Name: Joseph
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Posts by dreamreal:
Why don’t people talk to me in ways that I hear?
September 9th, 2010Every now and then, I wish people would compensate for how I hear and think, instead of always expecting me to compensate for them.
I end up being impossibly burdened by how people communicate. I’m used to it, of course; people have buried me in a torrent of words for my entire life.
But…
Every now and then…
It’d be wonderful if the people around me would stop screwin’ around and just give me a direct, unadorned answer. If they’d zero in on the point. If they’d stop telling me what it is, instead of dancing around saying how they feel it might be (and how that makes them feel.)
Like I said, I’m used to being surrounded by different personality types, so it’s not like I don’t have experience digging through a morass of irrelevance to get to actual meaning.
But it’d be nice.
Ah, the joy of a new day. Or something.
September 7th, 2010I think I need to write on this stupid blog more often than I do.
Stephen King (in “On Writing,” if memory serves, and golly is that a good book!) said that you should write every day, without fail.
I’m really bad about not doing that; I get to thinking about writing, and cache those ideas for a later day. Guess when that later day happens? Never. So the ideas get lost or buried (usually buried, honestly; I’ll see something that reminds me and go “Oh yeah!” Hmm, that last sentence reminded me of something…)
My problem is that I write on a blog, I think. A lot of the things I think of are pretty silly (i.e., remarkably stupid) or interesting only to me, and I would hate to contribute more nonsense to the blogosphere. So I don’t. And whatever I was thinking of gets lost.
As in my music, most of the stuff I write is rubbish (just ask my boss, as we go through draft #147), but some of it’s worthwhile.
Oh yeah, another problem with blogging: I don’t usually complete my
Big Saturday: football and new toys
September 4th, 2010First: FSU football! At last the summer of no-Bowden is over. We will always miss Bobby on the sidelines, but it was time. I just hate how it went down.
Good luck, guys. Here’s to a successful season!
Second: I’m writing this from my phone. With Oracle suing Google, and an actual need to be in better touch with my office, the time came for me to be dragged into the present. I got an Android phone: HTC Evo 4G, at your service. It’s fun! And horribly useful so far.
My oldest also got a phone, a Samsung Seek – and within two days crashed it. It wasn’t that hard to recover, but ouch. It’s a lower-end phone, although it has a keyboard and a touch screen, but it’s more than enough for him – he’s been entranced. I do wish Samsung was even 1% as open as the Android, though. He has to buy ringtones; I get to make my own (easily) if I want.
And I got a GPS, a Garmin nüvi 1300. I use it on the road instead of my phone – battery life, you know, and it also means my wife can use it if I’m elsewhere. It’s been very useful, especially as we drive around places with which we’re not familiar – which is happening a lot these days.
I also damaged even more of my toes. My left foot is a hurt magnet these days. It’s a consequence of not being where I’m used to being; I walked into a guitar case. I’m a klutz on the best of days, and these aren’t those days.
And we’re about to make an offer on a HOUSE! Today! A house! With a roof! And stuff!
So it’s a big day.:)
I am the person who wrote this blog entry!
July 29th, 2010I was looking at my poor, ragged copy of Slaughterhouse Five last night, and noted the author’s tag: “Kurt Vonnegut, author of Jailhouse!”
For some reason, it hit me: I’ve never read Jailhouse. I’d like to, I guess, if I have time and can find it. But it just struck me as odd, because Slaughterhouse Five is one of his best known works, and using a tag that says “author of a less known book” – especially on reprint – would just be strange.
Waking up
July 24th, 2010Man, I was so happy when I realized that I had only DREAMED that I had woken up, until I realized that I’d ACTUALLY woken up in order to realize it.
Grrrr, spring-security!
July 14th, 2010I just wasted a day trying to get Spring Security 3.0 to work – at all. Followed the documentation meticulously, only to endlessly have Spring tell me that I didn’t have a namespace handler for the security namespace.
Turns out it was a simple fix. I’d simply not included all three pieces of Spring Security.
If you’re using Maven, then, here’s what you’ll need for Spring Security:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-security-web</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-security-config</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-security-core</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
I would love to find out why the configuration was pulled out and not a required element of Security…. assuming it’s not some wankster just letting his hand off the throttle.
Stories
July 1st, 2010The story of who we are is written in our children – perhaps our own children, perhaps those children in whose lives we appear. Childless, our story ends.
That doesn’t mean that those who have no children are wrong or anything of the sort – it’s just that their histories become static, woven into others’ memories.
For better or for worse, my children are my story. For the rest of their lives, they will carry me with them, alive as they saw me, just as my father is alive with me now, being dead for a few years now… and he is alive in them as well, through what they saw of him, and through what they see of me having seen him.
This is not an urging for you to have children; if you have none, again, no big deal. It’s not sad or anything. It’s just different, and the lives you touch are touched in a different way.
I never thought I’d want to have children, when I was young. Now I can’t imagine living without my sons.
Flood of new music!
June 22nd, 2010I’d like to offer you three new songs: “Sleep,” “Impression, Part II“, and “Happier With You.” These make up more of the “Sleep” release.
Sleep, from April 2010, is a song I put together as a bit of a scherzo – “hmm, let’s see what I can do with these chord shapes” – and I ended up with this. I like it; the bass during the final section is a little unusual for me. I usually prefer the bass to be fundamental to the song, and to stay in that role; I’m not a fan of bass “leads.” (Don’t know why, as a bass player you’d think I’d appreciate a touch of attention. Oh yeah, I’m an introvert.)
The guitar was my Sheraton, run through an Orange amp; I like the basic approach of the Orange, and the sound fits well for me, I think.
“Impression, Part II” is, well, part two of “Impression,” and it has a bit of story behind it. For one thing, it’s the first song cycle I’ve done in years – in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever actually recorded any cycles. (I’ve written some, you see, and not done anything with them). It’s the mirror image of Part 1. Where Part 1 makes a statement, Part 2 denies it; Part 2 uses ‘real instruments’ where Part 1 uses synthesizers and artificial elements, in most cases.
Even the voice is different; yes, that’s my real voice, completely worn out after recording “Happier With You,” with a vocoded harmony line. There’s no real denouement to the song; there isn’t one in Part 1, either, and while it would have been satisfying to have a killer lead somewhere in there, it just never fit – and it would have taken away from the cerebral nature of both parts (and yes, I just described my own stuff as ‘cerebral.’ I’m sorry.)
Impression, Part 2 has something like eight acoustic guitar tracks to it; they don’t sound as busy as they look in the song’s source material. I’m very pleased with the sound, including the (compressed) bass. As usual, my voice is the part I have the least faith in. (It’s still the only voice I have.)
“Happier With You” is a song I wrote for my wife while driving home one night (we were dating at the time). It’s one of the best songs I’ve ever done, and this version is what I hear in my head; it may be a tad too fast, in the end, but what I did was play the acoustic guitar at the speed that sounded right to me, and fairly well matched that the whole way through. So maybe this is the speed it’s supposed to be.
It’s got a few “single sources” — the drums, the bass are done with one track each. Everything else is doubled and panned right and left. I recorded the voice a little different here (and used the same technique in “Impression, Part II”) – I set up a mic as it would be on stage, where the mic is on a stand, roughly six feet high, so I’m singing up – and I recorded the voice while playing the acoustic guitar (the acoustics panned left and right are recorded along with the voices, the acoustic guitar being recorded acoustically, as it were.)
The bass was incredibly hard to record. The drums, too, for that matter – harder than you’d think it should be. The electric guitars were pretty simple, though.
“Sleep,” as a release, is coming together. Seven songs, so far, in order:
- Dream
- Lucid
- Sleep
- Aurora
- Impression (part I)
- Happier With You
- Impression (part II)
I have a few others on my list to do for this release, including some vocal tracks; we’ll see if I can get to them in short order.
On the Song That Is Too Fast To Play-eth
June 20th, 2010Okay, this thing is going to be a frickin’ barn-burner. As in, barns literally burning down. (It’s an anti-barn protest song.)
Well… maybe. But man, oh man – just finished laying down the electric guitar tracks, and by the end of them – both of them – I’m doing my whole in-the-moment thing, where I can replay everything in my head – it’s hard to explain, but it’s that feeling you get when you’re on stage, and you forget the fact that you’re ON STAGE and just blow, man.
It’s incredible when that hits you, and it’s why so many musicians play past their limits.
I may still change the guitars just a bit – the outro was improvised, as it usually is, but I think I can do better – and I still need to mix and tweak things here and there, but .. just wow.
I thought I’d have weeks left of work on this song. But it’s been three hours of work so far. Incredible.
Ow.
June 19th, 2010I write this with numb fingers, because they’re bleeding for the first time from playing guitar in freakin’ years. I usually slow songs down a little to record them, because in my head they’re too fast anyway, but today: nope! Full speed ahead!
And I forgot that on bass, the song I was recording is really, really difficult even at slower tempos.
At fast tempos… just… ow.
I decided what I was going to do was try to get through a few measures at a time, and just piece everything together… so naturally, when I hit record, I did the whole thing in one take, all five minutes of it.
Just… ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Owie. Ouchie. Now my fingers hurrrrrrt.