Lee.org

This was posted to the Burning Man NYC mailing list today. I’m flying to Reno tomorrow.

Plaid just got a call from a friend who is out on the Playa helping with infrastructure.

the latest report is that is has been raining so much in the last three days that there are only about 500 people out there. It has been too wet to drive on.
bring “wet shoes” and “dry shoes”

Strong winds have been reaching up to 100 miles per hour and blowing over the porta potties..

Bring extra “tiey-Down Stuff”

100 miles per hour?!?!?!?

One hundred miles per hour?!?!?

One. Hundred.

[Gulp]

But that was MY idea!

Yesterday I opened up EMedia Magazine, saw an ad for an industrial multi-CD burner and again thought about an idea I had a while ago. Use fast CD burners to make a live recording of a music concert just minutes after the show is over. I had this idea maybe a year ago while looking through a similar magazine. So last night I went out to my local music house, The Stanhope House, to spec it out.

Perfect. The place held about 150 concert goers. I guessed that maybe 10% of concert goers would spend the money on a CD… That’s 15 CDs…. such a burning rig would cost under $2,000… working 3 or more nights a week, it could make money. The Stanhope House already had a good permanent mike setup. I could tap into that. There wasn’t much room in the soundboard area…. hmmm… and it wouldn’t be cost effective to have me come out and mix the album for just 15 sales. I could make a small box with 2 or 4 burners, a mini PC, maybe running Linux with special software and just a few buttons on the case. Buttons for “Start recording”, “Stop”, “Next song starts here”, “No music here”. The sound engineer could make the CDs. But what music licensing when a band plays a cover? Ah. The Harry Fox Agency is all about music royalties. For just $0.08 per song, we can burn a CD of a cover… Figuring out the exact royalties to be paid is a technical task…. But well suited to the computer: it could keep track of every song burned and at the end of the month export a list of who gets paid what. But that means the track names (and authors) have to be inputted into the computer as it’s being burned, to give proper credit. Hmmm. The sound engineer might need to have a keyboard and screen, tied to the Harry Fox music database. That’s ok, it’s doable.

I called my sister, asking about Greatful Dead bootlegs (she knows about such things). She offered good advice (except for the part about my idea being dumb and unworkable, but hey.)

I was getting ready to call the owner of the Stanhope House today or next week to talk about my plan. I called up TJIC to mull the idea and maybe look for programming support. He said, “Oh yeah. I read about something like that in the New York Times a while ago.” ERK! What? No. It’s MY idea. So I go online and…. fuck.

• The NY Times article (I think it is anyway… close enough) (local version)
• Instant Live from Clear Channel
• From Rolling Stone (local version) This article cinched it for me.
• Newbury Comics Instant Live Category

…the Who jumped on the idea and wound up grossing $1.2 million on live CDs from their 2002 tour. Early this year, Phish made every 2003 show available — within forty-eight hours — on livephish.com; the band has sold more than 150,000 of the recordings and earned more than $2 million.

There is probably room for me in this industry. I could probably even make a living at it if I worked hard at it. But it isn’t my idea.

Molls sent this to me before xmas. I stole it from this site and pulled it local for posterity. Click on the picture to play this shocking Shockwave.

I sent this to a bunch of my programmer-type friends recently

It’s the algorithm, stupid.

If you’ve ever taken a computer programming course, you know what a binary tree is…. and dreaded implementing it.

I present to you what looks like the obituary to binary trees:
(and check out the link, the paper is very readable)

Skip Lists vs B-Trees (added: 8-May-2003)

http://www.enhyper.com/content/skiplist.pdf

Skip lists are a relatively new algorithm introduced in 1987 by William Pugh. Their simplicity and performance makes them an attractive alternative to the well known Btree algorithms. Testing reveals a dramatic speed advantage for skip lists when compared to B-trees. In addition to the basic speed advantage of the algorithm, skip lists also show an additional speed advantage for large data sets.

If this article doesn’t impress you, then float it to a programmer friend of yours and you’ll likely put a smile on his face (and another tool in his toolchest)

Happy Day,
lee

—-and now your random quote—-
My friend Katherine W was looking for comments on a user manual that she was writing. She sent it out to one co-worker and asked for comments back a couple days later. When returning it, he said quite confidently, “Oh yes, I read the whole thing.. And it looks just fine.” Then she pointed out the several spots where it read, “When you read this, come see me and I’ll give you 5 dollars.”

Here is a local copy of Skiplist.pdf

TJIC has set up his own domain for Technical Video Rental. :-)

So where are all those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Colin Powell was talking about in front of the U.N. on February 6, 2003. He had recordings and confessions and photos with circles and arrows (and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining…). They haven’t found a single bit. Did Colin lie? Did the U.S. Secretary of State fabricate an entire presentation in front of the U.N. and international television? Maybe everything was trucked to another enemy country… maybe it was all smoke and mirrors. Jeez, the real world is more tense and exciting than the TV show 24; that’s a hard act to follow.

Out of the blue, I was offered a staff position at a new NERO International chapter. The head of the campaign wrote to me:

I am starting a chapter of NERO International in New Jersey, and I am looking for creative knowledgeable people to form a Staff, or even just to NPC. I want to reward people justly and to have great events where a Staff that works together makes for a great game for players – even people who know nothing about NERO. I love to roleplay and I love to LARP, which is why I have gotten involved over time. I remember your characters – and though I would not normally send an email like this, I recall you as an excellent roleplayer and great to roleplay with.

I was of course appropriately flattered, and the spark inside me that glows brightly when playing shimmered a bit. But I didn’t let it smolder. I’m too disappointed in the too many years of hanging out with people that couldn’t ground themselves. I graciously declined the offer.