Author: Stefan

I had almost expected that my M-Audio Delta PCI sound card was not going to work when I chose to install the 64-bit version of Vista on my new machine, but I did it nonetheless. And guess what? I’ve been waiting for months now for M-Audio to release a 64-bit driver for this old sound card that I have a strangely close kinship with.

It’s been good to me in the XP days, providing 24-bit/96kHz sound and low-latency recording possibilities. The ASIO support interfaced nicely with Fl Studio which allowed me to add software reverb and other effects while recording on the fly. I bought the card about 3 years ago and M-Audio is still selling the same thing.

Unfortunately, the company has left a lot of it’s customers in the pits of hell. We were stranded on the lonely desert island called Vista, waiting for them to develop a driver that allows their card to do what it was made to do. They released a private beta of the driver; this I thought was unfair because they selected who could do the beta testing and who couldn’t. When I submitted my request the outcome was pretty bleak.

The good new is that the public beta driver is now open for testing. M-Audio has the driver download hosted here. Note that it is still in the beta stages of development. To actually get the driver working I had to instill it, uninstall it and then reinstall it again. So far it’s been working nicely for me and I’m looking forward to doing some more recording at home. Now it’s just waiting for them to come out with a completely stable release.

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Change is constant and no landscape duplicated.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Is it narcissitic to Google yourself every day? Not that I would be doing such things, but sometimes you have to indulge that attention-craving monster that the wonderful world of blogs, social networking sites, and photo sharing sites have created. One thing in particular that has increased my search rankings is the Creative Commons License. For artists, writers and photographers this could possibly be a good route to pursue when trying to create a presence on the internet.

The Creative Commons license was developed as a way to easily share your work on the internet while providing an alternative to the old copyright model. Think of it as copyright 2.0. With a license you can define who will be able to use your work and how it will be used.

I own a Flickr account and it has been one of best things I have done. It provides a community in to which I can easily share my photography. It also provides a way in which I can easily register my images under the Creative Commons License. Individuals and organizations actually use Flickr quite a bit to gather images and many are searching for photos that fall under this licensing. My images are free for any user to download (even in large size), but when using the images the user must give some credit to me for providing the image. You may think that giving away my photography for free may not be such a great thing. I think of it in terms of a portfolio builder. The good thing about the Creative Commons License is that you can choose how you want to license your images; you can limit your file sizes in Flickr as well. With this you can do it the way you want and reap the rewards.

Here are few sites that are using my imagery:

The Phillyist
Tipr.org
10e20
Michigan in Pictures
idealist.org
National Parks Conservation Association

There are several sites out there that allow you to easily license your images or you can always just embed their tags into your sites, but Flickr is the only one I have used on a regular basis. If anyone else has covered this topic ins other areas, I would be happy to link to your site. Anyway, I found this very useful in making my content more readily available on the web and I hope you might be Googling yourself more to see in what new ways your creations are being used.

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We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life, is rounded with a sleep.
– William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

Last night I had a dream that has followed with me throughout the day. I don’t even really know the significance of the particular parts, but for some reason it still resonates. Sometimes when I’m dreaming certain aspects of the dream will appear luminous or unclouded and others will fade into periphery. It’s almost like looking through a magnifying glass.

What I can recall is being in a classroom. In the front of the classroom the teacher, who is unfamiliar to me, was discussing something like history or literature. I stood up and am ready to leave the classroom out of boredom, but the talk suddenly shifts. She mentions that she has cancer and is dying. As not to appear rude, I stopped in my tracks and listened. It’s not that I really cared if she is dying or not, it was more the appearance that I was worried about.

The scene shifts and while the transition is a bit foggy in my memory, I can remember following a well-dressed student out of the classroom. He had reddish hair and was older; nobody that I would recognize in my waking life. He sat down on a bench next to another older man. My impression of him altered. The vitality I had seen before in him was no longer there. A spore-like plant was creeping up his sleeve as he was staring into space. It was as if he was slowly and unwittingly being devoured by some form of moss.

Although the events that took place in my dream held some significance to me today, I’ve been thinking about the individuals that have been inhabiting them. Who are these strangers and why did my unconcious mind conjure them into existence? Why have they been assigned these roles I have given them? What do they symbolize to me?

Some days I feel like I’m dwelling in someone’s dream or a character in someone’s story. There are times when I feel that the world around me is as phony as a Hollywood set. At certain instances it seems I’m tested and tempered by the events occuring in my life.  Events that occur and people I interact with hold some underlying meaning.  It might just be the way I’ve been interpreting the external world most of my life, but I do feel a certain underlying current guiding the events of my life.  I know it’s not science, but it just might be spiritual.

Maybe we are figments of someone else’s unconscious thoughts and desires or maybe this thing we call life is all an accident.  The former seems more appealing to me and a more romantic notion.  If this world were such an accident and nothing means anything, what is there to live for?  Maybe we create these religious and spiritual constructs to make life barable, but when I wander through the visceral, murky landscapes of the mind, I can’t help but wonder if my own life is but a dream.

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Today, I decided to give my blog a little TLC.  It’s been sitting and collecting dust in the netherworld of cyberspace for some time now and certain people would agree that it’s time for me to start writing again (thanks Cara).  To signal this change I finally upgraded my slightly outdated version to the new 2.6.5 that I am really starting to enjoy using.  It has several nice features to it and cleaner look and feel.

One of the benefits of updating to the new version is the ability to post to my blog from my iPhone.  WordPress offers some simple setup tips here for those people like me who may have created their own template to use within the WordPress system.  A snag that I ran into when getting the iPhone app to communicate via XML-RPC involved some of the plugins that I had installed for WordPress.  Either Bad-Behavior or Akismet were preventing my phone from making remote procedure calls to WordPress.  Both of these plugins are used to prevent comment spam and have done a great job of it so far, but in this case they were interfering.  Once I updated these plugins I was able to go on with business as usual.  My iPhone app now interfaces nicely with my blog.

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