For those of you who haven’t caught on, or don’t love music/me enough to subscribe, I put a new mix on boroboro.com.
It is undoubtedly my best one so far, which doesn’t say much, but I can definitely say that it is the most cleverly named.
Second mix is up. This time I went for something a lot more low key, bpms from 77-102 or something. It probably got a bit too eclectic, but there’s bound to be something likable. If there’s a downtempo afficianado around, see how many she can name. For all other purposes, I’m calling this one my downtempo pleaser.
1:41:26 running time — 139MB 192kbps MP3
Not many notes on this one, I guess. Like I said, a bit too eclectic, but it was sitting there, begging to be done. The major point I need to make is that Hooverphonic’s No More Sweet Music and Block 16′s Slow Hot Wind have exactly the same melody. I mean, it could have easily been ripped. Block 16 did it first, from a quick look. Seriously, skip over the rest if you have to, but listen to that. Oh, and despite the fact that every track in the mix has a special place in my heart, my personal favorite that I’m feeling right now is the Young Folks cover. Also, I don’t know how I got two STS9 tracks in there, but don’t let that fool you. Lastly, I normalized the audio special for Lincoln.
My first recorded mix. I figured I was playing a lot of music, doin sweet stuff, so I might as well save it. I hooked up the decks to my Gentoo box running a newly compiled Audacity. The tracks are more or less random, though recognizable, and I’d say it’s uptempo, if not danceable, overall. If you need appx. 2 hrs of music and don’t feel like committing anything, this might be your lucky day.
About half an hour through I was graced by the presence of a somewhat inebriated Mr. Oltman, who had some interesting requests. I did what I could to make it work, but bear with the rest of it. It’s way more fun to mix with an audience, even if it’s just one. We had fun, so just think about that when it gets ugly 
1:51 running time – 205MB 256kbps MP3
Highlight it for a better view.
Anyway, the tracklisting and notes are good for me as they solidify the mix. I hope the tracklisting works for you. DJing’s not magic and I don’t intend on keeping secrets. If you need help finding any tracks, hit me up in the comments or email.
I recently added to my collection of possessions with the purchase of a 1985 Cheverolet G20 Conversion Van.
My 1985 G20 and I
Without further ado, here are the relevant stats:
Originally I was searching for a light truck to move all my junk cross-country to my new job after graduation, but this works so much better. It has so much room and handles a lot better than one would expect.
The A-Team Van
Being that I was looking for a random ride and not a diamond in the rough. It’s only 2 years and a model off of the A-Team van (a 1983 G15). It’s older than 25 years, making it technically a classic car. For a while, I felt a desire, no, an obligation, to renovate and restore it. After all, they don’t make conversion vans anymore, and I basically hit the jackpot. I should do my part to preserve history.
Except that would cost about $3000 or so. If you want it done right, it’s going to cost you. In the end, I think I’d rather donate the money to a charity than obsessing over and over-investing in the market of fleeting worldly items. Ah well. If you want to dissuade me, hit me up in the comments.
A looong exposure of the interior of my G20 van. Feel free to make it your wall paper. Copyleft, etc.
P.S. The easiest way to car shop is to subscribe to your local Craigslist RSS feed for vehicles sold by owner. A couple times per day, peruse for a minute and you’re done. Glorious.
Update: The happy ending is here.
I wrote an email to my bosses tonight. This one’s kind of special and I haven’t seen many of them around, so I’ve decided to post it here. The background is that I’ve been working on a neat little project for the past couple months. I was really excited to do it and had some fun results. Now, even though I spend a good chunk of time thinking about it, when I actually sit down to program I can’t seem to get it implemented.
This last week I clocked 4 hours, down from 20. I wasn’t sure if that was going to be indication enough that I wasn’t working, so, here’s my email.
Hey XXXX,
I’m writing this email because I have a problem. It’s been bothering me for a little while now and I’m not sure how this is going to come out, but I thought I’d best bring it up.
The problem is that I’m stuck. For the past couple weeks I’ve been unable to do any work on the project that actually feels like progress. I place all the blame on applicable-sounding excuses, like school/exams/projects, but to be honest I’m just not as motivated as I was before. I understand that the idea is to create a usable tool and make it available to people via a friendly interface, and I have a lot of design ideas I feel strongly about, but I just don’t see it being used enough to merit the implementation effort. I’m not sure that I have the full picture on the issue, but it seems like my program, as iffy as it may look and load, does about what you need it to, since it’s only going to be run every few months by a select few people.
It’s hard for me to express it precisely, and also to approach you like this, because I don’t want to come across as though I’m giving up, even though it feels that way a bit. I just feel much better coming clean on the issue. And long story short, I still do want to work on it, but I would like to come back to it in a little while. Or pick it up again before then if I feel so inclined. I just don’t want to keep banging my head on this when I could potentially be working on another project. Not to mention banging one’s head gets old kind of quick. I’d appreciate it if we could talk about this some more, if you have time.
Let me know what you think. This could just be something easily remedied with an expectations-management pep talk or a poignant anecdote, as far as I know. I’m just a proto-professional experimenting with openness techniques. I haven’t seen many guides on how to tell your boss you suck, so I’m guessing you don’t get a lot of emails like this.
Thanks,
Mahmoud
So it’s kind of wishy-washy and not the proudest display. But it’s honest and I feel better. Not as good as if I could wrench this program out of my brain and onto the server, but this way he knows now’s a good time to chime in. Also, maybe I’ll start a trend of circumlocutive openness in the workplace.
Well, I’ll post the result if it works out. Otherwise, I’ll downplay my double failure. I don’t want to turn this into a whiny blog.
It just is. I’ve put together some sweet kit and hope to have mixes up in the coming months. For the record, here’s a sweet setup that’ll get you rolling for just one grand:
2x Denon DN-S1200 Compact MP3/MIDI turntables ($369 each)
1x Denon DN-X120 Compact 2-channel mixer ($168)
1x Pair of Sennheiser HD280PRO closed headphones ($74)
2x Kingston 16GB USB flash drives ($30 each)
I’ve got to say that ever since playing with their 3500 series turntables I’ve been anticipating my first turntables. Here are some features of the DN-S1200 that make it great for a starting DJ:
Anyway, there aren’t a ton of reasons to get the DN-X120 mixer, but it is very compact, has almost everything you’ll need until much more advanced stages, and there’s even a rebate that will get you a free case specially fitted to 2 DN-S1200s and the DN-X120. Being able to move your stuff around safely will let you DJ a lot more freely and you’ll be a happier DJ. Still, weigh your options. I almost got a 3-channel mixer, but I decided to put that off until later.
I should mention in case anyone has a similar problem and is looking for a kindred spirit that one of my tables was defective when I got it. The scratch disc central hub was stuck/jammed. I called Denon and they were very swift/professional about the whole thing. We’ll see what the repair’s like when I get it back.
Also, here’s the keyboard I got. Collapsible, illuminated, spill-proof. Some day I’ll have the turntables to match.
I was thinking I’d upload mixes in the future, with the possibility of requests. Let me know if you have any ideas.
Edit: Added prices and links.
I am a big, corpulent fan of thesauruses and mplayer. Mplayer has about a billion command line options, as any respectable linux staple should. Unfortunately, I’ve had some difficulty tracking down some of the more useful options. For instance, I was looking for a way to trim a sound file from the command line.
With mplayer you can specify output devices, so the command to play a song through your speakers and the command to write a new file often differ only by the output specification. Where this comes in is that the command I was looking for is also useful for playing a segment of a sound file.
I googled around for “mplayer trim audio file”, “mplayer crop audio file”, “mplayer start end command line options” (to see if the ones I wanted were in the main list), and “mplayer start end positions”. I think I ended up going through my own shell history until I found the commands I used for creating GIFs from movies (like I said mplayer/mencoder is great). There I found the elusive -ss and -endpos command line arguments. Why ss is ss and not startpos, I don’t know.
Next time you’re looking to trim anything or play anything, use the following commands as a template.
mplayer -ss 16 -endpos 1:21:33 [additional options] [input files]
Note that ss and endpos have the same input specification. So you can go by number of seconds, or mm:ss, or hh:mm:ss. endpos is the number of seconds you want to capture/play, so ss=5 and endpos=10 will play the 10 seconds starting at the 5th second.
(Note here that I had some strange results on one file, but that could have just been mplayer.)
Anyway, I hope that was helpful. As a postscript, here are some other examples for you.
Create a trimmed wavefile from an input file, including ripping audio from video files:
mplayer -ss [time] -endpos [time] -ao pcm:file=output.wav [input_file]
If you want to trim a video, you’ll have to switch to mencoder. Don’t worry, ss and endpos still work:
mencoder -ss [time] -endpos [time] -ovc copy -oac copy -o mytrimmed.avi [input_file]
(There might be a way to do it with mplayer, but I don’t know how. This works fine though 
)
Here they are.
