I spent about 11 hours on my car stereo this past weekend.  I got two of four speakers installed!  I will do the other two next weekend. 

I could have paid someone to install my car audio but I wanted to make sure it was done right.  I had an amplifier installed at HiFi Buys about three years ago and they not only did an awful job, they fried my existing stereo.  They replaced it with an Alpine but took three days consisting of 16 hours to get it finished.  When they were done, my clock no longer lit up on the dash board and there was a huge crack in the plastic behind the fold-down rear seat.  You get what you pay for!

Whe I've finished the door speakers, I will replace the head unit.  That shouldn't take but an hour. 

Following that I will install two amplifiers.  Small, inexpensive ones, of course!  These will take several hours.  They require lots of wires be run.  It annoys me that car stereo equipment requires thicker wire than an arc welder but, according to all the newgroups and wire guage tables, it is really necessary.  When I have the amps in place, I will need to build a box for my sub and get that installed as well.  The box should take a day and the install only a minute and 5 seconds. 

From that point forward I will be smiling every time I have to drive somewhere, everytime traffic crawls to a stop, everytime the light turns red in front of me and every time the clock tells me it is time for my commute home. 

I thought having a baby would be the maturing factor in my late twenties life, making me unquestionably an adult.  I have to admit the reality is sobering.  A tiny person’s life is not only a result of your actions but also completely dependent on you.  However, I haven’t acted like such a kid, such a goofy, bumbling, silly person since I was as tall as my 11-month son!  So having children is as maturing as a rollercoaster ride at Six Flags. 

We just put a contract on a house!  Now I am a real adult.  I am going to enjoy all the benefits and responsibility of home-ownership.  It’s been a lot of fun so far!  I am very pleased to think that I own some lawn and a fence and a bunch of walls, not to mention the dishwasher, fridge, stove, garbage disposal, lighting fixtures, furnace, basement, sun room, porch, attic, cabinets and molding.  I have a mortgage, a second mortgage, homeowner’s insurance, a security system, pest-control, water, gas and electric hook-ups and all the systems that make it all work.  Talk about coming screeching into adulthood! 

My wife and I are tremendously excited to start investing in our property.  We already had that feeling of belonging and purpose and righteousness in our rental because we residing together.  It didn’t matter if it were an apartment, a hotel room or a van down by the river.  It was home.  Now we can paint the ceiling midnight blue if we want to without asking anyone’s permission.  It’s a small thing, really, but very librating. 

I have been trying to use VSS integration with VS.Net for well over a year.  It works great at home when I am by myself.  I can track changes and keep versions in history and can confidently change code knowing that I can roll back if I have to.  At work, however, when it is critically important, the integration has limitations that result in having to use VSS explorer outside of VSS.Net.

I have come to very few revolutionary conclusions.  I was hoping to get to a point where I could recommend a configuration for a large development team.  Unfortunately, I can only express that for those who wish to use it, VSS integration is tolerable.

First off, only bind what you will be editing.  If you aren't going to be changing a project that is part of a larger solution, get the files from source control and use them locally but don't bind them to the VSS location.  If you don't need the source code at all (for debugging or stepping through funtionality) simply get the binaries and use the compiled dll.  Its much easier and saves a lot of time when getting latest.

For a project that you do modify and require VSS functionality, here are some tips:

• Project should remain writable.  It is a pain in the butt to have to check the project out to remove a component from the project or to add a test page.  When you need to make persistent project changes, check out the project file externally, make your changes, check it back in, then mark the file writable again.
• In VS.Net, under tools --> options --> Source Control --> General:  check the box “Allow checked in items to be edited“
  now you can chose “edit“ in the Source Control dialog in addition to check out.  very useful when you want to add a simple message or line of test code but do not want to persist that change

That's all I have for now, if I think of anything else, I'll let you know.

 

Stumbled across this blog specifically for gadgets.  Get your geek fix here

 

 

A few VW bus related parodies I've come up with... 

Xtreme Programming

 

Everything you need in the worst case scenario.

 

funny, but chilling!

Clemens Vasars on Free Software, "It’s idiocy"

This is not a rebuttle, but a counter-point.  I wish to shed light on the bigger picture.

A friend of mine once said, "forget about trying to make it in music.  It's a fairy-tale.  There's no way a true artist can ever make it."  He is in a band these days.  He has rediscovered what it means to be a musician.  He may or may not have resurrected his dream of being a rock star.  He has, however, resurrected his love for music, his passion for performing, and his youthful optimism that something done for the love of doing it is worth doing.

"Forget the dream about stuff being free and stop advocating it. It’s idiocy. It’s bigotry. If you want to put your skills to work and you need to support a family, your work and work results can’t be free." from Clemens blog

BTW, his blog runs on DasBlog, which Clemens helped to create, and distributes as true "free, open-source software".  I want to personally thank the Newtelligence team for their contribution.  It's awesome.  It has given many developers the enabling technology to be chatty and say too much about everything in a very public way.  It also has helped evolve the internet.

Michael Earls said, "I couldn't agree more," on his DasBlog blog site. 

So what are they trying to get at?  I think they are trying to express the idea that profit has it's place.  calling Microsoft and proprietary software vendors evil might be fun, but it's silly.  Even so, don't forget that open-source has it's place.  It creates value that commercial software cannot because it is not driven by the mighty dollar. 

Free Software that rocks

Consider several tools we (my daytime employer) are just beginning to implement and one we have embraced fully. Wiki, NUnit and NAnt. These suites of free software provide a very robust set of features. They could easily be marketable and profitable products but have evolved along a different path, been more accessible to everyone, and benefited from cumulative community contributions. These are true open-source projects. Even Microsoft has learned from the collective work on NAnt and modeled MSBuild very closely to it. I'm sure MSBuild is going to have some pretty exceptional, .Net specific enhancements and will profit greatly from everyone's FREE contributions. I have learned to appreciate open-source passionately. I have learned a great deal from examining the source code for applications that are openly available. I use several open-source apps every day: RSS Bandit, NAnt, NUnit, DasBlog, Wiki. I use open standard consciously and without being aware of it.  Design patterns, UML, code examples.  None of these things were necessarily created for direct profit.  Perhaps along the path to solving some busniess need in the aim of generating revenue...   But these aretifacts are free.  It's not a black and white issue. You can contribute to open source at the same time that you develop for profit (or hourly wage, as it may be). I know of one developer who has contributed in very significant ways to open-source and community work groups, this guy named Michael Earls, yet he works for a corporate giant in the TelCom industry. mmm hmmm... You can contribute to your industry in a million ways. When you write articles, you contribute to the community. Companies profit from that work. Their emplyees read that article and take your hard-earned knowledge back with them and apply it, possibly in direct competition with you. Should you refrain from sharing knowledge? Perhaps there should be one person who will control all knowledge and decide what will be made public and who has aceess to which. Ok, one person is probably not appropriate. One group. Wait, we've been here before? Who gets the knowledge? How should that knowledge be shared?

Closed Mindedness and many shades of grey

Its like the single vs. married dichotomy. Does life as you know it end when your baby is born? Can you not have exhillarating fun when you're married? (Don't tell my wife, I have her convinced that we can still party and live life like we enjoy it). I work with a fellow whose favorite thing to tell me is that I am in denial. He insists that I will eventually give up and realize that my personal life is over, my dreams are dead and I will never be anything more than a dad until they all grow up and then I retire (and get ready to die). He loved to hear about my single days and all the things I was doing outside of work. When I married, I didn't move out to the burbs and subscribe to Comcast and Tivo. I stayed intown and live in the most cosmopolitan, stimulating part of Atlanta, the Virginia Highlands. I live there wth my wife and son and enjoy walking to shops and restaurants and every once in a while, I walk to a pub and throw a few back. I occassionally play an open mic and sometimes catch a live musical act. These are not the typical activties of the average married with children american. I will be the first to admit that I do not stay out until 4 a.m. and spend my saturdays sleeping off a hangover. I instead wake up at four to change tiny dude's shitty pants. Yes, there are differences but they are personal. Some of them are universal, some of them are not.

Free and/or Open

Open-source does not mean free. Free is freeware. Software can be both freeware and open-source but each term are addressing two different things. Open-source means you have contributed some knowledge in the form of software and offer for others to do the same. If someone wishes to use it in their business or in their commercial product, awesome, good luck! When you participate in open-source, you learn as you solve problems, as others solve problems and submit their solution and as you collaborate. It is a learning and sharing practice. It is very rewarding to participate. It is very rewarding to stumble upon some artifact of all this work and start digging.

Open Standards

Standards are best developed our in the free world. When I say free, of course, I mean lacking dictatorship by some profit-centric manager. If standards are created by companies, they tend to solve that company's needs ahead of the industry's needs. When developed by public contribution from industry pundits and leaders in the community, they tend to better represent everyone.

The Bottom Line

Oh but we must survive! "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta eat." So when you decide you want to build this great application, do you create it, release all your code and hope that someone thanks you with paypal? Hell no! You have to work for someone. You either work for a business or you work for yourself (which means you work for your clients, who may be a busniess, but that's just semantics). You create marketable product or solve business needs with software functionality. When you learn something really cool, that's when you get to make the world a better place. You can even write an applicaiton that solves a common need and let everyone use it. Like NAnt. Until MSBuild arrives, it is what is out there. And it rocks! And it is free. I would bet money that the creators of NAnt have been consulted, or at least approached, to assist with MSBuild. So open-source can turn profit.

The bottom line for me is this: Focus on your goals and objectives. Decide where you want to go and don't move your gaze until you've reached your destination. Do what you love and figure out how to get rich later. Don't let profit drive the train. You'll be a slave to the winds of change that way. Instead, drive ever-forward and you'll find you are making the biggest wind.

If you want a more practical way to say that: Take money out of the equation. Decide what you love to do. Then, figure out how to get someone to pay you to do that. (Michael Earls said something like that but I can't find the original post)

I may be a little premature on this recommendation but on first listen I love both of these albums!

The first you've probably heard of or at least heard a track or two if you listen to any (rock) radio - college or mainstream.

Damien Rice -“O”

I read about him some time ago and have recently heard a few cuts on college radio as well as commercial radio.  He sounds like a girl on some songs and no one ever mentioned his name after the song (or maybe I subconsciously disregarded it because I was expecting a girl's name).

The lyrics paint pictures in your mind while the stories make you think you've heard them before.  The melodies feel alot like home.

Rufus Wainwright - “Want One”

I heard this playing in a local record store.  I mistook it for RadioHead and went looking for the album I don't have.  I asked the clerk which RadioHead it was and he laughed and showed me Rufus' album.  This is a brilliant work!  His croaning voice is a near dead ringer for Thom York of RadioHead but with less driving edge but more refinement, possibly being more accessible to the general populous.  The development of the songs is apparent exceptional.  It is like a rock opera without being annoying, sort of Stix meat RadioHead....  If you know what I mean by that, go listen to some songs, or just buy the album. 

File Sharing - P2P

I'd like to point out that I kazaa'd Damien Rice prior to purchasing it.  I heard Wainwright playing at a local music store - Corner Compact Disc - http://www.cornercd.com.

I never would have purchased Rice's work if it weren't for Kazaa and I would not have heard of Rufus without the local music store that truly adds value as a music retailer.  So support this store and stores like it.  Pay the extra buck rather than Amazoning it (or get it for a few bucks less than the mall store) and alot for some time to listen to their listenting stations.  Some clerk in that store spent all day previewing new albums and picked one that they love.  No one tells them which ones to showcase and no one pays them to do it (like BlockButter and Tower).

So download some tunes.  When you find something you really like, buy it.  Two reasons:  the artist sees some of that return and can keep creating their art and the quality of a cd is truly better than MP3's and other compressed file formats.  It really is, you may not be able to tell on your crappy computer speakers or your stock car stereo, but the difference is there.  Something in the music is lost on an mp3, you can't always detect it, but your brain can...  and so can you soul...  because music is for your soul, after all.

 

 

This started out as a reply to Michael's post about the evolution of duality but I decided to start my own thread as I find myself wanting to share my philosophical diarrhea all the time and this weblog listens so well!

To those who have not, I suggest introducing yourself to Robert Persig's meta physics of Quality.  It is the underlying theme of his book The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“ Its poorly named (the book and the philosophy, I think), but it is designed to remove the duality of common subjective/objective metaphysics. 

We often create classifications to describe things and then suddenly out pops an exception.  Why is it an exception?  Because it does not follow the rules of logical reality?  NO!  because our rules are flawed.  Consider mammal, reptile, bird, fish...  Classification of these groups were defined from existing scientific knowledge of creatures in our Earthly world.  Then came the Platypus!  It lays eggs yet is covered with fur, has a beak, secretes poison, has an electro-receptor system for detecting prey...  what is this?  is it an exception?  is it a class all by itself? Truly, it is just a collection of qualities that make up the animal.  The meta-physics of quality suggests that "Quality" precludes everything else. 

Quality not just as a property of something (like the quality of being purple) but a measurable value which serves to both define and drive something (like the quality of being happy).  Quality drives evolution.  The value of being in a place with lots of light drives plants to evolve taller.  Gravity drives things to be short and close to the ground.  The quality of being tall outbids the quality of being pulled by gravity.  This allows classifications to be broken down and redefined more easily.

Light and Dark are the same thing.  They are quantities of light from much to none.  Black and White are values of shade quality from much shading to little or no shading and are really the quality of interpreting reflected light. Good and evil can be described and multiple qualities of wickedness and wholesomeness but there are so many more properties that make up what is evil and what is good that we group them such.  In fact, this falls into the "subjective" category (is ambition good or evil?) but then we find universal truths that can be listed as "objective" (murderous is evil) and this explains our failure when approaching the study of some interest because nothing truly falls entirely into one category or the other.  Even math begins to behave in strange ways in certain instances.  We call these anomalies, irregularities.  There is always that realm of unknown is any topic and when new knowledge does not follow old dogmas we either call it a Platypus or change our formulas to support it.  Democrat and Republican are a perfect example of illogical classifications.  We have become so immersed in this duality that we fail to serve the majority of people who have nothing personal to gain from an election.  We introduce the Platypuses of the Green party and the Christian Slangiest party but the truth is that we should just drop this party nonsense and vote on the qualities that we admire and share.  More people would vote if they had something to stand up for.  But to stand up against the most offensive party is like taking a punch from the weakest bully, what's the point? 

Allowing yourself to break free from the confines of your previously formed classifications and predispositions is a great way to find inspiration.  Language is one of those limiting structures.  Consider that American English has hundreds of words for money but only one word for love!  In fact you say, "I love my wife," and , "I love this commercial" the same way.  The Italians and French have many words for love but they don't generate the kind of gross national product that America does...  Alot to consider.   I mumble when I play the guitar while writing a song.  Before there are words to the song I try to let the emotion of the melody become something.  I have been told by other musicians that they “liked what I was saying in that first verse”.  The funny thing is that I wasn't saying anything.  It sounded like something to them and they made it fit the emotion of what they were hearing.  Because there was no rigid language structure there, their brains filled in the gaps and out came something else.  Or perhaps I was saying something and didn't know it!  But then my brain was doing the same thing.  That's the funny thing about brains.  When you take the cage off, it can do the most amazing things.  Clear the clutter first, then begin your dance. 

Begin with Quality.  Never begin with rules.  Apply the rules as they are appropriate and necessary.  When the rules work, use them to help make things consistent.  Every once in a while, even if just as an exercise, remove the rules and see if what comes out looks like a big, incoherent mess or if, by some subconscious, innate genius, a pattern emerges.

 

As expected, I'm running into more and more online related to my new obsession.

I'll expand after I've read the article!

http://alpha01.dm.unito.it/personalpages/cerruti/musicafutura.html

This will be an ongoing blogscussion. I have recently been granted the opportunity to study a subject of intense interest and riveting, even scary, possibilities. I have dual careers: Musician and Software Engineer. Some might say that the former is a hobby but I take it too seriously to be a hobby (though recently have learned to take myself much less seriously). You might call it a dream but this subject consumes me, defines me, drives me and makes me who I am. I am husband and father, musician, man and programmer/geek, in that order. I identify more with my artistic expressive character than I do with just about anything. In fact, I entered the professional computer world with the intention of using it as a stepping-stone to a career in music. I will not elaborate on this topic here, other than to say, “Keep your sites set on your ultimate destination no matter how far you get blown off course. Eventually, all paths lead to the same place.”

For my birthday, my wife searched and found “The Shillinger System of Musical Composition” by Joseph Shillinger. Two volumes weighing in at 900 pages each is an ominous avocation. It will be a labor of love.

What is it? The two volumes encompass a theory of music from a mathematical perspective and describe the general mechanics of music removed from traditional notation and rules of western music. It creates a visual, geometric approach to music that provides a model from which we can more easily architect a musical score. As opposed to rules from which we are restricted, this system is founded on opportunities and choices, distinguishable paths, which are revealed as we begin a musical voyage in the form of a song. It begins with rhythm on a macro and micro scale. The sounding of a note and the harmony or dissonance of chords is defined as the zooming out of a rhythm or polyrhythm. This concept has always intrigued me and I have been dancing around this theory on my own without grasping what it could mean. I was drug into the biology of the inner ear and physics of it and failed to grasp any useful meaning because music was encrypted within the complicated bounds of traditional music theory.  What I know of Joseph Shillinger is only what I've found online.  Here are some resources:

Harry Lyden on Shillinger

the Muse's Muse Messageboard - Yukon's topic on Shillinger << particulary good discussion with the usual banter

Some infor from Berklee

a sizeable PhD in music thesis by Jeremy Arden (pdf)

Music is not a mystical sorcery that stems from some ancient undiscovered, magical organ. It is a concrete part of human psychology and sociology that all humans share. It came from somewhere. Perhaps its evolutionary path split from speech out of early language as some theorize. It is certainly the most powerful way to express emotion between people. Sometimes you can decipher a complicated system by working back to its source. We can’t do that with music because we have no source, there are no early recordings. There is no record of what music sounded like 6000 years ago. We have to start with today, and today is very evolved, very powerful and very deep. 1800 pages may be a good start.

Some complain that using a system will remove the creative element from an artist. Using software is even worse. What if I can write these systems into a software product? My goodness gracious, holy f~@%ing s#!t! Could computers write music? What would happen to the world? First of all, computers tell them what you instruct them to do. If you program a system into some software, this instructs the computer to do something specific with an expected input. A human will still drive the racecar! Consider animation. Fifty years ago we were enthralled with moving pictures! No longer were artists confined to still images but now they could create scenes that changed in time. On one hand we had the ability to record reality as we constructed it (Hollywood) and on the other we had the ability to draw fantasy and make it move as if it were real (animation). Then came computers. Now we could not only create more realistic pictures faster, we could let the animation software do much of the drawing for us. An animator creates shapes in three dimensions and tells the software where to move it. She tells the software where the light is coming from and what the texture of the surfaces are and then executes the render command and lets the computer take over. When it is finished, a very realistic fantasy has become visually realistic. She can tweak and finesse the details and even combine it with real filmed events and suddenly we arrive at today. Would anyone argue that movies have destroyed the visual artist or that computers have killed the painter? No artistic freedom has been damaged by the introduction of software that draws for us! It has been enhanced, expanded and liberated! If I had known where animation was going when I was in high school, I’d be an animator today! Instead, I program computers for a living. …but recently I discovered a mathematic-based system for composing music and what do you think is spinning in the back of my head. Other than a thousand unfinished songs, a spark of an idea is flickering to life.

It will take a long time to finish these books. I will be taking my time and enjoying the trip. I will try to share regularly what I discover and learn. This is truly a liberating possibility. Sometimes a stepping-stone constitutes a very long journey.

Michael posted a blog about Netflix being a sham.  He has observed movies taking longer and longer and the service degrading as time went on.  He also made a comment about “tenure” having something to do with your place in line.  I thought I'd pass everyone on to a very scientific study that someone did on Netflix and revealed exactly what Michael observed but contradicts the concept of tenure having anything to do with your Netflix profile.

http://dvd-rent-test.dreamhost.com/

First, this is an exhaustive analysis of a distributed Netflix experience.  The author did an excellent job of validating his theories and hypothesis. 

My Netflix perspective is this:  Blockbuster sucks on big hairy donkey knob.  Their business model is based on ripping off their clients and taking advantage of human psychology.  If people did not forget to return movies and end up paying more than the movies are worth in late fees, they would not survive.  It is by virtue of peoples shortcomings that they are profitable.  It is more likely that someone will forget about a movies after two days then it is that they will remember to bring it back, hence, the four day rental.  Additionally, Blockbuster has a negative affect on the quality and selection of movies being produced because they only carry block busters and not less marketed, independent films.  Bottom line, I save alot of money by using Netflix, even if I onl rent three movies per month, because we can keep them as long as it take us to get around to returning them.  In fact, that's what they are hoping for.  Netflix makes less money each time you rent a movie in a month. 

Check out that above link.  Consider the alternatives and make an informed, a rediculously informed, decision.  This person, the author of the Netflox analysis, clearly has too much time on his hands.  However, I sure am glad he does because it makes an entertaining and interesting read.