Punctuating The Silence

I’m not a big phone fan – I don’t like to call people, and not a lot of people call me (email and IM mostly serve that function). Still, the phone is a necessity in today’s world, so there’s no escaping it. And like it or not, most of us have a home phone, a work phone and a cell phone, and all of these have voicemail to manage. With all that, and the few calls I get and make, I still get annoyed by some of the limitations I’m faced with in managing these. Enter GrandCentral.

One thing to note, first, however: I got my invitation to the closed beta yesterday, so I’ve had my account less than a day. And while I’ve spent a good deal of time poking around the interface, recording greetings, uploading my contact list, etc, not too many people have the new number yet, so I won’t be claiming it changed my life just yet. The potential is definitely there, though. Read about my initial impressions after the jump.
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While working on a website recently, I was given an article to post containing a quote with the person’s name. Normally, you would think, this wouldn’t be a problem. But given the context and the fact that I wasn’t given any addition information, I removed the name. Later, the author contacted me, asking why I had removed the name. I explained briefly that once published on the website, it would be out on the Internet, for all intents and purposes, forever, and that for certain things, we needed the permission of the person or persons being named, with their acknowledgment that they understood the implications. The author talked to me later, asking for a longer explanation, not quite understanding what I was getting at.

The point is this: once set free on the ‘net, it’s out there for anyone to find, at any time in the future. Case in point: I listen to a number of podcasts, and a new one recently talked about a song that was released on the artist’s website for free. What I didn’t realize was that I was listening to this podcast some time after it was released, and they failed to mention that the song would only be available for a short time. When I went to the site, the song was no longer available (in fact, there was no trace of it at all). A quick Google search for the song title led me to a blog that had the link to the original mp3 file on the artist’s site (which generated a 404 – not found – error). A Firefox plugin called “Digger” gives me a context menu with an option to “find page in the Internet Archive”, and a click on that gave me a link to the mp3, which I downloaded and now have.

Things you say (or are quoted as saying, and in certain contexts), or things you publish, even if you intended it to be temporary, on the ‘net, are usually still accessible. In the case of an audio file, it means continuing to give your content away for free. In the case of things directly tied to you: thoughts or opinions, well, consider the implications of, for example, a future employer doing a quick online search for your name before an interview.

(As a disclaimer, the posting of the article mentioned at the start was in no way detrimental to the person being quoted, but having been given no indication that they had given consent to be published, I had decided to err on the side of caution. It turned out to be good for starting a discussion.)

“The companies that made AACS spent millions and years at it. The hackers who broke it did so in days, for laughs, for free. More people now know how to crack HD-DVD than own an HD-DVD player.”

–Cory Doctorow

Yeah, I know I wrote earlier that we only had 2 gigs this weekend. More on that in a minute. Last night was the first gig in Burlington, NJ. We were the inaugural act for a new coffeehouse starting at the Broad Street United Methodist Church. It wasn’t a huge crowd, but they were appreciative, and it was a fun night. The only major mishap was my main controller locking up right at the end of the penultimate song of the first set. It’s connected to my laptop via USB, and when a USB device goes away in Windows/Usine (yes, yes, I’m using Windoze – Usine is that good!), there’s no getting it back without rebooting. Fortunately, Dan has no problem filling in the spaces with his ability for extemporaneous speaking! I was able to reboot fairly quickly, and we closed the set.

Also, my friend Ben was there in the capacity of official band photographer. Thanks, Ben! Looking forward to seeing the results (even if it turned out to be more of test run – who knew what our backdrop would be?)!

And now the “.5 gig” explanation: Dan’s father is the senior pastor of our church, and he and his wife came to the gig last night. He heard one of the songs, and realized it would be perfect for the service the next morning, so he asked Dan if we would do it. This proved to be interesting, as we don’t have enough time to set up our entire rig Sunday mornings (although we do have some gear there: Dan and I play on the Worship Team for the first service), so we needed a “B” rig. For Dan, that meant one guitar (which happened to be the one he uses Sunday morning), using a clean sound (ie no pedal board), and his laptop and MIDI pedal board. For me, that meant my Korg Karma (which I usually use Sundays), my X-Station and my laptop. The laptop provides the environment, and any number of soft-synths, and the X-Station turned out to be the hub. Not only is it the audio interface for the laptop, but I ran the audio of my Karma through one of it’s inputs, and thus only needed to run one input (going mono here) to the sound board. I also needed to make a second copy of Usine (one of the things I like about it is that there’s no install, and nothing in the registry), with a separate config (Windows/Usine tends to freak out a little when all of the devices it’s expecting aren’t there – I’ve had some re-mapping in the patches going on, which wasn’t fun to recover from).

We got home from the gig last night about 10:30ish, and unloaded the truck, and then I spent the next little while programming the laptop software, imagining in my head (I didn’t want to get everything out and set up) how everything was going to hang together. Dan and I got to the church this morning a little earlier than normal, but were still up against the clock. Somehow, we managed to set up, debug, sound check (which doubled as a quick rehearsal), and get through the other practice (the regular service stuff), and still have some time left over for other special music to get in some practice time. Amazing. It all went perfectly, too. Well, OK, maybe not perfectly – I couldn’t hear myself very well for our one song (I had a headphone monitor, but it needed more gain than I could give it – I’ll have to work on that), but I got through it OK – I even nailed the solo!

A regular gig for us is 12 songs, so technically this was 1/12th of a gig, but I’m adding the other 5/12ths for all the work that was needed to get there. Hopefully, as it’s pretty inevitable we’ll be asked to do more things on short notice, or more confined spaces, that this “B” rig will work out for a lot of the things we do. It might take some re-working, but we should be able to pull it off. Eventually, I can see phasing out the Karma in the B rig in favour of my CME controller, and relying more on soft-synths.

This afternoon, we’re off to Barnegat, NJ (the Shore!) to lead worship at the Bayside Chapel. it’s a smaller set, but we’ll have the full rig with us (we might use their sound system), and it should be a little more relaxed.

I went to a talk given by an engineer from SGI the other day. I was thinking, as he talked about their Intel-based products geared toward clustering, parallel systems and storage, how far the company has come from the uber-cool graphics hardware I used to drool over as an undergrad over a decade ago. As a member of the executive of the computer club in the CS department at Guelph (President for two years), we had a prof who had connections to SGI via Alias, which was based in Toronto. We used to borrow large machines from them periodically for the club, and we always got lots of time on them. We had access to our own SGIs in the department, but these were always bigger systems with the high-end graphics boards.

One of the changes SGI has gone through in recent years is their re-branding, which meant a new logo. I always loved the 3D SGI logo, and was sad to see it go (I still have a small embossed version of it that I appropriated from an older, recycled machine stuck to one of my monitor bezels).
As part of the talk, we got a pile of literature, some swag, and a business card from the sales rep for our area. I had taken it all back to my office, put it on my desk, and happened to turn the card over. I was happy to see the old logo on the back. It makes me wonder how many people there miss the old days too.