John Peel – The Heart of Music

I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard it this morning. John Peel has died. I guess I’m getting to the age where all of my Heroes are dying.

When I was a kid, growing up in rural Michigan, I used an old radio that had a shortwave band and I would tune in to his show on the BBC. One moment I remember was him playing a track from the soon to be released second Killing Joke album “What’s THIS For…!” From Goodrich on a shortwave this crackling, scratchy sound seemed like a dispatch of music from outer space.

I only heard him again when broadband internet became a reality. When I got XM a few years ago, I made sure to listen to his show on the BBC World Service as often as possible.

John was never one that I ever thought would not be around. Maybe this is why everyone is so shocked. Granted, 65 years old seems rather young but being a diabetic like John, I understand what a toll the disease can have even when it’s under control. Death comes early.

As the day has gone on, I’ve realized what a great loss it is. Every generation needs a John Peel and he was vital for at least three or more decades. If you get a chance, head to the BBC site and listen to one of his archived shows. You won’t regret it.

Today I listened to BBC 1 and BBC 6. The broadcast on BBC 6 was particularly appropriate, playing the punk and ska and reggae that John had. It was heartbreaking to hear BBC 1 play Teenage Kicks, his favorite song after the news broadcast focusing on the event.

I can’t imagine how we will deal with the immense hole left by his absence. He was a champion and the heart of underground music. It was a very sad day. Bless you John. Good on Ya!

Colorware – Colorize Your Gadgets!

How cool is this? A company called ColorWare sells high-gloss colored computers, game consoles, iPods and more! You can even send stuff you already own to be colorized. Has anyone used them?

Memories of the End of the Century

We went to see “End of the Century” at Landmark last night. It was a documentary about my beloved Ramones. Very thorough, possibly a bit long, it makes you realize that there was nothing so stunningly different since The Stooges.

And while Joey spoke of The Stooges while Down on the Street was playing in the background it reminded me of the time that Joey was DJing at Album 88 late one night after one of their shows in Atlanta. I called up and requested a song from Funhouse and they didn’t have it so I grabbed my copy and drove downtown. Joey wanted sandwiches too. So there we sat listening to tunes from Funhouse, our eyes meet and both of us with goosebumps. We both cried out when the DJ cut the song in the middle of TV Eye. It was pretty damn cool. Afterwards me and my friend Mark Mayo headed to his hotel, the Ramada on Peachtree (apartment building now), chatted for a few minutes, then he fell asleep and we left.

It reminded me of the first time seeing them with my sister Lisa in Detroit at the Motor City Roller Rink on their End of the Century tour. What a place that was. What a bunch of bands that played there. I saw The Clash on their London Calling/16 Tons tour, The Pretenders on their first tour with James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon.

It reminded me of seeing Rock n Roll High School (my first time experiencing anything Ramones related) at the Flint Institute of Arts and pogoing up and down with a few other oddballs during the concert sequence.

It reminded me of getting kicked out of Graham Central Station in Phoenix for sticking my hand in the face of some obnoxious guy about half way through the show. I sat outside listening to the rest of the show.

In watching the documentary and listening to their music, especially the early stuff, I didn’t get the feeling of fury that I got from watching Westway to the World or The Filth and the Fury. The Ramones didn’t necessarily exist to be a punk band. They were a rock band. As they say, “four guys from Queeens.” They were inspired by The Stooges, but I don’t think it was in the way that a band like The Clash or the Sex Pistols were so directly inspired by The Ramones themselves. Like Rick Rubin basically said, I don’t know what music today would sound like without the Ramones.

You know, I always thought there’d be some sort of reunion at some point, but it’s amazing how fast things got whittled down to two drummers. Rest in peace guys. I love you.

Finally a Friday Afternnoon!

Finally, after about three weeks of work work work on all fronts I was able to get a way in the afternoon and so did Joyce! We headed out to the Brewhouse Cafe in Little Five Points for a Fall beer on the patio. A guy dressed as Jason from Friday the Thirteenth came up with a flyer saying that longtime Beastie Boys DJ Mix Master Mike was playing a few blocks away a Criminal Records.

We headed over to Criminal and waited with a small crowd of people (including a puking girl in a UCLA Bruins hoodie) for Mike to show up. We had good timing, because after about 10 minutes he showed up and started the most amazing deck work I have ever seen. Really. I suppose the last time I was that impressed was when I saw MC 900 Foot Jesus‘ DJ Zero maybe 10+ years ago! He played for maybe 10 minutes and then signed autographs. We got a photo with Darby and the Jason character.

Here’s hoping that Mixmaster Mike made it all the way up to Gwinnett in time for his opening slot at the Beastie Boys show.

Director in Flash and the Meaning of Life

Why are we here? What is this all about? This is what the experience of dealing with Flash in Director brings about in me. Why do we bother? Is it the cross-platform compatibility? I mean after all, there is now a third-party player that will connect to a database and do other fancy Director type stuff. One project I’m working on has moved to Director MX 2004 to try to get (I think) AS2 capability, but what about Director MX 2004’s lack of support for Windows NT, ME? Then again, the new third-party player only supports OS X on the Mac side.

In a way I think that part of the problem might be the disconnect between Director’s synchronous nature versus Flash’s asynchronous nature.

Then there’s the lack of blinking cursor in Flash text fields embeded in Director unless you switch from another active window. Naturally, your client thinks you’re an idiot.

Anyway, these sorts of problems have been around for a few different flavors of Flash and Director and the fact that it never really gets any better is really getting me down. As far as I can tell there aren’t alot of answers out there. I really can’t ever recommend that anyone take the Flash in Director path.

TBS Gilligan’s Island Game (and Singletons)

Completed a Flash game called “Island Hop” a couple of weeks ago for StudioCom for the new Gilligan’s Island reality show on TBS. They’ve just posted it and you can find it here.

Completely AS2, I also discovered the Singleton pattern from EAS2 and the Gang of Four book. Basically a Singleton class guarantees that only one instance of a class is ever instantiated. A static function, getInstance(), will return the same object reference wherever it is needed in the program. For instance I had a timer class that I make into a singleton class that allowed many other classes to access the current timer object at any time.

The constructor is not public, but the static getInstance() call handles calling the constructor. Let’s look at at Timer class example:

class Timer {

private static _instance:Timer = null;

private Timer() {
//do stuff to instantiate
}

public static getInstance():Timer {
if(Timer._instance == null) {
Timer._instance = new Timer();
}
return Timer._instance;
}

//other public / private functions and stuff here
}

It’s so simple I could just cry.

Passing Data from Flash to Director

Just finished a phase of a project for Roundbox Media. My task was to allow for the import and export of data to/from a CSV file (comma separated values). It’s probably common knowledge, but an interesting thing, pointed out by Javier, is that Flash cannot call a function in Director and pass Flash objects in the call. Only a call from Director to Flash can do this.

For example, I select which people I want to export to CSV and click the “Export” buttton. In order to get my array to Director for processing, Flash has to call a function in Director, say “doExport”, which in turn calls a function in Director that retreives the data from Flash, say “getExportData.”

Flash:

function btnExport_Click():Void {
getUrl(“lingo:doExport”); //tell Director to retrieve data
}

function getExportData():Array { //called by Director
return myPeoples;
}

Director:

on doExport — Called by Flash to get array object
myFlashArrayObject = sprite(“flashSprite”).getExportData
— process export
end

There was a lot of strange stuff that I never figured out (see previous post), but in the end things are working well. So well in fact, that they’ve assigned another feature for me to implement. The stuff about passing objects between Flash and Director was probably the most helpful information I got out of the assignment.