HiR:tb Toots (@warwalker)
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By junior on December 22, 2009, at 12:13 am As I am currently disintegrating into a small pile of trembling viscous goo under the combined pressures of a ridiculous workload at the office and the insanity of trying to make a Christmas in the paltry few minutes remaining to me afterwards, this is not going to be a long or particularly entertaining post. Nevertheless, after collapsing like a pile of dirty laundry on the couch in front of the Leaf game tonight, I am moved to tippy-tap a thing or two.
I know there will be some gnashing of teeth in the Barilkosphere about OT loss to Buffalo tonight; yes, there should have been someone in front of the net there when Derek Roy potted the winner, and I’m looking in the general direction of Francois “Happy Trails” Beauchemin when I say that. Yes, it’s a bummer to lose to a divisional rival (and its apparently super-fucking-human goalie) like seventy-eight times in a row, but there are bigger pictures to see, larger fish to fry, and more metaphors to mix. In short, there are reasons to take heart.
Hear me, Leafs fans. Tonight:
- On a Tuesday night matchup in late December, in a game that would be their third in four nights, the Leafs brought effort and forechecked the crap out of a Sabres team that has been their nemesis for oh, approximately nine years. In years gone by, Tuesday night + 3rd game in four nights + pre-Christmas ennui = 9-1 shellacking led by a four goal third period from the Sabres’ team bus driver;
- Viktor Stalberg potted a beauty and may still have the use of both shoulders;
- the Monster raised everybody’s Christmas spirits by allowing the Sabres to ring enough pucks off the posts behind him to play the Carol of the Bells. He also battled through some questionable play to post another solid outing without a visit to the cardiologist; and
- NIKOLAI KULEMIN. OMG BEST GAME AS A LEAF EVAR.
It’s the last point I want to really focus on. I’ve been waiting for Kulemin to break out in a way that doesn’t involve a visit to the dermatologist and I think he is now absolutely poised to take his game to the next level. If he plays every game in his career like he did tonight, it will be a long and fruitful one in Maple Leaf Blue & White, that’s for sure. Kulemin was on the forecheck aggressively and with physicality throughout the game, showing excellent anticipation and then following through with the physical effort to get himself into the right spots at the right times. He was the direct cause of several Buffalo turnovers. He took a tremendous hit along the boards to chip the puck out and generate the rush that produced the second Leafs goal. He was also quite responsible defensively and used his body to separate the Sabres from the puck, not shying away from some tough customers like Mike Grier. Terrific game from this young guy.
Whatever, we could’ve had another point, yadda yadda yadda, but I really liked what I saw out of this kid tonight. Best game he’s played in a Leaf uniform.
By junior on December 7, 2009, at 11:23 pm I know, I know, I just took the trouble yesterday to tell you I probably won’ t be blogging for a little bit, and now here I am. What can I tell you, I’m in a good mood after the Leafs shellacked the Atlanta Thrashers tonight. Positively giddy because of a five-goal second period outburst, I logged on to the computer for a moment to hang out in the post-game thread over at Pension Plan Puppets. Okay, truth be told, Chemmy had promised (threatened?) to tell a really off colour story, and I was unable to turn away…
Anyway, in the process, I got a hot tip tonight about the rosters for the upcoming World Junior Hockey Championships. The U.S. and Canada recently announced the players that will be invited to audition for spots on their respective teams. The DEFENDING MEMORIAL CUP CHAMPION Windsor Spitfires will be well represented at these camps. Four Spits have been invited to try out for team Canada: forwards Taylor Hall [you may have heard of him, I think he’s draft eligible this year or something], Greg Nemisz [Calgary] and Adam Henrique [New Jersey] and Ryan Ellis [Nashville]. That means that four of the thirty-six players invited to camp will be carrying Spitfire equipment bags (and a little bit of Memorial Cup bling) into the room. Oh yeah; Hall and Ellis may bring along their 2009 World Junior Gold Medals for good measure.
Two other Spitfire players have been invited to camp for Team U.S.A. – defenceman Cam Fowler and goalie Jack Campbell.
Oh, and forward Richard Panik is expected to play for Slovakia, as well.
All told, that’s SEVEN current Spitfires that will be vying for ice time at the upcoming World Juniors. If that doesn’t tell you that this team has a real shot at the unheard of – repeating as Memorial Cup Champions – I don’t know what could.
Keep in mind, too, that there are others on the team who could have been chosen. According to a recent Windsor Star article, Leafs’ prospect Kenny Ryan is said to be upset that he was not invited to Team U.S.A.’s camp, believing that his decision to bolt from Boston University and join the OHL Spitfires may have caused him to be passed over.
It says here he’s not missing anything; Hall, Ellis, Nemisz and Henrique – along with a few other good Canadian lads – are gonna bring home the gold again from this tournament.
By junior on December 6, 2009, at 11:50 pm You may have noticed it’s been a little quiet around here the last little while. Just trying to keep my head above water at work these days; it’s not that I’ve stopped writing, it’s just that basically all of my writing is being done at and for work. By the time I get home nowadays, I am just flat out too tired to pound out much of any worth at the keyboard.
I am hoping that the pressure at work will abate a bit in the next two weeks, and that I’ll be back to blogging as usual by Christmas.
In the meantime, do what I’ve been doing – listen to my brother at Slug is Doug; he’s trying his hand at podcasting, and he’s pretty good at it, I think.
By junior on November 25, 2009, at 3:20 pm I have been pre-occupied with issues of civil defense, ever since the brazen assassination attempt of Sunday last. Clearly, Juniorvanian security forces must be augmented if peace, order and good government are to be domestically restored. Accordingly, although the Government of Juniorvania prefers the dove over the hawk, it is quite clear that the dove gets its ass kicked by things like snakes, whereas the hawk literally eats them for dinner.
Accordingly, serious consideration has been given to augmenting the armed forces of Juniorvania in the fashion depicted below (supplementary forces shown deploying seasonal camouflage).
 Santa and unidentified elf personnel medi-vacing casualties in sector 7-G on Bat 21 - Gene Hackman (not shown) believed to be hiding in the juniper bushes.
By junior on November 22, 2009, at 10:39 pm  Judging by the beret, this particular criminal must be French. Let’s play a little game, shall we? Why don’t you tell me what species of reptile you see coiled in the leaves in the picture below. I should mention that the little cretin was, um, what’s the word, “rattling” his tail when discovered. By “discovered”, of course, I mean “nearly trod upon” during a brief late-morning survey Spouse and I conducted of the western environs of Juniorvania; tramping about in the brush is a lovely way to spend some time in the warm sun of a mid-November forenoon, cup of tea in hand – provided, of course, that one’s woodsy saunter is not interrupted by pestilential menaces and assorted blackguards of the animal kingdom intent on doing you in. My perambulations seemed to disturb our most recently discovered visitor, as Spouse advises me that the vicious little scoundrel actually struck at my pant leg as I strode through his immediate vicinity, blissfully unaware of the potentially mortal threat currently attempting to assassinate me.
Let’s make an identification, you amateur herpatologists: tell me what sort of a beast you think it was that made such a brazen attempt upon my life. Take a close look at the markings. Remember, if you will, the rattling of the tail; it’s difficult to forget, I can assure you, for those who have had occasion to make the personal acquaintance of this little villainous bastard. The taxonomic process ought to be a little less stressful for you to do in the comfort of your own presumably adder-free home than it was for me during my dangerous, death-defying afternoon stroll among the serpentine assassins concealed around the perimeter of Juniorvania with evil in their repitlian hearts. It will be easier for you to summon up Google and tap-tap-tap a couple of keystrokes, possibly noshing on a little snack, as you idly venture a guess about the identity of my would-be killer.
Things were considerably less serene here as we embarked upon the process, I can tell you. It involved rather a lot more screaming than I suspect most professional biologists employ during the conduct of their work, which screaming was spiced with a liberal dose of anxious profanity. Still, we managed to get the photo and avoid entirely a trip to hospital, so all’s well that end’s well I suppose. Except of course that somehow, during the identification process, the pint-sized terrorist managed to flee the scene of the crime and remains at large, a fugitive from Juniorvanian justice. No doubt the little miscreant is plotting his next murderous escapade, so visitors to these parts should consider security precautions and have an eye to the ground when travelling alone.
 He may be small, but he's a criminal.  If you look closely at the bottom of the picture, under the leaf in the middle, you can see the rattling thing on the end of the rattling thing.
By junior on November 16, 2009, at 1:21 am I was up early Sunday morning and in a bit of a half-sleep reverie when it occurred to me that – most unusually – there was rather a lot of noise outside my bedroom window.
When you get right down to it, I sleep about eighty-five feet from the edge of a cornfield, often indoors. Generally, there isn’t an awful lot of noise out there for the would-be sleeper or his next-day relative, the dazed and confused early morning riser, to contend with. What little audio ambience there is would typically be of the pastoral background sort – birds chirping, wind rustling through the trees, that sort of thing.
These noises, though were different. My brain needed to assimilate and assess the information with which it was being bombarded. First, I determined that there were noises of many varieties, and lots of them. Whatever was happening out there was not taking place by stealth. I decided to confer the status of “racket” upon what I was hearing. With that taxonomic decision out of the way, I proceeded to consider whether there was possibly more to learn about the situation. After some careful reflection, I decided that quite a number of the many noises were similar; I decided to assume that there was a lot of something causing this cacophony. But what could those somethings be? Examining my audio memory banks, I could not recall ever hearing this particular sort of racket before. Click here to continue reading Morning Visitors, Evening Intruder
By junior on November 15, 2009, at 3:55 am  Believe it or not, this is MUCH tidier than it was before...
Pencils down, everyone, National Tidy Up and Reorganize Your Home Studio Day is over; just a lovely fond memory now for another year. Come now, no cheating, seriously, time is up!
My little corner of wired-up heaven isn’t perfect; it’s cramped and I don’t (yet) have the kind of dedicated patch bays that allow one to wire up an effects unit to the mixer without having an eruption of cabling spilling over some surface or another. I’d also like to get the mixer on a bit of an incline so I can see the controls more face on while sitting in my comfy task chair. Finally, my old Dell Dimension XPS B800r seems to have finally choked on Windows XP and its (funeral?) “Service” Packs, meaning there’s plenty of work still ahead to get that box up and running as a sequencer/sound module (hopefully with the capacity to run Skype too).
All things considered, though, my brain tells me that my stiff legs and aching feet are a fair trade for a vast improvement in the usability of this work space; for starters, compare the most recent photo to the one I published a couple of days ago and you’ll see that the stacks of miscellaneous optical media piled all over every available flat surface are gone. More importantly, there is no longer a stack of speakers in the middle of the room that resembles the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have now managed to get myself a little stereo separation in the “control room” mix. Of course, such was the state of the prior setup that in order to move the each speaker less than four feet in either direction I had to completely pull the whole system apart so that I could move the furniture that was impeding the correct setup in the first place. Allow me to say: oy fucking vay that was a lot of work.
Most awesome new development: I now have a Midisport 4×4 USB-Midi interface wired in to the system, and this device has a single green LED eye (pictured below, on the right) that seems to gently pulse whenever is powered up (which is whenever the computer is on, the way I have things connected). In other words, the Digital Overlord – the silicon brain at the heart of all computing matters anywhere in Juniorvania – has taken one step closer to looking like the HAL9000. It’s only a matter of time before I’m pulling cables out of the mixer and singing “Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do…”
 Dave, don't do that.
On the plus side: the colours!
By junior on November 14, 2009, at 3:27 pm Did you know that today is National Tidy Up and Reorganize Your Home Studio Day? Spend it with someone you love, and several hundred feet of cabling.
 Birnam Wood Has Come to Dunsinane and It's Tangled With XLRs
By junior on November 12, 2009, at 12:37 am  No T-Shirt, No Lonely Kid, No McCartney Back when music used to come on large circular pieces of vinyl, I had a copy of one of Paul McCartney’s solo efforts entitled McCartney II. Now isn’t the time to get in to the debate of Paul vs. John as songwriters, or the relative merits of their solo/post-Beatles work. Suffice to say that I had (and still have) a huge soft spot for Wings Back to the Egg, a fetish that led me to the purchase of the above-described McCartney solo effort.
There are a lot of things I could say about that album, a fact that is probably itself suggestive that the recording has some merit. For instance, I could tell you that this was one of the first times I ever bought a record by an artist expecting something rather specific but found, after purchase, that the record differed substantially from my expectations (we didn’t have HMV back then, you whippersnappers – you didn’t get a chance to listen first and buy second; every purchase was a bit of a leap of faith). I remember being taken aback by the album’s sound, and initially a bit put off by the distance between my sonic expectations and the actual product. The entire record, you see, was recorded by McCartney at his home studio. He played all, or substantially all of the instruments himself and recorded the thing to a (in relative terms) small multitrack tape recorder. The result was – in many places – a spare and very reflective album that challenged my youthful and juvenile musical tastes, but one that that I came to love after spending time getting to know the songs.
I mention this album because it had this awesome photo on the inner sleeve. In it, McCartney (wearing a sleeveless t-shirt, I think) stood with his back to the camera in front of the cabinet-sized multi-track recorder, looking down at the front panel of the machine and twiddling a knob with one hand. The image is black and white, and there is a palpable sense of heat and humidity, of long days and hard work accomplished. In my mind’s eye, I remember the photograph showing a young child standing to McCartney’s left, next to his leg, reaching up and tugging at father’s shirt in a desperate bid for attention.
I loved that album and I loved that photograph; among other things, the photograph gave a glimpse into the home life of one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, and it showed – much to my excitement – the studio gear in his home. I’ve written before about the fact that my DNA is deeply and genetically imprinted with the tech bug. I got thinking about this again the other day when I listened to my brother Doug’s first attempt at putting together a podcast (Doug talked a bit about how my granddad’s fetish for audio and recording equipment was passed down through my father to my brothers and me, and some of our early recording escapades). I was thinking about how much I used to hold that inner sleeve and stare at the picture while I listened to Waterfalls, dreaming about having access to the kind of gear that was shown in that picture.
 Testing, testing - can you hear me in the back? (SCREEECH!) That album was released in 1980. We’ve come a long way in 29 years, and the truth of the matter is that I now have access to – in some ways, anyway – arguably much more powerful recording equipment than Paul used to put together that record. The computer I’m typing this entry on has software in it that allows me to make multi-track recordings, to treat the signals I capture with an astonishing array of digital effects, treatments and modifications, and to synthesize entire portions of an audio track – summoning drums or strings where there are none in the house. It’s difficult for me to imagine how the 14-year old me might have reacted, had someone told me back then that – in time – I would have the very technology depicted in that photograph at my disposal, and contained in a machine the size of a small suitcase rather than occupying the same amount of space as Grandma’s china cabinet. The pace of technological achievement has been, in relative terms, rapid and consistent but in terms of the human scale of time gradual enough to become almost imperceptible, a phenomenon occurring in one’s peripheral vision but requiring careful attention to otherwise perceive. Consider that the iPhone you might be carrying in your pocket contains a computer that is many times more capable and powerful than the computers that guided the lunar lander to it’s destination on the moon in 1969. Consider that the same device is capable of almost instantly accessing a very large portion of the collected wisdom of the human race, or at least that portion of it that has been digitized to date.
All of that advancement and innovation, collected in softly humming piles and wired together in the physical embodiment of an electrical engineer’s psychotic break with reality was put to some use earlier today. Doug and I hooked up via Skype to test a technical concept: we wanted to see if it would be possible for us to carry on a conversation over the ‘Net, to locally record our own half or end of the conversation, then sync up the two halves to produce a presentable recording suitable for use in one of Doug’s podcasts. It worked like a charm. We each used a microphone and Audacity to digitally record our side of the conversation; when we were finished talking, Doug zipped his audio file and transferred it to me via Skype’s file-sharing capacity. A few minutes of mucking about later, I was able to not only sync up Doug’s track with my own, but to also clean up my own file by gating the audio to prevent some of the talkback signal that had spilled into my microphone from cluttering the sound. I also added a quick musical intro and end tag and compressed the whole thing into .mp3 format and shot it back via teh Intarwebs to Doug for his inspection and perusal.
I think that – had he found out about all of this – that 14 year old kid holding the inner sleeve to McCartney II would have been so excited, he would’ve had some trouble sleeping for quite a while.
Update (November 23, 2009): My brother Doug has, courtesy of the all-knowing Intarwebs, found a copy of the photo in question and passed it along to me (see below). My memory of the photo gets a “B”, possibly “B+”, I would say. In my mind’s eye, the photo was taken from directly behind Sir Paul, and he was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt; the photo seems considerably less tropical in mood than I remember it, as well. In fact, it looks kind of cold and clinical, if you get right down to it. Odd how memory plays tricks like that.
 The photo that sparked my imagination.
By junior on November 8, 2009, at 1:19 pm Yes, yes, I know. I have been a very negligent blogger. I don’t want to say it’s been
 Alesis MultMix USB 2.0 in its Peaceful Configuration a while since I posted hereabouts, but…well, it probably wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone if the header image changed to “rolling tumbleweeds.”
And no, my recent silence has not had anything to do with the Leafs’ early season struggles. My inconstancy would better be blamed on a prolonged period of fiddling about with various warring gadgets in Mission Control. Although some might describe what I’ve been doing as an exercise in amateur audio engineering, to me it feels more like I’ve been involved in an extended diplomatic mission to bring peace to the electronic devices gathered in my little high-tech office/studio/closet/electricity sink/rabbit warren.
The Dell XPS 700, for example, occupies a small plot of real estate not far from the Alesis MultiMix 16 USB 2.0 mixer. This mixer is a piece of equipment that is designed to take audio inputs (from microphones, guitars, tape decks, iPods, keyboards, etc.) and provide an audio signal that can be amplified through conventional means, or captured via USB in a computer running the appropriate software. It’s an integral part of my home digital audio workstation setup.
The digital and the audio, however, were not previously getting along that well. The mixer, of course, shared deep cultural ties (not to mention a pair of output cables) with its northern neighbour, the Behringer Europower EP2500 power amp. The amp is a device itself strongly allied (via a couple of 30′ cables) to a stacked pair of Elite loudspeaker cabinets. Being so closely affiliated with powerful straight-up sound reinforcement equipment seemed to provide the Alesis mixer with little incentive to cross the cultural divide and open lines of communication with its digital neighbour to the west, the Dell computer. I had tried to bridge the gap with a USB cable from time to time, but playback filled with clicks indicative of a sampling rate mismatch and some generally unpredictable routing and playback results made it clear that, although physically connected, the two solitudes were not communicating. Someone was going to have to actively intervene in the long-standing petty dispute being waged between these two regional powers. Thus began my effort to bring peace and co-operation to this region. Click here to continue reading Silent Here, Noisy Elsewhere: Bringing Peace to the Home Studio
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