Eponymous

Writing

"You need strong emotion, whether it's fiery or depressed, an extreme state of mind. I think in any art form it's the case." -- Daniel Ash

Maybe it's my lack of experience. Maybe it's my lack of talent. I tried to sit down and write music for the song known as Ravage in the new naming scheme, but I failed miserably. When I try to force it, like I did tonight, nothing comes out right. I have ideas, I can hear them in my head, but without that inspiration, without that emotion, nothing I produce sounds right.

I've been too happy recently and it's destroyed my creativity. I get the urge, I have the inspiration, to write when I feel negative emotions. I need anger; I need depression. It is in dealing with these emotions that I am able to write.

I have tried several times to force myself to feel this way. This usually buys me a few minutes in which I can write, but it often fails. Because the emotions are artificial, the results are mediocre at best.

I find this situation to be quite frustrating. I want to move forward with this album, but without that inspiration I am unable to do anything.

In the meantime, I'm slowly teaching myself to play guitar and, to a much lesser extent, a keyboard-style synthesizer. I've also been going through materials my music teacher friend gave me to learn some basic music theory. Hopefully once I find that needed inspiration, or find a way to work without being angry or depressed, this new knowledge will make things easier.

[/album] [permanent link]

NIN
On August 27th, I attended the Nine Inch Nails concert in East Rutherford, NJ held at the arena. I think I enjoyed it.

I ordered a pair of tickets through nin.com during the presale. Tickets went on sale at 5:00PM, I managed to get through by 5:05 and ended up with two tickets for Section 121, Row 8, opting not to purchase floor seats. I went with a friend with whom I've attended a number of concerts, including the Bauhaus/NIN show at PNC Arts Center in 2006.

As per the terms of the nin.com presale, we had to pick up the tickets at the venue. Because of this fact, and the massive amount of pointless and unnecessary construction at the Meadowlands, we decided it would be best to get there early.

My friend took the night off from work and I picked him up at his apartment after I got out of work. We grabbed a quick meal at a nearby Wendy's (which I'm still paying for...) and then headed over to the arena.

We arrived around 5:30PM, about two hours before the show. We asked one of the security staff if the box office was open because we had tickets waiting at Will Call. He informed us that the box office opened several hours prior and we could pick up our tickets.

We headed toward the box office and found a long line. We waited for a few minutes and noticed that the line had not moved at all. Figuring that a line for Will Call would be moving slightly faster than not-at-all, I went to investigate while my friend saved our place in line.

After a short walk I found another line marked by a sign reading "NIN.COM PRESALE TICKET HOLDERS." I asked the event staff member near the line if that was the line to pick up the tickets. He explained the procedure to me.

I went and got my friend from the other line and explained to him what the staff had just told me. He then waited outside while I walked into the box office, passing event staff who asked if I was picking up the presale tickets. Inside, another staff member indicated I could pick up the tickets on line 13 or 14. I picked up the tickets, went back outside and we got on line. The staff member who had explained the procedure to me came over to us, checked our tickets, and gave us wrist bands.

A little while later, just before the gates were set to open, another staff member came down the line checking people's tickets. He looked at ours, cut off our wrist bands, and told us to skip the line and enter the arena through the box office lobby. It seems people with lower section tickets were let in while people with General Admission floor tickets remained on the line.

Once inside the door, we waited on another line for about 30 seconds to have our tickets scanned for entry into the arena. On the other side of the turnstile, an escalator brought us up to the main floor. We walked around realizing we came in almost directly opposite our section. We stopped at one of the entry ways to have a look at the stage. The staff member at the entry asked to see our tickets. We told him we were on the other side but just wanted to take a quick look at the stage. He had no problem with this. I asked him if he new what time the opening act would be start and he replied, "7:30." I then asked if he knew what time Nine Inch Nails would go on. He took a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, then said, "They'll be on from 8:40 to 10:55." I thanked him and we moved on. We found our section and went down to our seats.

It turns out that row 8 is actually row 3. We were at the level of the stage and about a hundred feet away. We were angled enough to have a view of almost the entire stage (the lights on the stage right we facing away from us).

After that we then decided to walk around for a while since we had quite a while until the openers started.

I stopped and purchased an overpriced souvenir t-shirt at one of the merchandise stands. I should have gotten it a size smaller than I did. I'm still not used to not being overweight. We stopped at a concession stand and payed way too much for water, then did a few more laps around the arena. Finally we went back to our seats.

At 7:30 the opening act, Does it Offend You, Yeah?, took the stage. They were pretty good. I enjoyed their music despite having heard only one song prior to that evening. It was hard to hear their vocals because the gain on the microphones seemed to be a lot lower than it should have been, especially while they were playing. They thanked the crowd for not booing. When the announced that their next song would be their last for the evening, people cheered. The guitarist quickly replied, "Thank you to all the people who cheered because they like us."

I was fairly impressed by their set and wish it had been a little bit longer, maybe another song or two.

At 8:45 Nine Inch Nails took the stage as 999,999 played. As soon as it ended, 1,000,000 started. The continued with a few more songs from The Slip. After Discipline, the band tore into March of the Pigs. The crowd exploded.

The band made extensive use of three screens, which could be raised and lowered, throughout the night. During The Warning and Vessel, the screen to the front of the stage obscured most of the stage as the instruments used for the almost-acoustic Ghosts set were set up. Justin Meldal-Johnsen played a bass violin during the Ghosts set, which included a new rendition of Piggy.

After that part of the evening's set, the front screen was used again to hide the stage as the instruments were removed during the next song, which featured an animation set to the music and live video of Trent Reznor being processed on-the-fly to distort his image. I think the only way to describe the processed video is to say it looked like white noise in the shape of a person's face.

At the end of that song the screen turned completely blue. As Pinion played, the screen's lights were turned off in a rather unique way until the screen did little to obscure the band. The screen was raised quickly as the band tore into Wish, followed quickly by the classic Terrible Lie.

The entire 31 song set, including the five song obligatory encore was about 2 hours and 15 minutes. It was an amazing show. The set highlighted the musical ability and range of the performers and featured songs from all of NIN's major releases. The visual element of the show was well thought out and very well executed, adding to the music rather than distracting from it.

I took a few pictures using the low-res camera built into my phone. There is one of the stage, the foremost screen, and Trent during Hurt.

Setlist:

999,999
1,000,000
Letting You
Discipline
March of the Pigs
Head Down
The Frail
Reptile
Closer
Gave Up
The Warning
Vessel
5 Ghosts I
17 Ghosts II
19 Ghosts III
Ghosts Piggy
The Greater Good
Pinion
Wish
Terrible Lie
Survivalism
The Big Come Down
31 Ghosts IV
Only
The Hand That Feeds
Head Like a Hole
Echoplex
God Given
The Good Soldier
Hurt
In This Twilight

Eponymous

	About My Infrequently Updated Blog. The web-based journal of M. Forde, computer nerd, endurance athlete, and DeLorean owner contact Subscribe Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS. Flavors There's more than one way to view this weblog; try these flavors on for size. index circa 1993 Sections main musings running DeLorean code unix album TBM Archives 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 Disclaimers, Copyrights, Privacy, Etc. ToS Copyrights Links olix0r.net netmeister.org Giraffes Eat. Run. Sleep.	10 Dec 2013 Thoughts on National Computer Science Education Week This week is apparently National Computer Science Education Week. Code.org is organizing the "hour of code" to promote teaching of Computer Science and Programming in schools. They're also organizing petitions to make CS courses count as credits in Mathematics or Science for High School graduation requirements. In High School, my CS courses were by far my favorites, Programming in Pascal, AP Comp Sci in Pascal, Programming in C++, and AP Comp Sci in C++ ( the language for the exam switched my junior year). I learned a lot about structured code, elegant, efficient code. I learned enough about Data Structures and Algorithms that I didn't have to study for my college CS classes until Computational Structures (Discrete Math II with Scheme, essentially) in my third semester. I had an amazing Computer Science teacher who also taught me Calculus and the proper order of precedence in life: God, Family, Math. I wouldn't be where I am today without that educational opportunity I had in High School. I want others to have that opportunity too. However, this is where I differ with the opinion of the Code.org folks. I do not believe that CS classes should count toward the Math or Science requirements. In this state, CS counts toward the "practical or performing art" requirements, I'm assuming under the "practical" label. I think this is a better place for it at the High School level. Computer Science is not a hard Science. It's not Physics. It's not Biology. It's not Chemistry. There's a saying that if the subject has science in its name, it's not really a science. That is true with Computer Science. It's not studying the how and why of atoms, of molecules, of living systems, of anything really. It's not science. Computer Science is really applied mathematics. I am very fortunate that the college program I went through was very strong in mathematics: Calc I and II, Linear (Matrix) Algebra, Discrete Math, Discrete Math II in the guise of Computational Structures, Probability and Statistics, Theory of Computation, Algorithmic Analysis... the list goes on. All of these mathematical foundations were then applied to a machine, to make the machine carry out a task in an efficient manner. It's those mathematical foundations that are the true core of Computer Science. While mathematics is the core of Computer Science and Computer Science is essentially applied mathematics, I do not believe it should count toward the Math requirements. The CS classes would likely detract from other mathematics courses such as Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus. These courses are far too important to an education to be replaced by a Computer Science course. Many, maybe even most, High School Computer Science courses focus more on "programming" than the fundamental mathematical theories. They will pick the language du jour and teach you the syntax and semantics. They'll teach about basic data structures like arrays, and linked lists. The AP exam currently focuses not on implementing lists, trees, stacks, queues, and sorting and searching algorithms, but on arrays and lists using Java library calls. This is not math. This is learning Java syntax. [/code] [permanent link] 05 Nov 2013 Normalcy I realized that if and when I have children, they will grow up thinking it's normal to have a DeLorean. [/dmc] [permanent link] 17 Oct 2013 ... On man pages, a mini-rant I really despise the linux man pages. They're useless at best and wrong at worst. From the man page for setsockopt: "The include file <sys/socket.h> contains definitions for socket level options, described below." 1) The options are not "described below." 2) No, that file actually doesn't contain those definitions. On the other hand... The FreeBSD man page for setsockopt does actually describe the options and under FreeBSD the <sys/socket.h> file does indeed contain the definitions. [/unix] [permanent link] 16 Oct 2013 [mini-rant] I hate bash. I hate it. I hate how it bastardized bourne by adding half-assed implementations of features from ksh and tcsh. [/unix] [permanent link] 12 Oct 2013 Problems with loader.conf First the background. The story of how I got into this mess: I'm trying to get ACPI working on my laptop under FreeBSD. Specifically, I'm trying to get Resume to work properly. Suspend works, and resume seems to partially work. The fans spin up, the keyboard's backlight comes back on, but no screen. And without video, it's a little hard to figure out what's going on. ACPI works great on my server. It's running the same FreeBSD 9.1 x86-64 build that the laptop is, but the biggest difference is that it's an intel motherboard. The laptop is an Alienware, for our purposes, I might as well just call it a Dell. I started comparing the ASL output from both machines and noticed some things. First, the Alienware's ACPI implementation looks for the OS to be various forms of Windows or "Linux." The intel ACPI implementation also looks for these Windows variants and "Linux" but it has an additional OS string. It has an entry for "FreeBSD." I figured the easiest next step was to use iasl co compile the intel ASL source and load that DSDT onto the laptop. *I calculated the odds it would work vs the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid... and I went ahead and did it anyway...* I compiled the asl and I set /boot/loader.conf to override the DSDT with the intel one I had just compiled and I rebooted. At first everything was good. The machine went down, I got the boot loader, and the FreeBSD kernel started to load. Seconds into the kernel load, it rebooted itself. After the second time, I powered off and tried a cold boot. Same problem just as I had feared. Now i was in a situation where I couldn't successfully boot because of an error in loader.conf I needed to find a way to edit it. And here's the solution: The FreeBSD bootloader, like many others, works in stages. At a certain point, it can be interrupted at which point it provides a set of simple yet powerful commands to control various aspects of the loading process. If you still have that default menu at load, I beleive the option to chose is 6. I disable that menu so during a brief countdown I hit escape before the boot loader turns control over to the kernel. Once in the boot loader prompt, I entered the following commands: unload load kernel boot Pretty simple right? The unload command does what it says, it unloads the kernel and any modules loader.conf had pulled into memory. The load kernel command grabs the kernel and loads it into memory... but only the kernel thus ignoring the broken DSDT in loader.conf. And of course boot tells the boot loader to continue booting the system. Once booted, I removed the bad DSDT from loader.conf. [/unix] [permanent link] 10 Oct 2013 [/musings] [permanent link] 05 Oct 2013 1381017534 Good night, demonslayers. ================================================================== This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T [/mobile] [permanent link] 1381006292 --_CEEC49CB-DE1D-4A1E-9DFE-114E3B54D3CB_ Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Test blog Sent from my Windows Phone= --_CEEC49CB-DE1D-4A1E-9DFE-114E3B54D3CB_ Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Type: text/html; charset="Windows-1252" pe> Test blog R> Sent from my Windows Phone = --_CEEC49CB-DE1D-4A1E-9DFE-114E3B54D3CB_-- [/mobile] [permanent link] 1381005175 Corning is a quaint little town. Looking forward to exploring. ================================================================== This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T [/mobile] [permanent link] 1380987012 test test [/mobile] [permanent link] 09 Aug 2013 chafing... WARNING: possible TMI I thought I had healed from the chafing left after Saturday's River to Sea Relay... Until I ran in the rain yesterday. To quote a friend, "It feels like someone took a cheese grater to my crotch." [/running] [permanent link] 22 Jul 2013 Why do I run? So, why do I run? Here's one reason: [/running] [permanent link] 15 Jul 2013 Windows 8.1 in Virtual Box I was attempting to run the Windows 8.1 Preview in a VM using Sun's Oracle's Virtual Box on a Windows 7 host. I ran into a minor problem. The OS wouldn't boot. I received an error stating: Your computer needs to restart. Please hold down the power button. Error Code: 0x000000C4 Parameters: [redacted] Looking for the error code online led me to this article describing the issue and a fix. The key to fixing this was running the command: "c:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" setextradata "" VBoxInternal/CPUM/CMPXCHG16B 1 The CMPXCHG16B is an instruction in 64-bit X86 processors that allows for atomic operations on octal words. [/musings] [permanent link] 21 Jun 2013 Excluding directories while using pax(1) My primary disk is failing. There are large segments that are generating low level IO errors during read or write operations. Most of the files written to the bad area were under /usr/ports/ where the FreeBSD Ports collection is installed. A few files were under the web server's root. Figuring I'd take care of things prior to the disk actually failing to the point of it being irrecoverable, I purchased a new disk early. I installed it, partitioned it, and formatted it. To copy the data over, ignoring the areas that were causing the IO errors, I used mv to "move" the files from the web root under /usr/ports and used the following command as root: pax -rwvpe -s':/usr/ports/.::gp' -X / /mnt/newdisk/ The -X prevents pax from traversing into mount points that have a different device ID than the one on which it was started. This prevents an infinitely recursive loop from happening when the new disk's mount point would have been hit. It also prevents data on the non-failing disks from being copied as well. the -s option allows for sed search and replace scripts to be run. In this example, the : is used as the delimiter and any path matching /usr/ports/ is replaced by a null string. With this replacement all directories under /usr/ports are excluded from the copy. [/unix] [permanent link] 18 Jun 2013 Senator Elbert Guillory Elbert Guillory, a state senator in Louisiana, has switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. This website has a short commentary on the matter, as well as an embedded video of Senator Guillory explaining his decision. [/politics] [permanent link] 30 Apr 2013 I LOL'ed PATIENT: "The problem is that obesity runs in my family." DOCTOR: "No, the problem is that no one runs in your family." [/running] [permanent link] 02 Apr 2013 World Autism Day [/musings] [permanent link]

Eponymous

	About My Infrequently Updated Blog. The web-based journal of M. Forde, computer nerd, endurance athlete, and DeLorean owner contact Subscribe Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS. Flavors There's more than one way to view this weblog; try these flavors on for size. index circa 1993 Sections main musings running DeLorean code unix album TBM Archives 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 Disclaimers, Copyrights, Privacy, Etc. ToS Copyrights Links olix0r.net netmeister.org Giraffes Eat. Run. Sleep.	01 May 2012 Volunteers Needed The Lincoln Park Triathlon needs volunteers. If you'd like to help out, please visit www.lincolnparktriathlon.com/volunteers for more information. This event isn't possible without the help of volunteers. If you or anyone you know would be interested in helping, please contact us. [/musings] [permanent link]

First the background. The story of how I got into this mess:

And here's the solution: