Trends in Japan

I really cant explain it..nor what those wacky folks in Japan are thinking. Still, I keep up with the trends.

Dirty!

Dub has a new GPS in his car so I got to mess with that. We spent the first hour debating if it was a better idea to follow the directions or just take 20 most of the way. Come Abilene, we opted to follow the computer…which was probably the fastest. For the next 300 miles of hwy 67, we probably saw 20 cars total. Go technology.

The first highlight of the trip was when we hit the Comanche springs restaurant in Fort Stockton. Its main attraction is the Big Chef Sitting Bull burger. It serves 4 to 6 people and is FREE if you eat it (with fries) in an hour.

Dub had to give it a try. Mostly because he had a cousin (Kegman) who had made an excellent run at it a year or so before. Our waitress seriously tried to talk him out of it. Dub insisted. John even got some footage of them making the burger in the kitchen. When it came out…DANG..check this out

Here is the burger against a 1/4 lb burger!!!!

Party Cove just looks ill.

He had a go at it..but didn’t finish it. Luckily the motel had a mini fridge so we could keep it around and take bites over the weekend. (Yuck)

We pulled into Marfa around 11:30pm. After unloading the truck, it was closing time for the bar, but most of the wedding party was still loitering in the Thunderbird parking lot. I retired early, while the rest of the band went with the remaining wedding party to try and see the marfa lights.

We started the next day with pizza from Pizza Foundation.

It was some EXCELLENT pizza. I highly recommend it.

I walked around town a bit after, but I cant say that Marfa did much for me. The town is kinda like a Texas version of Aspen…but without 98% of the high dollar amenities. I looked at the pictures on the real estate office…most places were 150k to start (for shacks.)
Tons of art galleries…but the restaurants were modest. ( A good thing) Food was certainly good, but homey. Lots of people walking around with cell phones and yet, no Starbucks. The only retail coffee was at the gas station. Its a unique place. Maybe the best way to describe it is a place for rich Dallasites to go, but where they seem to be happy NOT bringing all that Dallas crap with them. (Just the cell phones and laptops…gotta tell everybody where you are at right?)

The weather and view is breathtaking. I hope to go back so I can see Big Bend.

The Wedding reception was a blast. We got fed the most amazing food. Quail (deboned!), Lobster, Pork and beef tenderloin (OH GOD!!! IT WAS AMAZING) and a most stellar Gumbo. The groom’s family are in the food biz…so that was an important part of the party…and spared no expense.

I was fascinated by all the candles.

the venue was pretty nice. Apparently Sonic Youth played there a year ago. We where told this many times. Yo La Tango was going to be there in a month. Did I mention that the town was filled with hipsters?

We dreaded Sunday’s drive back to Dallas. Amazingly, we got out of town by noon. We had quick stop at Alpine for food and a picture op at Jackassic Park.

I suppose its time to post my offical resume.

Word and PDF

They do some formatting too, so I might update it as needed.

This weekend is the Claremore Bluegrass and Chili festival. I’ve heard of this a few times over the years. This year the headliners are Tony Rice, Russell Moore and IIIrd time out, Rhonda Vincent and the Rage, Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver as well as Dan Tyminski (the singing voice of George Clooney in “Brother Where Art Thou”).

Unfortunately, Tony Rice…the guy I wanted to see the most, had to cancel due to Hurricane Gustav. (?? I’m not sure why…but whatever). His backup band, Mountain Heart, is usually a headliner anyway so they just played a longer set. The sound was excellent.

I didn’t find much jamming last night…but it was a Thursday. Bluegrass festivals in Texas/OK are much
different than the ones I’m used to in California. Out in California, the shows start Friday night and continue on until Sunday finishing with a gospel set and a few more winding down acts in the afternoon while folks procrastinate between packing up or having a few last beers.

Out here, the shows start on Thursday and are done Saturday night. I guess folks need to get back to church.
Bluegrass festivals are largely alcohol free as opposed to the “Texas Music” festivals like Larry Joes. Note that even the beer soaked festivals don’t have shows on Sundays. The two groups don’t seem to mix much.

Tonight should be pretty good. I hope to find a little more jamming…I’m kinda selective about thegroups I play bluegrass with. I like them to be better than me.

Tulsa is kinda neat. Its definitely an oil town. There are two refineries smack dab in the city center. Doesn’t seem to make gas any cheaper.

There are tons of neat motels on route 66 that herald a day when all you needed was a 15 foot blue whale in front of your motel to get customers to stop and stay. Thats WAAAY better than free wi-fi. Lots of neat old signs.

Downtown has a ton of older buildings. Very Art Deco.

I drove around a bit. There are plenty of independent coffee shops and art stores.

I read about one part called the Brookside district. Its supposed to be hip and trendy. Coming from Dallas that reads “New Urbanism“…blech. In reality, it looked like an older neighborhood like Lower Greenville in the 1980’s. Hope it stays like that and doesn’t end up like 2008 Lower Greenville.

There are a lot of pottery shops too. Guess with all these artists, the coffee shop I’m at got a deal on custom coffee cups.

I had hoped to drop by the Mercury Lounge too to say hello. The Sues had a gig booked there a year ago that was cancelled by the booking agent. Unfortunately, it was one of those situations where the disgruntled booking agent cancelled the acts and didnt tell the club. We are still on the website as a featured band…but have never played there.  The least I could do is step foot in it for a minute or two.

Basically, its a PIC chip with a bootstrap program on it. You can’t use just any PIC, you order the chip from the makers of PICAXE.  On the plus side, you have a “kernel” on the chip that makes programming it a breeze.  Just a serial connection from your serial port on the computer is needed.  Because of this, you can build a programmer with just a few parts.  Additionally, the BASIC is really simple.

The downside is that the kernel overhead is kinda high.  Even though a 8 pin PIC runs at 4Mhz, that translates to about 10,000 BASIC commands a second.

To get started I just bought this.  Its entry level. The cord is pretty much all you need. Once you have that, you can build a programming interface into any project you make with a resistor and a 1/8 inch stereo plug.

Because it is so darned easy, I figured it would be useful in my general exploration of noise making circuits.

My projects so far are here.

So far, it appears that its not so good for making audio.  There is a sound command, it can be used intelligently, but for the most part, its better suited for controlling things.  There are no timed interrupts and for the most part, its all synchronous. If you run a one second basic command to play a note…the processor is tied up for a second.

Still, I have hope I can find useful applications for this chip.  CMOS provides good building blocks, but you can simply things with code easily. Unfortunately,  CMOS is fast and the PICAXE is not.

Next Ill look at the PICAXE as a DCLFO. I found a good start at using PICAXE chips and shift registers here.

Seems like could make a decent LFO (with waveforms) based on shift registers.

Follow me. Using an 8 bit shift register and a resolution of 16 samples a second, an LFO with a max of 4 hz  would require 10000/ ( ( 8 bits * 16 values per waveform * 4 hz))  = 19 basic instructions per  interrupt.

Thats doable for an LFO considering most of the time, all we are doing is pulsing a bit. It will be grainy, but doable. For the most part, each interrupt would be a pulsing a bit.  Reading a READADC would be once in a blue moon. Anyway…in the next week Ill figure out if I can do it or not.

Applications? Well…who knows.

Later Ill get into the PWM capabilities of the PICAXE.  This can be filtered to get an analog value

Still I didn’t see any reason to not brush up on a few things. I have a pathological fear of being under prepared for these kind of things. When I googled “Technical interview questions” I found a wealth of du jour offbeat questions. The forums were filled with people asking “what do interviewers ask?” from candidates. Sadly, they were also filled with questions from potential interviewers asking what sort of questions should they be asking.

The most reasonable questions were the ones that test basic knowledge. I agree with those. If you have SQL on your resume, be prepared to write out a few simple statements. If you have JAVA, be prepared to write a simple class. Patterns and UML…better be able to write a diagram and at least know how to code a singleton on the whiteboard. I prepared for that stuff. It took time but it all was review or at most reviewing what the latest jargon was describing the stuff I already know.

Since I know everything I put on my resume I felt pretty confident.
(although…I might take PHP off because it is apparently a bit more involved that the stuff Ive done so far).

My technical interview went really well. I felt I nailed it, but they had somebody they liked better. I guess my vacation will go as planned.

An ex-coworker told me of an interview he did that had 7+ interviewers including the CTO . Then they asked him to come in the next day so that the CEO could do more stuff. (including those stupid riddles that self absorbed executives like to ask so they feel like they are smarter than the “talent”).

Finally after about 6 hours into the interview process he said “Make an offer”. It was for half his old salarly and one week vacation. He laughed and left.

One thing I did notice about my Swing knowledge was that even though I have been using it for almost a decade, there is a ton of stuff to learn. Java makes it so easy to pick up what you need. The APIs are all on line. You tell me what you want and I can research and code it. But after the interview and looking at all those questions it seemed like I needed to be a bit more proactive.

off to NERDBOOKS!

If you have not been to nerdbooks…you gotta go. (If your into technical books I mean) Its an internet bookstore in Richardson. They really are just an internet store, but you can visit the warehouse and browse the shelves. You have to follow a few rules.

1. You gotta like Dogs! There are 3 huge dogs that have the run of the place. They are more important than walkins. If you dont like dogs…tough…use the internet. Walk-ins are a privilage. The dogs have the rights!

2. No Small children. See 1.

3. You still have to order online. They have terminals inside. Weird huh? You enter your credit card and hand the guy the books. He looks em over and hands them back to you.

4. There are a ton of books and a crazy ordering system that you will not understand. If you cant
find a book, and you often will not…ask for it. Dont even try.

5. Its ALWAYS Chirstmas. Or..well…they just dont see any reason to take down the Christmas tree.

Its a really neat place. The books are cheaper than Borders and they have free soda. The dogs are actually very well behaved. I try and get my books there whenever possible.