A seaflux jam, featuring Matt Wilson on bass. This was also the first real "christening" of our new rehearsal space at Flood Studios. Thanks to Feline for setting that up for us.

It's been two days since I returned from Camp MMW, and I still feel like I haven't returned to reality yet. The experience was kind of like joining Fight Club — everything at work has had the volume turned down.

When I was first accepted, I wasn't really sure I was going to go. I had been amassing a decent-sized pile of debt, and I wasn't sure if it would be wise to get that much deeper, but conversations with friends and family convinced me that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and besides, "when was the last time you took a vacation?"

$z=sub{for($z=0;$z<@_;$z++){$z=oct("$_[$z++]")."$_[$z++]".$_[$z];for($w=0;
$w<length($z);$w++){($n,$n)=split(m--,substr($z,$w,2));$w++;$x=int($n);
push(@v,split(m++,${n}x${x}));}}for($w=0;$w<@v/3;$w++){$_=chr(int($v[$w].
$v[$w+055].$v[$w+0x5a]));$_=~tr,a-za-z,n-za-mn-za-m,;print $_;}};$z->(10016,0x460,
4120,6046,0x1810,3110,15706,0x83e,1130,2437,0xb5e,2110,2447,0x456,1213,6050,0x456,
3411,2613,0x840,1321,1763,0x7db,1910,2151,0x584,1312,1771,0x715,1714,2130,0x77a,
2112,3256,0x4ba,1411,7032,0x5ef,1718,2142,0x6af,1812,2442,0x6b0,1417);

A recent jam with the yet to be actively named CWC.

NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART, PREGNANT WOMEN OR SMALL CHILDREN. MAY CAUSE LOWER INTESTINAL DISCOMFORT, MILD ARRHYTHMIA, COCHLEAR BLEEDING, AND/OR SWIMMER'S EAR.

I was attempting to install DBD::mysql today, and I ran into a fiendishly difficult problem.

I've installed the mysql drivers for Perl countless times, but this time for some reason, I was getting the following error:

ool-4577f347:~/.cpan/build/DBD-mysql-4.004 root# make
cc -c -I/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/auto/DBI -I/usr/local/mysql/include -Os -arch ppc64 -fno-common -DDBD_MYSQL_INSERT_ID_IS_GOOD -g -g -pipe -fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -no-cpp-precomp -fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include -Os -DVERSION=\"4.004\" -DXS_VERSION=\"4.004\" "-I/System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE" dbdimp.c
dbdimp.c: In function 'mysql_dr_connect':
dbdimp.c:1565: error: 'ulong' undeclared (first use in this function)
dbdimp.c:1565: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
dbdimp.c:1565: error: for each function it appears in.)
dbdimp.c:1565: error: parse error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1567: error: parse error before numeric constant
dbdimp.c:1681: error: parse error before numeric constant
make: *** [dbdimp.o] Error 1


This is something I wrote over at DocForge, but I'm keeping it here for posterity. You never know what those crazy wiki-ers might do with it over there ;-)

I've got a directory full of eBooks in the godawful Microsoft .lit format. I had marked with the Finder labels the ones I've already read, and wanted to convert all the ones I hadn't read yet into a readable format.

After using the Spotlight UNIX tools and applying liberal amounts of command-line trickery, the end result was a rather beautiful pipeline, if I do say so myself.

This is a paper I wrote at some point during my Master's work. I think I had to do it because I kept forgetting to go to class, but I don't remember putting this much effort into it. It does a decent job of describing how it felt to finally break through various mental blocks about songwriting and composition.

[most emphasis is non-essential]

The compositional process has always been a difficult subject for me to adequately understand. For a long time I put forth a lot of effort to make my style of writing fit into a particular mold, only to be disappointed with the results. For an equally long time I had an idea of the kind of music I wanted to write, but I couldn't find the right method or approach to create this sound I heard.

This diatribe is a way for me to document the various discoveries I made as I began to develop my writing. Some of these things are really "well, duh..." kind of discoveries, but for me they are a way of simplifying important concepts that I find easy to forget.

The criteria I'll use to dictate whether or not to list something would involve how much of an impact the show made on me. In the case of opening acts, if I remember their name and music, I'll list them. I couldn't possibly cover all the smaller shows I've seen, so I'm not even going to count shows by my peers and so forth.

I'm hoping to get away from PHP in favor of mod_python, but the first thing I needed to do was get mod_python successfully working on Mac OS X. I tried once before, using the built-in Apache and Python binaries that ship with Mac OS X. At the time (I think this was still 10.4, but it could have been 10.3), the built-in Python wasn't multithreaded (or something like that) and the mod_python developers were starting to move away from Apache 1.3 altogether.

I had success recently compiling mod_python on Mac OS X Server, against the distributed (but inactive) Apache 2 installation in /opt. However, I found OS X Server to be basically garbage, so I did a fresh install of the client version of Mac OS X, and set about getting Apache 2 to compile, and then mod_python.

It was not easy.

Players:
Matt Cole – drums
Matt Wilson – bass
Phil Christensen – guitar

The fruits of a recent jam session with a couple of my favorite players. We had gotten a room at Smash Studios in Manhattan, but forgotten it was right around the corner from MSG. The circus was in town (really!) and we ended up getting royally boned on parking.

The expense was well worth it, however. Although we'd all been out of practice and forced to do the "day job thing" since our respective bands dissolved, I thought there were some really nice jams that came out of this session.