of the process of getting people who had essentially nothing to say to me to leave me alone.

As someone brought up in the Episcopal church who still bases many of my core beliefs in the Christian faith (though I’ve certainly had my fair share of questions, concerns, and doubts over the years), I thought the idea was wonderful — and have no problem at all admitting that I would be very hard pressed to answer many (if not most) of the questions posed.

On a personal level, I stand very much in the same camp as the author (along with Ellenoir, too, from what she said in her post): believe anything you want, just don’t try to force your beliefs on me, convince me that you’re “right” and I’m “wrong”, or attempt to frighten me into joining your religion through threats of hellfire and damnation.

This document is not meant as a personal challenge to you or to your beliefs. As far as I’m concerned, you can worship Jesus or be a Buddhist or a Muslim or have sex with Tinky Winky and call that a religion: It’s all the same to me. Really. The HPQ was meant to state my own reasons why I’m not a Christian; it’s not meant to imply that you shouldn’t be one. (There’s a big difference between the two, and many Christians would do well to learn it.) Be a member of whatever religion you want; just leave me alone and don’t push it on me. I’m not knocking on your door asking you to be a Wiccan or a Buddhist or a Satanist or an atheist or a Muslim or anything else that you’re not; all that I ask is that you extend me the same courtesy.

iTunes: “Blasphemous Rumours” by Depeche Mode from the album Blasphemous Rumours (1984, 6:23).

T minus one month and counting

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The first few days in May were usually busy days in my family. My birthday is May 3rd (I’ll be 31 this year), my little brother Kevin’s is the next day (we’re three years and one day apart — he’ll be 28), and my best friend from fourth grade on, Royce, has his birthday on the 5th (he’ll be 31 also).

While I’m sure there were some times when Kevin and I had separate parties, there were many, many years of joint parties also. Often my mom had the unenviable task of handling these more or less on her own, too — dad was flying in the Air National Guard, and his “one weekend a month” happened to fall on the first weekend, so he often had to leave mom to handle two excited little kids while he went off flying.

One year, on a whim, I entered a “guess the number of jellybeans in the jar” contest at the Anchorage Chuck-E-Cheese, and wonder of wonders, I actually won! The prize was a free birthday party, so that year Kevin and I had our parties officiated over by a giant rat. As Chuck-E-Cheese is a pizza parlor, mom and dad had an idea that “seemed like a good idea at the time”, and when the pizza arrived, they popped birthday cake candles into the pizza instead of into a cake. We laughed, blew them out, and started gobbling down slices of pizza.

Unfortunately, what parents hadn’t thought about was the heat of the pizza. While the candles were sitting in the pizza, not only were they melting from the top down due to the flame…but from the bottom up, too. I can’t really recommend a pepperoni-and-candle-wax pizza. It’s a bit more chewy than pizza is supposed to be.

iTunes: “Teclo” by Harvey, P.J. from the album To Bring You My Love (1994, 4:58).

PDA stylesheet tester?

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Is there an online resource that will display a webpage as if it were being viewed on a handheld PDA device? I’ve had a request for a handheld-friendly version of my site, but not having a PDA, I’d essentially be “coding blind”.

Any suggestions or pointers would be greatly appreciated. :)

iTunes: “Das Land Der Elefanten” by Nena from the album 99 Luftballons (1984, 3:42).

Sick

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Well, I survived my three days of long hours helping out at one of the other stores in the area (up at 6am, out the door at 7am to catch a 7:15am bus to Redmond, work from 8am – 3:45pm, catch the 4pm bus back to downtown Seattle, then the 5pm bus out to Georgetown, work from 5:30pm – 9:15pm, catch the 9:30pm bus home, get home about 10pm and fall over soon thereafter). Unfortunately, pushing myself that hard seems to have resulted in my picking up a really nasty little bug (stuffed up head, bad cough, general full-body exhaustion, etc.). I’m not thrilled about this.

Ah, well…I’ll bulldoze my way though work tonight, then come home and do my best to enjoy a weekend with nothing planned except lots and lots of sleep. Not the most exciting plan in the world, but it sure sounds good to me right now.

iTunes: “Ono Soul” by Moore, Thurston from the album Buy-Product (1995, 3:29).

Chronological vs. Chronoillogical

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While I won’t be swapping my post order around, Monday’s discussion on weblog post order has resulted in one small change here on Eclecticism.

Until now, I’ve had my monthly archive pages displayed in “newest to oldest” format to match the main page. This made sense at the time, but after spending a little time scrolling through and searching for specific posts, I’ve swapped the monthly archive pages around to display chronologically, with the beginning of the month at the top of the page. Far easier to browse through now, I think.

That’ll be the extent of the changes I’m making here, but in Eric’s followup post “First Order Solutions“, he proposes a possible solution that would allow for a chronological first page that would use cookies to collapse already-viewed posts to just the headline, leaving new posts expanded to be easily read. It sounds worth experimenting with, though I’m still not entirely sold.

First off, it could create a lot of unnecessary clicking if someone was searching through the page for a recently posted bit of information (expand one post, look through, close it, expand the next…or expand them all and scroll, scroll, scroll). It reminded me of something that Shelley quoted in her response to Eric’s post, from one of her posts in 2002:

A weblogger’s nightmare:

I am looking at a weblog page with a Google box to the right and a NY Times box to the left and several buttons with coffee mugs all over them that generate OPML, RSS, and various other assorted and sundry XML flavors. Within the page there is this outline with links and plus signs and you click on the plus signs and the content is expanded to show even more outlines, which can expand to even more outlines, and on and on and on.

And I see myself hunting desperately through the page knowing if I look hard enough, deep enough, I will find the truth. I will find what the weblogger has to say.

Finally, after I click enough of the little plus signs, and get rid of all these boxes that keep opening up and tell Google to shut the fuck up for just one second, I find it.

Also, just how much information will the front page hold under Eric’s scheme, and for how long will it stay? I see two possible options: either the page just keeps gathering new posts for the month (and eventually any visitor would have to scroll down through a page or two of collapsed headlines to find the recent posts), or as Chris Vincent points out, there would be the visual oddity of having older posts drop off the top of the page as new posts are added to the bottom.

Some interesting ideas, I’m just not entirely sold yet as to their practicality.

I was flattered, though, to get a compliment from Eric in his post, though…

…Michael wrote an entire post in chronoillogical format, with the paragraphs running last to first. The interesting part is that it made almost as much sense that way as forward, which is either a testament to Michael’s writing skills or else an indication that I’m wrong about the nature of writing. (Hey, why not give my critics more ammo?)

iTunes: “Where I’m From (Aural G. Ride Novox)” by Digable Planets from the album Where I’m From (1992, 4:50).

Pickled dragon…published!

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Last January, I passed on a story involving a pickled baby dragon in a jar that was making its way around the ‘net. Turns out the entire thing was a hoax…a hoax that landed the perpetrator a book deal!

An author who was so desperate to get his book published that he staged a hoax involving a baby dragon has won a lucrative publishing contract.

After numerous rejections Allistair Mitchell concocted a tale that a dragon had been found in a garage last year.

He said: “I created the hoax in order to attract potential readers.”

Mr Mitchell, based in Oxford, has now signed an book deal with Waterstone’s for his book Unearthly History, a thriller featuring a dragon.

Nicely done!

(via Neil Gaiman)