2010.07.29 by room34.com Tags




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Music Comments 2

66: The Mother Road

Anyone who follows this blog and/or my musical (mis)adventures (and bothers to remember any of it all) may recall that back in January I recorded a 21-minute prog rock suite called 66. If you don’t remember, it’s available in its entirety, both as 10 individual tracks and the complete suite, on my music site.

As usual, I’ve spent a ton of time listening to 66 since I recorded it. If my iTunes play count is to be believed, it’s somewhere in the range of 130 times, but I suspect it’s actually much higher than that, with different versions (the 24-bit version, the 16-bit CD version, the MP3 version), some of which I no longer keep on my computer, plus listening in the car and elsewhere that may not have been logged. The point is, I’ve literally spent days listening to this thing since I recorded it 6 months ago. And, not surprisingly, I eventually started to notice things I was unhappy with.

The most significant issue I had was with the drum sound. I don’t really play drums. (Well, OK, I do play drums, but I don’t really play drums.) The drum tracks are MIDI software instruments, part of GarageBand. I played the drum parts on my keyboard, looped them, tinkered with them endlessly in the track editor, and eventually arrived at an end result. But there were two problems: 1) they were too repetitive, and 2) they sounded plastic. The issues went beyond the drums, but they were my main source of frustration with what I had created.

I’ve been considering putting together a 3-track prog rock album this year called 3, in the format of the Yes albums Close to the Edge and Relayer. That would be one “side-long” track, followed by two “half-side” tracks. In other words, the first track should be around 20 minutes long, and the other two should be about 8-12 minutes each. I already have tracks 1 and 2: track 1 is the 66 suite, of course, retitled for these purposes as “66 (The Mother Road).” Track 2 is the final track of my improvised RPM Challenge album from February, 222, known originally as “All Together Now” but to be retitled “222 (All Together Now).” The final track hasn’t been written yet, and I don’t know what it will be like, other than that it will be about 10 minutes long and its title will be in the form of “Number (Three Parenthetical Words).” A hackneyed concept, I suppose, but that’s how I roll.

Anyway, since I’m repackaging two existing tracks for this album, it also gives me an opportunity to remix them (and, to some extent, to reworking them even more deeply, in that nether region between remixing and re-recording, which I am not doing).

First up was a remix of 66, which I undertook over the past couple of days. I changed the drum sound I was using from “Pop Kit” to “Rock Kit,” did some serious EQ, tinkered a ton with the reverb to make them sound more “live,” and also rearranged some of the notes in the editor to make the parts a bit more varied and interesting. I also reworked the EQ on the electric bass, as it sounded thin and plastic before, too. And while I was at it I made adjustments to the reverb settings on the guitar and Mellotron parts, and I also removed an 8-measure section of the final part, to eliminate some unnecessary repetition.

The end result then went through my new mastering process, which I think does a better job of beefing up the sound without completely squashing the dynamic range. And now, I present it to you. Enjoy!

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2010.07.20 by room34.com Tags




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Computers & Technology
Nostalgia
Video Clips Comments 0

Great Dieter Rams interview

Dieter Rams, legendary industrial designer from Braun in the 1950s and ’60s, pretty much invented my design aesthetic. I can’t imagine what the world of technology would look like without his pioneering work. Brilliant.

I especially like his design principle #10: “Good design is as little design as possible.”

I probably didn’t hear of Dieter Rams until about ten years ago, but I’ve seen the world through his eyes since I was a kid. Most of these Braun products were not readily available in the U.S. in those days (the late ’70s and early ’80s), but their designs were so influential that just about everything you could get here still looked like them, or pale imitations thereof.

Jason Kottke also tidily sums up Rams’ influence on modern industrial design:

And hey, I didn’t know that a book had been published on Rams’ work. I bet Jony Ive has at least three copies.

I’ll take one of everything, please.

Source: Monoscope via kottke.org

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2010.07.18 by room34.com Tags


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Computers & Technology Comments 0

CakePHP and the Session.timeout SNAFU

As I’ve mentioned before, my CMS, cms34, is built on the CakePHP framework. I love CakePHP, but it’s not perfect.

A client contacted me last week, reporting that customers using her website — specifically, a complex form that might take 30 or more minutes to complete — were having their sessions timeout during that process. Now, yes, you may point out (and you would be right) that this is an excellent scenario for using AJAX to save a draft of the users’ form data, or at least ping their session to keep it alive. And you would be correct. But there are two reasons I did not take this path in response to the problem: 1) I’m trying to remember to follow the web standards principle that JavaScript should be used only to enhance functionality, but the site should still work even with it turned off (though in practice I often forget to honor this principle), and 2) the site is in its peak of activity this week, and it would be daft to implement a major functionality change in the form right now — not enough time for adequate testing.

So, the task at hand was simply to increase the session timeout period, so users could stay on the form for a longer time without losing their sessions.

Seems easy enough. The CakePHP config.php file has some settings that play directly into this: Session.timeout and Security.level.

Session.timeout is an integer representing the number of seconds in the session. Well, not exactly. It’s a multiplier value, and the actual session timeout duration is determined by multiplying Session.timeout by the value associated with Security.level, which itself has three possible values: high, medium and low, corresponding respectively to ×10, ×100 and ×300.

I already had Security.level set to low and Session.timeout set to 1800, so really, the sessions should have stayed alive for over six days of inactivity. And yet, sessions were timing out after about 20 minutes. What gives?

What gives is another value in the config.php file: Session.save.

CakePHP offers a number of ways to store session data, but the default value is php, which means it uses the built-in session functionality in PHP. The problem is, PHP has its own session timeout setting (in the php.ini file), and frankly my dear, PHP doesn’t give a damn what CakePHP’s session timeout setting is. And so, with Session.save left at its default php value, my sessions were timing out after 20 minutes (the PHP default) no matter what I changed in config.php.

So, an experiment: I decided to change Session.save to cake, which tells it to use CakePHP’s own session cache, located inside your CakePHP application under app/tmp/sessions. (Be sure that path is fully writable by Apache!)

Success! I left a browser window open on my test site overnight, and the session was still active the next morning. But along the way in my troubleshooting, I had changed my Session.timeout value to 14400, which when combined with the Security.level setting of low (that is, when multiplied by 300), had my sessions enduring for a ridiculously long 50 days! Some quick work with a calculator (although, in retrospect, I ought to have been able to divide 14400 by 50 in my head) told me to set Session.timeout to 288 if I wanted my sessions to last for 24 hours.

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2010.07.14 by room34.com Tags



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Miscellany & Minutiæ Comments 2

Brand New: Room 34 Edition

I’m a big fan of the blog Brand New. I like seeing the “before and after” of various brand identities.

Lately I’ve been contemplating a brand refresh of my own. I’ve been mostly satisfied with the current Room 34 Creative Services logo. I really like the “rings” design element, the color palette, and, even though it’s overused, the Avenir font:

But there are some things I don’t like about the logo. I’ve been getting a little tired of the colors (even though I like them); I’m increasingly regretting including the “.com” (even though I like the fact that my logo is my web address); and I don’t like the redundant “Room 34.” Plus, Avenir is overused.

So, today I took a first stab at a new identity. It has a new color palette, using one of my favorite colors, reddish-orange (or vermillion if you prefer a more poetic name for it), it eliminates the redundant text, and it switches to another of my favorite, but much less common, fonts: Proxima Nova:

I’m not 100% committed to this change yet; rebranding is a big undertaking, even for a business as small as mine. Switching to this new logo will require redesigning my website, my letterhead and my business cards. But I like the direction. I especially like the letterforms (or, I guess, numeralforms) of the “3″ and “4″ in Proxima Nova Black. So nice. The new logo is also more compact and scales down better than the old.

Update: Based on JW’s excellent recommendations (and a few observations of my own) I’ve made a few adjustments: 1) improved spacing between the “o’s” in “room”; 2) resized the rings slightly for better lockup with the text — the top of the “4″ ring group is now aligned with the top of the letters in “room”; 3) slight change to the color in “CREATIVE SERVICES” so it is more readable on either a light or dark background.

Here’s the new version, on both white and black:

New Room 34 logo, revised
New Room 34 logo, revised
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2010.07.13 by room34.com Categories
Music
Top 5 Lists Comments 0

(Best) music of 2010 (so far…)

As my regular reader(s) know(s), I like to close out every year with a list of my top 5 albums. And usually every year around July I start thinking about how the year has crossed the halfway mark and I start looking at the albums I’ve amassed thus far in the year. I don’t always write about it, but I do always think about it.

In the spirit of openness (or, more accurately, in the spirit of assuming you care), here’s a list of the new music I’ve acquired thus far in 2010, possible candidates for the top 5 list I’ll eventually write in December or so.

Absinthe and the Dirty Floors: Side 1
Since this is an EP, it’s not really in contention for the top 5 albums, but it’s such a fun, energetic EP that it is at least worth mentioning. It’s also a nod to the multi-talented Joshua Wentz, who’s been known to show up in the comments here from time to time. (Learn more at the band’s website.)

The Bird and the Bee: Interpreting the Masters, Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates
This is a strange album. I love The Bird and the Bee, almost as much as I love Hall and Oates. I grew up with these songs. And yet, I’m strangely dissatisfied with this album; the “interpretations” are neither terribly original nor terribly strong compared to the originals. And yet (again), even though I’m strangely dissatisfied with the album, I’m also strangely compelled by it. In a year of strong releases from a number of creative artists, this disappointing, halfhearted effort from one of my favorites is still enjoyable and has been on heavy rotation on my computer, my iPhone, and in my car.

Broken Bells: Broken Bells
Take one member of The Shins and one of Gnarls Barkley — two bands I generally dislike — and put them together, and strangely, you get a band I really do like. Maybe it’s just that I don’t like the other members of these bands, but it’s probably just that these guys are trying something new. Whatever the case, it’s worth checking out.

Coheed and Cambria: Year of the Black Rainbow
I was really enthralled with Coheed and Cambria when I first discovered them in 2005, but with each subsequent album their schtick has seemed more contrived and pointless. This album, while on par with their previous work, is mostly an unenjoyable slog. Still, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to catch the band live this summer on a double bill with Porcupine Tree… but mainly for Porcupine Tree. (Unfortunately, I’ll have to pass up the opportunity, since the closest they’re coming to here is… Grand Rapids, Michigan?! What?!?!)

Field Music: Field Music (Measure)
The members of the band don’t see it themselves, but I’ve always thought Field Music sounds more than a little bit like Gentle Giant, and that definitely continues with this latest album. Like Gentle Giant, this music is probably an… erm… acquired taste, but it’s worth giving a chance.

Gorillaz: Plastic Beach
Much has been made of this “band” since they first appeared on the scene a few years ago. It’s a weird concept, and in the past I didn’t really enjoy it much, but this album really grabbed my attention. It kind of drifts off course in the middle (around the time Lou Reed appears), but overall it’s highly original, frequently weird, and generally satisfying.

MGMT: Congratulations
Here’s another band that’s been popular for a few years but that I’ve never been able to get into before now. I’m still not enjoying this album as much as I feel like I should (or, want to), but it’s cool. I hate the cover art though.

Pat Metheny: Orchestrion
If you don’t know anything about Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion project, stop reading this and watch this video right now!

Porcupine Tree: Anesthetize and Atlanta
I’ve been a huge PT fan for over a decade now, and they have yet to let me down. These stellar live performances from 2008 are absolutely worth seeking out. Anesthetize is the big release: a DVD/CD combo featuring a performance of their 2007 studio album Fear of a Blank Planet in its entirety. Atlanta is available as a download on their website, and was originally planned as a live album, but was eventually considered superfluous when the opportunity to film Anesthetize in the Netherlands presented itself.

Room 34: 66 and 222
Yes, a little self-promotion never hurt anyone. I recorded 66 in January and 222 in February. 66 is a 21-minute prog rock suite depicting a voyage along historic US Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, and is probably my most cohesive and well-executed project to date. 222 is an 8-1/2 minute experimental free-form improv on 6 instruments, with the 6 instrumental tracks organized into different permutations, resulting in 8 different “pieces” on the album all constructed from the same performances. I am contemplating producing a third prog-ish piece in the 8- to 10-minute range, and releasing the 66 suite, “All Together Now” (the final track from 222 that includes all 6 instrument parts), and this third piece, as a full-length album structured like the Yes classics Close to the Edge and Relayer, entitled 3. We’ll see if that happens. In the meantime, you can download both 66 and 222 for free at my music website.

Rush: Caravan/BU2B
The resurgence of Rush in the last few years is exciting for any long-time fans (like myself). Snakes and Arrows was arguably the band’s best album in over 20 years, and based on the strength of these two tracks, next year’s Clockwork Angels promises to carry on in the same vein.

The Seven Fields of Aphelion: Periphery
I’m not even entirely sure how I discovered this album, but it’s great mellow/ambient music for background listening.

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings: I Learned the Hard Way
No, this album was not recorded in 1967, but you’d never know from how it sounds. The Daptone label specializes in recording with vintage equipment to capture a classic ’60s R&B sound that simply cannot be duplicated with modern equipment. Forget digital, even solid state analog equipment loses the warmth, the soul, that is the essence of this music. Highly recommended.

Sleepy Sun: Fever
Here’s another album where I can’t really remember how I discovered it, but I really like it. This music, too, is dripping with a ’60s essence, but this time it’s the trippy, acid-fueled explorations of the San Francisco Bay Area. At times dreamy and ethereal, at times raw and harsh, always eerily engaging.

Spoon: Transference
If I remember correctly, this was the first new album I purchased in 2010, and it was a good start to the year. Spoon, like Fujiya & Miyagi or The Mooney Suzuki, is at least nominally influenced by the legendary ’70s German band Can. While I have yet to hear a Can-influenced band that can touch the mind-blowingly original, minimalist rock sound of Can, Spoon’s music manages to evoke a similar spirit, despite its more accessible, straightforward approach.

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2010.06.22 by room34.com Tags



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Computers & Technology
Miscellany & Minutiæ Comments 0

You can’t specialize in everything

It’s been one of those weeks that a freelancer dreads. Lots of fires to put out. You’re trying to swim upstream (as always) but instead you’re treading water in a rapids. Without a team of coworkers to depend on, when a problem arises, there’s no one to pass the buck to, or at least to, uh, share it with.

The problems haven’t really been that bad. Just a few bugs to squash, a few scripts to optimize, a few clients to reassure. But when you feel like you have to be the expert at whatever you do, this kind of week can be a source of anxiety.

It doesn’t help when your main lifeline to the tech world is the expert blogs you follow. Read a few articles on A List Apart and you’ll feel both inspired and a little despondent. There are so many incredibly talented, creative people out there doing amazing things. So why am I banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why all of my form fields suddenly disappeared in IE6? (Turns out it was the position: relative on the #main element, easily fixed by overriding it with position: static in the IE6-specific CSS file I wish I didn’t have to create.)

The point is, as a freelancer, at least one who aspires to be good, if not great, at what you do, you are your own harshest critic and worst enemy. There’s no way any of my clients would ever beat me up the way I beat up myself. I don’t think I’ve ever even had one detectably angry with me. But I am constantly getting frustrated with myself for not being on top of every single technology I put my hands on, and I’m inclined to treat every bug as a personal failure.

The sad fact is, it’s impossible. You can’t specialize in everything. It’s right there in the word. Specialize. As a freelancer, you have to pick a few things to focus on as your greatest strengths, while becoming as well-rounded as you can. But there’s always someone out there who knows more about CSS3 or HTML5 or PHP or jQuery or Whatchamacallit than you do. The great thing about being a freelancer in the age of the Internet, especially if you work on the Internet, is that a lot of those superstar über-geniuses are willing to share that knowledge with you for free. All you have to do is search for it.

The biggest danger in following the superstars of your chosen field, though, is idol worship. You get to know so many facets of their work and their personalities (especially if you follow them on Twitter), that you may be tempted to think you know them personally. You might even have a brief exchange with them about baseball. But that doesn’t mean you know them or know what their lives are really like.

We all make sacrifices to live the lives we choose. It’s inherent in the finite nature of human existence. Chances are, I’ll never be a web development “rock star,” because I’ve made choices that took me on another path. I wanted to be able to work on my terms, and fit my career in as one aspect of my life. I’m not logging the kind of hours I’d need to in order to get rich doing work for hire, or building the next great social networking site. But I have time to spend with my kids and SLP (though probably still not as much as would be ideal). I can make music. I can try to set the world record on my Asteroids cocktail table. (OK, that’ll never happen, but it’s 2 feet from my desk in my home office, if I ever decide to get serious.) I can take an afternoon off to take my son to see Toy Story 3 or head down to Target Field for a Twins game or write on my coffee blog or get some fish tacos at Sea Salt.

Or, I can spend half the morning beating myself up because I’m not Jeffrey Zeldman. But, who is? (OK, he is. But that’s it.)

The point is, I’m me. I’m damn good at what I do, but I can’t do everything. And that’s OK.

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2010.06.20 by room34.com Tags




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Music
Video Clips Comments 1

Carrot clarinet

As a clarinet player myself, all I can say is, “SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, THIS MAN MADE A CLARINET OUT OF A CARROT AND IT SOUNDS FREAKING AWESOME!”

Presenting “Making Jam” by Linsey Pollak:

Source: Boing Boing

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2010.06.16 by room34.com Tags







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Computers & Technology Comments 2

When is a CSV not a CSV? When you’re downloading it in Safari

Here’s another post that’s basically a cry for help. I did find this forum thread on the topic, but not a solution.

The problem: when I download a CSV file in Safari, for some inexplicable reason, Safari appends a .xls (Microsoft Excel) extension to the filename.

Never mind that I don’t use Excel… I use Apple’s own spreadsheet software, Numbers, from the iWork suite. Never mind that I don’t even have Excel installed on my Mac. Why, why on Earth, would Safari append a .xls extension on a CSV file? It’s not an Excel file; it’s a CSV. Different format. Sure, Excel can open it. But, you know what? Numbers doesn’t open it properly when it has that stupid extension on it.

Take the exact same file, remove the .xls extension (leaving the .csv extension), and Numbers opens it just fine. Leave it the way Safari has it, and it’s a mess.

This is not the only annoyance I have with Safari’s handling of downloads. I also hate how it automatically expands “safe” files, placing the original .zip or .dmg file in the Trash. I don’t want to delete those files! But if I turn this option off, it also doesn’t open the files I want it to open automatically, like Amazon MP3 downloads.

But hands down, this CSV bug — yes, that’s right, I called it a bug — is my biggest source of frustration. Sure, it’s easy enough to remove the extension. But it shouldn’t be there in the first place!

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2010.06.15 by room34.com Tags


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Music
Nostalgia
Video Games Comments 6

21 years gone: remembering life as a 15-year-old Rush fan

For much of the past decade I’ve been systematically reliving my childhood. I’m not totally sure what stirred up this extended wave of nostalgia, but it may have something to do with the simple fact that I have vivid memories of things I did 20-plus years ago.

It started in 2002, on the 20th anniversary of my acquisition (as an 8-year-old second grader) of an Atari 2600. I went crazy back in that summer of 2002, buying up lots (as in, auction lots, on eBay) of the games I never managed to convince my parents to buy me as a child. In the end I wound up with over 350 games in my collection, counting duplicates, including a dozen copies each of Combat and Pac-Man.

This year I’ve been rekindling my middle school obsession with baseball. (Good timing, with the Twins in a new stadium and playing exceptionally well.) I went so far as to bid on a complete Topps 1985 baseball card set, but lost in the final bidding war I didn’t expect would happen. Back in the day I owned thousands of baseball cards, mostly from the 1984-1988 Topps sets, but ironically I sold the entire collection on eBay back in 2002 to fund my Atari collection. I should have had more foresight.

And then there’s Rush. My long-dormant obsession with the band I spent so much of high school listening to (when I wasn’t – ugh – reading Ayn Rand) had been renewed back around 2002 as well, when I played briefly in a Rush cover band in Atlanta, and then in 2007 with the release of their outstanding Snakes and Arrows album. But now I’m really beginning to relive the summer of 1989, when I was 15 and first immersing myself in the band’s already extensive back catalog.

I’m not sure what prompted the latest resurgence. It might have something to do with the great new documentary about the band, which I saw at the Riverview Theater last week. But as with my Atari fixation in 2002, it’s more like there’s just something in the air.

A friend introduced me to Rush during our freshman year of high school, right around the time A Show of Hands was released. That was my first exposure to their music. Or so I thought, until the Replay x3 DVD boxed set was released a few years ago and I suddenly remembered having seen the Grace Under Pressure concert special on MTV back in fifth grade. I know that concert video had a big impact on me (probably because with his New Wave hairstyle Alex Lifeson looked so much like Simon LeBon), but for some reason I never pursued the band further.

Anyway, back to 1989: I had just gotten my first job, bagging groceries for $3.69 an hour (minimum wage), and, flush with cash, I made frequent trips to the local ShopKo store. The store’s electronics and entertainment section was well stocked both with cheap Rush cassettes and cheap (probably bootlegged) PC games. I bought a lot of both that summer.

My first two Rush cassettes were A Farewell to Kings and Signals. Even all these years later, those are probably my two favorite Rush albums, because they had such an impact on my young ears. They were so different, it was hard to believe they were produced by the same band, just five years apart. And yet they were both so good, so unlike anything else I was accustomed to hearing on the radio or on MTV in the late ’80s. (You see, there was once a time when MTV played something called “music videos,” which were just popular songs set to music. They played them 24 hours a day. And it was good. But not as good as a then-12-year-old Rush album.)

Whenever summer comes along, I start to reminisce about the summers of my youth, especially the summer of 1989. I can see, hear, almost smell my bedroom back then, window open, cool breeze wafting in, “Xanadu” blasting out of my Panasonic boombox on a hissy cassette tape I purchased at ShopKo in the $3.99 cutout bin. (Hey, that was more than an hour’s wages!)

Why am I drawn back so strongly to that summer of 1989? I’m not sure, but I do know something about it that is strongly compelling. Even though I was working at the grocery store, that was still the last summer of my childhood. The next summer, I had my driver’s license, and everything changed. But back in 1989, I was carefree, virtually no responsibilities, and I could just sit in my room and listen to Rush and play Adventure Construction Set on my Tandy 1000 computer.

Maybe part of what reminds me of then is that in some ways, my experience during the summer now is more like 1989 than it has been at any point in my life since. I have plenty of obligations and responsibilities now — I’m married with two kids, mortgage, car payments, etc. But I’m a freelancer, working mostly from home. And like in 1989, I can sit at my computer in my bedroom, cool breeze wafting through the open window, and crank “Xanadu” up to 11. Only now it’s an MP3.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Oh wait, that’s from Hemispheres.

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2010.06.07 by room34.com Tags


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Miscellany & Minutiæ Comments 0

Unchained: a new blog

This is a first: SLP and I are collaborating on a blog. The title is Unchained, and the concept is that we’re taking the summer to try to break ourselves of bad habits where food and exercise are concerned: we’re going to stop shopping at chain stores and restaurants, stop buying national brands, and start getting as much of our food as we can at local markets, co-ops, and on foot or bike. It’s going to be an interesting experiment, and we’re hopeful that, as with one of my other blogs, 52 Coffees, writing a blog can be a catalyst for personal change and growth. Check it out!

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