[Crap!  My PowerBook fried it's main board last week.  So I'm limping right now.  Hopefully it'll be back soon.  Folks; now would be a good time to perform backups.]

Hey, I've been invited to be a guest on Eric Brooks' Critic's Carnival, a locally produced interweb radio show on the progressive rock oriented The Dividing Line.  The show is on this Friday, March 25th, from 9pm to midnight PST, and it should be a lot of fun.  They're set up with a chat arrangement so you send off questions, topics and suggestions while we're on the air.  (Note that you may need to download an application to hear the show.)

If you miss it, the Dividing Line archives shows for a week, so you can listen to it at a convenient time.

In the meanwhile, you might enjoy Strong Bad's thoughts on radio.

Check out the Time Machine on eBay.

"Hello, I am selling what I believe to be a time machine that was built in the year 2239 by Dr. J. S. Strauss.  I found the machine under my house when I was doing remodeling to the bathroom.  The machine was hidden in a old rotten wood chest along with some other findings that I believe to be related to the machine like old pictures, letters, etc.  I don't know to much about time machines or electronics, but from my observations I believe that the machine might have caught on fire, at some time or another from the looks of the inside, and is now in a non working condition. It also looks like there might be some parts missing on the inside, but I don't know."

Wow.

Our dog Buddy died peacefully in our arms this morning.

The whole thing happened very quickly.  Starting about 6 weeks ago his appetite faded, then he barely ate anything, at first we didn't mind since he was a little overweight, then we became concerned, took him to the vet, found he had lost 20 lbs, but the vet found nothing, blood tested okay, we tried a wide variety of foods to see if he would eat anything, still he didn't eat, he lost more weight, we took him to the vet again Tuesday, she did an abdominal ultrasound and found tumors all over, in his pancreas, liver, spleen, and the really bad news is that it's inoperable.  His condition worsened over the last four days.

He's been the most wonderful dog there ever was, and we miss him terribly.

[This is from something I posted to the synth-diy list a couple days ago.  There was a discussion about some variations on the Moog Ladder Filter, such as taps, and arithmetically combining taps to get other responses.  I had found some patents for much wilder variations on the Moog Ladder Filter.]

If you're interested in variations on the ladder filter, I'll suggest you go to the patent pdf tool ( http://www.pat2pdf.org) and take a look at this guy:

US 6,084,470
Filter Circuit Capable of Setting Various Filter Characteristics
Shiramatsu, Nakamura, Goto
Kabushiki Kaisha Toshiba
July 4, 2000

This patent is an insane collection of unusual ladder filters.

Also check out these:

US 5,912,587
Active Filter Stack
Mihailovits, Beatson
Mitel Semiconductor
June 15, 1999

US 5,225,790
Tunable Widband Active Filter
Noguchi, Rinaldis, Esling
Digital Equipment Corp.
July 6, 1993

US 3,983,512
Current Controlled Electrical Circuits
Lipscombe
Feedback Instruments Limited
September 28, 1976

I'm sure some of these have significant musical potential.

As an aside; I think the synth-diy community is not being as creative as we ought to be.  If we still had the wildly adventurous spirit that was thriving during the 60's and 70's, one of us would have published a really fine collection of ladder filter variations way before this patent was filed.

Or, in other words, "Crap! Why didn't *I* think of that?"

Check out Michal Levy's remarkable short film Giant Steps, based on the John Coltrane piece.

(It's a large flash file, 5 MBytes.  I recommend saving a copy if you want to watch it more than once.  Which is very likely.)

So this is what dancing about architecture is all about.

I like how each note does something, especially in the solo, where each note does something wonderful. And I like how the pitch movement translates graphically.

The twins love this.

This is old news, from about five years ago, but what the heck... I haven't seen it summarized anywhere else.

Pat Metheny wrote about his opinion of soprano sax player Kenny G, including it in the Question and Answer section of the Pat Metheny Group web site.  Kenny G had recently released a recording of his playing spliced onto Louis Armstrong's classic "What a Wonderful World".  Metheny considered this to be a tasteless act, and explained why in a forceful and eloquent way.

Word of Metheny's criticism got out, the text was forwarded and passed around, and it become headline material.  I remember reading an article about it in a copy of Entertainment Weekly on a plane trip.  It makes the news when someone with a reputation for being humble, mellow, and generous lashes out.  It's a beautifully written and entertaining flame, but at the same time his message is truly important.

The entry was soon removed from the Pat Metheny web site.  Of course by then it copies has been stashed away and it is now available at a number of places, such as Jazz Guitar Online: Pat Metheny on Kenny G (including a follow-up posting), and Jazz Oasis: Pat Metheny on Kenny G.

[Later: Sigh, the jazzguitar.com site is no longer around.  You can view an archived version of it here: Archived Jazz Guitar Online: Pat Metheny on Kenny G.]

It's definitely worth the read.  (Go...)  (...if only to see the use of the term musical necrophilia.)

But the kicker is that Richard Thompson (probably best known as the guitarist with Fairport Convention) joined in by writing a song called "I Agree with Pat Metheny, Kenny's Talents are Too Teeny", which he plays at his concerts.

A recording of the song is here (mp3 format) on Richard Thompson's web site.

And here are the lyrics to read along with.  Note the cool references to the deatails of the Metheny commentary.  And the way the rhymes are so thoroughly tortured.

Dick Gabriel has written a very insightful article examining the recent business trend of outsourcing:

Outsourcing: Those Cheap Bastards
(pdf file, 1 page)

"Now the good news..."