The Gold Room by Lee Rosevere (whose work I'm otherwise not familiar with) is a well-executed interpretation of a not entirely new concept. Beautifully reverberated drones, drawn out, smooth, quiet, and patient. Certainly worth your time to listen...especially in the evening.

And speaking of appropriation, I joined up with Danridge on Saturday to check out Kill Yr Idols at the Clinton Street Theater. If you're familiar with any of the No Wave stuff or enjoy Swans/SY/Lunch or whatever, it's certainly worth the price of admission. Hell, I suppose the scathing commentary from the elders is worth the price alone (live footage from the 70s is a rare, solid bonus!). Seeing the new wave of no wave ramble was often a riot. The stark contrast was both uncomfortable and hilarious. Gira, however, tells us that he has no wisdom. Just see it, consider for yourself.

Since I keep coming back to Spybey, I decided I should buy some of his newer stuff...and so I grabbed the "Reformed Faction Of Soviet France" and "Klaverland Klompen Voetbal Club". As usual, I think both are quite good.

We barbecued yesterday: Halibut, veggie burgers, beef. The cousins and family came over, a good time was had. We played Frets on Fire on the TV, cooked and made a mess and otherwise goofed off. I think it was the first time we had two kids on the house at the same time...and it was easy. :)

I've been keeping an eye on the Chumby, because even though it's got pretty tame hardware, I love the idea that it's got WiFi and love the idea that it's silent and the price is actually approaching reasonable. In fact, I'm convincing myself to buy one (of course, when they're actually available and not just vaporware) if only to support the fact that they encourage hacking and spec out open hardware.

Stacy's been wanting to install some bifold doors in the house, so we started that next home project today. Turns out to be a gigantic hassle. Or maybe hassle means "interesting challenge" (or at least I used to think as much). Of course, the only off-the-shelf doors you buy at the home remodling place won't fit the space previously occupied by sliding doors...so we get to build it out and install moulding to decorate things and cover up the gaps. What started out as hanging a couple of closet doors and tacking up some moulding has turned into a major wall extension and refinishing project. In spite of it all, I secretly kinda enjoy banging on stuff with hammers and trying to figure out how to make it all work out...after all, why would a 2x4 actually be 2"x4" (it's more like 1.5"x3.5")?

It's moderately interesting that Infiltration Lab has an entry on last.fm without my intervention. It lives. After the next Infiltration Lab release or so, I'm going to try and spend some time on a 'bot that draws with pens. The downside, though, is that there is no time.

I posted a few new abstractions (mostly controls stuff) on my pure-data page and finally decided that it was time to join the pd webring. Of course, I have no idea if I'll generate the 4 hits/month to actually stay in the ring...heh, but being next to Frank's footils.org sure does help. Guess I got lucky. :)

I've also got a set of 3" mini CDRs and jewel cases and labels being delivered today for the two simultaneous releases I hope to do in the next month or so. Maybe that's optimistic, but sometimes you gotta be.

Oh yeah, and of all things, I'm playing golf today with the dorks from work. At least it's not 1000 degrees outside like the previous years.

Ongoing stuff from recent happenings.

Last weekend was the (last?) Cacophony event at Weapons of Mass Compassion. No, not the other Portland cacophony, but one actually related to the meaning of the word. I captured some images, posted them here. According to my failing memory, the fAWN sound was a top-notch stand out, and the unusal tones spewing from two oboes remain vivid. It was a swell show. The uncomfortable Fando and Lis imagery projected during several sets prompted me to seek out a few surreal classics I haven't yet seen.

Stacy and I are renting a rad little ultrasonic baby listening device to track the pregnancy. We're limiting it to 5 minutes once a week....but oh yes, there are recordings full of great sounds. My girl is a trooper...she carries my babe and puts up with my madness.

This week it was announced that the something-million startup company I work for was fully acquired by a something-billion company. Of course I can't speak freely in a public forum, and to be fair, it's only been a few days, but from what I can tell, this is going to be less than desirable.

Ryan had a birthday fest last night with some friends. He showed off his grey water recycling-slash-shower rig that he's building for the burning man thing. Fun smart stuff. Flocculant.

Tonight was a potluck party for the bikram yoga studio where I study, and it was a swell good time. If you know much about Portland or yoga or both, you'd think this thing would be filled with pseudo spiritual hippie mumbo jumbo, but it was [surprisingly?] down to earth, quite grounded [normal?]. The host, John, has a fantastic spread overlooking Oak's Bottom and a fantastic view of downtown.

On the yoga front, I just started the practice back up after taking 3 weeks off after abusing the hell out of my injured or torn hamstring. It's slow going, but it's great to be back.

And I finally made it to the Dutch American Import Store, which is apparently the only place in the area where you can get a properly salted licorice! I stocked up proper and am presently working on the DZ coins (oh how I missed your evil saltyness)! Looking forward to the "EXTRA STARK SALMIAK PASTILLEN" diamonds. They didn't have the salty fish licorice that I got hooked on, though, and I'm still looking for the freaky "Piss Ants" hard candy (Danish?) that Georg had in HS....(hilfe?)...

I had the chance to catch Primer at a coworker's house last night (on a gigantic screen in a basement). As with most good movie experiences, I knew nearly nothing about the film going in, but I was wowed. I won't spoil it, but some people probably make comparisons to Pi and Memento and perhaps even Office Space. If you're a sci fi fan, please, go view this thing as soon as possible.

In similar film news, I'm also admittedly looking forward to The Descent, even tho I haven't seen Dog Soldiers (want to). I need to be more wary of Hollywood trailers...they just can't be trusted anymore.

I stumbled on the fact that another Tarantino/Rodriguez horror flick called "Grind House" is in the works. Very very hopeful indeed. Anything that's got Corey Webster [Josh Brolin] in it is A-ok by me! I should really rant again about how the current geopolitical climate is causing us to entering another horror movie renaissance, but that's for another time.

Maybe I didn't make it explicitly clear, but sheesh, IE is just a gigantic steaming pile of crap. I'm pained by even using it while building my site redesign. Compared to Firefox, it's just completely inconsistent and broken. I just realized that the png js hack thing does something weird with images and rollovers, but I don't think it's worth fixing. If you're [still] using "that blue E" (as my mom likes to call it), you'll see what I mean.

In any case, I got a new noisybox splash screen up (and working, I think). It's not exactly fun trying to position things using css with a relative-but-absolute approach whereby some things must be absolutely aligned relative to other things (like the intro now). I wonder if there's a better approach than the negative top positions I hacked together? In any event, it seems to function...and it's not flash (which sucks).

Saw "A Scanner Darkly" this afternoon. It wasn't really what I expected (not having read it), but I completely enjoyed it. The good: It's druggy and trippy and visually beautiful and really smart and funny at times. The bad: Sometimes slow, sometimes poorly acted, and, tho I hate to admit it, sometimes too disjointed for my tastes. I already think I need to see it again, if only for the Yorke/Radiohead score and the swell sounds.

It's been up for most of the week now, but in case you haven't wandered by yet (maybe you track the rss feed?), noisybox.net has itself a brand spanking new web design.

Although it's not that drastic, I think it's a considerable improvement and I'm quite happy with how it's turned out. I think it keeps a rough edge while remaining somewhat polished. I never intended the old layout to have a "torn paper" 1997 kinda feel, but more than one person commented on just that effect. The new look is hopefully a bit more modern, a bit more refined. Bala suggested that the background image is a tad intrusive, and I explained that it's intentional (it is!). This is NOT a myspace page (myspace ranting elsewhere)...

There are a few remaining additions/changes that I haven't been able to do yet...including some shadows, hover images, and a new splash/intro image, but for now it's mostly done. Honestly, I'd have redone the splash image by now if it hadn't been so rediculously hot here lately (104 yesterday, muggy and unbearably hot upstairs in the ilab).

I'm optimistic that the redesign will help me to update the blog more regularly.

So now that I've done the lion's share of the work, I need to rant some about CSS (ala Dvorak last week on /.). Say what you want about the guy, I mostly agree with his basic premise that "modern" CSS design/layout is a gigantic pain in the ass. It's true. I guess I'm capable, but it's not exactly fun nor easy to build cross platform, standards-compliant sites. Prime example: I think it's completely backwards/bizare that a floated div has to be placed before other content to work right....ug. I feel kinda dirty even knowing this stuff.

For example, I had to implement some wacky javascript css hack to get the transparent PNGs to render correctly in that IE browser that apparently 81+%(?) of the population still uses (seriously, how the hell can that still be true...I think 95% of people I know prefer and use FF?). It's 2006...how the hell does IE *not* support PNG transparency?

I spent quite a bit of time/effort modifying the noisybox pages to be XHTML 1.0 strict compliant. I didn't feel the need to add the little w3c xhtml button, but really, the large majority of my pages are now completely XHTML strict. It may seem sillly, but this was a notable undertaking that I think will have long term value.

For the most part, it required adding closing <li> tags, closing <p> tags, and just generally cleaning things up and making tables into css and trying to remove unnecessary markup where possible. It's still far from perfect, and there are still plenty of inline style defs and counterproductive things like paragraph classes instead of headings, but I still consider it a big step in the right direction. It was pretty amusing to see some of the markup in the really old pages.

Other than the website, the tech projects have been somewhat slow. I've been trying to finish up the irrigation system in the backyard, and we desparately need to have a garage sale to move some of the crap out of storage. After summer, I think things will pick up again...

It's been raining for a solid week now it seems. Gray, overcast, wet, nasty. It's supposed to clear up soon, though, which would be rather nice because Danridge is supposed to take us fishing.

I haven't put the audio up yet, but I completed the next Infiltration Lab album, Bark Mulch Golem: Attack!. It's a long, dark, drony journey. I'll have some mp3s up via archive.org, hopefully later today.

So I bought a new desktop machine a little while ago, and although it really screams, I haven't been able to get a realtime patched kernel to boot on it...that is, until yesterday when 2.6.16-rt25 was released! Seems to work very well with jack and xorg modular. There's a clock drift problem with jack and dual core processors tho, and there's a jack branch called "clockfix" that addresses (fixes!) this issue, but it hasn't been merged yet. As a result, none of the stock Debian apps can use the jack server, which kinda defeats the whole point. It's progress, though. Now if only I could get those closed-source motherfuckers to support flash player and windows codecs, I might be satisfied.

Ministry and Revolting Cocks show is tonite. I want to hate myself for paying too much money to see a middle-age reunion tour, but it's going to be good. I guess I bought into the hype...so what.