DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Dear Gov. Schwarzenegger, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, Sen. John Campbell, and especially Assembly democrats in the pocket of labor unions, plus the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the State Building Trades Council:

You suck.

Sincerely,

matthew mcglynn

The BBC has published a Flash (!) version of the old Infocom text adventure based on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

That was the first and only Infocom title I ever bought. I’d poked at a few pirated copies of the Zork series and maybe Planetfall, but never played seriously or with any intention of finishing. Although I did download the instruction set for winning Zork I in the fewest possible moves, because I thought that was an important thing to have handy. (Geek trivia note: as it’s largely a series of one-letter instructions and short commands, the whole thing fit easily onto a couple lines of text on the BBS screen I downloaded it from.)

So I played the H2G2 game for an hour or two… got off the planet, got the fish in my ear, and got frustrated. I don’t think I ever ran the program again. I didn’t have much patience for games, much less games that lie to the player.

But now, thanks to the BBC, I can relive all my adolescent frustration for free, online, with pictures!! — a real change of pace considering the game’s ancestry.

Now I’ve spent about 20 minutes at it, and I can’t even stop the bulldozer. Clearly I was a cleverer guy at age 17 than I am now. Note to self: all those jokes about killing brain cells in college may have, in retrospect, been less funny than originally believed.

The BBC site also contains an interview with Steve Meretzky, the programmer who worked with Douglas Adams to create the Infocom game. (The interview alludes to the great difficulty of the Babel Fish puzzle, suggesting that, 20 years ago, I downloaded the solution to that from the BBS, too. Hmph.)

Pictured is the remains of a mature heirloom tomato plant: one lone tomato sitting in the dirt where the plant used to be.

WTF? What happened to my tomato plant?

The garden is fenced, so the deer can’t get in. The raised beds have hardware cloth (gopher wire) underneath. And as much as I hate the neighborhood turkeys, I can’t honestly blame this on them; it’s not their style. (They’d have wrecked the whole garden, and then crapped in my work gloves.)

The other five tomato plants were untouched. This one appears to have been sucked into the ground, whole, shedding the one tomato we hadn’t picked yet on its way down.

I’ve been meaning to write about my DrumDial for a year. I’ve been a student of various tuning practices for as long as I’ve been playing the drums (a longer time than I like to admit), so I can say with a bit of authority that this is the first tuning tool I’ve seen that actually works.

Drums can be difficult to tune because it takes a great ear to isolate the head’s basic tone from the sound of the overtones. The drum’s apparent pitch could rise or fall after impact, depending on the relative pitches of the heads and shell. Fortunately, measuring head tension takes you straight to the core problem (“the head is too tight or loose at this lug”), bypassing the misleading symptoms of the problem (“I think this sounds higher but I’m not sure!”).

With the DrumDial, it’s a simple matter to tune all the lugs to precisely the same tension. The result, in my experience, is a well-tuned drum. Without all that incessant tapping.

Measuring head tension makes it easy to adjust top and bottom heads relative to one another. Pitch is elusive, so it’s handy to not rely on it… just use the DrumDial to guide the tuning process. For example, set the resonant head a few PSI higher or lower to achieve the sound you want. It’s easy to make uniform changes, and easy to return to previous settings, because the calibrated meter makes everything objective. You could actually record your favorite tuning strategies, or maintain different ones for rehearsal, big vs. small venues, acoustic vs. miked gigs, etc.

Tuning is faster this way, too, because there’s no need to question “how far is far enough” at every lug. Just watch the dial. It’s no harder than pumping up a bike tire.

There are three things I don’t like about the unit:

• It’s heavy.
• It’s fragile. (Fortunately it comes with a foam-lined box, small enough to keep in a hardware bag.)
• The rim standoff clip is too fiddly and has to be re-attached every time the DrumDial is taken out of the box.

The first two problems can’t be helped, but I can suggest a usability improvement that works around the third one: when I install a new head, I use a permanent marker to draw a ring of dots on the head, about two inches inside the rim in front of every lug. To tune the drum, I set the point of the DrumDial on each marker dot in turn. This way I never need the standoff clip.

All in all, I’ve found this to be an indispensible piece of gear, so much so that even though I’ve cracked the plastic face due to careless storage, I can’t part with the thing for the two weeks it would take to send it in for repair.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (40% off DrumDial)

So I recorded a tambourine overdub tonight. I needed four takes!

I don’t imagine there’s anything I can say about how hard this is that anybody will actually believe, much less sympathize with, but … it was really difficult! I struggled to keep a steady rhythm for the 30 or 40 seconds I needed to.

Most takes started strong, but by about six bars in, they all started to sound like I was having a seizure. And giardiasis. During an earthquake. Shaking a tambourine uses muscle groups that I have apparently never used for anything else.

And I was thinking, ok, so I’ll play 2 bars and just clone them 10 times. But the first beat was hard, too — nailing the downbeat without having little dribbles of jingly tambourine sound ruining the majestic impact of My. First. Percussion. Credit! Never mind the fact that it’s going to be dipped in a bucket of reverb and mixed way off to one side, just audible if you’re paying attention. In a quiet room. Through really nice headphones.

Anyway I have new respect for those hand-percussion artists who spend years learning the nuances of instruments like the tambourine. (By the way, if any of you guys live around here, please get in touch!)