Hey guys & gals, I didn’t expect to be writing this the very next day. I actually didn’t expect to be writing it at all, I thought I said it all in yesterday’s anti-BL tirade… But as my wife condensed this dragged out 2 hour show into a mere 45 minutes before she went to work (Tivo of course, are you out of your MIND?), they managed to load me up with enough told-ya-so for at least one more blog.

So guess what happened on last night’s show? I’ll give you two clues. It involves and overweight person, and a knee… LOL YOU GOT IT! One of the dudes hurt their knee during one of the challenges, and of course, screamed his ASS off all northeast American style at one of the other girls in the house saying “I CAN’T RUN! GET IT!? GET IT!? I JUST CAN’T RUN!!!”. Well crap man, he should have read my blog and saved hiself that waddle and bottle of Percoset. I was just pissed that he aimed that nonsensical explosion at his poor partner and not at his crackpot trainer. My guess is because it would be easier to make her cry for TV, and was probably afraid Jilian would beat his tired ass. Like Mustratboy said, it seems the whole world loves to see these people cry and laugh and cry and laugh and…

On the team aspect, they booted the oldest dude on the team, who was the actual guy who PICKED them all to be on his team. Then he went on this rant about how he believes in loyalty and respect and they wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for him, and he comes from a different time. HAHAHA! Come on dude… My answer would have been “Dude, it’s a game… Do you bitch like that when someone wipes you out in Monopoly?” And YES, you are from a different time, when television was only worried about the damage Elvis was doing to us by shaking his ass on television, bet ya never thought it would get this bad huh? But, he had the least weight left to lose on the team, so everyone else could care less, he’s just a lightweight, and needed to go. (What’s with me and Elvis lately?) Coming on to a Survivor-like expulsion show, talking about loyalty… Goofball.

So there you go. One day after I blog about how bad they are beating these people’s knees up on this tv turd, a guy gets hurt. God, I hope I didn’t throw a whammy, that’s not cool.

Hopefully there will be no need to make this article series a trilogy, but we’ll see what happens…

And BTW, GO SAMMI! We don’t care how you screwed over Austin anymore, we’re over it at this point. Keep on with your bad-loser-hostin’-self!

Love -n- stuff,

Right Brain

Ok, this one goes out to my wife, who loves this idiotic piece of ENTERTAINMENT…

Yup, that’s right, I said “entertainment”, and I meant it. This show is based off of bad science, and I’m sick of wanting to go all Elvis on my expensive widescreen every time this turd is on my set. Let me ’splain Lucy.

This show’s goofy producers find these poor morbidly obese people, and then put them through the ringer with a trainer, who beats the tar out of them daily, and tries to teach them to eat correctly, which leads to bitch numero uno:

1. These people are getting their bodies used to an exercise regimen that:

a. No one can possibly continue if they have a normal life, after they win or are booted off the show.

b. Will cause most of these people to begin to gain weight back when they leave the show.

Given, I understand this is a type of “fat camp”, and they are trying to give these people some propulsion to live the rest of their life healthy. But I also think they are at a critical point in their lives, when they are truly making the decision to live healthy, and should be brought in more gently, and with a higher expectation of consistency, which is really what it’s all about in the weight loss game.

Now, the next problem is the stupidity of some of these workouts. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the trainers on the show for some reason, they are cool characters with taut little cartoon bodies, excellent motivation. But here’s the problem. Take a 500 lb dude. His bones, and specifically his knees and hips are taking a beating just moving him to the bathroom to pee. This is not a joke, our knees aren’t built for this. Now, amplify that by making him run around on asphalt with a trainer on his back. If these little trainers weight 130 lbs (I’m talking about Jillian here in case you are wondering) We’re talking about 630 lbs of weight, standing STILL. I don’t even know what the math is to compute the impact force of these people trying to RUN on a hard surface on their knees, but man, it’s easy to guess it’s way over what human knees were ever made to deal with. So exposing bitch #2:

2. These people are abusing their bodies, at their trainers behest. Use your head people. Replacing knees and hip joints later in life is not going to be fun. Back off on the nonsense, keep these people on super low impact exercises. Go get some advice from an orthopedic specialist, and do it right.

Those two are just small gripes compared to this next one, which for me really is the deal breaker. This is why I think this show is complete trash and should be taken off the air.

When you exercise and eat correctly, and you are overweight, two things begin to happen. You begin to put ON more lean muscle mass, and you LOSE fat. My emphasis is on putting ON lean muscle.

So lets say Lucy Loser (fake name, get over it) gets her butt mauled by crazy little Bob the trainer, and has been putting her body through some grueling stuff for a few hours a day, and she’s eating good. She puts on a bunch of fuel efficient fat burning muscle, and at the same time, she burns a bunch of nasty fat. Fast forward to weigh day or whatever the heck they call it… Lucy Loser gets on the scale, and it bleep bleep bleep bleeps it’s way through 25 random numbers, before it finally settles on a weight, that is only 2 pounds less than last week. You hear the big “sigh”, tears well up in her eyes as she swears up and down she tried her hardest, the teammates all give her looks of disappointment, and then they show her interview where she continues to crumble in what she believes is her defeat.

Not one person says to her “This is all bullshit. I have this scale over here, come see. It measures the amount of fat on your body AS WELL AS YOUR WEIGHT, because one of those numbers without the other is USELESS. Oh, look, it says you lost 2% of your bodyfat. Your body composition is completely different than it was last week, you actually lost more fat than %50 of these other people who had bigger WEIGHT numbers, and YOU are a healthier winner, not a loser, stop crying, and keep kickin’ ass in the coming week.”

So there you have it. My monster gripe about the show:

3. There is no attention paid to overall body composition, just “weight loss”, which means zilch on it’s own.

Now I know better, so I blame the producers. They probably think it’s just too complicated to get all that involved, I mean TWO numbers instead of ONE would just turn the show into something only Stephen Hawking could understand, and none of us has the time that he has to sit around and think about two numbers. Seriously.

Overall, I think it’s great that America is getting more health conscious. Teaching them bad science behind it is just bunk, and setting people up for unwarranted failures and depression. Booooo on you loser producers.

Oh ya, one last lesser bitch…

4. Stop throwing people off the show. I know you need drama, but damn, it’s a feel-good show. Let them stay, keep the teams together, and let them battle it out until the end. Why is there always this F’in “Survivor” need to get rid of people? To hell with that old formula already, move forward, be a little progressive.

Oh, that’s right. It IS television, what the hell was I thinking?

Peein’ In A Bottle Video on YouTube

Hola Geeks! Ok, now I KNOW some of you are World of Warcraft fans (lovingly known as Warcrack to those who are addicted) because it’s a proven fact that geeks can actually derive essential proteins and bioflavanoids via their eyeballs while playing this game. (No. Duh.) “Fans” is kind of a funny word to use, but the English language falls short for our purpose. Some of my friends and I simple call it “The Game” as in:

Muskratboy: “Hey, what game do you wanna play?”

RB: “Duh, THE game.”

or

RB: “Dude, you wanna play a game?”

Muskratboy: “What game?”

RB: “THE game!!!”

anyway, I digress…

Some of our best buds work for American Television Distribution (Producers of Stag) and luckily, they let us borrow their expensive cameras at night to film whatever nonsense we can come up with. Well, here’s your first dose of nonsense from the newly formed off-hours comedy troop known as “Skippy McLizard”.

Enjoy fellow geeks, we did this for you. And before you ask, YES, squirting that much EZ-cheese in your mouth and eating it like that IS pretty F’in nasty… Taken in that volume, it takes on a real strange cinnamony taste. Even stranger than that, is that my spell check let “cinnamony” go. That’s a real word? Even more strange-o than THAT is the second time, it DIDN’T let it go… What the F is goin’ on here?

Anyway, enjoy, fellow Warcrackers and EZ-Cheese gulpers.

-Love n stuff-

RB

Link to “Peein’ In A Bottle” Video on YouTube

Hey folks. I just wanted to plug a business that’s owned by a friend of mine that provides online document storage and management, DocuSync. Their feature set and pricing is pretty damned outstanding compared to the other services I’ve tried and I whole-heartedly recommend them to folks in need of such a solution. Which, in reality, is just about all of us with USB thumb drives being notoriously unreliable and the need for high integrity off-site backups being a fact of life.

They offer terrific personal and enterprise plans and even provide licensing opportunities for the application itself.

They’re currently running a free 30-day trial, and you don’t even need a credit card for the trial, so there’s nothing at all to lose.

Go ahead and take a look at www.docusync.com!

LB

P.S. Disclosure: Both Right-Brain and myself do work for these folks now and again, but this wasn’t a paid ad. I’m sincere in my belief that they offer a terrific service.

I had a query regarding the game programming tutorials I’ve been working on. The query is “Where the heck are they?”

Here’s a quick status. I would like to have the game completed before I posted the rest of the tutorials. However, due to some unforeseen circumstances the actual game itself is held up (it’s 94% finished, just hung up getting some animations done).

I’m a little split on if I should go ahead and continue the tutorials with the game as-is, or if I should go ahead and wait for a polished product to deliver to you guys.

What would you guys prefer?

LB

My wife sent me this link while ago. Found myself damned near on the floor. I’ve never been a major D&D player (pretty much right with the author and his experience), but this stuff is a great read.

http://www.headinjurytheater.com/article73.htm

Enjoy!

LB

Ran into another Flex 2 error the other day that’s again not crystal clear about what it’s trying to tell you. This one is:

Invalid Embed directive in stylesheet - can’t resolve source ‘Embed(source = “assets/my_picture.png”)’

Here’s the source:

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       <mx:style>
		.customVideoTree
		{
			defaultLeafIcon:Embed(source="assets/ds-qhv-film-icon.png");
		}
	</mx:style>

This one is pretty clear in hindsight, but care to guess what that error up there means to say? My initial thinking was that it was a syntax error with the Embed directive, but nope, the $25,000 answer is. . .

file not found

Now you know what can’t resolve source means, which of course makes perfect sense now. . .but sure tripped my up on the spot.

LB

I ran into an error while working on a Flex2 application this morning. The error made zero sense in the context, and I wasn’t able to find anything that explained it (reasonably) via google. So, here’s what I found the hard way :

The error was:

[RPC Fault faultString=”Error #2070: Security sandbox violation: caller cannot access Stage owned by .” faultCode=”Client.CouldNotDecode” faultDetail=”null”]

Here’s some sample code that will replicate the error:

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<mx:application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" width="800" height="600">
	initialize="e4xService.send()"&gt;
 
	<mx:script>
		<!--[CDATA[
			public function handleHttpResult(event:Event):void
			{
 
			}
		]]-->
	</mx:script>
 
	<mx:httpservice id="e4xService" url="assets/videos.xml" result="handleHttpResult(event)">
</mx:httpservice>
</mx:application>

And here’s some example XML for the “assets/videos.xml” file:

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<applications>
	<application label="Web Application">
		<category label="Upload Manager Set Up">
		<category label="Basic File Operations">
			<subcategory label="Uploading">
			<subcategory label="Downloading">
			<subcategory label="Moving and Cut  Paste">
			<subcategory label="Deleting and Recovering">
			<subcategory label="Creating Folders">
			<subcategory label="Setting View Mode">
		</subcategory>
		<category label="Sharing">
			<subcategory label="Shared Folders">
			<subcategory label="Shared Files">
			<subcategory label="Temporary Passwords">
		</subcategory>
		<category label="Address Book">
		<category label="Billing">
		<category label="Sub-Accounts">
		<category label="Search">
		<category label="Web Import (Advanced)">
		<category label="Multimedia">
	</category>
	<application label="Desktop Application"></application>
		<category label="Desktop Application Install">
		<category label="Basic File Operations">
			<subcategory label="Uploading">
			<subcategory label="Downloading">
			<subcategory label="Moving and Cut  Paste">
			<subcategory label="Deleting and Recovering">
		</subcategory>
		<category label="Sharing">
			<subcategory label="Shared Folders">
			<subcategory label="Shared Files">
		</subcategory>
		<category label="Backups">
		<category label="Syncing">
	</category>
</category>
</subcategory></category></subcategory></subcategory></subcategory></category></category></category></category></category></category></category></subcategory></subcategory></category></subcategory></subcategory></subcategory></subcategory></subcategory></category></category></application></applications>

Line 25 had some poorly formatted XML; “<application label=”Desktop Application”/>” (Closing the tag while it had children). This was my problem.

So, the short answer is: If you see this problem and you’re remotely loading an xml file, go over your xml with a fine toothed comb. The text of the error doesn’t make a lot of sense in context.

Hope that helps!

LB

Wooooooo! I can feel the heat coming off the Internet as that title got encoded into binary. FLAME WAR! I could probably end this now, and let everyone finish it in the comments section, and it would surely get ugly, but we’re not here for a big scrapple-dapple now, are we? I’m just going to throw my 2 cents into the pot, stir it, and hopefully you’ll come out feeling 2 more pennies worth of enlightened about DAWs and which platform to roll with.

First of all, I have been recording digitally on PCs since the Quad-4 from Turtle Beach came out (1995), and we had that whoppin’ 4 tracks of digital goodness to noodle with (that we could bounce to 2 virtual tracks! Wheee!)  So, you can say that I am a super freaky early adopter. Windows 3.1 was a great platform for audio recording, and I also believe heroin is really great for your health and longevity… All jokes aside, you already know I’m a geek (see URL above), and since I was 13 me and my computers have been tighter than Luke and R2… point is, I am not afraid of hardware or software of any kind. (That’s right, back off Excel, I’ll take you out just the same!)

Now no offense to Turtle Beach, because it was super early on in digital wonderland, but it outright sucked.  I could usually count on at least 15 crashes before I could complete any mix. I lost lots of great takes, and lots of thick hair. But what I did produce was leagues ahead of what was being produced with cassette based 4-tracks at the time, sound wise. There was a certain amount of hardship you had to endure to get music recorded sans that wonderful tape “HISSSSSSSSSS”… and we endured it.

Now as our systems grew, and got more complex, and multimedia became a more serious concern, our hardware and software got stronger and more integrated, and we grew along with it. Windows 95 made an immense difference (I know, I even feel funny saying that Windows 95 did something good for me.) and then we got DirectX and the audio mix DLL on Windows,
and things REALLY started to chug. With the consistent issues though, I was always extremely thankful that I was an IT person as well, and watched many of my non-techie musician friends say “F this, I would rather just pay a studio.”, understandably.  I had always heard that things were better on Apple, but I didn’t really believe it, and as a long time computer user, I go where
the apps are, and Windows just had all the apps…

So, fast forward to 2006. I was using Cubase SX 2 at the time, hooked up through a Presonus Firepod on an AMD X2. Now compared to the old days, it was AWESOME. Compared to the Mac I got at the end of last year, it just plain sucks. That’s right, flame me all you want. I have a flame retardant psyche, and I will continue to rock out in Mac bliss while you have at it.

Cubase doesn’t crash on OSX. If I happen to plug in or remove any hardware while any DAW application was running on Windows, I would be real lucky if I didn’t lock and lose my work. OSX handles this with grace and ease. Now I won’t lie, and tell you I’ve NEVER had a Windows machine running a decent DAW, I have had those lucky hardware combinations where everything was peachy now and then, but it always involved a lot of swapping out this controller or that interface because it didn’t agree with this motherboard or that memory… Always doing software tweeks, and dealing with random plug-ins not working, it was never perfect.  With my Mac, I can honestly say that I walk into my studio, and I work, as a musician, and a musician only. I have the chance to be creative, and think about music, not about gear. Macs are a little more expensive, but for me, those benefits are priceless.

You can use a PC, and if you are on a real tight budget, I would even recommend it. If you need to make music DEPENDABLY and RELIABLY though, and you can afford it, go with a Mac. I am not a Mac person, or a PC person, or an any computer type person. I am a computer user, and I go with what works, and I go where the applications are. Musicians have always huddled around Macs, so the software for musicians is always going to be there. We work with KNOWN hardware configurations on Macs, and that’s what makes it easier for them to keep things working correctly. PCs have an unlimited amount of variables affecting each individual machine, and that’s where unexplainable (and often unanswerable by any particular vendor) problems seep in.

For the uninitiated, OS X, although a newer OS, is based off of a Unix variant called BSD. Unix is old and strong, and has it’s own philosophy surrounding it, and there’s a reason it’s lasted this long running some of the biggest baddest machines on the planet… Because it works. If it can work for huge corporations, sorting and saving and serving terrabytes and terrabytes of data daily, chances are it will be able to swing the load on your desktop, even if you are running 4 separate effects on each of your 4 vocal tracks, and running 3 instances of that sweet new “Massive” synth from Native Instruments (have I mentioned that that thing rules? That’s
another blog day.).

So, in conclusion: We, my friends, are at the best point ever known for recording in the home. It’s cheaper than ever, and the tools get more impressive every single day. Whatever platform you wind up on, you will still have what you need to make great music and then some, for sure. You will surely have more than what the Beatles had available to them when they were starting out, and look what they did with what little they had!  BUT, if I have to cast a vote, I would surely say Apple is the way to go today. Yes Apple, even with all their nickel and diming. Yes Apple, with their crazy, borderline fanatical keynote speeches and fans, and their crazy patents, and all the other nonsense. Their computers just work, and I know that my life in my studio has been nothing but a joy since that shiny brushed metal monster showed up!

Fire away!

Love and stuff,

Right Brain