*pained noise here*

After Christi didn't show up, I sent her some email asking her about rescheduling, etc. I thought that she didn't write back, but I just found her reply hiding amidst supercollider mailing list crap

She doesn't want to work it out. not ever.

I was a fool to break up with her

maybe this would have happened anyway.

I love her. I counted her as the most important thing in my life for a third of my life.

My shrink says that I should let myself feel sad when I feel sad.

this is so so so wrong. this isn't supposed to happen. there must be some mistake somewhere. we're married. we're supposed to love each other. i was thinking all day about how much i miss her.....

alas alas alas alas woe misery

it would be very bad to call her right now and i'm not going to do it. very bad. very very bad.

Website review

Everybody I hang out with is currently out of town, so I'm going to a review a website on my blog. Orkut.com is Google's forray into the world of Friendster-like communities. These are community-type websites that rely on personal connections. You sign up and then get your friends to sign up and they get their friends to sign up, and it creates networks of these friendship associations. You can use these association to search for people who, for example, like Ayn Rand. You get a list of people and can see how they are connected to you. You are friends with Joe who is friends with Amanda who is friends with Julian, who likes Ayn Rand. You can then click on Julian's profile and look at her picture and find out where she lives and other info about her. For example, Julian might live in a town five miles away, list bondage as a hobby and that she is looking to date people of your gender. You could then send Julian email, ask for an introduction through the parties in between or pretend you never found this connection, depending on what you think of these things.

Orkut seems to offer all these friendster services, with a few more. For instance, orkut has "communities" of their members with similar interests. So you can find anarchists, biodeisel fanatics or whatever. Also, it goes farther in the personal ad aspect of friendster, by asking the same questions as yahoo personals. describe your sense of humor. do you live alone, have roomates or pets? etc. It lets you list a website, which is not supported by yahoo personals. and it's free.

It also will list your job skills, education, skills and resume-like things for potential headhunters. This inappropriate mixture of personal and professional is something that would only come out of silicn valley. does a headhunter really need to be able to find out on the same website that I know java and that I think body piercing is sexy? boundaries! networking for jobs and networking for dates are different animals! engineers should not be allowed to design these services because of their tendency to not have lives outside of work.

Also, what website do i list? my blog? my personal site? my professional site? i'm confused about the mission that i'm supposed to be trying to accomplish. also, it asks for a lot of information for a personal ad. More than I would normally post. But You can set levels of privacy for information and of course, it relies on these friendship networks, so theoretically, the people seeing it are somewhat trusted. Unless people cheat the system. In my friendster network, I've found Yale (who knew?), a few college radio stations, a Chinese restaurant, and the other day, Screetch from Saved by the Bell popped up. Who knew I was so few degrees of seperation from fictional celebrities?

Some nice things about the Orkut service is that you can tell it your many email addresses, so if people invite you to be their friend at any one of your ten email addresses you've used over the last few years, it will find you. And when I signed up, it remembered invitations that I must have received months ago and ignored, so I had connections waiting for me.

This service lists "affiliated with Google" on the bottom of every page. Will Google take over the friendship market? Is mixing networking goals innapropriate or very powerful? Is this product brilliant or too weird? I dunno. If you want to join and/or add me as a friend, just type in any email address that you normally use to reach me.

I am influenced by kraftwerk

The thing that used to need salt. I don't think it was obviously at 210 bpm before.... The code for this has changed a lot to reflect last monday's lecture. Um, and Kraftwerk has complicated drum lines and is extremely reptitive. so this now has um.. more involved drum lines and in every section, the rythms and melodies are now linked. so if you hear rhythm x in section 1, it will have melody y connected to it every time you hear it. of course, every time the program is run, the melody will be different. and the drums aren't linked to anything. and it is definitely definitely time for bed.

headlights

yeah, so the big mystery with the electrical system in my car is that i took out the highbeam bulbs instead of the low beam bulbs....

yeah....

Song structure

So I'm still working on the song that needs salt (ok, I know it's not a song unless it has words....). Aaron told me that the lastest incarnation resmebles Kraftwerk, so I popped Die Mensch-Machine into my CD player so I could try to get some inspriation on how to fix my doomed work (aside from de-glitching it....).

I'm listening to it right now, from an analysis point of view. when I listened to Kraftwerk before, as just tunes I liked, I tended to focus on their awesome sound design. This album came out in 1978 and is a fine example of analog synthesis. Their sounds are very nifty, nicely filtered and in tune. They get many nice fx from good filter usage and do a lot of unashamed analog sweeps, which are idiomatic of the instrument and aren't afraid to throw in a nice splat here or there.

Structurally, however, sound design aside, their songs are just lame pop songs with simplistic rhythms and chord progressions. Everything going on is in the sound design and the arpegiation. if you played the songs on the piano, they would just be goofy. they're not Frank Zappa, they're just a silly pop band and I never noticed till now.

Let this be a lesson to you: do not change the way you listen to music that you like.

friendster questions for Miss Manners

How formal or casual is the process of asking an aquaintance to be your friendster? If you exchange a few emails with someone in your friendster network and then meet in person is that adequate or should a more personal connection exist?

My car is fixed

I get it back tomorrow. Then i can rejoin the human race (... the daytona 500??....) and seem less flaky to the natives of CT. I hate driving, but I don't like bumming rides. But really, it took the scorn of my peers to incite me to repair.

Open Mic

I played at a trendy bobo restaurant. (bobo is a word i just learned. It means bourgeois bohemian. I like this word very much.)

Anyway, so I got on "stage" and my computer wouldn't start. So I got back off stage and it booted fine. computers like to do things like that on stages. they get stage fright. It's troubling for them to have to perform on command. So some other guy played and I got up and played three tunes. One was Dance Tune for Marek. The other two don't have names. One involves dubya. The other doesn't. All the other open mic players were guitarists/singers, except for Deborah, the host, who played dulcimer and confessed to me that she felt a bit out of genre.

I had been joking that there might be A&R people in the audience. Maybe I would be discovered and signed by Warner Brothers new experimental music label.

while I was playing my last song, some guy came curiously into the room and then made a rock-on hand signal and left. Apparently, he works at the restaurant and is a DJ at WESU radio. He came up afterwards and asked for a CD, so I sent him to my website. I'll burn him some CD tunes later. Not exactly an A&R guy, but still cool. this would be my first non-pirate radio play in the us.

A while ago, I cast the I-ching and it said there would be advantage in every movement. There are some obvious areas of my life where this is not true, but outside of those areas, it seems to be the case. Things are really going well. I'm meeting with success in a high percentage of my endeavors. sometimes, this success is different than what I envision....

Oh, and last thing, some dood at the open mic said I sounded like a band called "Silver Apples" from the late 60's. Apparently they did stuff with early analog synths that was really unlike what other people are doing at the time. Which is cool. But it also means one of two things: 1. They are this guy's only forray into experimental electronic. or else, 2. I still sound like I'm doing analog stuff, even when working on the computer, which would be unfortunate, since analog gear is better for analog sound, but at least the computer is portable and just intoned.

Cars and Marriage

Well, both my headlights are out, which means I can't drive at night. To locals of Connecticut, this is a way of explaining that I am a complete loser. Yes, a car is as vital and as necessary an accessory as it was in my high school.

So I was telling some story to Heidi (Heidi is the woman who told me I was too tall to date, so now we're buddies) that involved me getting a ride someplace, and she responded by saying she was going to come help me fix my car. Hopefully, this big 'L' will drop off my forehead...

After a lot of labor, I can now say that the bulbs are not blown and the fuse is not out and what's wrong is anybody's guess. consumer reports says something about weird electrical problems like the in the 98 bug. I'm calling the dealer tomorrow.

And, in the other news of the subject line, Dubya now supports a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Ok, so things have been pretty clear for a while now that Christi and I did not get married to live happily ever after (yeah, all this "breaking up" stuff....). we really got married in an attempt to destroy the institution of marriage. I can tell that family values are very precarious and need constant vigilance and that the opposite sex marriage of everyone in america could be destroyed, so that's why we did it. Who knew Bush would catch on? He must be smarter than he looks.

Ok, maybe I wanted to live happily ever after, but failing that, smashing the entire isntution wouldn't be so bad.

Spring Break!

I will depart Bradley Internation airport (located a mere 45 minutes form the wesleyan campus) on Thursday March 4th at 1:51 pm, which gives me time to provide my ride (whoever he or she may be) with lunch. Or, I could provide my ride with breakfast and spend some time in the airport doing reading for my Mystic Voices class.

I will arrive in Oakland, CA on Thursday March 4th at 7:42 pm. I will be amazed at the warm weather. I will immediately want either mexican food, chinese food or japanese food or good onion rings. in any case, i will be pining for the food offerings of my homeland, which I would certainly share with my ride

While in California, I will visit the beach. I will visit my family members. I will visit the Lexington Club. I will also do reading for my Mystic Voices class.

I would also like to do some gigging. I will have 20 minutes of laptop music. I can open for yer show. I can play at your house party. By the end of the break, I should have a longer set.

I will depart Oakland on sunday March 21 at 6:00 in the morning. Ugh. the tickets were about $70 cheaper. I will take a cab.

I will arrive at Bradley International airport on sunday March 21st at 5:00 pm. I will provide my ride with dinner (at a Middletown Zagat-rated restaurant!!) and a movie.

Missing something

If it were soup, I'd add salt. Can this algorythmically generated bit of music be saved? Does it need:

• George Bush?
• Explotions?
• George Bush exploding?
• Analog-ish grinding noises?
• Jessica Feldman singing on top?