I bet none of you did notice that smooth server migration (unless, that is, you were one of the poor fool who tried using either unknowngenius.com or wp-plugins.net during the past 5 hours). Everything should be back to normal now, please contact me if you notice anything broken…

Why’d I change?

While not exceedingly bad (compared to the worse I had), my former host, HostForWeb, really had sub-par uptime (2 or 3 failures a month on average), rather sluggish performances and downright asinine handling of the last DDoS attack on my server (upon seeing one single IP pulling my index page 50 times a second, they simply disabled my account in the middle of a week-end: that is just retarded)…

Renewing my contract for a year with HFW being out of the question, I went with Site 5 instead: they came heartily recommended and their rates for the amount of disk space (one of my biggest priority) is damn near incredible (I’m getting three times what I was getting on HFW, for the same price, and wasn’t getting such a crappy deal either). We’ll see if the rest is on par (so far, so good).

This is quite possibly the most pointless item posted to this blog to date (all right, competition is tough there), but I’m so ecstatic I can’t contain it (yea, I have no life):

Safari apparently received a minor update in the last OS X package (the ones that gets downloaded and installed quasi-silently through the Update manager), and they have finally fixed the “Undo bug”!

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Something for your ears at the bottom »

Good evening.
Do not attempt to adjust your radio, there is nothing wrong.
We have taken control as to bring you this special show.
We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving.

Welcome to station W. E. F. U. N. K., better known as We-Funk,
Or deeper still, the Mothership Connection.
Home of the extraterrestrial brothers,
Dealers of funky music.
P-Funk, uncut funk, The Bomb.

Parliament Funkadelic – P-Funk

Welcome to Station K.D.R.D… better known as…

Well, at the moment, it’s not known as anything. for a reason: I just made it up.

The concept is quite simple, really.

I have tons of these small tracks, pseudo-remixes, work-in-progress and all around occasional hour spent screwing around on decks with good ole music on wax. Every once in a while, I go through the length of packaging one hour of these into a nice and somewhat clean format for the enjoyment of the masses. Sometimes I even go one step shorter and only release a half-assed half-hour long mix with aforementioned musical goofing around.

All these mixes are available for your aural pleasure on the Dr Dave’s Insanely Cool Mixes Collection Page.

But this somewhat formal release scheme was still not cutting it. Three main reasons:

  • Quality: Let’s face it, while I’ve gotten to a point I’d deem “fair” as a professional producer, I am still, for all purposes, a hobbyist DJ. Both in terms of skills and commitment.

    Which means that, to an overwhelming majority, times where I get on the decks and toy around with either records or computers, yield sub-par results in terms of overall mixing quality. What with the constant drinking and abusing substance while playing (OK, not this month, but I have still many ways to take my attention off whatever I’m supposed to mix). Even the Mini Mix collection requires a bit of effort, and I am a lazy person.

    Hence the need for an even cheaper/easier way to share some cool tunes without inflicting unfair damages to your eardrums nor spend every waking minutes doing so.

  • Live Audience: this point kinda goes against the one just above, but the idea is that having an audience is good.

    Let me explain… These mixes I upload most definitely have an audience. They are downloaded, and listened to, by cool people, the world over. some of these people even send me nice notes or thank you gifts, which is really a testament to how awesome this Intarweb thingie is. But a live audience, it ain’t.

    If you’ve ever done any sort of art or music live, then you know, otherwise, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine: with the right mindset, there is a sort of pressure that drives you to expand on your usual practices and break the mold. Play/act/do whatever you would be doing in a studio, in a way that you would never have thought of doing before. The live audience is a major catalyst there.

    I hardly ever play clubs these days, and for the most part, I’m quite fine with this. But I do miss the crazy-spur-of-the-moment wild experimentations with vinyl, keyboards, sequencer, chopsticks (yea, I really did it once) and anything an adrenalin-fueled brain can summon.

  • Technical Reasons: as mentioned last time, I am nearing the ceiling of my hosting quota. Each new mix I upload now requires difficult choices, moving around, shuffling of files etc. No fun. Especially for me, whose sleeping pattern is deeply perturbed by the mere thought of link rot at night.

The semi-answer to all these problems being…

KDRD: Dr Dave’s Very Own MP3 Radio Station

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I cannot possibly be the only one to have noticed that the girl basically has one. single. pose.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure she has potential to make it into every college fratboy top ten shaggable. when she gets the coke-induced twitching under control.

But the fact this ridiculously cheap 20 degrees left, 30 degrees down, naughty-girl-with-malicious-eye-and-mischievous-smile is what nowadays passes for a paragon of charm, or even plain basic sex-appeal, is a sad testament to that pathetic MTV culture we live in.

And the fact I just took the time to write this, an even sadder testament to the very low level of productivity of my afternoon.

Solving math equations might not be the best thing for my manic-depressive tendencies.

Don’t know what’s more pathetic: that I will lose sleep over an unsolved problem, or that, each time I finally solve one, I start jumping around the room like a maniac for the next 20 minutes (Eriko still refuses to let me carve victory marks on the table).

Found this awesomely dorky time-waster through Cosmic Buddha and here is what it’s got to say about Spam Karma:

This new pizzle is destined ta become tha permanent news repository fo’ all th’n Spam Karma
[…]
Spizzay Karma in tha dogg pound.
[…]
Spam Karma cuz this is how we do it.
[…]
Spizzam Karma . Ya fuck with us, we gots to fuck you up.
[…]
You can leave a response, or trackback fizzy yo own site fo gettin yo pimp on.
[…]
S-P-to-tha-izzam Karma has gizzle nuts . Relax, cus I’m bout to take my respect!
Chosen excerpts from search results

Now I ask all the spammer beeatch out there, you sure you wanna fuck with my homies?

A while back, Jeremy, at Antipixel, commented on the deceitfully symmetrical appearance of the human body after stumbling upon the frightening realization that he was a freak of nature whose eyes and ears were both uneven.

His findings on feet sizes are perfectly accurate too: as any shoe store clerk will gladly confirm, it is no secret that practically everyone has got one foot a tad bigger than the other. It took me many years to finally remember how crucial it is that I try both shoes before buying, no matter how great the right side fits. My left foot’s big toe, permanently traumatized by years of dancing in undersized sneakers, is a sore reminder of the dangers of impulsive shopping.

Jeremy is too much of a gentleman to allude to another famous occurrence of body asymmetry. One that only members of the feminine gent usually worry about (although they certainly shouldn’t: I think it’s awfully cute).

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Picture montreal_street.jpg
The Japanese language has no future.

Literally.

It has got a present tense, a past tense, many inflections for each, but absolutely nothing to accentuate a verb in a way that shows it is taking place in the future.

This is not as inconvenient as one might think at first: present tense is used instead, and, when the lack of context calls for it, precisions such as “tomorrow”, “later”, “after” clear up ambiguities.

Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.

in Japanese, “I will miss you” becomes “I miss you”.

In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is 寂しい (samishii: lonely, desolate), instead of saying “I will miss you” or even “I will be lonely”, you say “I am lonely”…

In other news, arguing all day long while walking aimlessly in a city taken over by muddy snow and icy wind chills is about as fun as it sounds.

In BoingBoing tonight: “Cubase plugin makes music sound like it’s played by cellphone

60 years after everybody else, Nokia (and Xeni Jardin) discover the breakthrough concept of… Vocoder

Congratulations!

What’s next? some crazy device to make your music sound like it’s being played in a concert hall?

And do not come telling me this is news because it is being brought to the public at large: for chrissake, it is a Cubase plugin.