So apparently we're going to play on May 3rd sometime after 8pm at Studio Z
here in San Francisco. Our practice yesterday produced this decent collection of
songs. It's merely 35 minutes, but played live would be stretched out closer
to 40 I'd imagine. And we have a cover we might do, too.

It works now! All that's really left is to build the detachable footboard!
Yay. Here is a picture of the internals (what a big mess of wires, I know!):

...and the front:

...and here is an MP3 I made quickly with it.

After a day at the beach, getting the tops of my feet sunburned, I came home and
registered brainal.org (think Brainal Sex), and then found myself building a very
strange website on it. <3 PHP.

Here is a lovely playlist of tracks.

Also, made an RSS feed for our full jams, not sure if that'll be
useful for people.

I'm protesting the use of the word "blog" by calling this a home page, which
is what it really is anyway. Not too different than the ones we used to have
back in the 90s, only a little more chronologically biased.

Here is another kinda entertaining song from that last (April 2nd) jam.
And another, and another.
Oh and here's one from yesterday with just me and Brennan.

After working on many of the parts seperately, I finally got to put the box 
together, and suddenly everything worked! (I have't done the audio subsytem
yet, waiting on parts, so this is just the UI and whatnot). Woohoo! My 
knobs were all backwards, but a quick firmware update later, that was fixed. 
And the range on the expression pedal needs calibration, but that'll be an 
easy software fix. And I think I want to put a hinge on the lid for easy 
access...

Got my temporary crown, joy. Somehow I've managed to get up early every day
this week (the week after DST change, at that!), and it's really driving me
into the ground. mmm need coffee..

wait what does that mean anyway? but at any rate, I (like Steve) will be getting
some bling in my mouth. functional bling no doubt, but bling no less. or so I'm
told. sigh. what I don't get is that in this age, they can't make a tooth crown
in less than 4 weeks? shouldn't they be able to do it in a week, if not a few
days? so instead I'll have to endure a nice plastic crappy temporary crown for
over a month? lame. I want instant gratification.


perhaps the best decision I've made recently was to ditch the cheap electronic
drum kit (which was in my office from back when I was testing Jesusonic with 
it) in my office, and replace it with another desk, which is devoted to 
electronics construction. it has made it so easy for me to build another AVR
board for the knobs on the new prototype (above). There's something just really
gratifying about making things easier to do (or at least not any harder than
they have to be). Oh, and here is a terrible mp3 (not quite scratching, yet, but 
maybe someday).

(oh and oops, yesterday's posting didnt go live until today, doh)

Saw "Sin City" today, was very impressed. yummy even.

I only have one complaint, it was that after getting this LCD mounted in the
new Jesusonic case, and booting the thing up, the LCD requires you to hit a 
button to turn it on. Which is annoying. So I either need to figure out a way
to hack the LCD to always be on, or do something really dumb like have the
microcontroller in the box just simulate a button press after a few seconds
of being on (which could have negative consequences, so I probably won't do
that). Or I could just mount a nice little button on the box to toggle the 
screen on and off, but having to turn the screen on every time you plug the
power in is lame. real lame.

Got an expression pedal working with Jesusonic, yummy (right now it's just
connected to my microcontroller dev board). Since that works, I started 
working on a wah effect. Using a resonant bandpass, seems to be working 
but haven't gotten it to sound decent yet. Here are a couple mp3s.

The first one also has the new advanced drum sequencer I made earlier today,
it lets you specify volume, panning, and additional timing information for
each event. Yay for more flexibility, and it's backwards compatible too.

(One final post-posting note, I realized that picture is giant line6 ad. 
oh well.)

It is quickly approaching 5 in the morning, and I just got home. After seeing
a midnight showing of Napoleon Dynamite, and a spirited rehearsal turned jam,
I decided to ride my bike the mile or so home. San Francisco SoMa and Mission
is awesome at 4 in the morning on a bicycle. Nobody around, quiet, concrete 
playground. yum.

Also, I got some Etymotic 6i headphones for free (SV100 or whatnot), and while
I'm not completely sold on their everyday use for me (a bit itchy at times),
they are fuckin perfect for band practicing. They block out so much sound,
and when you mix in the monitors, feel really natural. OK they are good for
planes too..

The highlight of the jam we had is this song of epic proportion (or should that be 
plural?). Listen to the whole thing (start to finish) if you want to get it. 

Really.

I couldn't agree more with Brennan on this subject (the second paragraph).

Also, the whole April fools joke thing is funny, and was funny back when it
would be one or two or three things being thrown in there, making you wonder,
whereas the tons and tons of them that end up on sites like slashdot make it
really just annoying. seriously.

Fun fun fun. Motherboard and CF reader mounted, keyboard/trackball mounted, LCD almost mounted
(retaining mechanism needs to be finished), microcontroller firmware for knobs, footswitches,
LED display, multiple-device-on-one-serial port support, etc, done. Need to install the audio
hardware (sound board, transformers, 1/4" TRS jacks) and build UI hardware (knobs, 
microcontroller board, etc). Need to build the detachable footboard (with its footswitches 
and microcontroller and LEDs). And then the second preprototype will be done, and if I dig it
I'll have to go see how I can build ones similar to it quickly and cheaply, *sigh*.

Also, the whole secular "SKULR" doesn't really translate well. any suggestions?

As a followup to the last post, here is a picture of the new Jesusonic model in development. 
It's considerably smaller than the CrusFX 1000, and has plenty of room to shrink even more 
for the production model. This is the secular alternative to the CrusFX, and has other 
advantages. This one measures about 21" wide, 9" deep, and 3.25" high. I am pretty confident 
that will be able to be more like 8" deep and 2.5" high soon.

On a personal note, it's very satisfying going through an interative design process, learning as
I go, and realizing "hey, the next model I can make it even smaller." 

I think this model is going to get stained, as well. yum. The screen and keyboard will be recessed
into the top of it, the knobs will be along the front of the top (and they will be protected if
I get my way), the CF slot will be on the right side, all the power and audio i/o will be on 
the back, and the right side will have the footboard and expression pedal ports.

Soon I will be building the custom boards for this model. I set up a new little desk just for 
soldering and testing. fun.
 
I still need to find a nice compact backlit keyboard. help.

What's going on with Jesusonic:

  + jesusonic.com was down for a bit, but is back up now. the forums will
be back up shortly. the user submissions database was restored from an old
copy, so submissions that were from the last 2.5 weeks are not up, but they
will be back in the next few days too.

  + I've decided to use the Jesusonic prototype #1 (pictured on the web
site and whatnot) for our band's second show, which should happen in May 
here in SF. This will be the Jesusonic's stage debut! I'll post details of the
show once the scheduling is finalized.

  + I've begun construction of a secular Jesusonic prototype, which will be
slightly larger than the Pod XT Live, and will feature a detachable footboard,
8 assignable knobs (4 rotary encoders and 4 pots), balanced outputs, two inputs
(both hi-z and lo-z) and other refinements. For this prototype I'm moving 
from Basswood to 1/4" cabinet grade plywood, but I'm thinking I'll get 
some ABS cut from TAP plastics if this design works well. In the mean 
time, I've been reading up on my scrollsaw technique, so hopefully
I can go make some nice clean straight cuts. Pictures will follow shortly.

So Brennan Christophe and I decided that we're going to play a show in May,
so we've started practicing, and here are the relevant cuts from the practices
of our songs, in case anybody wants to hear:
  + from today (m3u playlist)
  + from 3 days ago (m3u playlist)
We have a long way to go, but I totally dig these so far. I'm not sure I know of
any other bands who make everything they ever do available for people to stream
as it is produced.. kinda fun, not sure what it really means though..

Congrats Tom, too, if you ever read this (doubtful).

Got a $329 Dell 420SC server (paid the extra $99 for the P4 instead of a 
Celeron), getting a bunch of RAM for it, so it'll be like $500 for a 
P4 2.8 ghz server, 160gb SATA disk, 2GB RAM, and GigE. Not bad. Oh what
will I do with all of the power?? I'm so used to this P3-500 with 512mb...
(this is for a name/mail/web server, in case you're wondering)