Teaching The Future

photo, originally uploaded by mross462.

Although Joe is wearing blue pants.

The reason

You can ask me about it and I’ll tell you.

The Group I Work With

We were all in one place, so we took a photo.

Hurricanes and Their Impact

First and foremost I would like to say that this is opinion is from a purely observational standpoint.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way here is what Ike looks like:

Here is the projected storm path:

In essence the coast of Texas should expect a hurricane by Friday.

Everyone at work is abuzz with knowing about the hurricane, where it’s headed, what it’s strength is etc.. etc… Well I shouldn’t say everyone, just the gentleman in the next row of cubes that I refer to as the “meteorologist” (pardon the spelling if I messed up) is pretty much on the Chronicle’s blog for about 6 hours of the day and giving vocal forecasts to everyone in the office.

The biggest thing that I want everyone to know is that personalities are the biggest reason that hurricanes are a big deal, and I say this because it reflects on multiple levels.  I’d like to think that most of us are not lemmings in this world but I’m constantly reminded of this (in my work enviornment) especially during this time. Lemming 1 goes to lemming meterologist to obtain the forecast and distribute etc… instead of waiting for the head lemming (contract head) to make an official statement regarding the storm and evacuation.

This goes on to a bigger dillema (spelling once again?) that decisions get made for reasons, and that higher ups make those decisions for those reasons. If the right decisions get made correctly that person should be given credit where credit is due. If the wrong decisions get made then that person will be vetted out of the system. Repeat process for all of humanity for all time.

In summation, events like this bring out the best and worse in people.

Tired of writing about the same old stuff.

The Weekend Made Me Happy

Over the weekend the girls did their job:

And I found some good new music:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Matias Aguayo – Minimal LP: The best thing I’ve heard since Sven Van Hees, the DJ Koze Maxi Version lays down the law on pumpin club anthems.

I would also recommend people go visit the blog I got the link from: myModern

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Martin Brothers – Dum (Link to come soon): The cheezy hook is cheezy (did I say the hook was cheezy?), but it reminds me of stuff so it’s up there on my list.

I’ll have a mix out soon with these tracks and others so keep posted.

Brazilians and the ways of business

So I’ve been selling off my DJ equipment (yes hoz me all you want, but I still made money on it, and with it) and I received a bid on my mixer from a guy in Brazil. Well let’s just say the transaction didn’t turn out the way that I wanted it to, and it is still currently up on ebay.  I was ready to kill this guy this morning as he tried to argue the price of shipping in the total cost (I told him 100 dollars as packing was 13.89 and shipping to Sao Paulo was 78.32). He then told me that he had to pay a 60% duty and could the total price for the mixer be 360. I was not about to sell my mixer for that price and take the hit on the shipping as it is a well maintained DJM 500.

What I’m really trying to get at here is the fact that he was willing to say that I can’t pay an extra 10% on the cost of the mixer to ship it to the other side of the tropics. Screw that. I’m paying an extra 10% on all my groceries these days compared to when I got here, not to mention the 33% increase in fuel which now currently sets me back 70 dollars per week to drive to and from work. Anyway what I’m getting at is the nerve for this guy to make the bid, not check international shipping rates, and make me have to repost and wait yet another week to send this out.

Graças.

Later.

I Take The Bus Mix

Courtesy of the Time afforded to yours truly by taking the bus to work, here it is:

I Take The Bus Mix By DMFM

The Origins of Daft Punk

When you were learning how to solve the equation: 4x + 1 =9. Tomas Bangalter was doing this:

Some new (old) music

There’s a CSS BUG in this post sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m to lazy to track it down

Well I figured I’d update with a little new old music.

Italoboyz vs. John Coltrane – Bahia (Party Swing): This song makes me appreciate all that time I spent in Jazz Class downloading Electronic Music, and does an excellent job with the breakdown, all be it subtle. For the classy house heads, you’ll enjoy it. Very very Farina.

Japanese Popstars – Dirty Popstars: Think Justice meets Tiga meets Chris Lake and that’s where we find the Japanese Popstars.

Lutzenkirchen – 3 Tage Wach: Translated, 3 days awake, think Felix Da Housecat meets Autobahn’s Nagellbett.

Popof – The Chomper (LSD Version): It’s got that minimalist funk kick to it.

Radiohead concert

Was fun. The multimedia presentation was awesome. In the words of Thom Yorke “Cool Beans”.

More available here:

http://ultra8201.blogspot.com/2008/05/last-night-radiohead-at-pavillion.html

My Hood part deux

So in my previous post I wrote about my experinces in my neighborhood regarding the Houston Ballet. Well no further than a mile from that same spot something else occured today that was interesting. The cheapest gas in the area is in a neighborhood known as the 5th ward, which I sometimes drive through depending how bad the 288 on ramp looks when I have to get through 2 lanes of traffic determined to get on 59 north or south. Anyway I looked there and found nothing so I proceeded on my route through the 5th Ward and my low fuel light was on, so I decided to get some gas. I pulled in to the station where it was $3.59 (I’ve only seen it cheaper at one other station which is somewhat out of the way) so I pulled in. Aside from the fact that the pump was slow (1/50ths of a gallon/sec) a car drove up with 4 people in it.

Now before I say something, I want to say that it is a regular occurance to find people purchsing beer at about 7am here on a regular basis, which I think is alright as I’ve had a Guiness or two for breakfast before in my day, and I believe most of the purchasers are getting off of work so a well earned Keystone light or two isn’t the worst thing. Anyway, so a gentleman got out of the car and said pardon me, pardon me sir, and then started picking up these little white things on the ground next to the pump. It took some time for me to realize that he was picking up crack rocks. He thanked me for not intervening and went on his way. On crack at 7am I have a different opinion, and you can pretty much guess a no tollerance for it as I have long had an issue with cocaine intake by other people.

Anyway the overall picture that I want to put forward is that this is the way Houston is, within 1 mile of beauty, art and wealth, there is addiction, dispair, and disrepair. In El Paso there was a more gradual transition between economic regions.

It is what it is.

Back to work.

My Hood

One of the things that I dreaded most about moving to Houston was the implicit nature of the big city. The suburbs, the traffic, the uncultured white people (I know I sound like a hypocrite, but sorry that’s my opinion), the pollution, etc… I was also worried that I would fall into this city and never be able to climb back out of the abyss. Well aside from all the traveling I’ve been doing (Shreveport, Portland, El Paso, and this week LA), last night was one of the times I felt that I was given a ladder.

Jelly asked if I wanted to take a walk at Herman Park while The Office was on. Having very few shows on television that I watch these days and much of it coming from a bittorrent download I said sure. The evening was cool, something which will be on a limited supply here these days, and the golfers were on the 18 holes finishing up their rounds before dark. We walked over to the miller amphitheater, and there it was, a semi dress rehersal for the Houston ballet, for an Asian themed ballet whose title I cannot put my finger on. We sat down and watched for about 30 minutes and then went for a walk in the zen garden with statues of Ghandi and MLK in this urban setting. It was by far one of the best experiences that I’ve had in awhile and made me appreciate this time.

Well back to the inspection packet.

Space in your life

One of the most interesting things I’ve seen in awhile:

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/nasacity/landing.htm

Much better than any presentation of this information previously.

Obligations

I’m sick of em right now as they are hitting me financially. I would like to say that I’m just tired of things, tired of not being paid by the USFA, tired of not being able to spend a week at home, tired of getting yelled at, tired of thinking about the implications, tired of things breaking, tired of getting out of work late, tired of having to think about the protocol of the world, tired of watching the gas pump go up 10 cents every week, tired of waiting for the IRS refund, tired of not being involved, tired of getting home and not being able to check my email every other day because I’m too busy, tired of it all.

Lilly was right “Let’s face it, everything from the waist down is Kaputz”.

You guessed it,

Tired.

Post R. Kelly Incident

So in honor of the guy who pissed all over my Kenneth Cole loafers last night at the Mars Volta Concert, some music:

Felix Da Housecat – Radio (Shinichi Osawa remix) – One of the things that I like about Felix and various other artists is the sensationalism of the old.

DJ Medhi – Signatune (Spiller Remix) – So amidst all the choppy electro hype stuff, this one stands out pretty well for me as a song that I would say is spot on.

Daft Punk – Voyager (Revolte Remix) – While we’re on the Ed Banger kick, this is a harder version with a vocoder vocal layered on top of it, definately something that I enjoyed as I kind of always thought Voyager to be at an interesting spot in the album.

BTW These were the loafers involved in the great crap comming out of the ground incident at the 02 lounge so just a little soap and elbow grease and we were right back to it.

Sport and Emotion

I don’t know whether any of you guys noticed this or not, but there are two things that get me emotionally involved in sport the first:

The Second:

Yes, yesterday was the Dynamo game against Saprisa, from Costa Rica. There was an important point brought up yesterday though that made me write this blog. A gentleman who I’d never met before asked me “You seem to know alot about the game.” I thought about this, and about how I got involved watching soccer in my youth, but never played it, never learned the official rules, but could understand the game. Ulitmately, a train of thought led me to the belief that watching sport and understanding the complexities and what makes one human just a little bit better at it than anyone else. To tell you the truth I don’t know alot about soccer, but from my experenice with fencing I know alot about sport, and where the competitive nature lies in man. Some of the best fencers are also some of the best intelectual athletes, and can disect a video, basketball, georgian handball, or soccer game way better than I’m able to. Anyway you get the point.

 Unit Testing.

Killing them with kindness

The idea of customer service it seems has come to such a far extreme these days. Empahsis is being placed “being polite” rather than getting things done. The bank I generally goto down here in Clear Lake was very polite in their service, but apparently lost a check of mine, and is unable to spell my girlfriend’s name correctly when I tell them. A police officer thinks he’s being nice by letting me go for doing about 7 miles over the speed limit, while being a hinderance to traffic and driving in my blind spot for about 3 miles on my way to work this morning. The flight attendant on the airplane who will not stop trying to explain to a man that yes he must valet his bag is holding the flight up for the other 90 people on the plane. The point being is that kindness sometimes is not the way to do things, and that procedure and protocol are, once the protocol is breached with kindness, tell them kindness is the worst of all the things you can do, just get it done.

Tired and complaning, later.

Exactly My Sentiments Towards Lou Dobbs

So I started getting GQ at the house after redeeming some frequent flyer miles for free magazine subscriptions, and on the last page of GQ, there was an interesting letter to Lou Dobbs criticizing his general existance. An electronic copy of the article can be found here. Thank you someone other than Fox News for telling the idiot to shut up. I used to be a fan of his Moneyline television program when I was a schoolboy in El Paso as I could always find out the latest economic statistics for the next day’s quiz. It made my involvment with my class that much better, and more enjoyable. I used to tell my classmates that Lou Dobbs was what you needed to watch before economics on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but with the new topics that Dobbs presents, it makes me want to barf as much as any other news reporter. Ok I’m done.

22 Minutes

Got 22 Minutes, learn how to turn a sphere inside out without creasing the sphere:

Ubuntu and Wireless, a noobs guide

So I finally got the linux box to connect to a wireless network at my home, and added the card to the supported hardware database which can be found here:

 https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsWirelessNetworkCardsAirlink101

I’m using the Airlink 101, AWLH3028 because it was cheap (total cost of 9.95 at Frye’s) so I bought two and will now try to setup a wireless bridge at the house, to ensure even coverage. Not to mention that I’m piggybacking, and would like a dependable wireless connection, instead of having to hold up my macbook to try to look for a signal. If you can get ahold of an old desktop PC, and want to configure it as an internet appliance this is the best way to go. Here is my hardware listing below:

 Dell Dimension 3000 (intel p4, 256 ram, 80 gb drive), running xubuntu 7.10.

I’m ultimately going to max out the ram, and hopefully install a 1TB hard drive in it and use it as a file server/bitorrent/frostwire box aswell as a place where Jelly can access the internet etc… Beauty of Unix is that two accounts are better than one.

Hope alls well.

Work email and Tryanny of the Masses

So I got a link to the PPT presentation that talks about Gen Y’s needs for NASA. Here is my resoponse to some of the content in it.

There are a couple of things that don’t really bother me about this presentation but that strike what I call an ehh feeling to the information presented. I’m going to analyze the presentation chronologically and tell you where my qualms are: 

• On slide 7/90: They all wanted to know more about what we do at NASA.
  • Yes, many people are curious about what I, transitioning into my current job, am doing. But one of the hardest parts to get across is that when I tell them I do user interface work for displays, about half the people understand that this is probably one of the more prestigious jobs to have versus where the reaction that I get is anywhere from apathy to people think that I’m lying, to trying to instigate a conversation regarding austronauts sexual relations in space (yes it happened at a bar in El Paso, with a guy who was in town as a result of the writers strike in California). The problem is that our generation was used to shuttle launches every other week, and seeing the station built, where the sensationalism is removed as it is a recurring normal thing. The Xers saw the tail end of the moon launch, and the end of the cold war as their milestones. The cold war was pretty much what fueled NASA, and if soviet Russia could put a man up in space, well the next thing they could do was put a man up in space with a weapon, and that was scarry to the red hating American Public. Luckily, NASA and the Soviet Union kept the space race peaceful, and now we have station which is an excellent step into not just the past, present, and future of relations between the two countries, but also for humanity in general.
• On slide 22/90: Engaging people in this exploration is not just an opportunity. It is a responsibility.
  • This is true, point well taken, but (and I’m sorry that I have to agree with Michael Moore on this), the broad American public has been brought up on the idea of fear and to be engaged with knowing about how and what to fear. The fear fell with communism and a perfect oppertuinity was created after 9/11 to instantiate a new fear in the American Public, but this fear is not faught technologically by saying we’re going to use the skies for delivery of our threat, we’re going to use the ground. So the good that is seen in the skies gets overshadowed by the evils being committed on the ground (on either side of no man’s land).

• On slide 22/90: The traditional concept of top-down, one-way communication strategy is dead:
  • Alexis De Toqueville used the concept of Tyranny of the Majority which is a criticism of the scenario in which decisions made by a majority under that system would place that majority’s interests so far above a minority’s interest as to be comparable in cruelty to “tyrannical” despots. Now, in my opinion, communication moves along these lines, people become blogsperts to which they have no means of actively verifying sources.
• On slide 37/90: We grew up with TALK SHOWS and REALITY TV. (Insert various logos for shows here.)
  • I never watched any of these shows, and as far as I’m concerned (except for The Daily Show), all these are trash remarketed and shoved down Gen Y’s throat, while “everyone” was watching Fantasia sing her heart out I was doing calculus homework in my dorm.
• On slide 71 of 90 “2 million Digg votes for latest NASA press release”
  • NASA is quite often on the popular page of dig (I know, I read it everyday) so the presence is defiantly there.
• On Slide 72: “NASA switches back to Macs”
  • As far as I knew NASA never used macs (maybe I’m wrong), but I’ve seen blogs make popular on digg that showcase NASA’s use of Linux. Macs would do the job, but they would be much more of an expensive architecture available cheaper but with a little more knowledge required to assemble a Linux Box.
• On slide 74: Don’t really understand why this is in there, we don’t need t-shirts we need innovation, and the right people to provide for that innovation.

 Needless to say I disagree with some of the things that this presentation presents. Back to work

SXSW Torrent Posted

Since I still have a foot in my indie rock past, I’m going to post a link to the SXSW torrent which showcases a song from each featured artist attending the SXSW festival. This is FREE and should be downloaded to see the direction that the indie/mainstream rock scenes are taking.

http://hewgill.com/sxsw/

BTW The 07 and 06 torrents are up aswell.

Back to work.

The things you hear while sitting in your cube.

So over the course of the last month I’ve been sitting in my cube with my headphones either on or off at various times, but I’ve been hearing some of the most interesting conversations regarding divorce/child custody cases. It makes me quiver pretty much just thinking about ever having that kind of personal entanglement with somebody. Maybe the tax incentives for getting married push people into the task that much faster, maybe the dependency issues, maybe the innocent idea of being with somebody for the rest of your life doesn’t encompass the thoughts of what can go on, just day by day. One thing I’ve learned as an engineer is that things can change day by day, and as the work heads towards completion things may change on a whim. This amount of time makes me think about how we as humans are faced with a dilema and the constant struggle on balancing past, future, and present.

My fencing coaches taught me one thing that will stick with me for the rest of my life, “You must have decision” will be burned into my skull. The thing they didn’t tell me that I had to learn is that at the time the decision is made, you must also have the economics to back up the decision, something that I think that alot of people become blind to, and whose emotions and dependencies end up messing things up in the long run.

 Brain tired.

Linux Install

So I got a linux box kinda up and running (minus the fact that I still don’t have reliable internet access). I’m running xubuntu on an old dell machine and it’s so much better than the windows crap that was on there. This will be a GP machine for internet access/word processing and maybe some sound recording (that way I don’t have to do it on my laptop. Gunna flash a belkin router in a bit and install a new interface to enable it to rebroadcast a unprotected wireless signal at my house (hope this guy doesn’t move out anythime soon). Aside from that I’m going to be working on getting a mix togeather for promo stuff here in houston, becuase after the fencing season is over, I’d like to be able to make some extra money on the weekends. I would also like to get ahold of a computer OScope and Function Generator so I can do some design work at home on the weekends that I’m here. Hope alls well.

DMFM

Some Music

So I’m stuck at work right now with no accounts to log into and a 700 page programming manual to read. To get an understanding of what it is you can click on it here:

 http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/motifref2/vol6a/Vol6a.pdf

So I decided I’d take a break post a couple of mp3s that I found online yesterday that I think are pretty cool (insert legal disclaimer here).

Hard-Fi – I Shall Overcome (Axwell Remix) :Axwell, nuff said. He seems to really like working with Hard Fi.

Kevin Saunderson Feat. Inner City – Big Fun (Simian Mobile Disco Remix): Everyone did one, it was Simian’s turn.

Kylie – In My Arms (Sebastien Leger Mix): Leger’s is a little more enjoyable than Chris Lake’s, which is a little bit harder.

After it all happened.

So here’ s the blog. I’ll be posting some information soon.