16:9 is a bit of a pain for an arbitrary standard that leaves me grabbing for my calculator every time i want to scale something and keep the aspect ratio right. Why the hell couldn’t they just use 16:8 instead, better known as 2:1. That’s simply twice as many pixels across as there are down. Let’s see - 720 high would be 1440, 480 would be 960, 11 would be 22, 10130 would be 20260… i mean, wouldn’t that be easy?
The following was all fast-typed into my iPod touch, so please excuse the lack of capital letters and the odd punctuation:
monday - 1:15am off we go. bus driver forgets to turn lights on. has terrible manner… “Boy, I been drinking a lot of coffee this weekend!” and “my son wants to go to fanshawe. i told him - you dont wanna be a driver!” Not the kind of banter that makes us feel secure. young girls behind me on their way to Mexico jabbering on about books, sunscreen and Harry Potter.
3:15am sitting in Pearson terminal 1 waiting for usairways to open. i remember this from last time. may not open for a couple hours. the waiting begins. it’s very quiet in here. over by the washrooms it was almost dead silent. amazing.
3:35am people coming in and milling around. blank stares at the check-in counter and some confusion. more people arrive and it repeats over and over. they really need some signage to explain that the counter doesn’t open until x am.
head feeling wooly from lack of sleep. terminal 1 really is an amazing building. big and airy. roof curved like a giant airplane wing. lots of glass, metal, duct vents that look like jet exhausts.
4:25am check-in opened at 4, met a bike mechanic and frame builder in a park tool shirt during the wait. now waiting for us immigration
5:25am US immigration slowly came to life at around 20 to 5. both me and the guy were super relaxed. barely asked anything and didn’t even ask to look at my work visa. metal detector was a breeze. no questions asked and one girl was actually friendly. cool tip: brought an EMPTY water bottle through (cap off) and filled it at the water fountain. saved money and landfill. walked straight to the remotely-located tim horton’s and was second in line for the 5am opening. there were 30 people there by the time it opened. got two toasted bagels. a giant tea. and a tea biscuit. tried to find sugared gum but no avail. stuck with dentyne spearmint with sorbitol. back to gate 193 and sat with the bike mechanic and his wife.
boarded without incident. window seat over the wing in this E190 plane made in Brazil. never heard of it. pretty new. comfortable seats. cabin started depressurizing as soon as I sat down almost, and very effectively - moreso then an A320. takeoff on runway D 06 (60 degrees east) which gave me an excellent view of the Toronto skyline. circled totally around downtown and passed right over heidi’s, but was too slow on the draw to get a picture of her place. this plane climbs like a frigging F-15.
9:47am arrived at gate 8:25am after listening to The Flat Earth and having my mind blown yet again - it never gets old. expensive dual-driver apple earbuds really do work very well on a plane, sealing out almost all sound. deplaned and bathroom and chill out. douglas international (CLT) has free internet. open a finder window and see more macs all sharing the LAN here. tweet about the cool rocking chairs and update this blog and ichat with matt thibideau. we’ll see if i keep this going.
Playing tonight at the Forest City Gallery (Richmond @ Horton) with Cailen Dye and the Exit 2012 Power Trio for Cailen’s Christmas Kills Closing Party. Playing Jazzmaster, Synthocaster, GR-300, BS-2, and maybe theremin. Come early, $5.
i had a session on the weekend where a friend had done a pile of complex drum programming using the grid in FL Studio Pro on his PC, and i needed to pull all that stuff into Pro Tools on my mac bypassing as much of the FL Studio bad mixer math as possible. Therefore i dragged all his raw samples over to my machine and recreated the patterns in Pro Tools, but there were too many complex layers to mix it by ear. Problem is, FL Studio displays all it’s volumes as a percentage (100% is full gain, 0% is off) while the rest of the world uses faders calibrated in dB. So i simply ran a S/PDIF feed from FL Studio into a PT aux and wrote down the peak value in PT for all 101 possible FL Studio gain settings (it didn’t take *that* long). When i finally was able to match the mix exactly, we were quite shocked at how much better it sounded.
If you ever get stuck doing this, i posted the chart for all to see. Note how non-linear (non-logarithmic?) the FL Studio percentage scale is:
FL Studio Mixer Percentage Values Mapped To dBFS.pdf
In a related incident, the same day we bought an Mbox mini for his PC (i was hoping to save all this hassle by using ReWire to feed the FL tracks into PT on his PC) and after 5 attempts at installation of PT, we couldn’t get the damn machine to load the Mbox drivers. Gi-normous Fail.
[originally tweeted. i hate Twitter-cross-posting but i’ll make an exception. It was far too long so i re-collected it here.]
For my birthday, i revisited the Sarnia skatepark for the first time in 5 or 15 years. i was really worried about the sharp banks, but as soon as i rolled in it just felt… normal. Like it’s supposed to be that way. It was a snake-fest full of bikers but once they figured out my vibe, they were cool as hell. The place has come full circle: 17-year-olds wearing exactly the same clothes we wore there 20 years ago, a car parked beside the bowl blasting ‘Seek And Destroy’… exactly like 1988. There were bikes painted in Hutch colours: turquoise and pink and lavender. There was new Mirra in classic black with gold anodized components - totally Jason Jensen 1980. Even though it’s 20 years later, there is the same cast of characters: The boisterous one, the competitive ones, the quiet guy who just rips, the guys who just stand around, the groupie girls… Some of the bikers were exceptionally brave, and Sarah, Nidia and i got some good photos:
It was a total time-warp. After an hour there, it really *felt* like 1988, which actually made it easier for me to find the nerve to try stuff. If i took a minute, closed my eyes and really pretended it *was* actually 1988 - like a dream - the fear went away, replaced by confidence. If i only had the legs and the power-to-weight ratio i had then, i’d quickly be at the same level i was at in the days of Sutton, Visser, Nichol, Hebert, Meraw…
Those guys owned that park, and they did a pretty good job in my driveway as well. It’d be awesome to have a Sarnia skatepark reunion. i bet they could still teach the kids a thing or two.
And that’s all i have to report. Over and Out.
Actually, they are two words and a phrase. Please, cease and desist:
1) The word, “Dude”, especially when used as a filled pause before a sentence. Do these people even know what a dude is?
2) The word, “ridiculous”. If as many things were as ridiculous as people say, we’d be so busy ridiculing everything that we wouldn’t get anything else done. People are not using this word because they mean it; they are using it because they are too lazy to think of something more appropriate. (i’m guilty of this as well - please kick me if you hear me doing it.)
3) The Phrase, “I’m just saying…”. Of course you are “saying”. What else are you doing? i bet in many cases you are making an excuse to repeat something that isn’t helping the current situation.
For more reading, investigate speech disfluency.
That is all. Carry on.
People really do talk like that in Shaw-lut, Nawth Cayrolahnuh.
–t
[Gate D11]
[Discussing the stock market…]
“The market has two emotions: greed and fear.”
–a person calling themselves “cynik”, posting in the comments section of *click me*.
Twenty years ago today, my mother died a gruesome death at the hands of cancer. Big thanks to those around me - particularly Sonya and Joe - for helping me survive that unpredictably difficult and no doubt frustrating time.
i’m not a particularly spiritual man, but i believe i feel her spirit, and even if it isn’t there (as she would have argued) i don’t think it hurts to pretend that it is - it can’t help but be a good influence.
Thanks, Mom.
i still love you.
–t
[london, canada]
