Weekend Agenda
Iced Coffee
I’m in Dupont Circle at a coffeeshop. The heatwave continues, so I look for the coolest places I can find. Otherwise, it’s too difficult to concentrate. If I can work for a while in a meat-locker like environment, I actually appreciate the heat much more. I’m looking forward to the kind of weather that allows me to wear a jacket.
Books
I just picked up a couple of books at Olsson’s. Gregory Clark’s “A Farewell To Alms” - a new explanation of the industrial revolution - and Edward Luce’s “In Spite Of The Gods” - yet another book about modern India.
I hardly need new books. The books I already have are already threatening the structural integrity of my dwelling. Maybe they’ll collapse in on themselves and create a black hole first.
But new books seem important. I like to keep current, even if it’s just a book here and there. This gets back to my last post, where I implicitly lament that I don’t flex my book review muscles on the job - because I tend to read books we don’t sell.
As a counterpoint, I’m trying to re-read John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid’s “The Social Life Of Information”. I read it a while back, and the warm glow of its ideas was in the back of my mind when I read “The Future And Its Enemies”.
Futurism
Although I see some of the subtleties a little better now, it is still very tempting to see the primary struggle as between Futurists and Luddites. What’s the fuss? Individuals who feel threatened by change will fight it. Arguments that the change will be good for everybody (or that murkier - “better in the aggregate” - since that doesn’t even appeal to the self-interest of the threatened, but to a nebulous altruism) don’t usually cut it, and power tends to triumph. If I saved the world from some rampaging robot invention, would I still be charged with destruction of property (“machine-breaking”)? What exactly is the legal precedent there?
I’m not doing nearly enough of the things I say I want to do. I don’t have any real excuse for this, even though it is tempting to blame the heat. I barricade myself in my one little air-conditioned room, and then I have trouble staying awake, because I’m not active. I don’t have any drugs that will help - caffeine and sugar don’t do much. I saw this funny picture of the stack of empty soda cans accumulated by the guy who hacked the iPhone, and I was envious: if I drank all that, I would be too jittery to do anything.
XP-80 Keyboard
I had a breakthrough with my Roland XP-80 keyboard. I finally formulated a question just the right way, and looked at the manual. Probably the fundamental problem with learning anything is: You can’t usually make sense of the new information. It’s like a sugar you don’t have the right enzyme to digest. No matter how much you swallow, you’re just going to get sick - not metabolize any of it. In the same fashion, new information can just wear you out, until you find the precise bit you needed all along. This is what gives me hope that learning can be properly organized - and makes me flabbergasted that it so often isn’t.
Well, I don’t know how much use you’re going to get out of the keyboard description, but here goes: In a “Performance”, you can assign sixteen instruments (“Patches”) to the MIDI channels and the keyboard. You’re not going to choose to have them all ON at once - you need control over when different instruments will sound. One way to control this is to create a recording of one instrument, and play another instrument on the keyboard to accompany it, but I find the whole process for doing it a bit counterintuitive. Every time you change the arrangement of which instruments can be played of which keys, the Performance data is altered and needs to be saved (or if you’re happy going back to where you had it - don’t save, but will that make you happy?). After all the time spent with PCs, the design choices of this embedded device seem really weird. I want to organize it all differently, but that’s not my prerogative - I’m stuck with the manufacturer’s design choices. It’s a permissive framework in many ways - just not any of the ways I care about.
There is one setting that toggles back and forth and doesn’t affect any of the other Performance settings: “Single Mode” vs. “Layer Mode”. By changing to Single Mode, you can override all the key-to-instrument mapping and pick out one instrument to play with one of the sixteen channel buttons that usually give you another form of patch selector. I personally find the data-wheel and the keypad more than sufficient, and if I didn’t there’s a sound-list menu that shows a batch of ten consecutively numbered sounds on the little screen.
Now maybe I can keep more of it in my head at once. To do anything mildly complicated, I have to have pencil and paper ready: There isn’t enough screen space to show all the instruments associated with a performance, so I have to plan it out on paper, then spend a considerable amount of time keying it in.
Programming Languages
I’m feeling pressed for time now, especially if I’m going to try to read several hundred pages of books later, but I thought I would mention my continuing struggle with computer programming.
My decision is to concentrate my efforts on Ruby and C++. Ruby is still fascinating after a long time: It has many interesting didactic qualities, and it in fact can be shaken down to its C roots, where it will admit to object extensions. Being able to write objects and methods in short order is very helpful to me as guideposts to doing it more slowly in C++. I’m not ready for the full array of containers and templates in C++ yet, but the main reason is that I haven’t done enough with the basics. Writing programs with the Windows API is still very confusing - it makes writing your own objects that much more complicated.
Posted by Evan Bittner Sat, 08 Sep 2007 17:41:00 GMT
