Ingredients:
1 box KD
1 small onion
1 stalk of celery
2 tablespoons salted butter
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Milk
Ground sage
Old Bay seasoning (or just celery salt, black pepper, and paprika if you don’t have any)
Plain breadcrumbs
plus whatever KD recipe calls for
Method:
Begin preparing the KD according to box recipe. While water is boiling and macaroni cooking, chop the onion and celery and sweat in a medium skillet with the butter, olive oil, and a generous sprinkling of Old Bay. After preparing the KD according to box recipe, mix in celery and onions. Resume heating on medium-low. Eyeball a large portion of breadcrumbs and mix in. Splash enough milk to properly moisten the breadcrumbs to a stuffing-like consistency, sprinkle a dash of sage in and mix. Remove from heat and serve immediately.

Possible vegetarian Thanksgiving side dish this year? We’ll see.

Scariest thing ever.

• It is fast.
• Whatever new features it has are nice touches.

This wasn’t meant to be a flashy release. Very low-key on the outside, while architecturally, the changes are quite massive. To start, this is the first practical application we’ve truly seen of EM64T (AMD64, whatever) on OS X. As an aside, all these stupid “OH MY GOD! 10.6 BOOTS AN i386 KERNEL BY DEFAULT! APPLE IS SWINDLING US ALL! BUT LOOK AT HOW COOL I AM: I FIGURED OUT THAT IF YOU HOLD ’64′ IT WILL BOOT X86_64!!!111″ stories I’m seeing all over the place are…well…wastes of keystrokes. Who cares if the kernel isn’t running in long mode? All userspace components (libraries, executables) are! The small gains from forcing everyone to boot 64bit are deeply offset by the hundreds of 32bit kexts in use for which a 64bit build may not see the light of day for months. I booted my machine with the 64bit kernel…there really isn’t that much of a performance gain (though it is noticible). As an early adopter of amd64 back under FreeBSD when the Athlon 64 was fairly new (which was a bit painful, but worth the experience), I applaud this non-boneheaded approach to backward compatibility, with graceful fallbacks to 32bit mode. Note that I speak without having ventured into the braindamage that is Win64.

Anyway, I digress. In this release, everything is faster. Safari loads in 1 bounce. The time from login to the point where I can actually start using the system is much shorter. And, despite the changes in drive capacity measurement base, it did free up quite a bit of space. It’s probably the first commercial OS release I’ve seen where the base install was smaller than the that of the release that preceded it.

I eagerly wait to see what can be done with OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch.  I also am pleased with Quicktime X; the screen capturing feature was a welcome addition.

My only complaints stem from 32bit compatibility and the abolishment of input managers: I miss multiclutch dearly, and now it is all but useless (unless I force everything to run 32bit executables).

As for the Exchange 2007 support, I’m having some weird-ass issues connecting to RIC’s Exchange server. It half-works, but on subsequent connection attempts the server rejects my password. I’ll have to give USS a call to make sure my settings are okay.

That’s about it.

Senator Kennedy may have started out well before my time, but he was a man who was definitely in touch with the concerns of my generation. Healthcare was just one of the issues, though it was one he felt to be most important. He was also revered, even among his colleagues who didn’t agree with him on anything. Sheldon Whitehouse said at a Q&A session that after Kennedy returned to the floor after a medical leave, senators from both sides of the aisle rose, some with tears in their eyes.

Chappaquiddick notwithstanding, Kennedy was a respected man and public servant with a huge legacy, from a political family filled with mystique. His name will go down in the history books, just as his brothers’ names did.

On a much lighter note, let’s talk about some junk mail I received today. This piece is from a company called “Domain Renewal Group,” and they sent me a notice offering to transfer my domain, theamigan.net, to them for the “low” price of $30 for one year. Let’s recap here. I pay $9 a year from namecheap, the domain’s original and current registrar. Why the hell would I go through the trouble to pay more money? Why did they waste their time and money printing the notice? This is the type of garbage environmentalists should be hooting and hollering about; I rarely see more of an utter waste of trees.

That’s all.

Yes, I heard you. You said something to the effect of the last line, right? Well, I don’t care.

I decided to try a little experiment as I sat here, bored and…bored. I took the (now mostly finished) mixes of Spatula and Gel Cell, threw Logic’s Pitch Corrector plugin on all the vox tracks, and A/B’d them with the originals. What did I hear?

I heard in-tune harmonies on Spatula. In-tune harmonies which completely missed the point of the whole “diabolical” feel of the vocals.

I heard in-tune doubletracking in Gel Cell. Sure, Adam does a decent job keeping in tune with himself. But in 2009, that doesn’t matter. He can sound like a pitch-perfect robot with just two clicks of a pointing device!

So anyway, I hear you saying, “well, Dan, you play synthesizers for chrissakes! If you’re so against mechanically-produced music, then you must be a hypocrite!”

I retort with this: it may be an oscillator (or sample player) producing the sound, but I am in control of it. If I want to detune it x cents, I have the power to do so. (Normally I don’t).

Lastly, the voice is the one instrument that most fluidly and accurately reproduces the emotion felt by the musician. Vocals are raw, powerful representations of emotion, thoughts, and ideas. With this emotion, there will by fluctuations in pitch. If I want a machine to produce voice (or sound like such), I either use a speech synthesizer or a vocoder (or both). Autotune sucks the human quality of vocals not unlike the way in which a shop-vac cleans the floormats in my car. Which is to say, in a very violent fashion.

So, in short, while it may be tempting from an OCD standpoint to plaster autotune all over our vox tracks, I think it is safe to say that autotune will not be making any appearances on M&C’s album, at least not in any capacity that it was originally designed for.

But I can’t.

You see, as I’ve suspected for ages, and what I’ve discovered today, the microKORG has some weird-ass internal signal routing. I have a patch, for example, that I made ages ago (when I first got the mk) that sounds like the VCS3 lead in Led Zeppelin’s In The Light. Today, I tried to replicate this patch on my Ion, a synth with very straightforward and documented signal routing. The patch I have calls for osc1 and osc2 to both be triangle waves, with no modulation between them (no ring/sync), and one of them tuned an octave down. But I noticed that when I have two triangle oscillators, mixed the exact same way they are on the mk, the ion makes them sound much different (and arguably, the way they should sound judging from the parameters). However, trying to isolate either oscillator on the microKORG produces some, well, fucked-up results. Listen to the podcast to hear it all.

And it’s pouring out and thundering. So I’m wondering whether it really is safe to keep the laptop plugged directly into the wall like it is right now.

And the Home Improvement episode where Tim and Al get arrested for scalping hockey game tickets is on. Again.

The end.

But this time, it’s not about banks and insurance firms. It’s about automakers, specifically GM.

With news that Detriot could “potentially be forced to seek relief under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code” without further government help, nationalization is starting to look like the lesser of many evils to some.

I say go for it, if GM truly is so important to the economy (which it is). They’re using government funds. Why should we trust (mis)management of this money to the very people whose initial failure prompted the bailout in the first place? Like I said in my last post, at least the government is intrinsically accountable to the American people, though whether this is the case in practice is obviously up for debate. Really, one of the few obstacles to such nationalization is all the rednecks who will cry “Communism!” if it happens. But here’s a hint: just because Cuba did something to every company back in the 50s doesn’t mean that we can’t do it to monumentally mismanaged automakers whose survival is effectively a keystone of much of our economy.

This is about a government protecting its citizens from financial hardship which largely came about through no fault of their own. It’s not about any sort of doctrine, or any systematic overthrow of a government, or any of that bullshit. But it just goes to show you what happens when you put the mice in charge of guarding the cheese. The executives fucked up. This fucking up endangers the financial stability of millions of people. They should not be allowed to continue doing this, and especially not while taking home a pretty penny for it.

Think about it.