Monday, January 9, 2017

the cold snap finally breaks today.

the long term looks reasonable. short winter? let's hope for it.

and i need to be far more productive today than i was most of last week.

it took me several days to get through may, 2014 and to the first new release in early june (dated to jan 10, 2001). but i don't have any serious hardware problems for a good year, now. so moving through the rest of 2014 should be relatively fast, so long as i actually do it.

can i get to the end of the year? i got stuck on the electronic symphony near the end of 2014. hopefully, i can get caught up to there if i'm really focused...

http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.ca/search?updated-min=2014-04-01T00:00:00-04:00&updated-max=2014-07-01T00:00:00-04:00&max-results=500

Friday, January 6, 2017

that was a scare...

i've been aware for a while now that something wants to destroy my archives.

listen: so long as it's open and in RAM, i can reconstruct it. and, i'll waste as much time as is needed to. it's kind of important.

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

so, i got roughly a month of opaque posts down today.

i want to say that i'll need to pick it up tomorrow. but, i know that the next batch of posts will be a little lighter, too.

i'm doing this until it's done. but, at the rate of a month/day? i'll be doing this until february. let's hope not...

http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.ca/search?updated-min=2014-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&updated-max=2015-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&max-results=500
i know i'm posting a lot of computer stuff to 2014 right now, but i had a lot of computer problems...

the bottom line is that i'm an electronic musician, that i've always been an electronic musician (since 1997, anyways) and that fighting with electronics is a big part of what being an electronic musician is all about. it's a nerds only kind of a job.

it's easy enough to be like "just because you're a nerd....", but you don't have to take my word for it. look around. if you avoid a few years of awful 70s and 80s hair metal, which you should avoid anyways, you'll quickly see that the historical record is actually quite uniform.

the person that i know of that has spoken about this most articulately is david bowie, who has admitted over and over again that the stories about drug use and partying (especially in berlin) were in actuality a way to hide the reality around how sterile and boring the recording process actually is. i know that he's on the record for this, over and over. in later years, he dropped the facade and just refused to talk about it, using the argument that he didn't want people to know how boring he is. he apparently use to install a punch card in the studio as a kind of sardonic joke, and make everybody clock in.

but, this reality is across the spectrum. i've heard everybody from roger waters to billy corgan to kevin shields to trent reznor talk about how dry and awful music production and touring is. which, in actuality, might be why all of that awful 70s/80s rock music took it upon themselves to go spinal tap in their promotional material.

i think the key point to keep in mind is that this is meant to be documentation, primarily. i'm publishing it as promo, because why not?, but it's meant for the historical record. if it's going to be interesting or appealing to people, it's going to be interesting or appealing to the same kind of people that enjoy studying journals of composers. which should not be confusing, at all.
i seem to have skipped the alter-reality. it's there, now.

http://rssmix.com/u/8219500/rss.xml
i'm posting....let's hope i can get most of the way through 2014 before i fall asleep....

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

so, i'm out of the shower and ready to get back to it, but i'm going to force myself to get some sleep and get at this again when i wake up...
the slow down of the last few days is coming to a close. i needed a lot of sleep over the last few days, partly from the 6 hour walk on the 31st and partly from the virus that i'm now largely over. it was about noon yesterday when i finished write-ups for the vlogs all the way until january 25th, so i won't need to worry about that for quite some time. as of this morning, groceries are done until at least the 18th (when i have to go out for an appointment). i have the first of two loads of laundry in; when that's done, i'll take a shower and probably go to sleep. but, i have nothing else to do until the 18th and have every intention to get a good chunk into the period disc by then.

i've got the new drive installed, and have moved a good deal of the data on to it, but i want to let it sit for a bit before i move forwards with it. i mean, what if it dies next week? if it makes it a week, my confidence in it will grow very quickly. this works out because i have all of those posts from 2014-2016 to post, still...

but, it spins. it's a good start, anyways.

Monday, January 2, 2017

this is consolidated: youtube, bandcamp, blogspot. i've shut down the delicious link dump, as it's superfluous after the move to blogspot and it was pushing ads in the feed (gross). i'm on the brink of closing down soundcloud, i just need to clear it out first. it's full of spam, because you have to pay to turn the comments off. facebook uses a proprietary feed algorithm, so they've been excluded by choice (that's just another reason to not use facebook). i would also like to add disqus, but they don't support this, either. i'm going to keep an eye out for a comment system that allows for rss and i'll no doubt use it exclusively if it presents itself. in the mean time, this is as much as i can put together in one place.

http://www.rssmix.com/u/8219212/rss.xml

even realizing what's going to push me...

i have to think i'll *start* by dual-booting 32/64 bit xp, and only move to 64 bit very slowly.

there's no use in getting too far ahead. what can i say about this very moment?

i did a huge amount of walking on saturday on no sleep while battling what seems like the flu. there was a delay before it knocked me out, but i spent the whole day sleeping.

i'm going to spend the night filing, which includes installing the new drive. i've got vlogs for the next month uploaded and have to do write-ups for them, as well. then i'll finish cleaning when the sun comes up, get in the shower at the end of it and then get back to what i was doing either tonight or tomorrow.

how much longer to finish posting 2014-2016? i don't know.
as mentioned elsewhere, the only wall i've had to scale or think i will ever need to scale is in ram. the newer vst sample plugin libraries want 16+ gb of ram, and i'd need to get to 64-bit to do it. that's a potential driver nightmare. it's likely workable, i just don't want to do it until i have to.

i'd have to reimage, to start with. it took a long time to build that image, and i don't want to even think about it. but, i'd certainly use 64-bit xp, fwiw. there's no benefit in upgrading; i just keep the machine offline.

what i'm wondering in the short-run is if i can convert one of these 250 gb drives into a pagefile. it would not be as fast, of course. but, it might potentially let me run a sampler.

this is entirely theoretical, right now: i haven't *actually* had an issue with a sampler that i can't resolve with the existing set-up. it's just that i see where the push factor is, and what's going to eventually force me to upgrade, one day. i'm going to eventually need more ram and have no choice...
actually, you know what? this is a moot point.

i'm not replacing my system partition; that is, my C: drive will remain on an older drive.

the new drive will neither launch the os, nor launch programs, nor do anything else that would be faster over ssd. it will simply store data.

i really just needed a lot more space.

there are currently 3 250 gb hdds in there. i bought it with four. it's split into a lot of partitions, including a 50 gb C: drive. one of the drives is solely for music, and that won't change. what i'm going to do is combine a lot of the smaller partitions together into a larger "discography" partition that will utilize the entire 2 TB drive. this will include things like wavs for burning cds and isos for burning dvds and blu-rays, as well as all of my source material, organized in iso files. so, it's all data storage.

as i move things to the new drive, it will open up space on the old drives. so, the remaining partitions (the virtual machine partition, the temp partition, the install script partition) will be able to grow. extra temp space will be useful, but it's otherwise not going to be much of a change.

again: i didn't buy this to increase speed. the machine is already blazing fast, because it's very well maintained (software. not hardware.). i bought it because i needed more storage space. and, that's the only change i'm expecting - more storage space.

so, why is my machine such a fast boot and yours so slow?

well, it's 32-bit. my hardware specs are pretty much maxed for 32-bit. but if you're running 64-bit then yours might be better. if you have an old machine, you know it. it's probably not why.

the reason is probably that i keep my software footprint to a bare minimum. i run regular scripts to clear out caches. nothing loads on start-up - not even backup services. and, the machine has xp on it.

so, i'm not disputing the premise. but, if i got a 25% increase in speed from an ssd, that would take my start-up time from ten seconds to 7.5 seconds. it would take my cubase launch time from 20 seconds to 15 seconds.

it hardly seems like it's worth the price, and the associated risk of using volatile storage on a system with very, very high data transfer rates.

what i needed was a lot of safe, permanent storage space. integrity. longevity. size. speed was not in the list of things that are of concern to me.
fwiw, my machine boots in seconds, anyways. it's about a ten second boot-up. you read through reviews of ssds and it's things like:

outlook launches in less than 30 seconds

i don't run outlook, but it would be launching in less than 30 seconds on my machine, trust me. cubase takes about 20 seconds to launch.

if your machine takes more than 30 seconds to launch fucking outlook, you need more than a solid state drive. you need ram. you need a faster cpu. and you probably need a fucking reinstall of your os, too.

thirty seconds to launch outlook. fuck. what is it, 1998?

Sunday, January 1, 2017

this is completely backwards. the most important issues when you're buying a drive are:

1) data integrity.
2) longevity.
3) size.
4) price.

while ssds might be faster on paper, you will never experience the difference.

i've thought about this, and i'll simply never warm to volatile data storage. it's a contradiction in terms. and i consequently don't expect ssds to win, in the end.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/battle-between-ssd-hdd-over-141508916.html

(edit: that article isn't opening for me. this one goes through the issues better - although the exaggeration around speed is comical. and, they talk about fragmentation as though it's the 1990s and they've never heard of a defrag.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404258,00.asp)
i finally got some winter boots today for the first time in years. it doesn't seem to snow half as much here as it does in ottawa, so i haven't needed them, really. but we got a good dump a few weeks ago, which reminded me i should have something in case i *do* need them. i've had to trudge through snow drifts in running shoes in the past, and it....it destroys your shoes. you get boots to save your shoes.

but, the reason i'm posting is to update on a running gag i've had in place for years. i got a good deal, yet again, by buying kid's boots on sale. how small are my feet?

a children's size 6 - made for roughly 6 year olds - was actually just a little bit too big. i got them instead of the 5.5's, which were a closer fit, in case i wanted to double or triple up on socks....

if they were shoes, i would have got 5.5's. so, i can for real buy shoes made for 5 or 6 year olds. i just did. and i'm about 5' 9" - relatively tall, actually.

i've continually pointed to a few biological gender markers like this. i don't think gender is genetic, i think it's a social construct. so, i reject the idea that being trans is a genetic condition (which is the actual scientific consensus, outside of religious circles on the left and right). but, if you pay close attention to trans people, you *will* notice these kinds of things that make you wonder if the rejection of a monolithic social construct around gender does *sometimes*, or *often*, have coincidental biological causes. for me, the things i've noticed most prominently are a lack of body hair in certain regions (i've never grown a hair on my chest, ever) and hand and feet sizes that are pretty unambiguously not-male.

hormones don't change your shoe size, of course. but 36 year-old grown ass men don't fit into shoes made for 6 year-olds very often, either. that's an entirely biological observation, and one that almost never applies to men.

i'm not suggesting we should go around measuring kids' feet and assigning them gender roles based on it. i'm just a little hesitant to declare my absurdly small feet to be coincidental to my gender identity and would point geneticists to markers like this if they want to find something. that's more evidence, to me, of a biological cross-wiring than any desire to wear a specific kind of clothing.

i actually hope i never have to wear them. but i'm glad i have the option.

the boots were something that i needed anyways; i also picked myself up a new 2 TB hard drive for the recording machine this afternoon as my christmas/b-day gift to myself, with a combination of money sent to me and money saved from a quiet december.

i bought the recording pc in 2006 with four 250 gb hard drives. three of them are still spinning. the fourth melted into itself in march, 2014 (i couldn't have saved it...rather, i should be happy that it didn't take the whole machine down, or start an apartment fire).

the immediate purpose of the new drive is going to be to store the entire discography, including period discs with vlogs. i'm going to be working on this in the new year, so i did need this, now - i've waited long enough. but, as i work this through, i'm also going to be converting the drives into permanent storage. there's still not any way to get 100 or 200 gb on a disc; these 250 gb drives will ultimately be ideal storage solutions.

so, what that means is that i've now begun what will likely be a lengthy process of swapping out drives. in the end, all four of those 250 gb drives should be replaced by 2 TB drives.

it's a dual core 3.6. yes, it's ten years old. and, i actually *have* had a few reasons to think about upgrading to 64-bit, specifically issues around RAM. but, i still see no reason at all why i'd want a faster processor than that, and don't see why i ever will. i was aware that the technology was hitting a plateau around ten years ago, and that it was going to take fundamental shift to break through it; that machine could very well last another 20 or 30 years, so i'm comfortable in committing to a long term plan around upgrading it. 

Thursday, December 29, 2016

i don't want to say this is taking longer than i expected, because i expected it to take a long time. but, i'm behind.

march, 2014 is when the drive crashed. i then bricked my board. i will eventually fix this with the help of a magical device that i have to mail order from asia; in the mean time, i am stopping here to do some editing and cleaning. my throat is really raw, and i think it's partially the dust (although it would help if i went out sometimes).

i know i have dedicated alter-reality fans, and i apologize for the delays, but realize that this will work out to more stability in the long run. when i get all of this data arranged properly, i will be able to quickly generate liner notes for each successive release. remember that this is happening now because i'm finishing the final liner notes for inri000.

i'm actually going to crash, it seems. and i'll be stepping away from the machine for the day when i wake up.

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

i now have all of the notes from 2013 up:

http://musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.ca/search?updated-min=2013-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&updated-max=2014-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&max-results=50

scroll down and read up if you want the narration, i guess. or use the navigation in the side paine.

note: this will eventually be converted into a journal that is properly ordered, chronologically, and is therefore readable. but, this remains a necessary step to consolidate the data, for now.

i'm going to stop to clean up a little and get something to eat before i get back to it. but, i need to start the monthly cleaning when the sun comes up, and i'm going to do some editing while i'm cleaning, so i need to find a cut-off point.

how about this:

(1) 1/2014-5/2014  (when my motherboard was fixed)
(2) 6/2014-5/2015 (finishing period 2)
(3) 6/2015-6/2016 (predictable breakdown, this time due to interference)

i want to get (1) done before i get to cleaning in the morning. but, first i want to eat.

Sunday, December 25, 2016

since i've moved to windsor, i've spent most of my time completing existing recordings. but, i have put aside a few demos for later, too. i'm just interested in sharing these, right now, so they'll be here for streaming, only. i initially had a soundcloud site for this, but i want to shut that down.

these tracks will eventually be moved out of this space, completed and placed on to singles, eps and lps for download.

i'm trapped in an algorithm.

in order to close the liner notes for inri000, i had to have the sections since 2013 included, which meant i had to distribute the vlogs into this blog. in order to do this, i'd have to import my facebook page going back to last year. but, then i'd might as well import the entire facebook page since 2013, and then cut that up for the liner notes.

it doesn't make sense to do today's alter-reality until i've finished importing that page, and it could take a few days. this is necessary to complete the period disc, and i knew it was coming. it makes sense to do it now.

it means i'm going to be bogged down with data for a bit, and just listening to what i've finished over the last few months.