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A Flaw in the Firmware
General | Posted 12 years agoHey, have you got a Mark IV Volkswagen Golf? Know someone who does? Here's a fun little experiment you can try.
Unlock the car and open the driver's door to cancel the re-lock timeout. Close the door. Press the hatch release on the key fob, then lock the car with the key fob. Note that the doors lock, the corner lights flash but the horn does not beep.
Walk around and open the hatch. When you close the hatch, the horn will beep, signaling the alarm is now armed.
Now we're gonna do it again with one small difference.
Unlock the car and open the driver's door to cancel the re-lock timeout. Pull the hatch release switch on the inside of the driver's door, close the door and lock the car with the key fob. Note that the doors lock, the corner lights flash but the horn does not beep.
Walk around and open the hatch... SURPRISE!! Did you just wake up the whole neighborhood when the alarm went off? Fumble with the key fob for a minute before unlocking the car to disarm the alarm.
Strange, isn't it? Logic would dictate that if the comfort and control module knows the hatch can be opened, it shouldn't arm the alarm. And it doesn't... if you release the hatch with the key fob. But there's some sort of bug if you release the hatch with the switch on the inside of the door, even though it looks like the alarm isn't armed, it'll reach out and bite ya when you open the hatch.
And it's completely repeatable. In fact, I did it over the weekend to make sure I remembered it correctly before writing this up. I do have follow-ups to do though. Does the alarm LED flash by the door pin when the alarm is sneakily armed? And when the release times out (without the hatch being opened) does the system then beep-and-arm, as usual? I may check those out too and report back.
Of course this is a fun little bug that does nothing more than annoy and surprise. Now that cars are becoming more and more computer controlled, who knows what bugs are laying in wait for that perfect combination of events to release dire, dire consequences.
For those of you confused about "releasing" and "opening" the hatch, on MkIV and MkV Golfs, pressing the button or switch for the hatch allows it to be opened. You can hear the mechanism in the door shifting. However you still must pull the handle (or use the super-stealth logo on the MkVs) to open the hatch. If 30 seconds pass without the hatch being opened, the mechanism will reset.
I'm sort of curious if this same bug exists in Jettas or Passats, but I have a feeling when you press the trunk button, the trunk pops open right away. So you can't "release" the trunk and then arm the alarm. Anyone with a Jetta or Passat willing to speak up on this?
Unlock the car and open the driver's door to cancel the re-lock timeout. Close the door. Press the hatch release on the key fob, then lock the car with the key fob. Note that the doors lock, the corner lights flash but the horn does not beep.
Walk around and open the hatch. When you close the hatch, the horn will beep, signaling the alarm is now armed.
Now we're gonna do it again with one small difference.
Unlock the car and open the driver's door to cancel the re-lock timeout. Pull the hatch release switch on the inside of the driver's door, close the door and lock the car with the key fob. Note that the doors lock, the corner lights flash but the horn does not beep.
Walk around and open the hatch... SURPRISE!! Did you just wake up the whole neighborhood when the alarm went off? Fumble with the key fob for a minute before unlocking the car to disarm the alarm.
Strange, isn't it? Logic would dictate that if the comfort and control module knows the hatch can be opened, it shouldn't arm the alarm. And it doesn't... if you release the hatch with the key fob. But there's some sort of bug if you release the hatch with the switch on the inside of the door, even though it looks like the alarm isn't armed, it'll reach out and bite ya when you open the hatch.
And it's completely repeatable. In fact, I did it over the weekend to make sure I remembered it correctly before writing this up. I do have follow-ups to do though. Does the alarm LED flash by the door pin when the alarm is sneakily armed? And when the release times out (without the hatch being opened) does the system then beep-and-arm, as usual? I may check those out too and report back.
Of course this is a fun little bug that does nothing more than annoy and surprise. Now that cars are becoming more and more computer controlled, who knows what bugs are laying in wait for that perfect combination of events to release dire, dire consequences.
For those of you confused about "releasing" and "opening" the hatch, on MkIV and MkV Golfs, pressing the button or switch for the hatch allows it to be opened. You can hear the mechanism in the door shifting. However you still must pull the handle (or use the super-stealth logo on the MkVs) to open the hatch. If 30 seconds pass without the hatch being opened, the mechanism will reset.
I'm sort of curious if this same bug exists in Jettas or Passats, but I have a feeling when you press the trunk button, the trunk pops open right away. So you can't "release" the trunk and then arm the alarm. Anyone with a Jetta or Passat willing to speak up on this?
Rush
General | Posted 12 years agoWhen I heard that there was a movie coming out about Formula One, I was skeptical. Let's face it, Hollywood hasn't exactly treated motorsport kindly, what with the Fast and Furious franchise (I hear it's getting back to its roots though), Torque, Redline, Days of Thunder... oh and Driven. Yes, I think we all remember Driven.
As a big fan of Formula One, I was ready to just blow it off as another hyped-up sensory-overload action-fest. Wait, it's called Rush? Oh God... with a title like that, how could it not be bad?
Well, why don't we find out for ourselves...
W-wait a minute. What... that... that actually looks good! It has interesting characters, thoughtful presentation and yet still has enough action to keep us holding our breath every time they're out on the track. Well of course it's good, it was directed by Ron Howard. And Ron Howard is a huge fan of Formula One. It makes perfect sense that he would treat it with all the respect and grandeur that it deserves.
Rush is based on the true-life story of James Hunt and Niki Lauda and their rivalry throughout the 1976 Formula One season. The season that Lauda had a near-fatal crash at the Nürburgring (not the Nordschleife) and was back in the car a little over a month later.
When September rolls around, you better believe I'll be in a theater seat watching Rush. I hope you will be too, even if you aren't a fan of Formula One or racing in general. Because like every 30 for 30 film I've watched, it's not about the sport: it's about the people in the sport. And that should appeal to just about everyone.
By the way, has anyone noticed that Days of Thunder and Top Gun are the same movie, only in different vehicles?
In Top Gun, the hotshot pilot shows off his flying skills, has a close call that gets into his head and he makes excuses to not fly because he feels uncomfortable in the fighter. Then he's put into the same situation again, except this time he makes it through, his confidence is restored, and he goes on to win the day.
But in Days of Thunder, the hotshot driver shows off his racing skills and has a close call that gets into his head and he starts sabotaging his races because he's uncomfortable in the car. Finally he's put into the same situation again and he makes it though unscathed. This restores his confidence and he goes on to win the race.
I had the (mis?)fortune of seeing them on TV back-to-back one day... and was struck by their similarities. They're both Simpson-Bruckheimer films, too. Hmmmm...
As a big fan of Formula One, I was ready to just blow it off as another hyped-up sensory-overload action-fest. Wait, it's called Rush? Oh God... with a title like that, how could it not be bad?
Well, why don't we find out for ourselves...
W-wait a minute. What... that... that actually looks good! It has interesting characters, thoughtful presentation and yet still has enough action to keep us holding our breath every time they're out on the track. Well of course it's good, it was directed by Ron Howard. And Ron Howard is a huge fan of Formula One. It makes perfect sense that he would treat it with all the respect and grandeur that it deserves.
Rush is based on the true-life story of James Hunt and Niki Lauda and their rivalry throughout the 1976 Formula One season. The season that Lauda had a near-fatal crash at the Nürburgring (not the Nordschleife) and was back in the car a little over a month later.
When September rolls around, you better believe I'll be in a theater seat watching Rush. I hope you will be too, even if you aren't a fan of Formula One or racing in general. Because like every 30 for 30 film I've watched, it's not about the sport: it's about the people in the sport. And that should appeal to just about everyone.
By the way, has anyone noticed that Days of Thunder and Top Gun are the same movie, only in different vehicles?
In Top Gun, the hotshot pilot shows off his flying skills, has a close call that gets into his head and he makes excuses to not fly because he feels uncomfortable in the fighter. Then he's put into the same situation again, except this time he makes it through, his confidence is restored, and he goes on to win the day.
But in Days of Thunder, the hotshot driver shows off his racing skills and has a close call that gets into his head and he starts sabotaging his races because he's uncomfortable in the car. Finally he's put into the same situation again and he makes it though unscathed. This restores his confidence and he goes on to win the race.
I had the (mis?)fortune of seeing them on TV back-to-back one day... and was struck by their similarities. They're both Simpson-Bruckheimer films, too. Hmmmm...
And now for something completely different...
General | Posted 13 years agoI'm sitting today watching my recordings of Fringe (I'm a few episodes behind, I admit). The episode is called Black Blotter in which Walter drops acid in the first act and ends up under the influence of it for the rest of the episode. He has plenty of hallucinations (including a lot of sparkly fairies) and a cryptic conversation with someone who seemed to be from his past (also in halluicnary form).
The group ends up on an island trying to find the source of a mysterious coded radio broadcast. And there they are, the goal in sight but between them is a man with a shotgun wanting to know what the password was in the coded message. Nobody was able to decode the message and just when we think all is lost... Walter has a serious flashback...
I just about fell off the couch!
It was a pitch-perfect tribute to Terry Gilliam, instigated by 6 Point Harness and directed by Greg Franklin. The whole thing was knocked out in less than two weeks, so the characters and storyboards were locked in the first week. Then animators analyzed dozens upon dozens of Gilliam's animations from Monty Python. The time and effort shows... they even included 'the foot'!
The other great scene was when Walter was tripping in the back of a taxi and the door opens with a formal server carrying a plate, saying, "Top you off, sir?"
"What have you got?"
"I've got a purple microdot... or black blotter." Walter licks his finger and sticks a black dot, then sets it on his tongue. The server smiles and says, "Excellent choice, sir."
Ah, Fringe. Where else can one of the lead characters drop acid in the name of science?
The group ends up on an island trying to find the source of a mysterious coded radio broadcast. And there they are, the goal in sight but between them is a man with a shotgun wanting to know what the password was in the coded message. Nobody was able to decode the message and just when we think all is lost... Walter has a serious flashback...
I just about fell off the couch!
It was a pitch-perfect tribute to Terry Gilliam, instigated by 6 Point Harness and directed by Greg Franklin. The whole thing was knocked out in less than two weeks, so the characters and storyboards were locked in the first week. Then animators analyzed dozens upon dozens of Gilliam's animations from Monty Python. The time and effort shows... they even included 'the foot'!
The other great scene was when Walter was tripping in the back of a taxi and the door opens with a formal server carrying a plate, saying, "Top you off, sir?"
"What have you got?"
"I've got a purple microdot... or black blotter." Walter licks his finger and sticks a black dot, then sets it on his tongue. The server smiles and says, "Excellent choice, sir."
Ah, Fringe. Where else can one of the lead characters drop acid in the name of science?
Silent Night
General | Posted 13 years agoI've realized over the past few years that the Christmas carol "Silent Night" is a very beautiful song, in the right hands. It was driven home last year while at Christmas Vigil mass, with the last song being "Silent Night". We had all circled the inside perimeter of the church, all holding candles. And we all started singing... gently, with feeling. And I think I almost cried. It's right up there on my list of powerful songs with Claire de Lune...
Many artists have re-imagined or covered "Silent Night", but the one that always sticks in my mind is what Simon and Garfunkel brought us. They took themselves singing "Silent Night" and then overlaid the seven o'clock news report on it. It is at once haunting, bittersweet and a poignant statement.
These days, the news is different... but I think the sentiment is still the same.
One of the most amazing renditions of "Silent Night" that I've heard has to be from Mannheim Steamroller. I was first introduced to this version through the Rush Limbaugh Show. As is the tradition, when Christmas rolls around, Rush starts playing Mannheim Steamroller Christmas music for all his bumpers.
I have a very vivid memory of the night I fell asleep listening to KFI radio back in Los Angeles and ended up in that half-awake state where outside sounds leak into your dreams. The overnight replays had started, Rush was up and he was playing this song. I don't remember much from the dream, except that the music was there... and in the final minutes of the song, I woke up with the most amazing feeling of sadness and wonder that I think I've ever experienced. It was a very powerful experience that I still remember to this day.
Merry Christmas, my friends. May yours be spent with friends, family and loved ones.
Many artists have re-imagined or covered "Silent Night", but the one that always sticks in my mind is what Simon and Garfunkel brought us. They took themselves singing "Silent Night" and then overlaid the seven o'clock news report on it. It is at once haunting, bittersweet and a poignant statement.
These days, the news is different... but I think the sentiment is still the same.
One of the most amazing renditions of "Silent Night" that I've heard has to be from Mannheim Steamroller. I was first introduced to this version through the Rush Limbaugh Show. As is the tradition, when Christmas rolls around, Rush starts playing Mannheim Steamroller Christmas music for all his bumpers.
I have a very vivid memory of the night I fell asleep listening to KFI radio back in Los Angeles and ended up in that half-awake state where outside sounds leak into your dreams. The overnight replays had started, Rush was up and he was playing this song. I don't remember much from the dream, except that the music was there... and in the final minutes of the song, I woke up with the most amazing feeling of sadness and wonder that I think I've ever experienced. It was a very powerful experience that I still remember to this day.
Merry Christmas, my friends. May yours be spent with friends, family and loved ones.
Fringe Titles
General | Posted 13 years ago(Hey, it's a two-fer Thursday!)
As I said before I've been watching Fringe since S1E1 and it has certainly come a long way since its humble, "monster of the week" beginnings. Although to be fair, there was an undercurrent of Olivia finding out what happened to her partner.
Perhaps most interesting to me are the title sequences. From the beginning we were able to find words in the titles: "Teleportation", "Precognition", "Dark Matter", "Cybernetics"... all sorts of Fringe-y science things our protagonists might be dealing with in the show.
Season 2 saw almost the same title... but it's evolving. Ah yes, "Neuroscience", "Pyrokinesis", "Parallel Universes" (hmmmm...), "Protoscience". New Fringe events for a new season, it would seem. Season 3 would start out the same with more evolution, including "Synesthesia", "Transhumanism", "Reanimation" and "Neural Networks".
But Season 3 would have us tripping to an alternate universe, one with it's very own title. What passes for Fringe science in this other universe? Well apparently a lot of the same things as normal, but also "Wormholes", "Retrocognition" and "Biotechnology". No surprise we'd end up with some episodes taking place in both universes, which got their own special title.
Now at this point I've already tipped off the "secret", that the words in the title relate to what is considered Fringe science in the episodes. I didn't get that at first. I mean, I got it, but I didn't quite key into the fact they were changing. But along came the great 80's Flashback episode, where we get filled in on a lot of back story. And naturally, it gets its own 80's Retro Title, complete with chintsy computer graphics and pop-synth theme.
But wait a second... did you notice the words in that one? "Personal Computing"? "DNA Profiling?" "Laser Surgery"? "In Vitro Fertilization"? Yeah, pretty Fringe science there... for the 80's! And that's when it finally clicked in my brain... that the words mean things and aren't just there for fun and entertainment. I was on the watch from that point on.
It would show itself again when we flashed-forward to the year 2026. Stark grey, with things like "Brain Porting", "Neural Partitioning" (remember that one, kids), "Temporal Plasticity"... uh... "Water"? "Hope"? Uh oh... those don't sound like good Fringe concepts.
Season 4 finds us back with the present day. With the two universes now joining forces to combat a common threat, we have the amber title, the product of red and blue working together. (I know, I know, but purple wouldn't have been the same. Besides, "amber" has a special significance). And as usual, our Fringe terms have been updated: "Gravitons", "Time Paradox", "Psychic Surgery", "Viral Therapy" and the big daddy, "Quantum Entanglement".
So here we are at the fifth and final season. And when I first saw its title sequence, well... "Community"? "Individuality"? "Imagination"? "Due Process"? "Freedom"? Those are alien and foreign concepts? That definitely does not sound like a good place to be in...
It's been a killer season so far though. I'll be sad to see it wrap up, but I know it'll go out in style.
By the way, now that you're like totally and completely sick of the Fringe opening theme, why not give the full solo piano version a listen. You won't regret it.
And a tip-o-the-fedora to quinhobp for cataloging all the Fringe titles in one place. Without his research, this journal would not have been as coherent or complete.
As I said before I've been watching Fringe since S1E1 and it has certainly come a long way since its humble, "monster of the week" beginnings. Although to be fair, there was an undercurrent of Olivia finding out what happened to her partner.
Perhaps most interesting to me are the title sequences. From the beginning we were able to find words in the titles: "Teleportation", "Precognition", "Dark Matter", "Cybernetics"... all sorts of Fringe-y science things our protagonists might be dealing with in the show.
Season 2 saw almost the same title... but it's evolving. Ah yes, "Neuroscience", "Pyrokinesis", "Parallel Universes" (hmmmm...), "Protoscience". New Fringe events for a new season, it would seem. Season 3 would start out the same with more evolution, including "Synesthesia", "Transhumanism", "Reanimation" and "Neural Networks".
But Season 3 would have us tripping to an alternate universe, one with it's very own title. What passes for Fringe science in this other universe? Well apparently a lot of the same things as normal, but also "Wormholes", "Retrocognition" and "Biotechnology". No surprise we'd end up with some episodes taking place in both universes, which got their own special title.
Now at this point I've already tipped off the "secret", that the words in the title relate to what is considered Fringe science in the episodes. I didn't get that at first. I mean, I got it, but I didn't quite key into the fact they were changing. But along came the great 80's Flashback episode, where we get filled in on a lot of back story. And naturally, it gets its own 80's Retro Title, complete with chintsy computer graphics and pop-synth theme.
But wait a second... did you notice the words in that one? "Personal Computing"? "DNA Profiling?" "Laser Surgery"? "In Vitro Fertilization"? Yeah, pretty Fringe science there... for the 80's! And that's when it finally clicked in my brain... that the words mean things and aren't just there for fun and entertainment. I was on the watch from that point on.
It would show itself again when we flashed-forward to the year 2026. Stark grey, with things like "Brain Porting", "Neural Partitioning" (remember that one, kids), "Temporal Plasticity"... uh... "Water"? "Hope"? Uh oh... those don't sound like good Fringe concepts.
Season 4 finds us back with the present day. With the two universes now joining forces to combat a common threat, we have the amber title, the product of red and blue working together. (I know, I know, but purple wouldn't have been the same. Besides, "amber" has a special significance). And as usual, our Fringe terms have been updated: "Gravitons", "Time Paradox", "Psychic Surgery", "Viral Therapy" and the big daddy, "Quantum Entanglement".
So here we are at the fifth and final season. And when I first saw its title sequence, well... "Community"? "Individuality"? "Imagination"? "Due Process"? "Freedom"? Those are alien and foreign concepts? That definitely does not sound like a good place to be in...
It's been a killer season so far though. I'll be sad to see it wrap up, but I know it'll go out in style.
By the way, now that you're like totally and completely sick of the Fringe opening theme, why not give the full solo piano version a listen. You won't regret it.
And a tip-o-the-fedora to quinhobp for cataloging all the Fringe titles in one place. Without his research, this journal would not have been as coherent or complete.
The Classic Squeeze Play
General | Posted 13 years ago"We gonna do a song that you've never heard before..."
-- Otis Redding, "Good to Me" Live at the Whiskey.There's a lot of music out there on TV that you've never heard. Trust me, I'd never heard it before either. Oh it's there, or it's supposed to be there, but network greed has taken it away from you.
Every time I watch Grey's Anatomy, either on the web or on demand, I am reminded that while Grey's does not have an opening theme, it does have a closing theme. A quirky, toe-tapping little wind-up-musicbox number. More than one, too. I have never heard that second one but I immediately like it. That's got some smokin' soul to it, right there.
How many times did we watch House, MD and grove along to Massive Attack on the opening. Anyone realize that there's a closing theme for House? Oddly enough, it's used as the opening theme too, outside of the United States. Seems Teardrop may only be licensed for use in the US.
Bones, Bones again, The Finder, Fringe, Glee (what can I say, Fox has good shows)... all these quirky, dramatic, playful, awesome 30-second shots. Why don't we usually hear these themes on the TV?
Why? The squeeze! Yes that's right, the part where the network shoves the end credit roll aside to breathlessly tell you about what's happening next (or next week) on the channel. Or just flat-out re-work the credits into the bottom eighth of the screen so they can run a promo. When was the last time you saw a real, honest-to-goodness credit roll for your favorite prime-time show? I can't remember any at all!
And I doubt it's gonna change any time soon. Because, you know... it's not like the people who actually made the show possible deserve any prominent recognition, right?
Speaking of the squeeze, when TBS pulls that stunt where they show you the opening credits of Friends off to the side while starting the actual episode in the main window, they save, what... a minute or so? But you don't get that minute back, do you? The show doesn't end at 4:59, it ends at 5:00 (with another overlap into the next show). How do they spend that extra minute?
Mmm hmm. They throw another ad at you. As my supervisor once said, "What? How do you spell that? M-O-N-E-Y?"
P.S. Best thing Friends ever did was run the tail of the show under the end credits. That guaranteed they couldn't be squeezed out, edited, sped up or otherwise tampered with in syndication. Too bad they never dreamed money-hungry networks would go so far as to edit the opening titles into a separate clip and play it off to the side.
Have you noticed that a lot of credits (squeezed or not) have a rather erratic pace. They start slow, then fly past you and then slow up again for the end? The speed of the credits is inversely proportional to the importance of the people displayed. They start out with actors, very important. Then comes production... the whole crew in the blink of an eye. Then they slow up again for the producer/director and come to a crawl for the sponsors.
I've actually started referring to that middle section of the credits as "flyover territory", since you essentially fly past them quickly and don't really pay attention, much like flyover country. Now, should I be happy or sad that my work in television would put me squarely in that flyover territory of the credits?
Brace Yourself...
General | Posted 13 years agoYour last chance, last summer.
Your last dance, beat to your own drummer.
Go out fighting.
Go out young.
A flash of lighting.
Eclipse the sun.
Brace yourself, brace yourself.
Brace yourself, brace yourself.
Brace yourself for the grand finale!A High-Efficency Audio Codec
General | Posted 13 years agoHmmm, I feel a song coming on... how about a little Pendulum?
Enjoyed? Sounded good? (If it didn't sound good, read on for a possible explanation) Now how big do you suppose that file was? About 5 minutes of music, 44kHz sample rate, stereo... would you guess it was less than a megabyte?
Yes, 5 minutes of near-CD-quality stereo music in just 868kB. A variable bitrate stream that averages around just 24kbps. You could send that over a 33.6 modem with room to spare. That is the magic of the AAC-HEv2 codec. And of course I wouldn't be bringing it up if behind the magic was some real genius work.
The original AAC codec was a good lossy audio codec and performed a bit better than MP3 at similar bit rates. Still, when the bit rates got low, it sounded just as crummy and muffled as any other codec. There's only so much you can cram into a small stream.
Enter the aural magicians.
They took the AAC-LC (low complexity) codec and added Spectral Band Repliction or SBR. SBR takes the low and middle frequencies of audio and, based on harmonics and transposition, can recreate the high frequency section fairly accurately. It gets some help from math sent over a side-band in the stream when necessary, but for the most part it can work on its own.
Now that crummy, dull-sounding 24kbps stream gets high frequencies added in for little or no extra bandwidth. Certainly not as much as it would take to actually encode and send those high frequencies: the heavy lifting and reconstruction is done by the decoder itself. This became AAC-HE (high efficiency).
What to do for an encore? So far we're only talking about a mono audio stream here. Why don't we make it stereo? Consider it done. Enter Parametric Stereo or PS. PS does for the spatial encoding what SBR does for the spectral encoding: sends the decoder mathematical information so it can process the mono stream back into a fairly-faithful stereo image. All this for just an added 3-4kbps. A 40 kbps stream (two 20kpbs mono streams for left and right) or a 24kpbs stream with Parametric Stereo information? I think that's a no-brainer.
Adding PS to AAC-HE gives us AAC-HEv2, what you're hearing in the audio clip at the start of this journal. And like stereo FM broadcasting, it's completely backward compatible with players that may not understand the add-ons. If you listened to the music and it didn't sound so great, you may have a player that doesn't understand AAC-HEv2.
If it only understands AAC, you'll get a 20 kbps mono stream that sounds like 20kbps. If it understands AAC-HE, you get the good sounds, but only in mono. Nothing ever breaks outright, you just don't get the extra goodness associated with the later versions.
I'll leave you with a few more selections to sample. Enjoy!
Industria (913kB)
Kid For Today (1.13MB)
Shiny World (1.08MB)
By the way
, if you ever wondered why the first second of a stream from DI or Sky.FM would sound muffled when the Freevo would start playing it, this is your answer. For some reason, MPlayer starts with the basic AAC stream and then the extra math kicks in to make it sound good.
I'm pretty confident most modern audio players should understand AAC-HEv2, but if yours doesn't, I know from experience that Foobar 2000 and VLC play back correctly. Give them a whirl.
Enjoyed? Sounded good? (If it didn't sound good, read on for a possible explanation) Now how big do you suppose that file was? About 5 minutes of music, 44kHz sample rate, stereo... would you guess it was less than a megabyte?
Yes, 5 minutes of near-CD-quality stereo music in just 868kB. A variable bitrate stream that averages around just 24kbps. You could send that over a 33.6 modem with room to spare. That is the magic of the AAC-HEv2 codec. And of course I wouldn't be bringing it up if behind the magic was some real genius work.
The original AAC codec was a good lossy audio codec and performed a bit better than MP3 at similar bit rates. Still, when the bit rates got low, it sounded just as crummy and muffled as any other codec. There's only so much you can cram into a small stream.
Enter the aural magicians.
They took the AAC-LC (low complexity) codec and added Spectral Band Repliction or SBR. SBR takes the low and middle frequencies of audio and, based on harmonics and transposition, can recreate the high frequency section fairly accurately. It gets some help from math sent over a side-band in the stream when necessary, but for the most part it can work on its own.
Now that crummy, dull-sounding 24kbps stream gets high frequencies added in for little or no extra bandwidth. Certainly not as much as it would take to actually encode and send those high frequencies: the heavy lifting and reconstruction is done by the decoder itself. This became AAC-HE (high efficiency).
What to do for an encore? So far we're only talking about a mono audio stream here. Why don't we make it stereo? Consider it done. Enter Parametric Stereo or PS. PS does for the spatial encoding what SBR does for the spectral encoding: sends the decoder mathematical information so it can process the mono stream back into a fairly-faithful stereo image. All this for just an added 3-4kbps. A 40 kbps stream (two 20kpbs mono streams for left and right) or a 24kpbs stream with Parametric Stereo information? I think that's a no-brainer.
Adding PS to AAC-HE gives us AAC-HEv2, what you're hearing in the audio clip at the start of this journal. And like stereo FM broadcasting, it's completely backward compatible with players that may not understand the add-ons. If you listened to the music and it didn't sound so great, you may have a player that doesn't understand AAC-HEv2.
If it only understands AAC, you'll get a 20 kbps mono stream that sounds like 20kbps. If it understands AAC-HE, you get the good sounds, but only in mono. Nothing ever breaks outright, you just don't get the extra goodness associated with the later versions.
I'll leave you with a few more selections to sample. Enjoy!
Industria (913kB)
Kid For Today (1.13MB)
Shiny World (1.08MB)
By the way
, if you ever wondered why the first second of a stream from DI or Sky.FM would sound muffled when the Freevo would start playing it, this is your answer. For some reason, MPlayer starts with the basic AAC stream and then the extra math kicks in to make it sound good.I'm pretty confident most modern audio players should understand AAC-HEv2, but if yours doesn't, I know from experience that Foobar 2000 and VLC play back correctly. Give them a whirl.
Portal: The Wii of First Person Shooters
General | Posted 13 years agoRecently played through Portal 2, loved every minute of it. I had several "Oh MAN!" moments as the implications of things set in, and I got giddy with my new-found portalistic freedom. And best of all, it had a "No way, no *@&#ing way!" climax that left me grinning from ear to ear. Those are the best kinds of endings, aren't they?
As I was going through it though, I realized that Portal is sort of unique in the FPS landscape. I mean, it's first-person, but you don't need the hummingbird-on-amphetamine reflexes that something like TF2 demands. Except for the big boss fight at the end, there isn't even a time limit on the levels. Even as the power core is melting down in Portal 2... you can sit and think and observe from different angles, try a few things, think some more, put it together in your head...
It was this quality that made me mention to
that she might like it. And then I started thinking, this is the FPS game that could appeal to people that usually aren't FPS players. After all, with the exception of the turrets, there's little out there actively trying to kill you. If you die, you start over again at the beginning of the level, as many times as you need. You don't need gunfighter reflexes, although you do need plenty of coordination for some of the puzzles. Yet, you're free to rehearse as many times as you need, and try again if you stumble over it.
This is the game that introduces non-FPS-players to basic movement, how to look around without making yourself motion-sick and generally lets them practice controlling their in-game self a lot, while solving nifty and sometimes devious puzzles.
And in that way, I've come to think that it's a lot like the Wii. The Wii was the home console that introduced non-console-gamers to console gaming, because it was pretty easy to pick up and have fun with. Similarly, I hope Portal brings a lot of new FPS players into the fold. Sure, nobody's gonna play Portal and then step up to CoD4, just like nobody's gonna play the Wii and then immediately sit down and kick ass on the 360. But as an introduction and something to pique interest, I think it fits the bill.
By the way, Portal has a history... before it was Portal. The spiritual precursor to Portal is a senior game project called Narbacular Drop. It's the story of a princess trapped in a sentient dungeon, and the dungeon has the ability to open portals on its walls. And because the dungeon resents its owner, it is happy to use this ability to help the princess escape...
Naturally, Valve stumbled across Narbacular Drop and loved the concept so much, they hired the entire team wholesale to come work for Valve and develop what would become Portal. Give Narbacular Drop a spin if you have the time, it's an interesting game in its own right, and the soundtrack isn't too bad either. ^_^
And just for the record, the defective turrets rock. I swear, when I first found them, I was trying not to laugh and disturb others. But finally it got to the point (probably right around "Where are we going? Is this a jailbreak? I can't see a thing!") I ended up busting a gut. I can't help it. They are totally my hero... if I could get a talking defective turret plush for Christmas, it'd make my decade.
As I was going through it though, I realized that Portal is sort of unique in the FPS landscape. I mean, it's first-person, but you don't need the hummingbird-on-amphetamine reflexes that something like TF2 demands. Except for the big boss fight at the end, there isn't even a time limit on the levels. Even as the power core is melting down in Portal 2... you can sit and think and observe from different angles, try a few things, think some more, put it together in your head...
It was this quality that made me mention to
that she might like it. And then I started thinking, this is the FPS game that could appeal to people that usually aren't FPS players. After all, with the exception of the turrets, there's little out there actively trying to kill you. If you die, you start over again at the beginning of the level, as many times as you need. You don't need gunfighter reflexes, although you do need plenty of coordination for some of the puzzles. Yet, you're free to rehearse as many times as you need, and try again if you stumble over it.This is the game that introduces non-FPS-players to basic movement, how to look around without making yourself motion-sick and generally lets them practice controlling their in-game self a lot, while solving nifty and sometimes devious puzzles.
And in that way, I've come to think that it's a lot like the Wii. The Wii was the home console that introduced non-console-gamers to console gaming, because it was pretty easy to pick up and have fun with. Similarly, I hope Portal brings a lot of new FPS players into the fold. Sure, nobody's gonna play Portal and then step up to CoD4, just like nobody's gonna play the Wii and then immediately sit down and kick ass on the 360. But as an introduction and something to pique interest, I think it fits the bill.
By the way, Portal has a history... before it was Portal. The spiritual precursor to Portal is a senior game project called Narbacular Drop. It's the story of a princess trapped in a sentient dungeon, and the dungeon has the ability to open portals on its walls. And because the dungeon resents its owner, it is happy to use this ability to help the princess escape...
Naturally, Valve stumbled across Narbacular Drop and loved the concept so much, they hired the entire team wholesale to come work for Valve and develop what would become Portal. Give Narbacular Drop a spin if you have the time, it's an interesting game in its own right, and the soundtrack isn't too bad either. ^_^
And just for the record, the defective turrets rock. I swear, when I first found them, I was trying not to laugh and disturb others. But finally it got to the point (probably right around "Where are we going? Is this a jailbreak? I can't see a thing!") I ended up busting a gut. I can't help it. They are totally my hero... if I could get a talking defective turret plush for Christmas, it'd make my decade.
Color Breaks Timing!
General | Posted 13 years ago(I promise this won't be as involved or technical as the last post... but given how involved and technical the last post was, that's probably not saying much... ^_~ )
The switch to Color TV wasn't without its fallout... a cloud that we're still living under today.
When you study the band map of a TV signal, you might wonder (as I did) how exactly the chroma signal can get overlaid on the luma signal with out some kind of interference. In fact, pre-color-era black-and-white sets would often try to interpret the chroma signal as luminance information and one would get "chroma dots" in the image. Post-color B&W sets employed a "chroma filter" that would trap the chroma information and keep this from happening.
Wouldn't the luma signal stomp all over the chroma, especially since it seems twice as strong? Well here we go with the cleverness again. While all of the luma space is used, there are specific peaks in intervals that coincide with each line of a picture on the TV. It was realized that the chroma signal could be offset so that its own peaks slipped between the peaks of the luma signal, making them much easier to pull out of the mix. To keep this interference to a minimum, the powers that were decided they'd make the chroma sub-carrier an odd multiple of half the scan rate. This is why they ended up with such a weird number: 3.898125MHz.
By now some of you are noticing that the band map shows the chroma sub-carrier as 3.57954545MHz, not 3.898125MHz. There was a problem with 3.898... and that was it tended to interfere and beat against the 4.5MHz audio sub-carrier with noticeable results. What to do? One of those frequencies has gotta change. The first suggestion was the easy one: Just push the audio sub-carrier up 0.1% to 4.5045MHz. However there was worry that this might not go down so well with existing sets out in the field.
The agreed-upon result was to pull the chroma sub-carrier down 0.1%. Fair enough, except that frequency is a multiple of the scan line frequency, which is in turn a multiple of the frame rate. Which means the scan line frequency and the frame rate also had to be slowed by 0.1%. Your 30 frames per second just turned into 29.97 frames per second... but that's close enough for government work, right?
It was close enough that it didn't mess up the broadcasting or the picture display. However, there was one area that it screwed over: program timing. Time-code still accounted for 30 fps, which meant that at the end of an "hour" according to the time code, you were 3.59 seconds short in the real world. Still not a big deal? Well it adds up to almost a minute and a half over the course of a day. And in the TV world, 1.5 minutes is a huge amount of time to fill.
How do you keep your recordings on track when your time code is 30 fps but your actual program runs at 29.97? SMPTE Drop Frame! An agreement that:
* At the beginning of each minute, two frames will be dropped from the first second, effectively starting the second at frame 2.
* At each 10 minute mark, the above rule is not enforced and the first second of that 10th minute will have a full 30 frames in it.
Sound like a kludge? Of course it is! But when you're using equipment that's running on a time code spec from 1967, you can't just walk in and shorten up the frame timing. Especially since SMPTE linear time code is everywhere: even the building-wide master clocks in most radio and TV stations use some form of LTC to communicate with all the displays.
Does this perfectly make up for the difference? Not exactly, but at least now at the end of the day you're only off about 86 milliseconds, instead of 1.5 minutes. All thanks to a set of rules regarding dropping frames.
By the way, those frames really don't exist. Back in a job a decade ago, I was editing video and told the playback deck to cue up to an even minute. It shuttled forward... then shuttled back... and shuttled forward... and back... and forward... turns out I'd told it to find me that even minute with zero frames, but thanks to drop frame, it didn't exist! So the deck would shuttle forward, find out it had passed the spot without hitting it and shuttle back to try to find it. Which of course it didn't and passed it again... so...
This has also shown up at my current job. Remember I said a lot of master clocks use SMPTE time code? We do, and we run on drop frame (because adjusting your clock by 1.5 minutes every day would just suck). This makes things interesting in regards to timing, like if we ever enter an even-minute automation cue into the run list. You might enter 18:35:00.00, but once you tab away it changes to # After all, you wouldn't want to run into the same problem as the VTR above and miss a cue because the time you entered never existed.
It's the same with show durations: something that has to total 25:00.00, you'll never hit it. In fact, if you add single frames one at a time, the duration will look like this:
# 24:59.28... # 24:59.28...
Yeah, confusing much?! You add a frame and the duration shortens by a frame? If you're not expecting it to happen, it can really mess you up.
The switch to Color TV wasn't without its fallout... a cloud that we're still living under today.
When you study the band map of a TV signal, you might wonder (as I did) how exactly the chroma signal can get overlaid on the luma signal with out some kind of interference. In fact, pre-color-era black-and-white sets would often try to interpret the chroma signal as luminance information and one would get "chroma dots" in the image. Post-color B&W sets employed a "chroma filter" that would trap the chroma information and keep this from happening.
Wouldn't the luma signal stomp all over the chroma, especially since it seems twice as strong? Well here we go with the cleverness again. While all of the luma space is used, there are specific peaks in intervals that coincide with each line of a picture on the TV. It was realized that the chroma signal could be offset so that its own peaks slipped between the peaks of the luma signal, making them much easier to pull out of the mix. To keep this interference to a minimum, the powers that were decided they'd make the chroma sub-carrier an odd multiple of half the scan rate. This is why they ended up with such a weird number: 3.898125MHz.
By now some of you are noticing that the band map shows the chroma sub-carrier as 3.57954545MHz, not 3.898125MHz. There was a problem with 3.898... and that was it tended to interfere and beat against the 4.5MHz audio sub-carrier with noticeable results. What to do? One of those frequencies has gotta change. The first suggestion was the easy one: Just push the audio sub-carrier up 0.1% to 4.5045MHz. However there was worry that this might not go down so well with existing sets out in the field.
The agreed-upon result was to pull the chroma sub-carrier down 0.1%. Fair enough, except that frequency is a multiple of the scan line frequency, which is in turn a multiple of the frame rate. Which means the scan line frequency and the frame rate also had to be slowed by 0.1%. Your 30 frames per second just turned into 29.97 frames per second... but that's close enough for government work, right?
It was close enough that it didn't mess up the broadcasting or the picture display. However, there was one area that it screwed over: program timing. Time-code still accounted for 30 fps, which meant that at the end of an "hour" according to the time code, you were 3.59 seconds short in the real world. Still not a big deal? Well it adds up to almost a minute and a half over the course of a day. And in the TV world, 1.5 minutes is a huge amount of time to fill.
How do you keep your recordings on track when your time code is 30 fps but your actual program runs at 29.97? SMPTE Drop Frame! An agreement that:
* At the beginning of each minute, two frames will be dropped from the first second, effectively starting the second at frame 2.
* At each 10 minute mark, the above rule is not enforced and the first second of that 10th minute will have a full 30 frames in it.
Sound like a kludge? Of course it is! But when you're using equipment that's running on a time code spec from 1967, you can't just walk in and shorten up the frame timing. Especially since SMPTE linear time code is everywhere: even the building-wide master clocks in most radio and TV stations use some form of LTC to communicate with all the displays.
Does this perfectly make up for the difference? Not exactly, but at least now at the end of the day you're only off about 86 milliseconds, instead of 1.5 minutes. All thanks to a set of rules regarding dropping frames.
By the way, those frames really don't exist. Back in a job a decade ago, I was editing video and told the playback deck to cue up to an even minute. It shuttled forward... then shuttled back... and shuttled forward... and back... and forward... turns out I'd told it to find me that even minute with zero frames, but thanks to drop frame, it didn't exist! So the deck would shuttle forward, find out it had passed the spot without hitting it and shuttle back to try to find it. Which of course it didn't and passed it again... so...
This has also shown up at my current job. Remember I said a lot of master clocks use SMPTE time code? We do, and we run on drop frame (because adjusting your clock by 1.5 minutes every day would just suck). This makes things interesting in regards to timing, like if we ever enter an even-minute automation cue into the run list. You might enter 18:35:00.00, but once you tab away it changes to # After all, you wouldn't want to run into the same problem as the VTR above and miss a cue because the time you entered never existed.
It's the same with show durations: something that has to total 25:00.00, you'll never hit it. In fact, if you add single frames one at a time, the duration will look like this:
# 24:59.28... # 24:59.28...
Yeah, confusing much?! You add a frame and the duration shortens by a frame? If you're not expecting it to happen, it can really mess you up.
The Transition to Color TV
General | Posted 13 years ago(It occured to me while writing this that if I didn't write a disclaimer I'd no doubt get ribbed by 
. So here is my disclaimer: I live in the United States and this is about NTSC television. Those of you who enjoy PAL or SECAM signals can do your own research, if you're so inclined).
Relatively speaking, black and white television is easy. I mean, once you throw away all the timing information, sync pulses and extra bits, what is the signal but the brightness at any given point in the scan pattern? Plain and simple Amplitude Modulated carrier to deliver a picture.
When you add color... things get a little more complex. First... how do you retain that all-important backward compatibility? That actually turns out to be the easiest part. You take your color signal and pull out the luminance; the brightness of the color in any given part. Turns out luminance is a perfect stand-in for brightness. You broadcast that and like the mono FM radios playing back the L+R part of the stereo signal, a black and white TV will find the luminance signal and happily display it.
Now what about adding color? Color is a strange beast, it's actually TWO different values: hue and saturation. If this is starting to sound familiar, then you might go open up your favorite graphics editing program and see what kind of color-picker options it gives you. Chances are, you can pick a hue-saturation-value (HSV) model, with a color wheel and a slider. That slider is your luminance, and the color wheel is your hue and saturation. Going around the wheel picks the hue, and the distance from center to the edge is saturation.
Yeah, this time it's Geometry: color is a vector. It is described by an angle (hue) and a distance (saturation). Luminance is an easy linear waveform... but how do you transmit a vector?
You turn to the nifty modulation scheme known as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, or QAM to its friends. I am going to really simplify the following explanation, but if you want to delve into exactly how QAM is put together I found a great set of interactive tutorials here. I had to walk through the first one to make sure I was understanding it correctly.
The upshot of QAM is that you can encode both parts of a vector into one wave: the angle is measured by the phase-shift of the signal wave relative to a constant base wave, and the distance is measured by the amplitude of the signal wave. To pick the color at 135 degrees and 75% from the center, you'd get a wave 135 degrees out of phase with the base wave and at 75% of the possible signal strength.
Yes I know, that's a lot to digest, but I said it before: color is complicated! Seriously, go give that tutorial a shot: the author talks you through it all step by step and lets you play around and see the way things change in real-time.
Decoding it is just a matter of comparing the phase of the signal against the known constant. And luckily for everyone involved, a "burst" of that constant is broadcast at the beginning of each scan line. This is known as "color burst", and gives the decoding circuitry the frequency constant for its own internal oscillator to lock on.
TV sound is the same as FM radio, only in about a third of the bandwidth (so I suppose this means the dynamic range of TV audio is less than FM radio audio). And you already know what was done when TV audio went from mono to stereo (Hint hint...). These three waves are all wrapped together into a 6MHz band and broadcast over the air to your TV. Which then dutifully picks it all apart and lets you see and hear programming.
Or... at least it did, back in the bad ol' days of analog. The whole landscape has changed now into a digital playground...
In the third and final installment of this series on how funky math makes for sweet encoding tricks, we'll dive into the AAC HE audio codec and the reasons why it can get you near-CD (or at least FM radio) quality over a mere 33.6k dial-up modem.
Stay tuned...
Back up there when talking about the QAM signal for color there's something interesting going on... you have a signal where the amplitude is changing, that's fairly obvious. But if you consider that the color is changing over the course of a scan line, which means the phase-offset of that wave is changing over time... that means the frequency of the wave is changing, to create different phase offsets, right?
You have a signal that is both Amplitude Modulated (AM) and Frequency Modulated (FM)... at the same time! Cue the iPhone explodey-head guy: "It's both AM... and FM... *pshew!*"
Now we tend to think of AM and FM as bands on our radio receivers, because in the 540kHz to 1070kHz range the signals are AM, and in the 87.9MHz to 107.9MHz range they are FM. But AM and FM aren't frequency ranges, they're the way the waves are encoded for broadcast. There's no reason you couldn't have an FM signal down in the 600kHz range. And aircraft communications are up in the 118MHz to 137MHz range but are AM signals.
There's no reason at all you can't have a signal that's changing in both amplitude and frequency at the same time, I just think it's not something commonly found.
Everyone can rattle off the four ubiquitous picture adjustments on your TV, right? Brightness, Contrast, Color and Tint. (I nearly said "knobs", but who has a TV with knobs anymore?) If you step over to the professional side, you'll find those same four adjustments, except they're known as Video, Setup, Chroma and Phase. In other words:
* Video/Brightness: Adjusts the maximum level of the luminance or how white the whites are.
* Setup/Contrast: Adjusts the minimum level of the luminance or how black are the blacks.
* Chroma/Color: Adjusts the strength of the color signal or how saturated the colors are.
* Phase/Tint: Adjusts the phase of the color signal, changing the vector angle and therefore the color mappings.
"Phase" seems like a strange label for adjusting the color, but now that you know how the color signal is constructed, it makes more sense. You're swinging that color vector around so what used to be red is now shifting through orange and yellow or back through purple and blue. It's worth mentioning that PAL televisions lack a Phase/Tint control. Because of the way their color signal is encoded, any errors are self-correcting, so no need to adjust your set!
And "Contrast" always struck me as a good label for the end user: as you push the black level up, your blacks start turning grey and everything gets washed out and "low contrast". On the opposite end, making your blacks as black as they can be gives you a very "high contrast" image. Do not, however, do as one student did back at the TV lab in college and make your blacks so black that the signal dips down into the area reserved for sync information and starts confusing the equipment...
Gee, you'd think I had a Mass Communications degree with an emphasis on TV/Video Production or something. ^_^
. So here is my disclaimer: I live in the United States and this is about NTSC television. Those of you who enjoy PAL or SECAM signals can do your own research, if you're so inclined).Relatively speaking, black and white television is easy. I mean, once you throw away all the timing information, sync pulses and extra bits, what is the signal but the brightness at any given point in the scan pattern? Plain and simple Amplitude Modulated carrier to deliver a picture.
When you add color... things get a little more complex. First... how do you retain that all-important backward compatibility? That actually turns out to be the easiest part. You take your color signal and pull out the luminance; the brightness of the color in any given part. Turns out luminance is a perfect stand-in for brightness. You broadcast that and like the mono FM radios playing back the L+R part of the stereo signal, a black and white TV will find the luminance signal and happily display it.
Now what about adding color? Color is a strange beast, it's actually TWO different values: hue and saturation. If this is starting to sound familiar, then you might go open up your favorite graphics editing program and see what kind of color-picker options it gives you. Chances are, you can pick a hue-saturation-value (HSV) model, with a color wheel and a slider. That slider is your luminance, and the color wheel is your hue and saturation. Going around the wheel picks the hue, and the distance from center to the edge is saturation.
Yeah, this time it's Geometry: color is a vector. It is described by an angle (hue) and a distance (saturation). Luminance is an easy linear waveform... but how do you transmit a vector?
You turn to the nifty modulation scheme known as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, or QAM to its friends. I am going to really simplify the following explanation, but if you want to delve into exactly how QAM is put together I found a great set of interactive tutorials here. I had to walk through the first one to make sure I was understanding it correctly.
The upshot of QAM is that you can encode both parts of a vector into one wave: the angle is measured by the phase-shift of the signal wave relative to a constant base wave, and the distance is measured by the amplitude of the signal wave. To pick the color at 135 degrees and 75% from the center, you'd get a wave 135 degrees out of phase with the base wave and at 75% of the possible signal strength.
Yes I know, that's a lot to digest, but I said it before: color is complicated! Seriously, go give that tutorial a shot: the author talks you through it all step by step and lets you play around and see the way things change in real-time.
Decoding it is just a matter of comparing the phase of the signal against the known constant. And luckily for everyone involved, a "burst" of that constant is broadcast at the beginning of each scan line. This is known as "color burst", and gives the decoding circuitry the frequency constant for its own internal oscillator to lock on.
TV sound is the same as FM radio, only in about a third of the bandwidth (so I suppose this means the dynamic range of TV audio is less than FM radio audio). And you already know what was done when TV audio went from mono to stereo (Hint hint...). These three waves are all wrapped together into a 6MHz band and broadcast over the air to your TV. Which then dutifully picks it all apart and lets you see and hear programming.
Or... at least it did, back in the bad ol' days of analog. The whole landscape has changed now into a digital playground...
In the third and final installment of this series on how funky math makes for sweet encoding tricks, we'll dive into the AAC HE audio codec and the reasons why it can get you near-CD (or at least FM radio) quality over a mere 33.6k dial-up modem.
Stay tuned...
Back up there when talking about the QAM signal for color there's something interesting going on... you have a signal where the amplitude is changing, that's fairly obvious. But if you consider that the color is changing over the course of a scan line, which means the phase-offset of that wave is changing over time... that means the frequency of the wave is changing, to create different phase offsets, right?
You have a signal that is both Amplitude Modulated (AM) and Frequency Modulated (FM)... at the same time! Cue the iPhone explodey-head guy: "It's both AM... and FM... *pshew!*"
Now we tend to think of AM and FM as bands on our radio receivers, because in the 540kHz to 1070kHz range the signals are AM, and in the 87.9MHz to 107.9MHz range they are FM. But AM and FM aren't frequency ranges, they're the way the waves are encoded for broadcast. There's no reason you couldn't have an FM signal down in the 600kHz range. And aircraft communications are up in the 118MHz to 137MHz range but are AM signals.
There's no reason at all you can't have a signal that's changing in both amplitude and frequency at the same time, I just think it's not something commonly found.
Everyone can rattle off the four ubiquitous picture adjustments on your TV, right? Brightness, Contrast, Color and Tint. (I nearly said "knobs", but who has a TV with knobs anymore?) If you step over to the professional side, you'll find those same four adjustments, except they're known as Video, Setup, Chroma and Phase. In other words:
* Video/Brightness: Adjusts the maximum level of the luminance or how white the whites are.
* Setup/Contrast: Adjusts the minimum level of the luminance or how black are the blacks.
* Chroma/Color: Adjusts the strength of the color signal or how saturated the colors are.
* Phase/Tint: Adjusts the phase of the color signal, changing the vector angle and therefore the color mappings.
"Phase" seems like a strange label for adjusting the color, but now that you know how the color signal is constructed, it makes more sense. You're swinging that color vector around so what used to be red is now shifting through orange and yellow or back through purple and blue. It's worth mentioning that PAL televisions lack a Phase/Tint control. Because of the way their color signal is encoded, any errors are self-correcting, so no need to adjust your set!
And "Contrast" always struck me as a good label for the end user: as you push the black level up, your blacks start turning grey and everything gets washed out and "low contrast". On the opposite end, making your blacks as black as they can be gives you a very "high contrast" image. Do not, however, do as one student did back at the TV lab in college and make your blacks so black that the signal dips down into the area reserved for sync information and starts confusing the equipment...
Gee, you'd think I had a Mass Communications degree with an emphasis on TV/Video Production or something. ^_^
They did it because they liked the game
General | Posted 13 years agoI remember walking through a Fry's back in SoCal and seeing boxes for the game Homeworld. And I remember seeing that sticker on the front proclaiming how it featured the song by the same name from the progressive rock group Yes. And being the big fan of Yes that I was at the time (and still very much am), I remember thinking, "Huh... how the heck did Yes get tied in with a computer game?"
I couldn't see the connection. How could having Yes on a game be an attraction? What gamer would see that and think, "Whoa, it's got a Yes song in it? Gotta give it a try!" I admit I was cynical and figured it was a studio thing: that Yes had written the song for their album "The Ladder" and it was poached in some sort of deal for use in the game.
Turns out, I was wrong. It was a mutual collaboration, with Yes writing the song specifically for Homeworld.
Now Homeworld is an epic song. It tips the scales at nearly ten minutes (although truthfully, for a group that released a double-vinyl album containing four songs, that's nothing). It has at least three distinct sections, or perhaps they're more like movements from classical music. And the damn thing gives me chills every time I listen to it.
Sadly, at the this of this writing, I have not played the game Homeworld, despite many good recommendations from
and others. So it was with great pleasure that I eventually discovered Homeworld was used in the end credit roll. Very, very fitting and a perfect cap to what seems like a wonderful, deep, emotional game. I seriously don't think it could have been done any better.
Normally when referring to music, I stick to GrooveShark unless I have to use YouTube. Too many times I find people get distracted by the video and then don't have anything to say about the song. Homeworld is my one exception to that rule, because it just fits. Perfectly. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
It's no secret I've been hoping Harmonix loses their sanity and does an all-Yes edition of RockBand. I was happy to see Roundabout made it into the latest iteration (and can attest I just about died trying to play the bassline). You thought playing through Won't Get Fooled Again was a workout? I wanna rock Homeworld!
I couldn't see the connection. How could having Yes on a game be an attraction? What gamer would see that and think, "Whoa, it's got a Yes song in it? Gotta give it a try!" I admit I was cynical and figured it was a studio thing: that Yes had written the song for their album "The Ladder" and it was poached in some sort of deal for use in the game.
Turns out, I was wrong. It was a mutual collaboration, with Yes writing the song specifically for Homeworld.
Now Homeworld is an epic song. It tips the scales at nearly ten minutes (although truthfully, for a group that released a double-vinyl album containing four songs, that's nothing). It has at least three distinct sections, or perhaps they're more like movements from classical music. And the damn thing gives me chills every time I listen to it.
Sadly, at the this of this writing, I have not played the game Homeworld, despite many good recommendations from
and others. So it was with great pleasure that I eventually discovered Homeworld was used in the end credit roll. Very, very fitting and a perfect cap to what seems like a wonderful, deep, emotional game. I seriously don't think it could have been done any better.Normally when referring to music, I stick to GrooveShark unless I have to use YouTube. Too many times I find people get distracted by the video and then don't have anything to say about the song. Homeworld is my one exception to that rule, because it just fits. Perfectly. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
It's no secret I've been hoping Harmonix loses their sanity and does an all-Yes edition of RockBand. I was happy to see Roundabout made it into the latest iteration (and
can attest I just about died trying to play the bassline). You thought playing through Won't Get Fooled Again was a workout? I wanna rock Homeworld!Backward Compatibility
General | Posted 13 years agoAlright, so lets say you've got an information transmission system and decide you want to expand what information is transmitted. What can you do to make sure the receivers you have in the field can handle the new, expanded format? I suppose in this day and age, you'd issue a patch, or a firmware update and life would be good.
But let's make it interesting: your receivers are simple solid-state devices with no firmware. It's all hard-wired or etched on a circuit board. Maybe you decide to offer a patch in the earlier use of the word, involving wire wraps and changed traces. Good solution, except you've got millions of these devices out in the field.
I imagine this is what the FCC faced when deciding they could upgrade FM radio from a mono signal to stereo. How do you alter the existing mono broadcast so that all your mono receivers already out there can still work, while allowing new sets to decode stereo? Well, they started by adding a 38kHz sub-carrier to the existing signal so they could send another channel of audio. Now what?
You can't send left channel on the carrier and right on the sub-carrier: existing mono sets would then only get the left channel. And if you've ever listened to some of the early Beatles recordings in stereo, you know that's a good way to end up without lead vocals, or only half the instruments, or other weirdness. (Trust me, the music PA in my gym only does one channel from a stereo XM Radio receiver... I've heard weird things first hand)
The answer... is really quite brilliant. First, you keep the mono signal (which is the sum of left and right, or L+R) on the main carrier for all the mono radios out there. They've been made to expect audio on the carrier, and they keep on chugging right along like normal. And on this 38kHz sub-carrier you put the difference between the two channels (L-R).
How do you get separate left and right from all this? By adding and subtracting the sum and difference signals. Strap on your algebra goggles, we're goin' in!
(L+R) + (L-R) = L+R+L-R = L+R+L-R = L + L = 2L = LEFT
(L+R) - (L-R) = L+R-L+R =L+R-L+R = R + R = 2R = RIGHT
Behold! Simple addition and subtraction of the two signals yields pure separated audio channels, while still keeping the summed channel available for the original mono radios to use.
Adding signals is easy to do in electronics, and subtracting signals is simply adding the opposite of the second signal. And an opposite signal could be as easy as reversing the connections from the decoder to the summing circuit. This is all stuff that can be done with simple, non-programmable electronics. (Oversimplified, I'm sure, but bear with me)
They faced a similar task when TV went from black and white to color... Plus, transmitting a linear signal is easy. How do you transmit a vector? Stay tuned...
But let's make it interesting: your receivers are simple solid-state devices with no firmware. It's all hard-wired or etched on a circuit board. Maybe you decide to offer a patch in the earlier use of the word, involving wire wraps and changed traces. Good solution, except you've got millions of these devices out in the field.
I imagine this is what the FCC faced when deciding they could upgrade FM radio from a mono signal to stereo. How do you alter the existing mono broadcast so that all your mono receivers already out there can still work, while allowing new sets to decode stereo? Well, they started by adding a 38kHz sub-carrier to the existing signal so they could send another channel of audio. Now what?
You can't send left channel on the carrier and right on the sub-carrier: existing mono sets would then only get the left channel. And if you've ever listened to some of the early Beatles recordings in stereo, you know that's a good way to end up without lead vocals, or only half the instruments, or other weirdness. (Trust me, the music PA in my gym only does one channel from a stereo XM Radio receiver... I've heard weird things first hand)
The answer... is really quite brilliant. First, you keep the mono signal (which is the sum of left and right, or L+R) on the main carrier for all the mono radios out there. They've been made to expect audio on the carrier, and they keep on chugging right along like normal. And on this 38kHz sub-carrier you put the difference between the two channels (L-R).
How do you get separate left and right from all this? By adding and subtracting the sum and difference signals. Strap on your algebra goggles, we're goin' in!
(L+R) + (L-R) = L+R+L-R = L
(L+R) - (L-R) = L+R-L+R =
Behold! Simple addition and subtraction of the two signals yields pure separated audio channels, while still keeping the summed channel available for the original mono radios to use.
Adding signals is easy to do in electronics, and subtracting signals is simply adding the opposite of the second signal. And an opposite signal could be as easy as reversing the connections from the decoder to the summing circuit. This is all stuff that can be done with simple, non-programmable electronics. (Oversimplified, I'm sure, but bear with me)
They faced a similar task when TV went from black and white to color... Plus, transmitting a linear signal is easy. How do you transmit a vector? Stay tuned...
Fifty Shades of Babe
General | Posted 13 years agoAs long as we're talking about Hart Hanson...
General | Posted 13 years agoThe guy is killing me... it would appear that Mr. Hanson goes out to well known artists and gets them to do one-off themes for his shows. Not securing the rights to previously written songs that can get chopped down to 30 seconds for the intro, but original 30- or 40-second bits.
He started (in my scope) with Bones, tapping The Crystal Method to do it.
Then for The Finder, he pulled John Fogerty, who not only did the opening theme Swamp Water, but also appeared in the first episode.
Needless to say, I could listen to longer versions of either of those themes all day long. People have tried... there's a 2 minute spliced-together version of Swamp Water, and DJ Corporate did a remix of the Bones theme... but either of those are not quite the same as the original piece being written as a longer song.
And you know, that's okay. The two themes are complete units in and of themselves, perfect just the way they are.
He started (in my scope) with Bones, tapping The Crystal Method to do it.
Then for The Finder, he pulled John Fogerty, who not only did the opening theme Swamp Water, but also appeared in the first episode.
Needless to say, I could listen to longer versions of either of those themes all day long. People have tried... there's a 2 minute spliced-together version of Swamp Water, and DJ Corporate did a remix of the Bones theme... but either of those are not quite the same as the original piece being written as a longer song.
And you know, that's okay. The two themes are complete units in and of themselves, perfect just the way they are.
My Firefly
General | Posted 13 years agoFor all of you who cried out in anguish when Fox cancelled Firefly... I wasn't there to experience it myself, but I now feel your pain. After a single season's run, Fox has canned "The Finder".
So let me say this as clearly and as concisely as possible: Fuck you, Fox.
You had a quirky show with believable characters, that had actual chemistry (enough to make me laugh at just how natural they seemed, not grumble because it felt forced). You wrote it up to a season-finale cliffhanger with the lead character going to jail and the whole gypsy marriage sub-plot still up in the air... and you cancelled it? In fact, not only did you cancel it, you shoved it off to Friday nights to die first...
And for what? "Bob and Kate"? "The Mindy Project"? "Mob Doctor"? Seriously?
*sigh*
Hart Hanson wrote:The funny thing is, my life would be easier if "The Finder" wasn't renewed ... If "The Finder" doesn’t go, I could actually go on a little vacation with my wife for maybe a week or 10 days. And if it does go, I can't -- and yet, sadly, I still want it to get picked up.
It was not a priority of the network -- I say that without bitterness, by the way. They have to make their decisions. It's like triage. They have to decide what's gonna work best for them early on and put those promotional dollars behind that.
Hart Hanson is a better man that I... that's for sure.
So raise a glass, or pour out a 40 on the curb... whatever your style is these days. Another show that was different from a lot of the stuff out there... left to die in the vast wasteland of TV. Rest in Peace, Finder. You will be missed.
At least Fringe is coming back. I've been with Fringe since s1/e1 and if that was getting cancelled, oh there would be blood. Probably from my own wrists.
Remember kids, down the street, not across the tracks!
So let me say this as clearly and as concisely as possible: Fuck you, Fox.
You had a quirky show with believable characters, that had actual chemistry (enough to make me laugh at just how natural they seemed, not grumble because it felt forced). You wrote it up to a season-finale cliffhanger with the lead character going to jail and the whole gypsy marriage sub-plot still up in the air... and you cancelled it? In fact, not only did you cancel it, you shoved it off to Friday nights to die first...
And for what? "Bob and Kate"? "The Mindy Project"? "Mob Doctor"? Seriously?
*sigh*
Hart Hanson wrote:The funny thing is, my life would be easier if "The Finder" wasn't renewed ... If "The Finder" doesn’t go, I could actually go on a little vacation with my wife for maybe a week or 10 days. And if it does go, I can't -- and yet, sadly, I still want it to get picked up.
It was not a priority of the network -- I say that without bitterness, by the way. They have to make their decisions. It's like triage. They have to decide what's gonna work best for them early on and put those promotional dollars behind that.
Hart Hanson is a better man that I... that's for sure.
So raise a glass, or pour out a 40 on the curb... whatever your style is these days. Another show that was different from a lot of the stuff out there... left to die in the vast wasteland of TV. Rest in Peace, Finder. You will be missed.
At least Fringe is coming back. I've been with Fringe since s1/e1 and if that was getting cancelled, oh there would be blood. Probably from my own wrists.
Remember kids, down the street, not across the tracks!
My Romantic HMIS diamond
General | Posted 13 years agoDante Shepherd of Surviving the World once put forth the design for a Romantic Hazardous Materials Information System diamond. Intrigued by the idea, I made my own.
So here's my call out to you: make one and post it up. Use any media you like: draw it, ink it, sketch it, use Illustrator/Inkscape or Photoshop/GIMP. Heck, make it outta Legos (I'd certainly be impressed to see that!). But make one. Post it up. And encourage others to make their own.
Yes, I'm seeing if I can start one of those viral meme-like things. Put in a little effort and join in the fun. I'm curious to see what people rate themselves.
So here's my call out to you: make one and post it up. Use any media you like: draw it, ink it, sketch it, use Illustrator/Inkscape or Photoshop/GIMP. Heck, make it outta Legos (I'd certainly be impressed to see that!). But make one. Post it up. And encourage others to make their own.
Yes, I'm seeing if I can start one of those viral meme-like things. Put in a little effort and join in the fun. I'm curious to see what people rate themselves.
Another Public Service Annoucement
General | Posted 13 years ago
recently posted a public service announcement about a good comic. I can wholeheartedly agree that Endtown is fabulous. It starts out darkly-lighthearted, but then gets deep... several times I found myself misty-eyed, or quietly moaning, 'Nooooo... why? Why'd that have to happen?' over the events that transpire. Give it a run, I don't think you'll be disappointed.However I realized I'd be remiss if I didn't do my own PSA for a comic I stumbled across (I think linked from the Doc's Machine Whiteboard comic) that captured my heart and mind and soul. It's an amazing fantasy universe, with artwork as if Roger Dean sat down and wrote a comic. And a cast of characters that spans the gamut, reaching in all directions from quirky, to badass to just plain, flat out awesome. This... is Kukuburi.
179 fantastic, full-color pages await, with promises of more to come. While Ramón Pérez does his best to keep the pages flowing in a timely fashion, he does have other outside artistic obligations that frequently take him away from working on Kukuburi. But he always returns to it when he has the spare time.
"Be ready for it. It's about to begin..."
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
General | Posted 13 years agoI took a load of electronics and computer gear to our local Re-Use/Re-Cycle place today. I'd rather give it to them where they can either re-purpose it and sell it, or at least responsibly dispose of it, rather than throw it in the garbage so it'll sit in a landfill. There's just one little catch: certain items are assessed a surcharge for disposal. Among those items are CRTs, LCDs and inkjet printers.
Now I understand that it costs money to dispose of hazardous materials properly. But let's take this to the logical, cynical conclusion. If I want to responsibly dispose of my old Epson Stylus Color 900, I'm assessed a $3 surcharge for disposal. Meanwhile I can toss it in the trash or fling it into a drainage ditch for free.
Sure, if I roll up with a truck full of CRTs (as I have done on occasion when doing a recycling run from work) then a per-item charge is in order. Obviously I'm doing company cleaning or industrial disposal in that case. But as an ordinary private consumer with one hazardous item in my load? Would it kill you to give me a freebie?
I have to assume that the re-use places exist to keep junk out of the trash and the local landscape. But if they're going to charge a disposal fee, all they're doing is punishing the people who are doing the right thing, so why bother to do the right thing?
Sadly, you have to create an incentive for people to do what's right. If you weren't getting back your 5-cent deposit that you paid up front, who would recycle cans and bottles? Easier to just throw them out. Same goes for the core-charge on automotive batteries, which you get back when you turn in the old battery. But there isn't quite anything like that for CRTs or LCDs or other computer-related equipment that might need special attention for disposal. Not yet, at least.
So remember, next time you bring a CRT to a local recycling place that wants to charge you $6 for hazardous disposal, tell them "No thanks" and keep it.
Then throw it off a bridge into a lake on the way home.
Now I understand that it costs money to dispose of hazardous materials properly. But let's take this to the logical, cynical conclusion. If I want to responsibly dispose of my old Epson Stylus Color 900, I'm assessed a $3 surcharge for disposal. Meanwhile I can toss it in the trash or fling it into a drainage ditch for free.
Sure, if I roll up with a truck full of CRTs (as I have done on occasion when doing a recycling run from work) then a per-item charge is in order. Obviously I'm doing company cleaning or industrial disposal in that case. But as an ordinary private consumer with one hazardous item in my load? Would it kill you to give me a freebie?
I have to assume that the re-use places exist to keep junk out of the trash and the local landscape. But if they're going to charge a disposal fee, all they're doing is punishing the people who are doing the right thing, so why bother to do the right thing?
Sadly, you have to create an incentive for people to do what's right. If you weren't getting back your 5-cent deposit that you paid up front, who would recycle cans and bottles? Easier to just throw them out. Same goes for the core-charge on automotive batteries, which you get back when you turn in the old battery. But there isn't quite anything like that for CRTs or LCDs or other computer-related equipment that might need special attention for disposal. Not yet, at least.
So remember, next time you bring a CRT to a local recycling place that wants to charge you $6 for hazardous disposal, tell them "No thanks" and keep it.
Then throw it off a bridge into a lake on the way home.
Space
General | Posted 13 years agoHave you ever heard song lyrics and found yourself wondering what inspired them? What events the writer must have gone through to write what you're hearing?
Every time I listen to "Space" by Slow Motion Reign, I wonder. And every time I listen to "Space" by Slow Motion Reign, I find myself tearing up before the end of the song.
Every time I listen to "Space" by Slow Motion Reign, I wonder. And every time I listen to "Space" by Slow Motion Reign, I find myself tearing up before the end of the song.
Space
Written letters carried up by rising balloons
I know that you'll get this someday
Everybody tells me that it's time to move on
But I still have to write this letter
So you gotta go to space
One way or another
Soldier of the human race
So you gotta go to space
On a suicide mission
Which one are we on?
Do you even know that you're gone?
Disappointed couldn't call you for a few months
After what you'd done nothing was left
You disappeared from off the face I hoped you would phone
One day wondering I called mother said you were dead
Before you left I wish I'd said
All this time I wasn't angry
Despite mistakes you had to make
Long ago my love forgave you
I had let it go
Long time ago
Not soon enough for you to know
Fire in the car, alarm
Firefighters on the run-on
Couldn't save the kids on time
Everybody burned alive
I had let it go
Long time ago
Not soon enough for you to knowFurries in the news
General | Posted 13 years agoImagine my surprise when I saw our kicker story for the 5:00am local news broadcast was... AnthroCon!
(I imagine if I had actually been paying attention to the rundown I wouldn't have been quite so surprised, but the master control op doesn't need to stay glued to it like the camera op does)
It would appear that the ABC station local to AC showed up and shot some footage and interviews and made it available on the network. I haven't gone to look for a story package or assets yet, but our local news team put together a kicker (the feel-good story at the end of a 'cast) about it, mostly anchor voice-over video and with one "sound-on-tape" interview with Red the Fox (in suit, naturally). In retrospect, it's kinda funny to see our official name-tag CG strip with "Red the Fox".
The story focused mostly on the fursuiters, but wrapped with the con's economic impact on the area. I believe they said it brings in $4 million while the con is in town. I wouldn't doubt it!
And when the story was run, our anchor said she thought our city needed its own furry con (although I'm sure it was a reaction to the revenue generation).
Perhaps the tide is finally turning...
(I imagine if I had actually been paying attention to the rundown I wouldn't have been quite so surprised, but the master control op doesn't need to stay glued to it like the camera op does)
It would appear that the ABC station local to AC showed up and shot some footage and interviews and made it available on the network. I haven't gone to look for a story package or assets yet, but our local news team put together a kicker (the feel-good story at the end of a 'cast) about it, mostly anchor voice-over video and with one "sound-on-tape" interview with Red the Fox (in suit, naturally). In retrospect, it's kinda funny to see our official name-tag CG strip with "Red the Fox".
The story focused mostly on the fursuiters, but wrapped with the con's economic impact on the area. I believe they said it brings in $4 million while the con is in town. I wouldn't doubt it!
And when the story was run, our anchor said she thought our city needed its own furry con (although I'm sure it was a reaction to the revenue generation).
Perhaps the tide is finally turning...
An Open Letter to Los Angeles
General | Posted 13 years agoCongratulations!
Feels amazing, doesn't it? To finally be standing at the top, hoisting Lord Stanley's Cup in front of the home crowd in your own barn? It's great to see the Cup come back to California, and fantastic for it to be back in Southern California again. Who would have guessed a place that hardly sees rain -- let alone snow and ice -- would be home to two championship NHL teams?
And what a ride. Going from being written off as the eighth seed in the Western Conference, to winning it all? That one single road-loss marring an otherwise unbeaten streak? Eliminating the first seed, then the second seed, and finally the third seed to claim the Western Conference trophy? You couldn't write this stuff if you tried.
You earned it, LA. Every face-off, every save, every check. Every penalty kill, power play, every empty netter. Every overtime win, every shootout goal... every one of those 82 regular season games to give yourselves a fighting chance at winning it all. Every one of those playoff match-ups. With every win, you earned this right to hoist the Cup.
So enjoy it. Because when October rolls around, it's not just the Freeway Face-off anymore. Now it's a battle between two Stanley Cup Champions.
Welcome to the club!
Kerosel
Anaheim Ducks Fan
P.S. You're next, San Jose! I wanna see three-for-three in California!
Feels amazing, doesn't it? To finally be standing at the top, hoisting Lord Stanley's Cup in front of the home crowd in your own barn? It's great to see the Cup come back to California, and fantastic for it to be back in Southern California again. Who would have guessed a place that hardly sees rain -- let alone snow and ice -- would be home to two championship NHL teams?
And what a ride. Going from being written off as the eighth seed in the Western Conference, to winning it all? That one single road-loss marring an otherwise unbeaten streak? Eliminating the first seed, then the second seed, and finally the third seed to claim the Western Conference trophy? You couldn't write this stuff if you tried.
You earned it, LA. Every face-off, every save, every check. Every penalty kill, power play, every empty netter. Every overtime win, every shootout goal... every one of those 82 regular season games to give yourselves a fighting chance at winning it all. Every one of those playoff match-ups. With every win, you earned this right to hoist the Cup.
So enjoy it. Because when October rolls around, it's not just the Freeway Face-off anymore. Now it's a battle between two Stanley Cup Champions.
Welcome to the club!
Kerosel
Anaheim Ducks Fan
P.S. You're next, San Jose! I wanna see three-for-three in California!
Andy Porterfield (1932-2012)
General | Posted 13 years agoOn April 17, 2012 the SCCA lost a great member. Andy Porterfield, SCCA member for 55 years, two-time national SCCA champion, SCCA Board Member, SCCA Enterprises Board Member and driver of the fastest damn GT-1 Camaro I've had the pleasure to see, passed away leaving behind his wife, son, daughter and grandchildren.
Despite flagging many of the Cal Club races that he participated in, I never had a chance to sit down and talk to him personally. However he was a major inspiration to me. Sometimes I worry that life's slipping past me and that the door is closing on my chance to race, even just at the club level. But seeing Andy out on the track, a man in his late 70s in a car that was faster than anything else (at least until Michael Lewis would show up in his GT-1 Jaguar XKR) gave me hope that maybe there's still time enough... there's still time for me to get into a Formula Mazda and have a few years of fun.
SCCA and Cal Club lost a wonderful person this week. I don't know where you go after you die, but wherever it is, I hope it has great tracks so Andy can keep on driving that Camaro.
Race on, my friend.
Despite flagging many of the Cal Club races that he participated in, I never had a chance to sit down and talk to him personally. However he was a major inspiration to me. Sometimes I worry that life's slipping past me and that the door is closing on my chance to race, even just at the club level. But seeing Andy out on the track, a man in his late 70s in a car that was faster than anything else (at least until Michael Lewis would show up in his GT-1 Jaguar XKR) gave me hope that maybe there's still time enough... there's still time for me to get into a Formula Mazda and have a few years of fun.
SCCA and Cal Club lost a wonderful person this week. I don't know where you go after you die, but wherever it is, I hope it has great tracks so Andy can keep on driving that Camaro.
Race on, my friend.
Goodbye, So long, Adieu
General | Posted 14 years agoBeen a fool, been a clown,
Lost my way from up and down.
And I know, yes I know.
And I see it in your eyes,
That you really weren't surprised at me at all.
Not at all.
And I know by your smile it's you.
Don't care for me, don't cry,
Let's say goodbye, Adieu.
It's time to say goodbye, I know that in time,
It will just fade away, it's time to say goodbye.Going out in Style
General | Posted 14 years agoIt's been such a long time,
I think I should be goin', yeah.
And time doesn't wait for me, it keeps on rollin'.
Sail on, on a distant highway.
I've got to keep on chasin' a dream,
I've gotta be on my way.
Wish there was something I could say.
Well I'm takin' my time, I'm just movin' on,
You'll forget about me after I've been gone.
And I take what I find, I don't want no more,
It's just outside of your front door.
