DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Apple announced the 2005 winners of its annual Design Awards.

The description of the “Tiger Adaptation” category winner, a file-transfer program called Transmit, made me laugh:

Transmit makes FTP/SFTP/WebDAV file transfers incredibly Mac-like, easy, and almost fun.

That would be a good tagline for this very website: “Debris.com! It’s … almost fun.”

Always on the lookout for a more efficient way to operate, I waited until June 11 to set some goals for this year. My theory is that now, midway through the year, the process should be only half as much work.

I actually started to do it in January, but I felt like the guy in the center ring of the circus, juggling two plates, a chainsaw, a torch, and an apple. Becoming a father, to extend the metaphor, was like trying to take a bite of the apple but nearly setting my face on fire.

After six months of cleaning up the detritus of broken plates, mashed apple, and smoke damage, I finally accepted that there isn’t a magic solution. There is only focus.

So, I’ve all but given up reading the news. Instead I rely on a few trusted advisors to tell me the things I’ll probably care about. (Oh, the irony!)

I’ve only baked bread four times this year — about a third as much as last year by this time. I still like the idea of homemade bread, but I’m trying to spend my time on forms of art that have a longer shelf-life.

Fortunately, even with my new and improved focus on other things, I’ve been able to keep up with my rigorous blog publishing schedule.

If you haven’t been by the site for a while, don’t feel bad… neither have I.

It might have been post-vacation blues. It might have been the thousand emails waiting for me upon my return. Wait, I’m exaggerating — it was only 967.

Shopping definitely had a part to play. As has the studio setup, which I’ve finally made serious progress on, even though all the boxes haven’t arrived yet.

More news soon. In something less than 11 days, I promise.

I’m in gear-buying mode, as I prepare for another month of recording. Recent research has revealed the folly of previous purchases.

Last year, I recorded drums for five songs, as chronicled here in excruciating detail. I think I captured workable, but not stellar sounds from my drum kit. (You can, in fact, judge for yourself, as I posted some early mixes: Bleed, Groove95, Cincinnati Summer, Best in Me, Ode to Soup.) This time out, I’ve upgraded a few key pieces of equipment. [Note to future self: I already know I’ll write this exact same article again next year.]

I was using AKG C1000S mics for drum overheads. Of all my mics, I was the least pleased with the sound of these, and so I started my upgrade process here. The question I asked was simply what mics should I use?

Net.wisdom says that the Oktava MK-012 is the best cheap drum overhead mic. And you know where that led me. But finally I did order a genuine pair of Russian “OktaBa” mics and shock-mounts. If I have time I hope to post an A/B comparison of the AKGs and the Oktavas.

I tracked my drums with compression, because I figured it would be easier to spend $100 on a compressor than spend five years learning how to hit each drum with exactly the same force every time I hit it. Not using compression risks clipping, which could blow a take. Or, alternatively, recording drums without compression requires dialing the gain back so far (to accomodate the risk of a louder hit) that the signal gets lost in the noise.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of exhaustive research, I’d decided on a dbx 286, which is a 1U rackmount compressor/gate device that enjoys great reviews on the dbx corporate website. It has the added attraction that it can be picked up used for less than $100, in fact for about $40 if you happen to buy from someone who ships it with literally no padding inside a box from a microwave oven and who agrees to refund 60% of your purchase price as compensation for the years of abuse endured thereby.

But like the C1000S mics, the dbx 286 has a lousy reputation within the community of online audio engineers — a reputation best summarized as “the first thing to sell to finance an upgrade.”

The low-cost compressor with the best reputation is the RNC — which, ironically, a coworker had suggested to me before I bought the dbx. Anyway, I’ve ordered two RNCs (one for the kick and one for the snare) and I’ll likely add a 3rd if I feel the need to compress toms or overheads too.

As a counterpoint to yesterday’s piece about living forever, here’s one about dying young.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a popular tourist destination. But as is true with lots of landmarks that offer dramatic downward views, more people come to see it than go home to tell their friends afterwards.

Not everybody who jumps dies, although most do. And it’s not a pretty way to go:

Jumpers … hit the water … at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures.

The fall broke both of [the man’s] ankles and three of his ribs and collapsed his lungs, but he lived — becoming one of only twenty-six people to survive the plunge from the Golden Gate.

There’s nothing funny about suicide, but I laughed when I read that some of the people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, presumably with a vision of dropping gracefully into the water to disappear below the waves in a sort of romantic farewell, instead hit the southern tip of Sausalito.

From the pictures, Sausalito looks like a pretty easy thing to miss, but from a pedestrian’s point of view there is a long span of something that looks like the bridge that isn’t anywhere near the water. (Photo courtesy Ken Adelman’s wondrous californiacoastline.org.)

In January, the Chron ran a story about Eric Steel, a documentary filmmaker who filmed the bridge constantly for a year. Steel recorded about 20 jumpers, and plans to make a full-length documentary about the bridge suicides. The Chronicle published his comments in January, in an article called Film captures suicides on Golden Gate Bridge:

My crew and I spent an entire year looking very carefully at the Golden Gate Bridge, running cameras for almost every daylight minute… We observed and filmed most of the two dozen or so suicides and a great many of the unrealized attempts.

[O]n several occasions during the year, my crew and I were the first callers to the bridge patrol offices when we saw these events begin to unfold.

Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie tells a related story. While accompanying a foot patrol, she encountered a man who seemed like a jump risk:

[H]er group stopped to assess a handsome middle-aged man who’d been at the south tower for two hours. “He said he was just taking a walk. But we all had a feeling,” Currie said. “Still, you can’t gang-tackle a guy for taking a walk. Five minutes after our last contact with him, he walked to the mid-span and looked back. We all took off after him; I was only twenty feet away when he went over. We saw him go in, feet first.

“The other guys felt they’d followed procedure, done what they had to do, didn’t get him, and they’ve moved on. But I had nightmares for a week.”