02010-01-27 | Uncategorized
The first rehearsal for the recording of the new album starts at 10:00 today. When the recording starts for real, sometime in the coming weeks, I’ll bring some of my studio gear to Jon’s studio, in order to be able to have all of the microphones and pre-amps and converters for 16 tracks of HD recording.
Hm, wouldn’t it be cool, no, let me rephrase that, wouldn’t it be interesting, if the recent attacks on Google, which were blamed on Chinese hackers, and possibly black-hat Chinese Government Hackers… were actually perpetrated by Tibetan Freedom Fighters, who happen to know their way around computers? Khampas with internet instead of long knives. My imagination runs away with me and I can see a basement somewhere in Dharamsala, New York or London, filled with a gaggle of computers, with prayer flags crisscrossing the room, and people chanting mantras while they are hitting the keyboards.
Evidence Weakens That China Did the Recent Cyberattacks
an article in The Register calling into question the one piece of hard evidence that has been put forward to pin the Google cyberattacks on China. It was claimed that a CRC algorithm found in the Aurora attack code was particular to Chinese-language developers. Now evidence emerges that this algorithm has been widely known for years and used in English-language books and websites. Wired has a post introducing the Pentagon’s recently initiated effort to identify the “digital DNA” of hackers and/or their tools; this program is part of a wide-ranging effort by the US government to find useful means of deterring cyberattacks. This latter NY Times article notes that Google may have found the best deterrence so far — the threat to withdraw its services from the Chinese market.
(Via Slashdot)
I am back from the rehearsal and listening to mp3s from the recordings. Jon named one of the new tracks Tabouli Western, he he. We working out arrangements for 11 new pieces. More rehearsing next week and then four days of recording the week after that. The plan is to finish recording by the end of February and work on finishing touches and mixing in March.
02009-05-30 | Internet, Music
From the BBC:
BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Spotify streams for music lovers
Music streaming service Spotify is only a few months old but it has already attracted much attention from music lovers.
The site allows its members to create and listen to heir own playlists of songs streamed to them online.
The same peer-to-peer technology as found in file-sharing is used to deliver near-CD quality and tracks that playback almost instantly.
The service is free for listeners willing to hear audio and on-screen adverts (which appear between roughly every five songs), although users can otherwise pay £10 per month for a premium service which enables them to listen to songs without adverts.
And from guitarist Robert Fripp:
Robert Fripp’s Diary for Thursday, 21st May 2009
The industry-word is that Spotify currently has little advertising to support it & few punters are signing up for the subscription service. In my view, Spotify provides an exemplary model of how the new, emerging music industry of digital provision works against the interests of music’s originators & generators.
02009-03-01 | Internet, Ottmar
Ottmar Liebert & Luna Negra | Facebook
Nope, I am not on Facebook. Looks like a fan has set that up. Fine with me, as long as it doesn’t say somewhere that I sleep with unicorns…
Thanks LW
02009-03-01 | Internet
What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09 | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
But you know, I’m not scared by any of this. I regret the suffering, I know it’s big trouble — but it promises massive change and a massive change was inevitable. The way we ran the world was wrong.
I’ve never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I’m bored with the deceit. I’m tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I’m disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I’m up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.
The cure for panic is action. Coherent action is great; for a scatterbrained web society, that may be a bit much to ask. Well, any action is better than whining. We can do better.
Inspiring, I think. Works better for me than this collection of 40 inspirational speeches.
02009-02-03 | Internet, Music
Digital Web Magazine – Is The Web Really Helping Us Find New Music?
So what did we do before the Internet transformed how we find and buy music? What can these services add to offer us an even better experience?
The human factor—that’s what. Remember the guy who ran the local independent record store? The album he nagged you to listen to that you knew you’d hate, only for it to eventually blow your socks off? What about the music journalists whose opinions we value, even if we don’t always agree. We should always want an expert view to point us in a direction we never thought of going, to broaden our horizons in ways we never considered. What happened to oddball choices, eclectic taste, and taking a chance? Since when did we only want to listen to derivative playlists of the same old music, recommended and validated by people like us with the same old set of CDs?
