The Mumbler

Here's what I remember. I remember plans being made in the driveway and the thrill of anticipation. I remember Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" playing on the radio as we wound our way up the Sea-to-Sky highway. I remember a crackling fire in the fireplace, as soothing a sound as you'll find in this world. I remember hiking and exploring. I remember letting my friends go alone. I remember a soft voice when nobody was speaking. I remember terror. I remember the Mumbler.

"The sun shining at this time for a few minutes afforded an island which, from the shape of the mountain that composes it, obtained the name of Anvil island."

~ from the journal of Captain George Vancouver, June 14, 1792

On a small island in Howe Sound named Anvil, my grandfather built two cabins, both nestled (one above the other) under the shoulder of a Bible camp. The one down by the rocky beach was for him; the one above, on a steep rise, for his sister Jean.

The cabins in Winter

Anvil Island seems to exist in two different worlds. In the memories of many, it's sunshine. Its warmth and brightness can make a person glow for long afterwards, almost like the effect of radiation in a comic. In the real world, it's an island of cold dark shadows, moist with the memory of rain that never quite goes away, surrounded by mountains that steal most of the few hours of sunshine that might persuade its dank forest to surrender its water to the sky. Around some 90% of its shoreline bare cliffs plunge directly into glacier-fed, mercury-stained waters. It looks less like an anvil than a grotesque molar, lonely in the mouth of the sound. Welcoming, it is not.

Ah, but it is well-loved, despite its somewhat fierce mien. As a child, it was my real home. Civilization was a baffling, noisy and unfriendly place. As a teenager, I merely waited out the school year to return to it for those blissful few weeks of socializing that made sense to me. It was in that between time of adolescence that I went there and finally saw past the brightness into its dark, dark shadows. Something was there, looking back at me.

Sounds Get Squished, Sounds Get Gooder

One of the first things I learned about working with music on computers is that the most important effect you can use is compression. The next thing I learned was that it's the least understood effect. Lord knows I didn't understand it. I'm not entirely certain I do now, but I feel confident enough to blather about it in a blog post. I'm pretty sure that I know it well enough to describe it, even if my own application of it would make proper audio engineers point and laugh. But why worry? Nobody reads this blog. And if anyone ever does and they happen to know where I've gone wrong, maybe I'll finally learn!

Original, compressed and final side-by-side-by-side

Quick 'splain
[1] Because of peaks, levels can only be increased so far using just volume controls.
[2] Compression squishes the peaks down.
[3] Now volume controls can raise the levels more effectively.

That's a quick overview, but I'm going to go into more detail about each stage. Read on, if you care.

There's a Market for Anything

Hello!

It took me by surprise at first, because I couldn't even imagine it would be desired, let alone popular enough for an entire product line. But as time went by, it became increasingly clear that Cottonelle toilet paper must be specifically designed to allow a finger through. Either that or they've failed rather spectacularly to make a useful toilet paper. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that there is enough demand for a TP that includes a high likelihood of a surprise connection between fingertip and sphincter that such a product would be on the market and available wherever normal alternatives can be found.

It puts me in mind of a Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson quote from an old Stuff or Maxim magazine. This is from memory; I no longer have access to the magazine and I can't find the quote online.

I still maintain that the best piece of ass I ever had was when my finger went through the paper.

Maybe Cottonelle can work out a sponsorship agreement with him.

Blog Blogger Bloggest

Way back in the dim, dark history of websites I started to make them. I wasn't very good at it at first, but nobody is and few people ever got to be exceptional. There just weren't many good ways to make websites look good at first, especially with the number of differences between browsers and at first there was no such thing as a WYSIWYG editor. I think, actually, Mozilla had a simpe editor but it wasn't particularly good for much more than very simple things.

Along came Dreamweaver. It was - supposedly - powerful and excellent. I got a copy for work. I hated it.

Here's how it changed my workflow: I used to code pages by hand in a simple text editor. But Dreamweaver allowed me to use a visual editor to almost make the web pages I wanted. After I made each one I needed to make changes by hand so I would wade through oceans of pointless, confusing and distracting gibberish and often simply give up and go back to the text editor.

So really it added time (and frustration) to my workflow. I stopped using it and haven't gone back to anything like it since. That was in about 1998. I still use a text editor. In fact, I'm writing in one now!

Heroes of Pulp Fiction

Adventure Comics #372

When I was just a little kid, I read the comics that my oldest brother inherited from our even older cousins. I didn’t choose anything; I just read whatever was available. Mostly these were DC’s Adventure Comics from the late 60s featuring Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes. Superboy, you see, would travel 1000 years into the future to fight evil villains with a great big group of teen heroes who had all been inspired by his own legendary self. They were colourful and campy, filled with teenage drama and science fiction. In other words, perfect!

The concept of artists and authors being responsible for these works never occurred to me. There were just the stories and the characters, and that was good enough for me.

Hey Baby, Nice... Nevermind

I've never been much of a Green Lantern fan. Not sure why, he's just never really captured my imagination. But I'm always interested in the latest comic-based movies, so I was checking out the Green Lantern trailer when something grabbed my attention.

Or maybe I should say a lack of something grabbed my attention; a lack of clothing. Yes, in typical comic book fashion, a female character is exposing her chest in a way that's just barely legal and is definitely in violation of physics. And it makes it even more glaringly obvious when she is the only character showing any flesh and also the only female character in a room full of male characters.

It's Stifling in Here!

Photo by David Shankbone

Said Fox News chief Roger Ailes of the reasons behind Glenn Beck's departure: "Advertisers who get weak-kneed because some idiot on a blog site writes to them and says we need to stifle speech, I get a little frustrated by that."

I spent a little time wondering what he meant by "stifling speech". It's obviously not about Beck's ability to speak. That's unchanged. And he can do it in public, too. Then there are the books that he publishes. He's losing his TV show at Fox, but I haven't heard that his radio show is over. Oh, and he has a website.

So what does stifling speech mean to Roger Ailes? I guess it means that nobody is willing to pay Beck millions of dollars to speak on TV. With that it mind...

Stop stifling my speech!