Joel Stevens

To celebrate my refound ability to use the music room (jonathan's been around for a while) I threw down a song in about three hours. It is a homage to Jonathan's ability in Settlers of Catan (Seafarers edition). For the record, we played around 10 games, I won all but two, which Elly won. Enjoy!

Finally decided on a band name, "Monicker". Created a fancy flash website for it, Monicker Music. Check it out!

rerecorded the song with Elly singing

Production Notes

Charles wrote this guitar part a while back, but we never got anywhere on the lyrics. I decided to throw these down, although it turned out to be about the most pathetically sad song ever. Ah well... In any event, very minor reverb on both the guitar and the vocals, compressor and eq on both, and a volume booster.

Lyrics

Night after night
she dreams in colors
but day brings grey
and she discovers

all the thoughts she has
tangled up and sad
with nowhere to go

day after day
she walks in circles
but night brings grey
and she discovers

all the dreams she has
tangled up and sad
with nowhere to go

she thinks
she dreams
she thinks
she has

one more thing to do
tangled up and blue
with nowhere to go

Production Notes

Charles wrote this song in November and I finally got around to producing it. The entire song is based on Minor 7 piano trills, a simple vocal melody, and has a dueling cello part (two different expressions panned left and right). For the piano, we used "The Grand 2" and the cellos are "EWQL Symphony Gold." Standard vocal chain, and two very subtle background vocals (see if you can hear them).

Lyrics

the night time is dark here
the day time is dim
pitter patterns

salt water in the bay
catching falling rain
safety in twos
lay me

clouds drifting over head
sun splits in two
hey music
the pattern is pitter

Production Notes

This is a new love song Charles wrote. We messed around with a lot with bringing in disparate parts and then doing a build up at the end.

Drums were battery 3 per usual on electronic stuff. Standard vocal chain. The intro is the guitar part with melodyne chopping out notes and then effects run on top (flange, reverb, and some others). Mostly the mixing and production is where all the effort came in, and I think it came out well (especially with the new monitors and headphones I just got).

Lyrics

my code is in 4
your code is in 2
we speak in 10
one each finger

take my hand
we'll count on the future

if you aren't real
then what am I?

my code is code
your code is my code

Jonathan just made this video for his sister's birthday, and it's pretty much filled with awesome (despite the fact that he continues to be a douchebag). Here is the video and here is a way to digg it.

Well it was time, and since I was already spending a lot of money, why not? We painted a darker green and then a terra cotta type brown and a muslin trim. Pictures are here. More news as it comes...

For the past week, Elly and I have been working on the house. Pictures can be found here. I'll break this up into three sections:

Section 1: rearrange
We made our larger bedroom into the music room and guest bed room. We weren't really using the bottom half of the room in the old bedroom so this bought us a ton of room. We also got rid of a lot of furniture and stuff and gave it to GoodWill/relatives.

Section 2: a whole bunch of new stuff
We also bought a bunch of stuff:
1) A 42" Westinghouse LCD (duplicate of our current one). We mounted this on our new bedroom wall a la the commercials.
2) A mac mini. Our new bedroom computer / media server / thing of awesomeness. Got wireless keyboard and mouse as well. We hooked up our 1 TB external hard drive to it.
3) new bedside tables.
4) new end tables for the living room
5) new lamps for bedroom
6) guitar hangers for new music room

Section 3: patio!
We decided to lay down some flagstone as a patio in the backyard (we have no grass there). Since I've been doing steps, here's some more:
1) measure it out, came to ~400 sq ft
2) dig 3-4" in the area and desperately try to find places to put dirt from said digging
3) put more different dirt in dug area (actually decomposed rock)
4) place stones (in this case 5.7 tons of them)
5) realize that takes forever and decide a nap is needed
6) desperately hope you finish soon

Ping Pong club in Austin finally located: Austin Table Tennis. Anyways, got myself beat down by two really old guys on Saturday and then played again today and got really beaten down. These people are good. Also, bought a new paddle to put on the mojo spin. Got a pretty cheap blade (I think it was a bomb 749) and "friendship" rubber. Total cost was 48 bucks, and it was pretty cool all in all.

Seriously, it is hard to go through this process. I just did the "Texas Two-Step" (retarted) wherein you have to be registered to a specific local area and go vote. Granted early voting was pretty painless, but it takes some effort to actually go do it. Then yesterday was the caucus. It sucked. Ass. I left the house at 6:50, went to this elementary school, waited until 7:40 for the last person to vote and then had to get in this huge unorganized line where I found out people with kids get to go first (complete bs) and then I signed my name. An hour and a half to sign my freaking name on a sheet of paper.

The answer to this problem is obvious (at least in my opinion). Online voting. We can keep track of our finances and buy anything we want online, but we can't vote? Granted DieBold is a piece of shit company that deserves to die (that much money and you still can't get it right? and now everyone thinks paper voting is a better idea? Seriously go to hell DieBold.) Can we just put google in charge of voting and be done with it already? I would vote on every freaking issue if I got an email that said "here's your choices, here's a synopsis from both sides with links--now vote". You want voting to go up, take it online. I realize there are some poor people and some old people that can't deal with computers, but they can vote the old way or go to a library and vote on that computer; this would definitely increase voter participation and decrease the immense pain in the ass that is our current system.

And I didn't mean to. At first, it just started with my roommate buying a PowerBook and telling me how awesome it was. I was dubious about laptops and about Macs, 'cause I hated everything before OSX. I don't know why I hated it exactly, but I didn't like how it felt, and at that point I was a hardware build-it-yourself type which wasn't really all that macesque.

Anyway, I started doing some website coding with my friends, and they all had the new MacBook Pros (right when they came out), so I bought myself one. Then I realized that laptops were awesome (mostly so I could mess around on them, code, whatever, while watching TV or sitting in the living room, flying, etc.) I didn't think it would be awesome, but it was. Also, I like OSX. I really liked Debian when I ran it for a while, and having a terminal is strangely comforting. That was my first Apple purchase.

I then got an iPod Nano. I didn't buy it; I won it at a christmas gambling party. I thought iPods were stupid honestly, but it grew on me (especially while snowboarding). I think after that, it was the iPhone (it was the first cell phone / plan I was willing to spend money on, before that, I didn't really use or like cell phones). Then I decided to go with the whole AppleTV thing to make my all my videos digital, which in turn resulted in me getting the Apple Extreme for attaching a large harddrive to the network and having a happy 802.11n household that would be all compatible since it was all apple right? Not really. I had to manually install a 802.11n card in my MacBook Pro to get it to stream to the AppleTV right. Guess what, no more repairs from apple (offically) since I had modified the MacBook Pro (jerks). Anyway it is all working. Then I got Elly a MacBook Air when it came out (so I could use it when traveling or whatever, and she could use it at home). Did I mention she has an iPhone too? See what I mean? I didn't mean for it to happen, it just did.

I'm using Nifty Corners Cube to make all my rounded edges. It is pretty cool. It uses javascript to do it, and you do not have to mess with images. It also figures out the various backgrounds to do the transparency right. All in all, it is awesome. However, when trying to get it to work, it messed up my css, so I had to do a few fixes. Here's how I got it working:

First, copy all the javascript files into your public/javascript directory, and you won't need to worry about the css files, unlike it says you do. Then include:

<div class = "code">
<%= javascript_include_tag 'niftycube' %>

<script type="text/javascript">
    NiftyLoad=function() {
        Nifty("div.blue_container,div.code,div.inner_container,pre");
    }
</script>

In the top of the file that you want to use. Notice the div.x type syntax. Just replace the names up there with the divs you want. You can also do classes with the # sign as I recall

I also had to edit the niftycode.js sourcecode (where it finds the css) to get it to stop overwriting my css (it was screwing my fonts.

function AddCss(){
niftyCss=true;
var l=CreateEl("link");
l.setAttribute("type","text/css");
l.setAttribute("rel","stylesheet");
l.setAttribute("href","/stylesheets/niftyCorners.css");
l.setAttribute("media","screen");
document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(l);
}

and that's about it!

First, there are two people that got pissed off about this today, and one of them was me. However, I'm trying to parse it out, and I'm going to attempt to present this fairly with some of my own conclusions.

So I had some wax build up in my ear while snowboarding up in snowmass this Christmas. I was desperate to get it out, and spent a lot of the night putting rubbing alcohol in my ear and shaking my head around (does not work). I gave up and went to a doctor on the slope (Dr. Michael Check) to get some relief. While there, I signed some forms and asked him point blank how much it would cost. His response revolved around him not knowing the negotiated rates of my particular insurance (which was true), and did not tell me how much he would attempt to charge. I assumed it couldn't be too bad (foolish), and went on with the appointment. He asked me a few background questions (personal information, any allergies, any previous surgeries) and looked in my ear. He confirmed what I already said was the issue (wax build up with liquid inside), and then blew it out. (He put hydrogen peroxide in my ear and let it sit for 10 minutes, and then used a water syringe to blow out the wax, which was, of course, gross).

So then, I got a summary of insurance for 370 dollars, which my insurance cut down to 240 dollars (woo negotiated rates). The original charge was 90 someodd for "surgery" (apparently it was surgery) and 280 or so for an initial visit. I was pissed. (At this point, I should note that my insurance is very high deductible, so I pay the full amount after the cut off). I thought about it for a while (while waiting for the bill), and concluded that I should pay it and not make a big deal out of it. However, for better or for worse, I got the bill and wrote a letter with the payment (full amount). It said a few things like how I asked for a straight answer and didn't get any, wondered if he thought 370 dollars was an appropriate bill for 20 minutes of work, and threw in an insult equating the "unethical" billing with the problems we have with american medicine and insurance. I did note that I understand he had expenses to pay as well as high rent for an on the slope locale.

Anyway, I thought I was done with it, but he called me at work today (I didn't realize who was calling), and tried to explain it to me. First, he said that the billing amounts were "arbitrary" essentially admitting that he charged a very high amount to get the maximum amount out of insurance. Then some justifications about how much other doctors would cost (e.g., ENT or emergency room doctors), estimating them to be 800 dollars or more, which I responded to by noting I had had this done before for less than 100 dollars. I indicated that he effectively was billing at over 800 dollars an hour which he would not consider an appropriate measurement. I don't recall many of his other arguments, but they all seemed to be revolving around how insurance works and how other doctors charge. He did mention that I might have felt differently about the "simple" (my words) procedure if my ear drum had burst; however, I didn't realize that not being incompetent was a fair excuse for high bills. In any event, after 10 minutes (I was working), I ended the conversation with "however you want to rationalize it", click.

I'm still thinking about this, and I think the main issue is the whole charging as much as you can and see how much you get rather than actually charging how much a service is worth (like a real professional), and the failure to answer my questions about cost. I probably would have still done it for 250 dollars had I known it up front, and I wouldn't have complained later. People should be up front and communicate! I'm open to other opinions if you have any, however.