Glacial Communications

It turns out we can’t go to Burning Man this year. It’s cost prohibitive for us, and we were running into some scheduling SNAFUs- for us in Ohio, it’s a two-week affair including travel…

Our loss could be your gain – we’re selling the tickets on eBay. Get ‘em while they’re there. update: They’re gone. Hooray for “Buy it Now”.

And here I just about had band-in-a-bag ready to go…

If you’re a regular subscriber, you may have just noticed the RSS feed went a little haywire. It’s on purpose. I’ve 1) rearranged things so that FeedBurner is now the RSS provider for the site, and 2) I’ve installed the FeedWordPress to merge the Press The Button Podcast feed into this blog. It’s now one stop shopping! Now all I have to do is get the enclosures to work properly in the feed, and tweak the default text – the podcast feed is automatically generated by a shell script that runs a few hours after the show is over.

This week’s show was all about slapstick comedy. Three Stooges, WC Fields, etc.

The first hour was all about maps, since that’s my latest obsession (while you’re at it, check out the maphacks page – there have been a lot of updates).

The second hour was less about maps, and more about the feedback/delay system we’ve been using the past couple of weeks. I also was giving my QY-10 (yeah, I got another one) a bit of a spin.

Ok, this isn’t terribly musical, but I decided to throw together a little Google Maps mash-up last night.

Basically, I took a bunch of USGS GeoName data, pulled the “summit” data (aka mountains and hills, etc.) out and reformatted it into XML. The script will then display all the mountains on the map for a particular state/territory (all 50 states, DC, and most territories are represented). For a state with a lot of peaks (California, Alaska, New York, etc.) it’s really slow to render. Be patient. Hopefully I’ll come up with something a bit faster/better soon.

Hopefully this is just the first of many “maphacks”, as I call them.

Check out MapHacks here.

Take a break for a couple of weeks, and it turns into almost a month…

Ok, let’s see what’s happened the last four weeks:

6/20/2007 was done by the lovely and talented Widget. I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but she said it was awesome.

6/27/2007 was subbed by DJ Eisenmann of “Soundtrack to the Holy Wars”.

7/4/2007 was a collection of field recordings (some from my recent Bay Area trip, and some fireworks from the 3rd) being processed in real time with some additional samplage.

7/11/2007 was more field recordings from the 3rd and 4th, and a recording of my recent adventure. I did the processing a little differently this time, running the entire program signal through a long digital delay (on an Alesis Wedge) and then feeding it back into the mix. Ended up with some nice distortions.