good ol’ BrokeBak is going to @rhiannononon tomorrow. he’s been laid bare, ready for a bright future with another loving soul

though our time together was brief, he filled a void that i didn’t know i had

and his newer, sleeker replacement is no simple substitute. TreeGigna may be delightful, but she’s much blander. her flat black background, those out-of-the-box icons. i can’t peek at an Orchid Mantis behind my bright cartoony-lookin’ Apps, or the ubiquitous quilting control console. i can’t OpenSSH in to make a backup anymore. Jiggy’s gone. and ms. Gigna doesn’t ask to be ‘awaken’d, plead ‘hungry’ on low power, or proclaim ‘*sat nam*’ when the timer goes off

BrokeBak, this is to you kid. you’re were the best

so keep up the good work. while i toss one back

is that part of what allows them to be free?

i don’t know. fun-ass web-tool wise, i’m generally a follower. i try to hop on the bandwagon early, but i ain’t out there cutting through the wilderness. maybe because i don’t like giving my contact information to everyone. even though i know that services crave that data for adopter / customer engagement, and that can be a good thing

old school, huh. i’m stupid in the face, you say

“so where are you getting at”, you add. okay, i’m getting there…

the Twinkle app was a great tool in Jailbroke-iTouch-Land. i loved the look, it was rich and engaging, and made the absolute most of the Twitter experience. a joy to use. and i’m brand loyal (perhaps a good side of being old-school)

now, in iPhone OS 2.0 land, i need to register with Tapulous. what? why?

sorry sorry, okay okay. yes, that’s the price i pay for freedom. rather, costlessness. alright. but there are other free client Apps out there that don’t require registration. and i’m not that loyal

still i’m curious. ultimately… is this a smart play on Tapulous’s part? will people buy in? i’m guessing that people who choose to micro-manage their identity distribution, aren’t really the Twitter demographic

more power to them if it works for them

on a related note, it seems there’s a nice little convoy of bandwagons going along now. Brightkite is still in invite-only mode. i don’t hear people talking that much about them these days. i reckon it’s all about FriendFeed, identi.ca , Ping.fm and HelloTxt. they’re all open-access (though they require registration). i don’t understand the mystique of closed-beta land. though it’d make total sense from a scalability perspective

still. i joined the others. i gave up my Name to them, and Names have power

hypocrite, you say. pagan heretic. and then you wrap me in sack-cloth and cotton rope

why are you doing that?

there may be a couple ways of doing this, but i’m going to focus on the App called Tuner.  you’ll find it in the music section, and it’s the mature successor to the iRadio app which i cracked out with a while back

i believe that the App itself uses the same station selections as the Radio section on iTunes. S E B is not listed there unfortunately. *sigh*. it’s defintely a top-tier-listenership numbers thing. Ambient music, and moreso my quirky take on it — featuring ms. Fitzgerald, mr. Crowley, and long empty spaces — doesn’t quite have that mass market appeal :)

however, all is well! Tuner has an [ Open... ] option that fits the bill. you can find it on any page except Bookmarks. you can enter the playlist script:

• http://sleepbot.com/ambience/cgi/listen.cgi

or enter a stream IP, in which case please choose one of the following:

• 67.19.78.90:8096 (US, primary)
• 207.152.135.11:8000 (US)
• 88.191.75.44 (EU)

don’t even give it a name. the App will hit the server and derive that automatically. once it’s playing, create a Bookmark for the station

the player itself works like a dream. they’ve really improved the overall experience. the streams are much more sustained, and it has all the features you’d want in a starter product, including an indepenent volume control

i only wish it provided the full Shoutcast YP listings like its primitive (yet charming) ancestor

happy listening, sleepy-heads !

or maybe it’s just an entrenched habit now

i’ve come to rely upon Twitter to instantaneously capture my mood.  i scrape the feed and persist it locally so that i’m comosing a ‘long-term’ platform-agnostic diary in the process

but now that the service has gone all FAILwhale’y, and i’m having such an intense weekend — what with my happy new iPhone 3G et. al. — i’m not able to capture it spontaneously.  isn’t that just such a weak-ass thing to bitch about, too ?  yah, i know !

so, here’s a summary (so far).  yes, i know this is very self-indulgent, but hear me out:

• stayed awake until 4:30a getting Apps onto my phone. Tuner is a killer. i’ll blog soon
• up at 8:30ish to take Jonesie to the vet. Jonesie is a healthy and slim 15 year-old kitty now. discovered that it costs a pretty penny to do blood work on a kitty like that
• left my laptop at @sfstagewalker’s place last night. very nice party. met up with him this morning, took him over to Steve’s to wrap up cuts on the Sweetie Tanya tracks. Jonesie came along for the ride (not of choice). discovered that injection of a third party can change the nature of a budding friendship. long story, much more than 140chr in length
• i have to be a keyboard this afternoon. *sigh*. no, honestly it sounds like fun! but it’s a three-hour time slot that would otherwise have been devoted to more iPhone App tweakin’ & consumin’
• realized while re-reading this post that i’m feeling manic. i swear, i haven’t felt this way in a loooong time. wow. it’s a refreshing return to joys of old. i mean, if i’m gonna have a depressive side anyway, i totally deserve to have the counter-balance

wow. and it goes from there. seriously. intense 48 hours. some day i’ll look back on this sh!t and laugh myself silly

i’ve been working on a Rails app for my site for the past several months. since March, actually

it looks like it’s ready to be used ‘in Production’. ultimately, it’s just a relational editor themed around the way the ancient-yet-functional AftM database is structured. but i’ve been maintaining that database since 1995 by spreadsheet imports. “hey, it works for me”, i thought. “why waste time building something you rarely need.”

first i absorbed Ruby. that was fun. i really like the language, nice & elegant. but anywhere you have an eval() construct, you can abuse the hell out of it. and people will :) . lack of static typing, other dynamic language stuff, the pros & cons thereof. i spent 3 weeks going over the language, understanding its syntax & ‘threading’, etc. i documented it all in assertions, as the gentlemen who wrote Groovy in Action so wisely have taught us. was it an unnecessary time-sink? not sure… but i can now always look back at examples of the patterns (that really work). and wrting those patterns early on in the unit tests helped me grok the syntactic sugar

next i re-wrote all of my handy-dandy command-line scripts. ones that i use for quick file tagging, etc. of S E B’s audio library. i learned plenty of weird stuff, and finally implemented a quarterly report generator for BMI. another “hey, why spend time building a tool…” situation magically resolved by the desire to learn something new

third, i went to build the AftM editor in Rails. i got the models in, full unit testing, figured out about routing and the like. wrote a whole mess of singleton helper instances to supplement the controllers. did i keep up my unit tests? hell no :) . TDD be damned, i’ll fix it if it breaks. i honestly feel quite guilty of having gone all hack-and-slash on it, but i wanted to get done. and if it breaks at some point in the faaar future, fixing it will just allow me to re-ingest the ‘Ruby nature’ of the app and see if i still feel the same way about the way i architected it

for a week there, about a month ago, i was actively switching between Java, JavaScript, Ruby & Rails, Groovy and a mystical little language called Lua on a daily basis. i’ve since cut it down to 3

and it took an agonizingly long time. ‘gonna learn a language, test it out, grok it, re-write some scripts, then throw up a web app.’ i think the most obscure things i actually had to learn were (a) partials and (b) inheritable attributes. routes drove me nuts for a while. but about two weeks ago, i had a nice AJAX-y editing flow & toolkit and the whole app fell together. like, the last 35% took 5% of the time. Rails helped me get there quick, once i got to understand the framework conventions

oh, yeah… wait… and i also ported 1800+ ancient bookmarks into de.licio.us. i was very late getting on that train. but it does what i need to do now. i had to fight tooth & nail with Ridiculous, and API quirks around the privacy flag. yeah, damn, that was a time sink. i forgot about that

so, what… that’s 4.5 months, probably working about 12h a week… that ain’t so bad. i gots me new scripts, a whole new app, and a whole carpet-bag full of obscure framework facts (that i hope i have sufficiently self-documented). but core Ruby language? yeah, i got that covered. the fun tricks about how CR-LFs & parens work, etc

hooray!

now i can do a bulk add of Albums that have been sitting out of the AftM site. that’s the next. and the next after that next is probably some more music to the S E B stream

then i has a whole new project that i’ll tell folks about once it’s ready

a generous listener, who will remain nameless, has contributed a relay node in Europe.  if you are having issues with cross-Atlantic skipping of the S E B stream, please feel free to change your default connection to:

pq.cacamou.info:8000

the S E B Listen link has been updated as well; it’s the last relay in the cluster

enjoy the slumber

really now.  it’s about time

yes i mean the Rewind.  the DJ technique technique by which the current track is re-wound and re-started, traditionally at the request of the crowd, thus making the crowd go ape-shit

it’s a Jungle tradition.  probably passed on from some similar Dancehall tradition.  Dubstep has also inherited this tradition, passed down from its primitive ancestors.  i couldn’t find an ‘origins-of’ page for the Rewind, but i was once told that it started in Jamaica during local parties where guns were fired (into the air) to denote a call for that elusive Rewind.  if indeed guns were involved, consistently, i can see why a tradition would develop

however.  please.  stop

i used to think it was just plain lazy.  “whew, my hands ache.  gotta wind it back.”  then over time i understood the need to please the crowd.  the DJ will stop, whether he’s in a groove or not, and rip off the Rewind. often overlayed with sounds of ‘whoop whoop’ [thought omitted] and someone with long dreads and amazing charisma spouting off a grumbe of verbs and nouns

but i’ve watched it go south.  i’m pretty sure that i liked the Rewind experience the first 15 times.  and that was probably once, or twice per set tops.  alright, 20 times, over a good dozen shows.  then when Bad Company started hitting the scene, it got progressively more.  i noticed that the DJs and their MC were enciting the crowd, tempting them to call for it, indeed training them to scream and spin an arm in the air when a fresh dubplate was spun.  sometimes regardless of quality

and i believe that is where we stand today.  on the precipice

please let it be curable.  my beloved Dubstep is so young, and has so many years yet to live.  but frankly i’m seeing those signs.  maybe they were always there and i just never wanted to believe it  >* snif *<

i swear i’m not alone … i overheard a conversation about 9 months back or something, a woman who seemed English, talking about how tired she was of it and that there was a growing movement to stop calling.  that’s about all i remember.  it was a vague night.  maybe Europe is where this change begins and we’ll catch up on it stateside some time before 2012

here’s where i think the problem lies.  the audience now controls the performer.  without much discression.  in fact, it’s a co-dependency.  seriously …  last night at the Benga & Skream show here in SF i swear there were four Rewinds in a row.  and i believe it went on to be 5 of 6.  alright, let’s say that two of those f*krs were seriously knocking it loose.  but starts and stops for 20 minutes?  bitches, please

gosh darn it.  sorry.  i sorta lost my head there

i guess i feel that the DJ has always been and will always be the Higher Power in the relationship.  the Creative Force.  it is his artistry which drives the night, the mood, the energetic flow.  and his Flock has been taught to interrupt him.  regularly.  a constant stream of rythmus-interruptus.  his opus, broken

please.  Retire it.  it’s a thing of days gone past.  we’ve lost our way

time for something new.  something weed-related, maybe

about 10m ago, i turned my head up from reading this week’s tech feeds, to look at my happy glowing TV set which was running ESPN2.  it was Euro2008 game, Turkey vs. Czechosolvakia.  i’d put the game into the background when CZE had gone up 2-0 some time in the early second half.  still, the commentators were talking about how how TUR was really stepping it up coming out of the half…

looking up, it’s 89:00, it’s 3-2 Turkey.  i missed a 3-score turn-around in the last 15m of play.  Three scores starting at 75′ in the game.  i just watched the highlights … stupendous work

yes, i was streaming in one of the greatest comebacks in the tournament, and not paying attention to it.  this would not have been so bad, except for the fact that i’d watched the first 89′ of Wed’s game of TUR vs. SWI.  that was the game with the torrential rain in the first half which the field couldn’t drain.  Switzerland, the hosting country, had been up, yet Turkey had come backed to tie it 1-1.  of course it was clear that the game was going into penalty kicks, so i packed up my lappy-top and headed back to work to set up for a presentation

Turkey scored the winning goal in the 4th minute of stoppage time

i really love sports as a background when i’m working on other things.  i consider it to be ‘non-deterministic entertainment’, meaning that you don’t know who’s gonna win until they play the game.  all the player stats in the world don’t mean a damn until you play it out on the court / field / diamond / pitch / course

heh.  but it’s not like i actually watch.  it’s just there as a visual presence.  so when cool stuff like this happens, i’m liable as not to miss it.  i’ll probably watch the Celtics vs. Lakers game tonight the same way.  i made a concerted effort to watch their 24-point Game 5 comeback on Thu — game recast courtesy of ESPN at midnight — but i lapsed into sleep-induced loopiness before the 4th quarter started and so i missed all of the heroics

the first person that says ‘dude, buy a DVR’ gets a lollipop

hola! it’s been a long time since i rapped at ya…

new music launch today, 14h of good stuff all obtained from the following sources:

• Gordon Hempton
• nrvnet
• Low Light Mixes

if you want to see the playlist from today, it started at around 8:30a PST and will probably run until 10p:

http://www.sleepbot.com/ambience/feed/playlist-20080611-8-22

peace out, all you wild-eyed children

no, really. i wanna nudge myself. it’s been about 3 weeks since i’ve written anything longer than 140 characters.

i had a nice long mellow chat with Charles last night (after flirtin’ after drinkin’ after dancin’ and singin’ — yes, in that reverse order) about my blog, what inspired me to start writing, etc.

well, i started myself a blog pretty much because everyone else had jumped off the Blog Bridge and i sorta wanted to see what was so cool about it. it also gave me an excuse to find ways to integrate my own feeds (much like mah FriendFeed does now) and persist them locally. a nice engineering exercise. spent more time on it than i should, but it’s running now and will be 10 years from now too. as new feeds / formats / media sources come along, i’ll add new componentry to it … it’ll be a nice excuse to keep up to speed with Java

all that. and yeah, i enjoy writing too !! there are different ways about this of course. my friend Liz is doing the write-a-novel-in-a-month practice, the major tenet of which is focused creative spouting; don’t edit, just shoot it out onto the page. i tend to write like i code, with constant refactoring all along the way. i want what’s built to stand the test of time

i haven’t written a review on Ambience for the Masses in probably 4 years. each one is about six sentences, and it takes me 20 minutes to write it. i want to capture the unique essence of the album and my experience of it within that span, without using the same terms that i always use, or the same sentence structures that i always use (cuz like i’ve written 400 of them) (and have 200+ left to go). it’s sculpture in a way

whereas Twitter, that’s a different story.  it’s spontaneous and length-restricted.  and now that i have that wonderful service as an outlet, i think a lot of my creative expression prose is flowing there.  it sates my need to txt

but this long-form style has it’s real value.  it’s wonderful for summation.  for when you look back over what’s behind you in a larger context, now out of the moment, and it simply begs for transcription.  or for Grand Learnings that require a lot of cut & paste & links & eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles & arrows & a paragraph on the back of each one & some form of comment tracking & tags

the peace of my evening is beginning soon.  i’m going to go fall backwards into it

love & light

i had a remarkable, remarkable experience this past Friday.  oh, i so must tell you about it!  i simply must!  come, come and sit …

Molly has been my friend for years, we’ve practiced Kundalini together for the vast majority of it, and now she is performing regular massage work on me.  she knows my body, she comments on how it has changed since we last met, and then she guides it back into balance.  we both find the relationship charming

well, she had me on my left side and was getting beneath my right shoulder blade.   suddenly, everything inside of me became funny.  i went with it for a few moments, but then jumped back and watched my entire body spasm with laughter.  “seriously”, i could ask myself, “what the heck is so funny?”.  and the only answer was that it was funny that i was laughing so hard.  that itself too is funny

but the laughter wasn’t coming from my head at all.  in fact, i had the clarity to actually watch myself experiencing, and participate in, a biological state that was absolutely and totally Ridiculous

“that’s a kidney point”, Molly tells me.  she keeps asking me if it hurts, and i actually ask myself that question seriously.  like, was i laughing so hard because i was in incredible pain somehow?  funnyness as some form of moog-plugged systemic transferrence to a suitable channel for the expression of emmense pain energy?

nope.  it was, in fact, just plain Ridiculous.  of the capital-R type.  so i laugh and laugh and laugh for a good three minutes

and wouldn’t you know it … it’s indeed 100% kidney point LOL!  she gets to my feet and moves into kidney ‘points’ one and three (two isn’t that important) and it all starts again.  laughing laughing and more laughing.  lighter this time than the first, but still absolutely f*kg Ridiculous

this meridian of mine, it’s just like pushing a button on a candy dispenser

thank you Google for this lovely found article on Kidney Care.  apparently this cross-circuitry is all tied into the sexual center.  and i’ve been giving that root chakra of mine a good friendly kick-start these days

seriously — if you ever have a chance to ride that laughter ride i just rode, stop & get into line for that ticket.  and i sure know now that i could be drinking more water & less caffiene :)

curiously, there was only one other body point where i reacted like that

with me on my back, she put a warm stone on that spot above my eyebrows which i focus upon during my kriyas.  yah, we know what that is.  yep, a warm stone on that, and the Ridiculous laughter rolled in waves again

i rehearsed the Coffee Crush moves on Saturday for Sweetie Tanya.  Tonya (not the same) choreographed us through a few new moves, and asked us to please keep practicing our moves.  yeah, right.  whatever.

so as i was practicing this morning, i felt that itch return.  the one i mention in the Subject line, that i’ve talked about in the past.

there’s something so sublime about being on stage.  about manifesting, in front of an audience.  and there’s something even more sublime about doing that night after night, and feeling it fresh every time

last weekend Chris Hayes directed a Twilight Zone effort down at the Dark Room, and i had the privelege to participate.  good fun, but there was nothing like working with leading-man Bryce Byerley who add to absorb a good 100+ paragraphs of dialog and details for a three-night show.  he did it brilliantly.  amazing work, and now he has to flush it all from his mind again to pick back up where Sweetie Tanya left off.

i’ve hung around theatre people all of my life.  when i spent social time with the folks at MIT, it was always the conceptual gamers, the performers, the people who had the fluids of artistic creativity dripping out the sides of their ears at every waking moment.  my first entry into that world was the Assasins’ Guild, and things went from there.

ya can’t help but be inspired when you’re around people of such ferocity.  it’s amazing.  and such a privilege to participate in the festivities and games.

i feel honored and indulgent to be on stage.  i can taste it even now.