Ack. One of those days that makes my brain hurt. Bitmap color matching bug on Intel. ColorSync expects and returns data in big endian even on Intel. Found a flag that says “the bytes are in reverse order”. Tried it. It either caused an infinite loop or just plain piss poor performance, like waiting minutes before I killed it. So, I had to swap the bytes before and after the call to CWMatchBitmap. Then PostScript output was screwed, depending on if the image was rgb or cmyk and the output profile was cmyk or rgb. Ack. So yeah, I spent the day looking at argb and cmyk data, some times big endian and some times little endian, so half the time I had to read and think backward, or backward–backward if it was swapped for ColorSync and I was looking at the data as longs instead of bytes.

One of the neighbor chicks, Katie, bought her husband Rob a big ass Weber stainless steel gas grill for his bday. She picked it up today and was going to surprise him with it tonight. Then he called and said he’d be home for lunch, so she rushed over and asked if she could store it in our garage until later. I helped her unload it, then helped her carry it over after he left. That’s a serious piece of cooking equipment. I’m kinda partial to this Charmglow cabinet unit. Looks like something Ward Cleaver would have on their backyard patio.

Today was window–washing day. Inside and out were a mess. I manned the outside and Kim did the inside and screens. Now it’s time to replace a bunch of the screens. You can see where Kim scrubbed them with a brush because the black coating stuff came off the fiberglas. Hell, they’re 19 years old.

When we pulled into the cul de sac last night, most of the neighborhood was gathered at the end around a fire. We unpacked, grabbed a couple chairs, and joined them. That was the perfect ending to a long driving weekend.

We just got back around 8 tonight from a trip to Keota. Mom’s 80th birthday party held in Washington at a newish Italian restaurant (which is totally out of place in Washington, both decor–wise and food–wise). Lots of relatives from all over the place were there. I hadn’t seen some of them for, jeez, 20 years or more. My 25 year class reunion was that night. A couple cousins came back to Ma & Pa’s house after the party, and we were just having too much fun to go out to the KC Hall (where all the big events are held if the country club is booked) and stand around with a bunch of classmates that wouldn’t have much to say. I would’ve liked to talk to a few of them,but family first ya know.

For those city–raised readers, the KC Hall is in Harper, which is a few miles west of Keota. Check the satellite image—the natural gas plant south of Harper is pretty much the same size as the town.

Guitar music simply can not be read without the little dots!

Kim made her first trip of the year to buy some plants. Got some cool stuff. I trimmed out of control shrubs. We need to make a point of doing that in the fall, especially with the ones that you can just hack off at the ground and they completely regrow the next year.

Tried helping a neighbor sweat a pipe back together on his sprinkler system, but the propane just wasn’t hot enough to get the big hunks of copper to take the solder well at all. I cleaned the hell out of it, tried flux, did the whole thing twice, no damn go. Wish I had one of those real plumber MAPP gas torches.

I’ve had some computer history show on the Science Channel while sitting here. It turns out that Steve Ballmer has always been an unstable freaked–out caveman and Bill Gates has never combed his hair or looked cool. Shocking, I know. You heard it here first.

The ButtKicker. Somebody recently mentioned this to me. Maybe I should build a throne that incorporates one of these. Dig the specs; 5–200Hz, 400 watts minimum, 1500 watts max.

Now anyone can keep their secrets safe and provide exercise for their cage–bound varmints with this little contraption. I’d just like to see the little bastard run around in loops when an overflow of shredded paper clogs up the wheel.

Speaking of binary (like I did a couple days ago), here’s one of my favorite .sigs I see on a developer mailing list:

There are 10 kinds of people in the world; those who can read binary and those who can’t.

Brent just sent me the link to this Roland 909 emulator. Bands whose drummer suddenly explodes can just plug a MacBook into their PA and load this up. There ya go! Although I can’t be sure, I think the 909 is what Brent & I rented from West Music back around 1984 when we recorded “Dead Babies” and “Death, Taxes, & Herpes”.

This is the showerhead for me.

This video makes me smile. He’s the man. Musta munched the tranny or something like that, cuz obviously the engine and hydraulic system still work.

Leo blogged some live Kinks video. Here’s an old version in a small setting of Celluloid Heros that’s pretty cool, even if it doesn’t have the swoopy synth part that the later One for the Road version did.

Yipe! Weird. Here’s Ray singing it with Bon Jovi.

The ruler of all geeks, Woz, explains the two watches he wears. The nixie tube watch is brilliant, in an electronics geek sort of way, but it’s also great art. The binary watch, not so earth–shattering, because binary clocks have been around in many forms. Still, it does make geeks feel like they belong to a secret societ when they see 10101:10000 and can say, “gosh, look at the time!”

Holy tone deafness! Hear Burt Ward sing a cover of “Orange Colored Sky” (Nat King Cole). Read about more bad covers at Retrocrush—most have videos. Dig the picture of the Brady kids and Marcia’s groovy (and nicely filled out) bikini top. (Oh this is too weird. I had Letterman on earlier because Charles Grodin was on. Still goddamn hilarious. Anyway, I wasn’t paying attention and that Craig Ferguson show came on. Maureen McCormick was one of the guests. WooooEEeeewwooooo. She’s chunked out a bit.)

Hmm, while most of the covers are truly bad, the guy is completely fucked when he says this about Vanilla Fudge’s version of “You Keep Me Hanging On”:

Boring? Idiot. He also didn’t like The Lemonheads’ cover of “Mrs. Robinson”. I thought they gave it some much needed life. Oh my god. Do not listen to “I am the Walrus” by… wait for it… Jim Carrey. I need to go find some Imodium–D now. What a bucket of puke he is.

Um, the guy really does have no taste. I just got to the part where he describes Bowie’s “Heroes” as “pretty dull”. Is this guy retarded?

Wow, I sure haven’t been surfing much lately. I was days behind on most of my normal web reading. Since I started writing new features, I haven’t been looking for distractions during the day. I took some time the last couple evenings to redo that slo–mo movie on the Turnstyle front page so it has me in it instead of their old drummer. And there’s a better shot of Kim, except the lighting isn’t all that flattering. In fact, it’s also bad on all the shots of me—made my eyes look kinda Andy Kaufman crazy.

Got a wedding reception to play Saturday. Denny Lodin will be joining us as sound guy. Maybe I can get him to add harmonies from the board like I did before. It’ll be fun, and I’m sure we’ll hear a “da–ha–ha” or two.

The cables that came with my Yamaha drums are really thin, zip cord–like wires, hardly good for repeated tear–down and set–up. Plus, there’s a lot of slack in some of them with my setup, so it looks like shit. I soldered up some new cables cut to the lengths they need to be and zip tied them into a nice little snake. I couldn’t use the old one I used with my old set because the 3–zone pads need a 3–conductor wire and TRS plugs.

I also made another little 1/4” to XLR adapter cable so I can have my own monitor feed from the board. This one had to be different than the previous 3, because the snake only has 4 male “output” jacks. Mine will go into channel 16, which is female, then I’ll have a gay cable on the other end to go into my monitor.

Toothpicks are made from birch. Well I’ll be dipped. One of the more interesting episodes of How It’s Made.

Went to GC to check out the JBL today. Got a couple of very helpful guys to wait on me right away. I asked if I could have them plug in a drum machine or keyboard so I could hear how it will sound with drums and they were happy to set it up. The display model was on top of 2 other tall cabs, so the guy asked if I’d like to have them set it on the floor so I could get a better idea of how it sounds as a monitor. You don’t get that kind of service every day. I liked it (who wouldn’t?) and bought one. Man, this thing is deceivingly light. Plus it’s carried with 2 hands, so that helps in making it manageable, unlike our Roland amp. One thing I hadn’t really looked at before is the XLR–1/4” combo jack on the input. Pretty damned cool how they integrated both types into one jack.

I stuck it in the basement next to the Roland and Kim helped me A/B the two. Night and day. A better analogy might be black hole and supernova. And the badge on the grill lights up. Woohoo! The only con is that the top isn’t totally flat, so it might not be that great of a coffee table for my Gatorade and ashtray.

I was thinking how times change. In Spare Change I think we started with one CS–800 for our PA. 800 watts. Now I have 500 watts just for a monitor. Hell, Black Diemond’s first PA was what, 130 watts?

I also needed to pick up some cable making supplies. Called and stopped by a few places and nobody sells that shit (at least on Saturday). One guy recommended Ax–Man Surpluss, a place Kim & I went to a few years ago. I told Brent about this place. If you’re an electronics geek or just love incredibly weird stores, this is the place for you. Be sure to take the store tour on their site and click the pictures. They love doll heads, mannequins, and writing funny things on the shelf cards. If you’re shopping for a dozen alligator clips, a little bendy monkey, some choke coils, some puke green plastic spoons, a 30A motor as big as your head, a plastic egg with a tiny furry chick inside, 300’ of RG-6 coax cable, and an iridescent skull sticker, you can get it all here. (We got 2 of the skull stickers.) They seem to have a lot less military surpluss than they did the last time we visited. I remember a bunch of gas masks from different countries. Shoulda bought ‘em then. I love gas masks, especially the old ones that have the filter hanging down like a snout. Creepy. Like something in Star Wars’ cantina.

Looks like Apple will be selling LED–based displays soon. Fantastic! Unless I’m wrong, it means less power usage, cooler, brighter, and no dimming with age that LCD displays suffer from. I’m hoping they will be able to redo the entire line, MacBooks and Cinema Displays. Not that my Cinema Displays are anywhere close to being old yet. One thing I wish to hell they’d do is make a dual– or triple–input display. This awful Sony will turn to crap one of these days, and I need the extra inputs for the times when I need to turn on the PC or the old G4 for debugging. But, I suppose buying a KVM switch wouldn’t be out of the question.

Cool. I rigged up a nice little practice set. I put a couple of my old Dauz pads on the Yamaha rack that I leave in the basement and used my old EP1 trigger pedals, so the only thing I need to take down to the basement is the brain. Oh, and the pig of an amp. That makes me happy because I don’t like lugging crap up and down the stairs. It’s weird sitting on my cafe stool because it’s so high. Not very comfortable either. How did I put up with that for so long?

I might get one of these to use as a drum monitor so I don’t have to lug the Roland. It’s about 10 lbs. lighter and has a bunch more power (500w vs. 180w).