kampers.net

It’s official, I have completely lost control of my life… I was watching Reloaded again a few days ago and The Architect said

Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.

And I think he was right, because for a long time hope has been the one thread keeping me sane, but the recent realization that it was just a paper-thin self-reinforcing delusion was one of the most ultimately shattering moments I have ever experienced.

I don’t feel much like writing here anymore, you don’t want to listen to me complain anyway. I’m going away for a while, first one back wins. #

For about a year now, well, more like 1.5 years, I’ve been continually depressed at some level. A lot of times I’m happy, but there’s usually some cynicism underneath. Right now I feel really sad. I don’t know why. Even if something really makes me laugh, it’s like there’s a weight on my shoulders.

Lots of things make me sad. Too much work, KSCR, our country, girls. Not having someone to talk to about anything. Our country really depresses me. Why do we have to kill people?

Totally stupid things depress me. Like tonight I was walking back from my car to KSCR after the meeting to get my stuff and shutdown terminal services, and everybody was suddenly gone without saying goodbye, and then this lady stopped me because I was walking past the orientation party and I didn’t have a nametag. So I felt like my friends deserted me and I couldn’t even walk to KSCR without being accosted, and that made me really sad, even though none of that is such a big deal. I think I was already tired from working all day, and that set me off. Then Clarity came on when I turned on my car, and I started crying in the car, I don’t know why.

Gonna keep working now, because I have a deadline tomorrow morning… #

A teacher of mine from high school died last night. He was a great man, and one of the only teachers who taught me about good writing through his own. He was also one of the only teachers at my school who had enough courage to call the administration on its bullshit from time to time.

The last time I saw him was just after graduation, and I had no idea it would be the last time. I knew he was doing badly, but I’ve been kinda disconnected from it out here. I was never his best student, but it’s for people like him that I hope we’re not purely biological beings. #

On Friday I drove to Santa Monica to stand in line for the grand opening of the new Shrine of Jobs, it was amazing. Not the store—I figured the reason there were about 3000 people in queue was the Less Than Jake show, but no, they were all Maclots. Amazing. I was completely surrounded by the RDF. Those people waited for three hours to get… a t-shirt. At least I got one, or something, ha. I should sell it on eBay. Anyway, I had a nice time reading my book in the sun while I was waiting, and the show was great. I was going to go back to KSCR afterwards to hang out for the last 15 min of WWP, but there was a huge jam on the 10 and I got back around 10:30.

Oh, ugh. I narrowly avoided dying while driving towards the 10 in Santa Monica. Well, actually, it probably would have been the passenger in the other car to die, but anyway. Here:

Chris: i went through an intersection on a yellow. a big SUV was trying to turn left opposing me. i guess he thought i was going to stop or something… but i was doing ~40, too fast and close to stop. so, his passenger side door careening towards my windshield, i handbraked, braked, and twisted the wheel left, resulting in my front wheels locking (or so it felt—i thought ABS prevented this?) and my rear wheels sliding around to my right, narrowly avoiding collision. stalled as i came to a stop. then the light turned red, and i restarted, and drove off. kinda scary. and now my clutch feels like a wet rag.

Jerk SUV. Might want to watch out for that oncoming traffic thing before turning next time.

So last night I went rock climbing at a state park in Calabassas. It was a blast. Full moon, so it wasn’t so dark. I forgot how fun climbing is. I want to go again… well, after I heal from this time. The park was beautiful. Oh! You could see Mars really well, because it’s close. It looked like a red star.

I wanted to go play marimba today, but my forearms are hurting from climbing, so I’ll have to wait a little while. It’s weird because usually my extensor tendons/muscles are the ones that hurt, but right now it’s the flexors, and it’s a completely different kind of wrist pain. #

So, I was doing my show last Wednesday, and something weird happened.

Aside: my show on KSCR is called Netcast, and in my two-hour slot I play only music that you can legally download online for free. The point of the show is to pull people into the legal alternatives to Kazaa and the like (as opposed to push, which is what the RIAA does). The idea is to draw attention to the innovative artists out there who understand the power of the online music community.

Anyway. So I’m doing my show, and a bunch of girls walk in to the studio. Now, this is an unlikely event in the first place, akin to Lars buying shares of Napster, but that’s besides the point. The weird thing is that I was explaining the content of the show to one of the girls (“do you get to pick your own music? what kind of music do you play?”), and the conversation went something like this:

me: well, I play only music that you can download online, for free. girl #1: well, isn’t that almost everything these days?
me: no no, I only play songs that are legally available for free.
girl #1: what do you mean? what’s illegal?
girl #2: kazaa is illegal—
girl #3: it is?
girl #1: no way!

And it struck me that those RIAA goons have a point. I don’t personally know anyone for whom downloading has completely replaced legally purchasing music, but there must be a lot of them out there. Especially kids who were initially learning about music during or after Napster, which is everyone about four years or more younger than me.

I didn’t really have a moral problem with Napster et al. before, because I consider my use of it to be fair enough. I download songs before I buy them (would you buy a car without a test-drive?), and I download stuff that you can’t find elsewhere (bootlegs, b-sides, etc.). I used to download a lot of radio singles without bothering with the rest of the album, but I don’t really do that anymore… although this has more to do with my changing musical tastes than my downloading habits.

Anyway, it struck me that there are a lot of people (mostly younger than me) who legally own maybe five albums total, and have a collection full of burned CDs. That does seem wrong to me. A quick look at my music collection (which is stored on my hard drives in a lossless audio format) shows that it’s about 80% legal—that spans about 100 artists and about 300 albums. #

take in restraint like a breath
my lungs are so numb from holding back #

It’s been such a long weekend. After going to a nice park in the hills where hang-gliders land with Courtney and Wopek, we went to Amoeba… I got some OOP Keiko Abe and Evelyn Glennie, score!! The latter has a fifteen minute recording of Michi on it… it’s really great. I have new ideas for improvisation already, although I’m not fast enough to play what she plays. I also got old Jawbreaker on the cheap, and the last GYBE album I didn’t have.

That was the short part of my weekend. Then, I spent about six hours yesterday and twelve hours today installing and configuring the new KSCR streaming server. It was incredibly frustrating, but I learned a lot. Two Ars threads (here, here) and a trip to CompUSA later, here are some things I wish I had known:

• The kind of flush-mount racks that computers use are different from the flush-mount racks that audio equipment uses, even though they have the same mounting holes. The racks for computers are actually telecom racks, which makes sense considering the origins of the server computer. There is no reason for this, other than to frustrate rackmount newbies.
• KSCR’s studio B rack is about as beat-up as they get.
• The copy of Win2K Server that Dell ships with its servers does not come with Terminal Services installed.
• The drivers that come with Creative’s USB sound card offerings do not let multiple applications sample from them at once, unlike any other normal sound card.
• The popular Winamp line-in plugin floating around will only pass through to Shoutcast or Oddsock with these settings: 44100 Hz 16-bit 2-channel dev 0.
• Of the server components out there (Icecast, Icecast2, Shoutcast, WMA): Shoutcast has the least features, Icecast is the most stable, WMA is the least useful, and Icecast2 is the least stable.
• So, Icecast would seem obvious, except that if you try to run two concurrent sessions, the second session’s compression will not be able to keep up with the output bitrate, even though CPU utilization never reaches 100%.
• Icecast2 is the only one that really does this properly.
• The plugins for Winamp that allow DSP chaining are brilliant and beautiful.
• ISD takes about 12 hours to register a new MAC address for a faculty/staff account.
• Oddsock2 is probably the best m3w replacement Winamp plugin.

I also learned that working for hours at a time in a 93?F room is very bad, when I almost passed out after moving some heavy crap. I guess I should’ve remembered that from the summer in NJ when I fell over and nailed my head on a piano. Oh well, today I drank about 3 liters of gatorade when I was in there.

There’s a ton more, but I don’t remember right now. This would really only be the second or third time where I’m completely responsible for the status of a mission-critical server. No major screw-ups yet (knock knock).

So, where did my weekend go? #

Well, I voted in the MoveOn.org primary for Howard Dean, and he won. Then I voted against the SAG/AFTRA merger, and that didn’t go through.

Stay tuned for stock picks, I guess. #

I like this a lot better. I took the picture standing in the middle of the intersection of Vermont and 36th around 3am. The road was sleeping, but I was wide awake. #

I was disturbed yesterday to find out that the band ‘!!!’ prefers its name to be pronounced ‘Chik Chik Chik.’ Losers. Ask any linux geek how that’s supposed to be pronounced, and (s)he’ll say ‘bang bang bang.’

I mean, well. In keyboard order:
! @ # $ %, Bang At Hash Bash Cen.

Duh.

Also, yesterday, I finished school. Nice to be done. Pretty sure I scored that 4.0. I had my show tonight, and it went well. Almost no one was listening, but it was fun playing a lot of new underground jazz. I saw The Hulk tonight. It kicked Spiderman’s ass. So, time to work some more for WiFiLand. And I need to cash this nice security deposit refund sitting on my desk, so I can be not broke again.

In my barefoot summer laze today, I stumbled upon this shrine of glory. It made me really happy, actually.

We agree with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking is addictive.

That’s an actual quote from Philip Morris USA. Amazing. I also saw the Truth spot that they filmed next to Tommy on TV the other day. Yay. I didn’t see myself in the background, though. I should’ve gotten off my bike and identified myself as a brother and started protesting. Victory has found its first foothold on Mt. Everest, I guess.

Oh. Now that the metaphorical NDA of academic integrity has been lifted for Summer 2003, you can read my portfolio for my Broadway musicals class. If you’re into that sort of thing. It’s mostly just me complaining about bad singing and stuff.

I am completely excited about the prospect of this new music database thingie I’m making for KSCR. It’s going to the crowning masterwork of my PHP and database skills. There’s templates, and proper database structure, and proper authentication, and you name it. I’m doing the entire thing with objects, which is not beginner’s fare in any language, to say the least. It’s all like

“Hello, I’m an album, I have some tracks. Here, let me return you an array of track objects so that you may print their titles, oh glorious template output class!”

I think, after I make the new KSCR site, and the music database, and round up WiFiLand, I might be done with PHP for a while. I am now for all intents and purposes an expert. The only way I could really learn more about the language would be to work at Zend or something. Time to move on.

I got into Booth for the first time since my audition on Tuesday, and they have an amazing 5-octave marimba. I have never played on such a nice instrument. I would have kissed it, but then I remembered it’s bad to touch the bars. I want to play it for everybody.

Careful what I wish for… I suppose I’ll be having a nice solo recital in Newman any semester now. #