Basslines to Baselines

While grabbing a muffin at NCC today I happened across a flyer from a group called The Center for Food Safety concerning products made from and by cloned animals. I was a little more than shocked – and yet, not really – to read that the FDA is in the process of allowing the use of cloned animals in commerical products.

The FDA is taking public input on the matter till April 4th. After checking out a handful of the sources provided by CFS fact sheet it seemed smart to send a letter to the FDA (one of those auto-activist deals) to register my concern. The issues of genetical engineering are highly volitaile, but the CFS’ contentions about the dubious safety of these practices for animals and humans seem enough to advocate the postponement of commerical use.

Once the safety of the animal, consumer – and hey, why not the ecosystem too?! – are no longer lingering question marks it maybe be practical to allow cloning in the future, but I have low expectations that such developments will be implemented in a way that is holistically sustainable. I’ll still be eating my organic food thank you very much.

Marijuana Legalization – especially in the United States – is a matter of human rights.

After listening to this lecture by Eric Schlosser, I’m reminded of how any law-abiding rational citizen should be able to understand that marijuana is not a threat to society. The U.S. ‘War on Drugs’ is probably of the most wasteful expenditures of public money that I can think of – not only in the time & energy expended by ‘enforcing’ the often excessive measures, but also the cost to those who are penalized for the victimless crime of affecting their biochemistry in a reasonably safe way. The hypocrisy is staggering when you consider the facts.

In light of this I have made the conscious decision to add Schlosser’s book, Reefer Madness, to my reading list; Fast Food Nation was excellent so I anticapte another intruiging read.

Oh and in case you’re wondering… after trying pot on numerous occasions I can say I never really enjoyed it once. Those who know me already know how much I dislike being around smoking, of any kind. To put it bluntly I think marijuana smells funky, tastes like dirt, and is a little boring AND YET I cannot imagine why the government attempts to prevent people from using it. It takes no stoned-paranoia to see the ingrained, morally-bankrupt prejiduce that feeds this policy.

Topic Global Warming, is it real, what could the effects be
I tune in while a clip from ‘’An Inconvenient Truth” plays, following, the panel of experts try to spit out 100 words in the 45–60 seconds Larry will allow.
Talking Head One (worked in some capacity for the Weather Channel, also wrote a book about climate change) She stated that an overall change in climate will have definite changes for life on earth, though resisted being detailed – lacking doom & gloom I sense near palpable disappointment from Larry.
Head Two (Bill Nye Science Guy, serving on some committee for concerned science folk) more or less corroborated with the clip; as he gave straightforward scientific explanations Larry kept pouncing on the ends of his sentences demanding “whats that mean?”, “is that bad?”, “global warming, better or worse than plague of genetically enhanced Super Locusts?”
3 (geology professor from MIT) mumbled in monotone without saying much else than the global temperature rise wasn’t (or won’t?) be a full degree but is (will?) be more like a tenth which mwa-mwa-mwa; clearly the token skeptic, failing to actually get a point across – only One Tenth!
Number Four (some economist/optimistic-free-market-apologist) His main point was that the cost to react to the possibility of global climate change isn’t worth it, because it will be offset by the possibility of the future economic power of the world’s poor and their ability to cope with the environmental effects with their own capital. Therefore because poor people should be able to throw their own money dealing with their displacement we shouldn’t need to change our own pollution friendly market.

What I Learned
The Global Warming issue – seemingly far too complex to cover in the blanket statements Larry King likes to throw around – is somehow further convoluted by a show/man that is helping to lower the level of discourse each and every news day. Populist commentators used to ennoble their audiences minds, not slice and dice every thought into fast-food-sound-bite-thougts. Or at least I imagine that, for instance, the ideal of a character like Edward R. Murrow actual belongs to the real history of American broadcasting. I like to believe it.

I love meta-data. I love mp3s. I love iTunes.

But I really don’t like not being able to natively edit the elusive “Podcast Tag” they’ve implemented in iTunes 7.

What ends up happening is that when you download any audio file from an RSS feed, iTunes tags the file as a podcast (Apple’s own extended id3 attribute) and keeps it in a seperate part of iTunes interface. For most users this is a great solution, and I apprecaite this UI-design for most podcasts I listen to. But there are definite times when I want these podcasted files to mingle with my music instead of podcasts. Months ago, the first week version 7 was available, I spent a night downloading some mp3 meta-data editors and got no where, other than being reaffirmed in my respect for iTunes overall design…

… but damn Apple’s occasionally overdistilled simplicity!
However tonight the mood was right, and knowing if I gave it a few months someone else in the wide web world would figure out a solution, gold has been struck. At least I think — I should to actually verify this process published on macoshints before endorsing it, but in the least here is a starting place.

Today is unusual this season. Waking up to an overcast sky, and the warm cold glow of fresh fallen snow replaces the sunshine that would usually stir me on Sunday; it’s been falling for over two hours now. In the past two decades of my life this would be considered normal Minnesota winter weather, but right now it seems like a friend you’ve lost touch with dropping in unexpectedly. Very familiar but oddly unsettling, owing to the uncertainty about how you came apart in the first place.

The past three years winters have been noticeably milder, at first less snowy, and now less cold all together. Passing news reports about regions in the southern United States (where they are not used to much cold or snow) getting unexpected blizzards - for which they are not nearly as prepared to cope as us northerners. It’s not shocking, but quietly disconcerting, especially in light of Al Gore’s new movie – amongst other things – the image of the last 400 years of temperature change sticks in my mind.

Around here, we’ve been known to jokingly thank global warming for any unseasonably warm weather, I think some with a bit more irony than naivety. In the past five years the sort of ominous overtones of such glib remarks seeming less and less… timely.

Of course it’s wrong to justify a belief based on the small sampling of my own personal experience – weather systems are far more complicated than the faculties of my casual observation can coordinate – but the experience of the possible baby steps towards cataclysmic weather shifts has made the looming specter of Global Warming actually tangible in a way that is making it harder and harder to deny. It causes me to silently sigh and mutter “I told you so”.

Growing up and attending public school in the early 90s I was exposed to a flurry of environmental ideas that had broken into the mainstream. I can remember in kindergarten learning about pollution, and this image of giant heaps of trash piling up in a landfill became categorically wrong in my small mind. As I progressed through school I was surprised by how many of my peers, and the society in general, seemed entirely skeptical of the need to be concerned with recycling, greenhouse gas emissions, conservation and other mainstay environmental initiatives.

I always had an oddball passion for environmentally soundness, often running up against surprising resilience or indifference in others concerning the potential doom of the planet. I’ll admit I may have indulged the whiny-bleeding-heart-liberal-sob-story a bit, but for the most part I wasn’t a cawing crow. In my mind the aesthetic & ethic (elegance, efficiency, sustainability) of environmentalism were just as desirable, as the outcome. Over time I just became used to letting people become set in their ways, but as the convergence of public opinion and the escalation of circumstances comes to a head I am hopeful that people will do the right thing when it matters. Or future generations of Minnesotans will probably learn about the hazards of heavy snowfall in kindergarten instead of on their way to the busstop.

New Drum & Bass tunes that I had to have physical copies of arrived at the office today:

Back to Your Roots, No Escape, Warehouse / Destroyed, No Soul, Reservoir / The Feed, Midnight Special, Jump / Flatline, Ni Ten Ichi Ryu (Teebee Remix) / Sidewinder (Infiltrata & Hochi Remix), Be There 4 U, Falling / Out of Time (Calyx Remix), Dance All Night (Calyx Remix) / Freak Seen (not audio links you mp3 hungry fools!).

Their arrival prompted a discussion on the desirability to add a turntable to the office, which was mostly suggested to up the Lounge atmosphere. We’re talking retro here. Though I have low expectations of this transpiring I think it’d be pretty fantastic to listen to my collection at work.
With the the package sitting open on my desk it was a hard last three hours of the workday.

When I got home I rolled Back to Your Roots over Jump and felt a bit like a DJ Friction biter, only because he introduced and basically got me hooked on Back to Your Roots via his essential mix *. Additionally he starts Next Level 2 with Jump and I played around with a non-disruptive looping effect (called ‘roll’) on my DJM-800, which I suspect Friction also used on Next Level 2, but damn that songs lends itself to mashing & looping… soo good.
* also see - and a much better mix - Madd’s set with a fucking brilliant mashup of this song.

Mark Fox here. Designer, DJ, and aspiring writer. I have this intention to add commentary, record my experience and contribute some things to the global mind that is the internet, and in course I hope to meet and exchange with a wide varietey of net citizens, at leat those that understand english I suppose. With this blog I’m trying explore both the presenation and creation of online text. It’s a project I’m taking my time developing, so while I have big ideas, I will only be making incremental changes, playing with different topics, interface issues and everything in between. It’s more of a tool for discovery than a personal journal, but it’s technically both.

Recently I upgraded from iTunes 6 to 7 – with some subversions in between – and man, I’m loving it. Whenever someone is dominating, people got hate. Sometimes for real and sometimes to front. All the iTunes 7 haters need to step off. While the initial bugs are not fun, most of them are just quirks resulting from the changes in 7. In the cases of real bugs, they get fixed pretty darn quick. Is itunes 7 a flop? Fuck no! People are pitching a fit over what is a pretty standard process - not everything works perfect the first time. Most of the reports of bugs seems over-inflated, in part caused just by the fact that it’s ‘visually’ so different. It’s that whole psychology of having breaking the familiar and creating a sense of anxiety which creates the perception of problems real and imagined.”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the common invocation, but while I wouldn’t called iTunes 6 broke, iTunes 7 sure doesn’t need to be fixed anytime soon. Four & a half reasons to love #7: * Seamless playback between files (a.k.a. “Part of a Gapless Album” checkbox under file info) : finaly, I can play DJ mixes broken into multiple tracks without the painful stab of silence inbetween tracks. * Creating two new views - one that incorporates Coverflow and one that groups albums with artwork thumbnails : this could be two points but in short, both views are incredibly useful; “Cover Browser” (as they call it) is a great way to browse your collection with the Coverflow interface, now, without having an external application; “grouped with artwork” is great for me as I like to hunt down files that aren’t in albums and this makes my hours long works sessions of sifting through my music hunting stray songs that much more visually pleasant and slightly more efficient. * The interface change - while initially jarring - is that much better : not merely a superficial refresher, but it is easier to comprehend in the left bar area, plus the brushed metal was maybe becoming overdone, so the more subtle texture works; even shifting the logo and the file icons associated with iTunes from green to blue makes sense… that is after the feeling of betrayal washes away (similarities to Windows blue were confirmed with another Mac head). * The new “Album Artist” tag : another really useful feature for DJ mix albums broken into multiple files; it’s hard to explain this if you’re not anal about tagging, and a collector of DJ mixes as well, but imagine any compilation that is handpicked by a cool, notable person and you want to somehow retain this information with the compilation album, and the title itself doesn’t naturally include their name… what do you do? do you replace each tracks artist tag with the compiler/DJ’s name ? no, bad form - you like your information and you don’t want to pollute your files with confusing tag style. what if you added the compiler/DJ’s name as the ‘composer’? well no again, composer is for the person who wrote the song (which is not always the same as the performer), relevant for classical songs, cover songs, or standards. Album Artist to the rescue! I’m told that it also solves the problem where two or more artists have the same album title (e.g. the ubiquotous ‘Greatest Hits’). For these reasons I don’t even mind the slight speed hit (perceptible only on my 120+ gig music collection, my laptops 10 gigs has no noticeable lag). Big ups the iTunes team at Apple. Boh code selektahs!

Tonight - we dispersed the rest of Radio MCAD’s physical manifestation to various individuals and some to the school. Jessica and I got quite a bit of memorabilia - well mostly me. I am a hobbyist historian of my own projects. Is that vain? Probably, but since I’m writing my own history know one will be the wiser. Plus if anybody down the road wants to start an internet station at MCAD, Jessica and I will have this archive of knowledge. Well, we’ll be the key part - but the things don’t hurt in retaining our own memory. And in truth she’s probably more important to talk to than me, being that she fixed all of my project management mistakes, but HEY, it’s nice to think that I can still impart some art-direction device.
Let it be said: I came, I saw, I got some free cables and stressed away 5 years off my life—and—had a blast: working with audio people, making noise, running around setuping crazy installations, creative resource allocation, postering. It’s been awhile since I can say thus but tonight I am so fucking tired > god it’s just like being a student again. Except now I’m a teacher. In fact tonight we had the Podcasting Workshop help us bury the final remains. They got some free cds in exchange for their labor. Moving stuff wasn’t the only tiring part… it’s all of the memories, successes, failures & hopes that the things retain.

No regrets. It was amazing.