|
|
|
copy and paste age
Wednesday, January 17 2001
In the evening at around 6:00pm as I was preparing to head home, suddenly my cubicle became a focus of all sorts of varied human interactions. The first person to randomly materialize was Chris Johnson, the old lead developer from the Community Team who has come back as a vampire contractor to help with an imminent upgrade to Vignette 5.0. We talked mostly about big earthquakes (such as the one in Chile that measured 9.5 on the Richter Scale back in 1960). Then Frank from the UK team arrived to ask some of his "quick questions" about matters work-related. This got me to start talking about Vignette Story Server and what an excellent marketing job the promotions people at Vignette did back in 1999 when their task was to sell that piece of junk to aspiring dotcoms worldwide. "I remember when the Vignette promotional wave passed through CollegeClub," I recalled, "Those people should get some sort of Nobel Prize for Sales. They could have sold the Holocaust to a room full of rabbis!"
Next Linda showed up, followed soon by her boyfriend Julian to take her away, well before I actually had a chance to say anything to her. It's almost as if I've made a New Year's resolution to break off all contact with her.
After work today I battled fierce winds and somehow made it home safely. Then, after first replacing the noisy fan on my main system's 450 MHz K6 processor, I immediately turned my attention to learning how to use some digital music studio software that I have, um, obtained. I had been trying to use a package called Cubase, but in the complete absence of documentation its learning curve had proved prohibitively steep. With this other software I was using tonight, however, I managed to figure most of it out in the space of a little over an hour.
John (my housemate) came home just as I worked out how to do the drum machine stuff, and I was so excited I immediately set up a copy (a perfectly legal copy for which I first shelled out an extra several hundred dollars of course) on the downstairs computer for John to play with. He launched into it with gusto, quickly composing a quirky little hip hop polka dance groove.
Meanwhile, I was busy mastering the intricacies of multitrack analogue signal recording. Oh, let's see, I need some distortion running through a chorus pedal and then some delay, followed by a phaser and another distortion pedal. Oh, and I'd like to do that passage once more. Let's see. Copy. Paste. Rinse & repeat.
What did people do before the digital age, before you could conjure up electronic building blocks such as these out of thin air and chain them together into arbitrarily-complex arrangements? Just yesterday I was doing all of this sort of thing with discrete pedals and patch cords, all of which had their quirks and maddening tendencies to fail. Some of those patch cords, if you didn't arrange them just right, would either cut out entirely or would lay a muddy 60Hz hum over every signal they encountered. Mind you, this digital stuff can be a quirky too. If you try to do too many things too quickly or in a confusing sequence, the software gets boggled and your delay effects start sounding like the mutterings of schizos through cellular telephones.
In other fascinating news, Fandango Matt
has just directed my attention to a new-fangled weblog that appears to be drawing heavily on reattributed content from Randomly Ever After. Go see for yourself at the following URL: http://dqee83h3.blogspot.com (I'm not creating a hyperlink because I don't want the "author" to know I'm talking about him). Just so you know, I've never really had much fear of plagiarism on the web. It just seems to me that anyone who would resort to unattributed appropriation would probably have enough other problems that I wouldn't need to resort to any sort of corrective action to get the justice I might deserve. I think in this case, "utter crassness" is the malady of the day. Anyone this witless probably doesn't have a whole lot of friends. I'm left with little to feel about this save for amusement, although the utterly humorless manner of the appropriation also leaves me with a vaguely sick feeling. Please, whatever you do, don't communicate with this weblogger. Let's hang back and check his page from time to time and see what other morsels he finds worthy of claiming to have said.
Live by copy and paste, die by copy and paste.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010117 feedback
previous | next |
