The Launch of the Galactic Peace Tour Orbiter w/Pics

This was one of the signal events in aircraft history, when the Galactic Peace Tour Orbiter took flight from Lotho's Tennessee Spaceport.  Lotho handled Mission Control.  Cadillac Man provided Technical Assistance.  Silas Scarborough did photography and less than clever colour commentary.

Cadillac Man and Lotho Considering the Matter

With cars men can stare at a broken motor for long enough and somehow it will magically fix itself. So it is with hot-air balloons and this bird will fly.

Considering the Matter Further

Staring intently has now somehow managed to light the fire.

And Further Consideration

Lotho is either losing patience or falling asleep.

Lift-Off

What say we try it with a dozen of them next time.

The Amazing Amazon Bat Drone Games

Amazon has announced plans to test delivery by drone helicopters of packages weighing up to 2.2 kg as those comprise about eighty-six percent of Amazon's business.  (RTL: Amazon plans drone delivery to US customers)

These mad little machines would be flying about in such incredible abundance that it would be mandatory to put transponders on them so it's always known where they are plus other drones can see them while they're flying.

Rather than worrying about the cops putting guns on them so they can shoot hippies, there's another side to this.  (The cops have already got guns on drones to shoot hippies.)

The Bat Games

As kids we liked to throw rocks in the air when bats were about because it would be cool to watch the bats chase the rocks to the ground.  No way you would hit a bat with a rock as they can see just fine, it's only you who can't.  It was cool to watch them flying like that and maybe they even got a kick out of it too.  This is what kids did before Nintendo.

How the Bat Games apply to Amazon is what will also get kids off Nintendo.  If you chuck a rock up to where the drones are flying about then it would be funny to watch all the drones dancing around trying to miss it.  Because those drones change course, others have to change course and there could be a quite satisfying ripple effect as drones get crazy all over the place.

And, hey, if throwing a rock doesn't get it high enough, what you need is a potato gun.  Don't have one?  Come to Texas.  Tennessee works well also as I hear they make excellent potato guns in Tennessee.  (Tennessee is also where we launched the Galactic Peace Tour Orbiter.  It may still be flying somewhere.)

The Second Life AVI Choice Awards Are Back Again

The AVI Choice Awards bring out the best in people.  The selections the committee makes are always rubbish but the mud starts flying long before the selections are made because so many people know they will be rubbish.

There are two main contingents in the commentaries:

• The first is going for Straight-Up Bellyaching about how much the AVI Choice Awards suck.  This won't go too far as they also sucked last year and will probably suck next year.


• The second is the Quit Bitching and Join Them crew.  Apparently the Join Them crew thinks you won't want to commit suicide if you are a party to Mankind Tracer being elected Best Rock Vocalist.

For my part, I don't care.  Second Life is a lot of fun ... so long as you avoid the cheerleader popularity contests.  They revolted you in high-school.  Why would you want any truck with them now.

The best shows in Second Life very rarely get the biggest crowds as "Wrecking Ball" and similar dreck play big to people who like to look at pictures of food.  They also dream of getting for Christmas one of those machines that removes callus from their feet.

I've said it before but I'll use it again:  if you're interested in contests, you're better off getting into a spitting contest or hitting things with hammer.  Music is not a competitive sport.

The Ongoing Battle with the Boss DR-880 - Updated

This is turning into an extreme coverage of MIDI Program Change.  If it's boring you then go to Facebook and find out what people are eating.

That a Program Change sent to the Boss DR-880 drum machine will switch the active drum kit makes perfect sense if you are slaving the DR-880 from some type of driving device such as a controller keyboard, etc.  That permit the controller to set the drum kit to be used and then play the drum notes on the keys such that the DR-880 sounds them.  You would do this because the DR-880 almost certainly has much cooler drum sounds than are built into a synth, etc.

However, changing the drum kit is absolutely bleedin' useless if you are driving the DR-880 from a looper, specifically the Boss RC-50.  (The Boss RC-300 is pretty much the same as the RC-50 but it's newer and probably has more memory.  Get yourself a used RC-50 and save yourself a pile of money.)

I have now reached the point of grovelling before strangers to find information on this subject.  I found one guy on a pedal-steel guitar forum but couldn't reach him there so I poked around and found him on Fandalism where I sent him a message to ask if he knew of the problem.  He's got two DR-880s so he must be pretty good with them.

There's another option for help as there's a DVD for $29.95 that provides a fairly extensive tutorial.  I look at buying this as a sign of weakness.  It should be possible to find the answer on the open net but so far I'm turning up zeroes.

Even if nothing else, it all looks cool in the dark.  There are red, green, blue, and yellow lights all over the floor so it looks like a flyover for some demented spaceport in here.  I have not played with any lasers yet as I want sound before I want lights.  Besides, there is no fog juice and that stuff is about $25 a gallon.  That's fine and will be handled in a couple of weeks.  There will be lasers ... BUT ... first I will solve this Program Change problem.


Update:  None of the above is a Murder-Death-Kill for a the Boss DR-880 in combination with a looper.  At worst I will turn off transmitting Program Change and then will instead select the appropriate DR-880 drum patch manually.  This is a hassle for live but so it goes.  The reason for the ongoing combat is these are intelligent devices and it should be possible to configure them the way I want.

(Murder-Death-Kill comes from the movie "Demolition Man" which was most likely the ridiculous movie Sandra Bullock ever considered.  It's kind of funny to watch, tho.)

Jade Rabbit Goes to the Moon

China yesterday launched its Jade Rabbit rocket to send a spacecraft to a soft-landing on the moon.  It was a pretty cool week-end for launches as India also launched a rocket to Mars.  I imagine the Las Vegas bookies have low odds for the Indian mission being successful but probably fairly high odds that the Jade Rabbit will accomplish the Moon landing.

People may say China's lunar landing vehicle is just a copy of the U.S. landers which are exploring Mars.  What seems more likely is that there are only so many ways to make a lander that works and the generic design of six-wheeled vehicles seems to be sorting out as the most effective.

America once led the space race but then it decided it liked starting wars better.  One of the problems with that is wars cost much more.

One thing America could do that would be cool would be to adapt its drone technology to do something more than just this insane Muslim whacking and instead send them into space to eat space junk.  There are thousands of things orbiting the Earth and most of the things are junk but no-one ever does anything to fix the problem, instead relying on gravity to eventually pull these objects back to Earth.  That's fine if you don't mind waiting hundreds of years and don't mind lots of things being hit in space in the meantime.

People often say we should deal with Earth before dealing with Space but the latter is a trifle relative to wars.  Bush spent a trillion in Iraq in a year while it's not likely NASA has spent that much since its inception more than fifty years ago.

I noticed in CNN's coverage of the Jade Rabbit launch that the reporter referred to the 'military-backed' space program in China.  Apparently that was supposed to give the idea that America's space program is not military-backed.  America has been shooting off military space vehicles from Vandenberg AFB for decades.

It will take about two weeks before Jade Rabbit is in position to try a landing on the Moon so it looks like the Chinese are trying for the Neil Armstrong Effect in staging a landing around Christmas time. What the Chinese care about Christmas is anybody's guess but it will still be a cool thing to see.

How to Have Much More Fun with Lions (video)

Shooting lions is so suck-filled that we'll just have to blow past that to something that's a whole lot more entertaining, particularly for the lion.  Car-L is a contraption rigged up by some Australian guys so it would run on remote control.  Mix that with Africa and this video is what you get.

"Mackie Messer" - Phoenix J (video)

Phoenix J played at Cat's Art MusikCircus recently and the video is a recording of one of the songs, "Mackie Messer."  This is when I learned this is the source of "Mack the Knife" and it was written in 1928.  Phoenix J sings it in the original German but she's actually English.  It won't matter whether you understand German as you will feel the vibe anyway.

She's a very talented lady and she plays only a guitar in this song but she can play what she likes and she adds whichever instrument best serves the song.  It was very cool to hear her performing "Mackie Messer" and also to learn of the history in it.

More Female Trophy Animal Killers Brag Up their Shooting

A petition to Ban Melissa Bachmann from South Africa has gathered about 200K signatures and the Stop Melissa Bachmann Facebook group has about 350K members.  Apparently Bachmann has whined about it to other hunters as now other women are bragging up their killings.  Two, in particular, claim seventy kills including lion, rhino, and bears.  (NineMSN:  Extreme huntresses defend Melissa Bachman)

Olivia Nalos Opre is shown here with the lion she killed.  She said she only wounded it with her first shot and then it bounded out of the underbrush to kill her.  Obviously it would try to kill her after she's just popped a cap into it.

Mindy Arthurs is another of the same and here's a picture of her after shooting a bear.  She said it made her feel 'on fire.'  All it made the bear feel was dead.

These brainless females quote the standard litany that their hunting is 'good for the herd' and is actually a form of conservation.  That's utter rubbish as the lions they shoot in Africa are raised specifically for that purpose.  They are not wild lions and have no fear of man so any fool could shoot one.

This idea of conservation really burns me up.  I don't know which one of them killed the rhino but her conservation doesn't seem to be quite working as one variety of rhino recently went formally extinct in South Africa.

Silas Scheduled at BluesFabrik in Avination - January 4th

Avination is a most interesting alternative to Second Life and it has the same sense of boldness as Second Life in the early days.  Zaphod Enoch is a long time friend of Cat and he's invited me to play at BluesFabrik on Saturday, January 4th, at 1:00 pm SL Time.  I played for him once before in Avination and it was a great gig so it will be very cool to go back and it's an honour to be asked to play.

This won't be the first gig playing back in the U.S. but it is the first one that is hard-scheduled.  Right now I'm very much hoping to play at Cat's Art MusikCircus on Thursday and soon after at Julie the Poet's swimming pool.  There's also a gig at Woodstock but that's a little more distant.

That's not Woodstock as in everyone take acid and dance naked although I suppose that would be ok. It's more like Woodstock in play whatever the hell hippie music you like.  It would definitely be a cool place to play.

Meanwhile, the battle with the drum machine continues.  I've watched many tutorials and found them worthless.  If I discover anything useful then I'll post it.  I can't believe my question is so rare that it's never been encountered before.  So the battle continues.  I screw with it for a while and then I withdraw so we can glare at each other for a while.  There's something learned each time so sooner or later it's going to crack.

No, I Don't Want to Hear Your Jazz Christmas Song

There are three primary problems with Christmas:  Aqua Velva, Madison Avenue, and jazz Christmas songs.

Aqua Velva is the after-shave that has been coming back at Christmas for decades because kids have no idea what to get Daddy for his present.

Madison Avenue is what created the riots on Black Friday.

Jazz Christmas songs are why going to the Mall at Christmas time is excruciating.  Don't record a jazz Christmas song.  Just don't.  Think of the children.

I like jazz.

I like Christmas.

I do not like jazz AT Christmas.  It is not cool.  It is not progressive.  It is annoying.  Don't do it.

(Ed:  What about the Christmas songs Sufjan Stevens did?)

That's different.  He's not doing be-bop or, much worse, R&B that's pretending to be jazz.  That kid could make it cool even at a party to celebrate Millard Fillmore's birthday.  If they played his Christmas trips in a Mall then I might even be able to handle going to a shoe store or, worse, a candle store.

On second thought, no, not a candle store.

(Millard Fillmore was an American President.  No-one has any idea what he did.)

Frustrated with the Boss DR-880 - Updated

The object with the Boss DR-880 drum machine is to get it so it switches to the right drum sequence whenever I switch loops on the Boss RC-50 looper.  Ideally I would be able to switch drum sequences each time I switch phrases as each loop on an RC-50 can be comprised of three independent phrases.  For example, one phrase might be the verse, the second for the chorus, and the third for some whizzy lead part.

But none of that works.

MIDI is definitely getting to the DR-880 from the RC-50.  Start/Stop initiates or halts the current drum sequence on the DR-880 and timing is being received.  You can see the tempo hover between 119-120 as it switches to match identically the clock in the RC-50.  (That may sound a little unusual but you would be more likely to hear a problem if it were not doing it.)

The Boss DR-880 has 'Songs' which are collections of drum 'Patterns' ... but the Program Change from the RC-50 doesn't change either one.  This is making zero sense to me.

Program Change is a fundamental aspect of the Art of MIDI.  In this application, I want to change from one drum sequence to another.  For a music synthesiser I might want to change from the Angel Voice to the Gnarly Bass Banger.  There is much more detail but that, generally, is what Program Change does.

I have read manuals ... a lot.  There is one for the DR-880, another for the RC-50, and yet another for using the DR-880 and the RC-50 together.  Useless.  In one manual it says Program Change will switch the DR-880 drum kit.  Now what the hell good is that.  Why would I want to switch in the middle of a song from, say, a drum kit for a rock band to the kit used by a Polynesian drum circle.

As I say, it makes no sense.  But that's ok as the manuals don't agree anyway.  There are other references to Program Change switching the Song.

There are tutorial videos on YouTube for using the DR-880 and the RC-50 in combination but most of the ones I saw were guitar bozos who want to dazzle you with their cool licks rather than actually provide any useful information.  There's another video from some guy doing a demo but he's so awkward in using the DR-880 that he would give most people a reason not to get one.

There's nothing wrong with the DR-880 and in fact it's a very powerful drum machine.  It's also more expensive than many so try it first.  Know going into it that learning it is not a quick thing and you will hear this from anyone who has had one for a while.  Also know the device was first released in 2004 when memory was quite a bit more expensive so do expect memory constraints with the DR-880.  Most estimate you can store at most about thirty drum songs in it.

There was some guy slamming Boss equipment recently to say they're the McDonald's of pedal effects ... but he's some guy who spent $2000 on a Martin to play chords on it.  Pfft.

Boss equipment is capable, very difficult to break, and is fairly economical relative to what it does.  There's better stuff, of course, but there always is.  Even if I had the money for more gear of this nature, I would not be considering it.  I hate screwing with hardware.  I just want the sound.

(Ed:  This is boring, dude)

You think YOU are bored!  I've been going through this stuff for a couple of days now.  Who knows, maybe someone will see it and have something more useful to offer than advice about cheeseburgers and might know how to resolve the problem.


Update:  It's definitely the drum kit that gets switched by Program Change.  This makes no sense to me whatsoever but Boss isn't in the business of making things that make no sense, I must be missing something.  Maybe you have some demented reason for changing in the middle of a song from a hard rock drum kit to bongos but there isn't a reason that's immediately coming to me.  Back to the manual, it seems.

Have You Hugged Yer Hedgehog Today

Time for a bit of gratuitous cuteness.

I don't think I needed to see this hedgehog's gentleman's area but he's still mighty cute.

Do NOT get a hedgehog as a pet.  They are NOCTURNAL (at least, mostly nocturnal).  Getting exotic pets doesn't make you cool and it will frequently make the exotic animal dead.


In some other critter news, Britain has called off the badger cull in Gloucestershire as officials say the shooters weren't killing enough badgers.  Although the cancellation is generally good news, it could also mean they will come back with machine guns so they can kill more of them.  (BBC:  Gloucestershire badger cull ends as targets missed)

I don't care about law and order.  I just want to kill some damn badgers.

The U.K. has a big problem to solve as America has had maybe half a dozen cases of Mad Cow Disease whereas the U.K. has had about one hundred and eighty thousand.  It's known that the disease is spread by feeding animal tissue to other animals, particularly cows and sheep, so it's not clear how badgers got blamed but they don't seem a serious consideration in control of the problem.  (WIKI:  Bovine spongiform encephalopathy)

Yah, and while you're stopping the badger culls, how about keeping the campaign alive and stopping those chickenshit fox hunts too.  That's one of the few human activities more cowardly than what Melissa Bachmann does when she shoots the tame lions.  (Yes, they are tame.  The lions are raised by businessmen specifically so rich bitch 'hunters' can come to Africa and shoot them.  These are NOT wild lions.  They have no fear of humans so any fool can walk up to one and shoot it.)