journals

When a new shipment of Lemurs arrive from France, the excitement begins to grow at c74 headquarters. But it's not what you think. Yes, we are happy to receive a new shipment because it means people like the Lemur and are buying it. And, yes, it's always good to see that the big box of expensive hardware you just purchased arrived safely. Despite these good reasons, which occasionally lead to hugging the delivery driver, the best part is the BIG BOX.

Whew! It was a ton of work, and took a lot of long hours, but we've released Max/MSP version 4.5.7 - a free update to all Max/MSP 4.5 users.

The update contains a littany of various bug fixes, some new pattr features, and support for our upcoming Pluggo 3.5.4 update. This version also is the first to undergo a new regimen of testing to ensure that it is the most solid we've released to-date. All very cool stuff...

If you are a Max user, be sure to download the update from http://www.cycling74.com/downloads/maxmsp.

Now on to getting this Pluggo update finished!

...a rifle range? A battlefield after a Civil War Reenactment?

My colleagues Andrew and Meg and I headed over to the new Recombinant Media Labs facility last week for a fun-filled week of Max workshoppery.

The nature of the booth traffic is visible not only in a relative dearth of exciting action demo photos on my part (I am giving them aforementioned demos, and thus otherwise occupied), but also in my relative lack of trade show mobility. There are a few exceptions.

We’re behind the Apple booth. This is a good thing in that we are beside and right in the demo audio line of fire of the Sony booth; two such circumstances would probably make anyone mad as a hatter.

Greetings from the Los Angeles equivalent of a serious cold snap (which equates to an exceptionally nice respite from a Midwestern winter). Yes, it’s NAMM time again….

The first version of MSP was released eight years ago -- December 21, 1997 to be exact. As MSP's age now represents a child old enough to read and understand a few rudimentary swear words, I felt it was appropriate to reflect briefly on MSP's past, present, and future.

Dismenbering the morning New York Times and spilling Honey Nut Cheerios all over some random section is one of life's little pleasures, but it's always best to take a quick run through the whole paper.

How else would I have found out that the Bush Administration called off the hunt for weapons of mass destruction? It was buried on page 10, a couple of hundread words. On a normal day, the hoopla about the ancient grape varieties of Campania in southern Italy would have completely distracted me.

Pfui. The Washington Post and even CN-bloody-N gave this little number the space it deserved right up front. Even the online Times relegates it to the "other" column on their International page.

Some days, the Gray Lady is looking mighty shabby. At least I can still take solace in Paul Krugman's bracing work debunking this year's shell game--the "privatization" of Social Security. Biff! Bap! Pow!

In the course of a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion with an old friend, we wound up talking about a particular form of anxiety.

I wasn't planning on googling drug-smuggling secrets.

A friend and I were talking about the Steven Soderbergh film Traffic. In addition to reportedly featuring our pluggo software in action, there was this bit in the film where Catherine Zeta-Jones inspects some kind of statue which turns out to be molded from cocaine.

I wasn wondering whether there was much in the way of fact about this detail, went a-googling, and stumbled upon this interesting online chronicle of drug smuggler stash secrets (although it appears not to have been updated recently). THC-laced suckers? Ink cartridges full of heroin? Hollowed-out Princess Di biographies stuffed with blow? Meth with the Ferrari logo? It's all there.

Even though J. and I were trapped in The Storm of The Century down in southern Indiana on our way to see my mom in Kentucky for the holidays, we really hadn't had any snow to speak of here in Madison. That's odd because because this particular time of year is the period when you lock yourself indoors because it's normally umptythree degrees below zero with a 20mph wind.

But not this year. It was a rainy (Dutch?) winter until night before last, when we had the first of two nights of a picturesque white fluffy blankety postcard snow. Not the towering grimy urban pyramids of plow-sculpted densepack or grey slurries of meltwater and salty post-snow, but the lovely cover of soft snow that gracefully starts by softening the edge where the lawn meets the walk, then ripens into a driveway and sidewalk-obliterating field of undulating and dazzling white

Of course, I now have to go out and shovel quite a few feet of sidewalk, but hey. I will officially enjoy this for a few more days, and think about great things to eat when it's cold and you don't mind staying in and doing a little work in a warm kitchen.

An amazing part of my breakfast reading was provided by a fascinating article in the New York Times Science section consisting of a dozen or so answers to a single question:

"What do you believe even though you cannot prove it?"

You would think my weekly cruise by Boing Boing would have had me going on about how you can have Richard Stallman record telephone answering messages for you, but no.

This is the Arts and Crafts column, thank you very much. Or Kraffs, as we say here in Wuhscahns'n. A couple of Bristol University mathematicians have crocheted a festive version of the Lorenz equations. Their crochet pattern appears in the latest issue of the journal Mathematics Intelligence. There's a PDF version of the article here. It's worth it for the pictures alone.

Cool, huh?

The radiophonic portion of my life has an annual ritual associated with it that might surprise no one; a top ten. It's that time again.