facebook | twitter | google reader | soundcloud



Wednesday, July 30, 2008
he's at it again! this guy has gas to burn!
7:28 PM

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

permalink / 0 comment(s)



How to Daisy-Chain 2 Serato Boxes
4:57 PM
Each month, The Librarian and I use two laptops and two Serato boxes so that both of us can use the same two turntables and one mixer. Enough people have asked me how to do this that I made this quick diagram.

Note that to do it this way you need a 4-channel mixer, but you do not need any additional cables and you don't need to split the signal either.

On this diagram, "t" refers to the "through" channel of the Serato box.

__mixer__
| |
___________________________________|ch1 line |
| _______________ _________|ch1 phono|
| | | | | |
| | ___________|_______|_________|ch2 line |
| | | ______ | | _____|ch2 phono|
| | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | _|____|____|ch3 line |
| | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | __|____|ch4 line |
| | | | | | | | | | |_________|
_|_|__|_|__ | | _|_|__|_|_
| 1 t1 2 t2 | | | |1 t1 2 t2|
| serato | | | | serato |
| a | | | | b |
|___________| | | |__________|
| | | |______| |
| | |_____________|
| |_______________
| |
| |
__|______ ____|____
| | | |
| deck 1 | | deck 2 |
| | | |
|_________| |_________|


With this setup, mixer channels 1 & 2 have both line & phono, so DJ #1 can use those as he normally would.

DJ #2 *can* also do vinyl, but he needs to remember that the vinyl is still on the first two channels.

If you *do* want, you can split the phono signals right before the mixer, putting phono 1 also into phono 3 (and phono 2 also into phono 4), but that just weakens the signal and is unnecessary.

Regarding power:
If you have zero power supplies, *both* Serato box USBs need to be plugged into the laptops.

If you have *one* power supply, you can unplug the USB for that box. So, for example, if you do need to switch laptops (e.g. if you have 3 Serato dj's), then it's easy to move the power supply from one Serato to another.

UPDATE: Thanks to the folks on the ScratchLive forum, here's a pic someone else did of a similar setup.

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Monday, July 28, 2008
no more link farming here
4:44 PM
so, now that i've been a heavy user of google reader, the link-farmer type stuff that I used to post here gets mostly posted over there. not a big deal; in fact, i'd say I get more viewers over there. :)

anyway, so if you still want to see that stuff, and you aren't already my google reader shared friend, hit me up with a google talk chat request (to my dj name at gmail.com), then turn on your "friends shared items". you'll be doing yourself a favor anyway. google reader is awesome.

I guess that means i'll have to come up with actual content for this blog!

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Sunday, July 27, 2008
john waters at southgate
10:06 PM

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

permalink / 2 comment(s)



Wednesday, July 23, 2008
mowing the sidewalk
8:41 PM

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net



nothing like using gasoline WHERE A BROOM WILL DO!

douche-tastic.

this is the guy who has what we call the "Best Driveway in the World™". i've seen him use a power washer to essentially rake leaves out into the street.

permalink / 2 comment(s)



Macho Boy at a rave
12:02 AM

2008-07-19: Macho Boy @ Electronica 101 from dj empirical on Vimeo.

we unplugged those fucking annoying raver lights not long after.

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Monday, July 21, 2008
yawn
2:41 AM
going to bed too late. tomorrow's listening should include early Death and also some Derek Bailey.

whether that will be helping or hindering my energy level is yet to be discovered. :)

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Saturday, July 19, 2008
kyle cannon
11:01 PM

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

permalink / 0 comment(s)



sean enjoying a 40 on his 40th
9:26 PM

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Monday, July 14, 2008
my international music collection
3:45 PM
so, i did something i don't do often: put my main music collection on random/shuffle. usually when i do shuffle it's on a smaller subset of my music, say, music i got in the last month, or something like that.

the first 10 results: most non-USA music. neat. here they are, with country designation.

Skatenigs - Hoosegow (USA)
Pitchshifter - Skin Grip (UK)
Roots Manuva - Awfully Deep (UK)
Benny Benassi - B-Tone (Italy)
Dokaka - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Japan)
Nancy Ajram - Sana Wara Sana (Year After Year) (Lebanon)
Neil Hamburger - He Wasn't One (USA)
Nitzer Ebb - K.I.A. (UK)
Queen - Princes of the Universe (UK)
Robert Normandeau - Éclats de voix (Canada)
Final stats: UK 4, USA 2, and one each Italy, Japan, Lebanon & Canada. That's a pretty good mix, I'd say. Maybe i'll update this as shuffle continues.

anyone else? this could be a good meme, right? :)

UPDATE: next 10:

Dr. Seuss - The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, side 1 (USA)
Les Rita Mitsouko - Petite Fille Princesse (France)
Momus - Don't Leave (UK)
The Knife - Marble House (Sweden)
Dream Theater - Through Her Eyes (Alternate Vocal & Alternate Sax) (USA)
Liaisons Dangereuses - Etre Assis Ou Danser (Germany)
Clutch - Land of Pleasant Living (USA)
Cassetteboy - NewsiswherejournalistsR (UK)
Mitch Hedberg - Gambling (USA)
Plump DJs - Tilt (UK)
UK is still in the lead! :)

New totals: UK 7, USA 6, and one each Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Canada, Sweden, France, and Germany.

UPDATE 2: one last update. next 10:

Björk - Bachelorette (RZA Remix) (Iceland)
NoMeansNo - Brother Rat (Canada)
Phonosychographdisk - Blow? (USA)
Gnarls Barkley - The Boogie Monster (USA)
Dandi Wind - Utopia Now (Canada)
dr. butcher m.d. - The Arrival (USA)
Ozzy Osbourne - Working Class Hero (UK)
Mogwai - Cody (UK)
Cansei de Ser Sexy - Alala (Brazil)
orNot! - Illigant Brogues (i'm from the USA ;) )
so, final totals for the 1st 30 on shuffle: USA 10, UK 9, Canada 3, and one each Brazil, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, and Sweden. So, the USA wins, but with only 1/3 of the tracks.

Anyone else want to try it?

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Dolby's Cube
1:46 PM
What?!? A group made of Thomas Dolby, Lene Lovich, and George Clinton (and featuring one of the pioneers of house music)? Why did I not know of such a beast?

Ah, because there wasn't much material, and its most prominent position was as part of the soundtrack to a particularly odious Lucasfilm. No wonder.

You can hear it as well, thanks to the egg city radio blog, though the tagging is as odious as the film. Good thing I'm a musicbrainz user.

UPDATE: It's a neat coincidence that Dolby made a related post a day before I posted this bog entry.

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Book Meme
11:29 AM
Book meme, grabbed from glacial23. I've read nine of them.

----
The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you read part of but never finished.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strikethough those you hope to never read again, and sometimes wish you could un-read.

As glacial23 did, I've also added notes in parenthesis.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (dje: I've read, I think, 2 of the three books in the series)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (dje: I couldn't imagine reading the whole thing, talk about boring!)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (The Tempest, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, All's Well That Ends Well, Twelfth Night / What You Will, Henry IV, part 1, Henry V, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline) (dje: jesus, that's *one* book to them?! Italicized, as I've read R&J, MacBeth, and I think RIII)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (dje: I'm taking this to mean the first book, not the entire friggin' series, which i couldn't finish. I read it right after reading The Illuminatus Trilogy, which made HHGG seem... lame. )
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (dje: yes, a strikethough of a book I haven't read. eat me. I read Angels & Demons and that was enough Dan Brown for me.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (This is one of the few Irving novels i *haven't* read.)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

permalink / 3 comment(s)



Monday, July 07, 2008
neat last.fm thing
6:56 PM

permalink / 2 comment(s)



schädel: "Trevithick"
9:59 AM
So, near the end of last year, arratik had a quick little contest involving a secret message, which I was able to solve. Not long after, he sent me my prize, a circuit-bent toy train. It rules, and I've used it in a couple live shows (as schädel, half of the noise group The Black Fives).

I also used it in a 13+ minute noise piece, which i recorded, handed out to a couple people, but didn't upload here. Last night, editing chunks of my band's practice sessions, I ran across the wav file and decided to remaster (or really, just "master") it, which involved leveling out the audio in a couple places, and adding some reverb to the whole thing.

So here it is, for your listening (dis)pleasure.
schädel, "Trevithick"

Items used: the train (with effects) and a mixer feeding back into itself.

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Wednesday, July 02, 2008
McCain's no McBrain
9:56 PM

McCain's no McBrain, originally uploaded by DJ Empirical.

just letting you know where my loyalties lie.

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Tuesday, July 01, 2008
a few vids from the radiohead tribute show
11:45 AM
i managed get a few vids on my little p&s.


2008-06-28: Black Signal, "Down Is the New Up" from dj empirical on Vimeo.

my guitar tone is shit in this vid, but it sounded fine there. hmm.
sean (our drummer) is singing on this, and dan is pinch hitting the drums.



2008-06-28: Ghost Horses, "The Goaming" from dj empirical on Vimeo.

a minimal techno/acid version of radiohead. i loved it.




2008-06-28: Guild of Calamitous Intent, "2+2=5" from dj empirical on Vimeo.

sean sang for this project as well; it features a few members of his old band malahida.

permalink / 0 comment(s)



hope for the future
11:23 AM
i was in macy's yesterday, when in walks a gaggle of 12/13 year old girls giggling and being generally very... 12/13 years old. i was walking down the escalator, which was broken/immobile, but still accessible.

the girls walked down behind me. in the midst of all their giggling & chatting, i heard one of them say, "sorry for the convenience".

that made me smile. there may be hope for america's youth yet.

permalink / 0 comment(s)



I'm Voting Republican
10:04 AM

permalink / 0 comment(s)



Archives:
2004/09 - 2004/10 2004/10 - 2004/11 2004/11 - 2004/12 2004/12 - 2005/01 2005/01 - 2005/02 2005/02 - 2005/03 2005/03 - 2005/04 2005/04 - 2005/05 2005/05 - 2005/06 2005/06 - 2005/07 2005/07 - 2005/08 2005/08 - 2005/09 2005/09 - 2005/10 2005/10 - 2005/11 2005/11 - 2005/12 2005/12 - 2006/01 2006/01 - 2006/02 2006/02 - 2006/03 2006/03 - 2006/04 2006/04 - 2006/05 2006/05 - 2006/06 2006/06 - 2006/07 2006/07 - 2006/08 2006/08 - 2006/09 2006/09 - 2006/10 2006/10 - 2006/11 2006/11 - 2006/12 2006/12 - 2007/01 2007/01 - 2007/02 2007/02 - 2007/03 2007/03 - 2007/04 2007/04 - 2007/05 2007/05 - 2007/06 2007/06 - 2007/07 2007/07 - 2007/08 2007/08 - 2007/09 2007/09 - 2007/10 2007/10 - 2007/11 2007/11 - 2007/12 2007/12 - 2008/01 2008/01 - 2008/02 2008/02 - 2008/03 2008/03 - 2008/04 2008/04 - 2008/05 2008/05 - 2008/06 2008/06 - 2008/07 2008/07 - 2008/08 2008/08 - 2008/09 2008/09 - 2008/10 2008/10 - 2008/11 2008/11 - 2008/12 2008/12 - 2009/01 2009/01 - 2009/02 2009/02 - 2009/03 2009/04 - 2009/05 2009/05 - 2009/06 2009/06 - 2009/07 2009/07 - 2009/08 2009/08 - 2009/09 2009/09 - 2009/10 2009/10 - 2009/11 2009/11 - 2009/12 2009/12 - 2010/01 2010/01 - 2010/02 2010/02 - 2010/03 2010/04 - 2010/05 2010/08 - 2010/09 2010/09 - 2010/10 2010/10 - 2010/11 2010/11 - 2010/12 2011/01 - 2011/02 2011/02 - 2011/03 2011/05 - 2011/06 2011/09 - 2011/10 2011/10 - 2011/11 2011/11 - 2011/12 2012/03 - 2012/04 2012/05 - 2012/06 2012/07 - 2012/08 2012/08 - 2012/09 2012/10 - 2012/11 2013/02 - 2013/03 2013/05 - 2013/06 2013/08 - 2013/09 2013/09 - 2013/10