The ethernet-wired electric guitar - at 100Mbits! The Electric Studio - at 6ft 1inches up!

Brian Clapper sent in this link:

The mercurial CEO of Gibson Guitar Corporation wants to shove Ethernet up your ax and rock the music world. By Greg Milner from Wired magazine.

I got excited about this technology about a year ago. The guitarists I talked to about it met the idea with fear and distain - "Waaa? Can I still do feedback?" - me , I want this sort of feature on my audio gear, desperately. I have noise problems - I want perfect sound from my keyboard, a bed of silence so deep you can smell the snow - and I can't get it. Guitarists, now... they want to be noisy....

Brian plays trombone - and his .sig on this message cracked me up -
I came home the other night and tried to open the door with my car keys...and the building started up. So I took it out for a drive. A cop pulled me over for speeding. He asked me where I live. I said, "Here."-- Steven Wright

And I live... here. I spent until the wee hours of the morning in a massive multi-tasking mode - burning cds, building software on three different machines on two different architectures, dictating into my ipaq, fixing various things wrong with my network, hacking on secure sendmail - and best of all I got a toolbox, found all my tools, put it in it...
Then hauled the toolbox into the laundry and finally put my multi-media box - the one I continually try to work on my songs on -- in the laundry room. It was just too noisy where it was. Better yet, I had an innovative idea:
The real innovation was that I put it on the shelf, just before you exit the house (see aformentioned steven wright tale), and I put the shelf just above the door, and the computer upside down so that an ejected DVD or CD is within easy reach on the way in or out.
I sawed. I hammered. I drilled holes to pass the firewire and vga cables through the wall. All while blasting .flac files at maximum volume.
Amazing what you can do at 2AM when you live alone.

I gotta take a picture of this. It seemed so wrong - yet so right - to mount the dvd upside down in the case. But it is so simple... and just perfect up high, out of the way....

I flashed on Tom Wolfe's "The right stuff" when I did it - one of the astronaut candidates had had it with all the tests and started playing games with the deadly serious shrinks he was dealing with.... handed a blank piece of paper, and asked:

"What do you see?"

he looked at the tester deadpan and said

"But it's upside down."

...I guess I should rip apart the power supply and flip the fan to blow rather than suck - wind sucks rather than blows, according to Bucky Fuller....

---

Brian wrote later about his 15ms of fame:

Years ago (probably 16 or 17 years ago at this point), I saw Steven Wright doing his comedy stand-up routine at a comedy club in Philly. I forget the name of the club; it's the one that had a Middle Eastern restaurant over top of it. Anyway, we had seats right up toward the stage; there were four or five of us at this round table. At one point during his act, I was laughing so hard he actually stopped and looked at me.

I had a similar experience last year when maotig took me to see Henry Rollins. We had center seats and at times he seemed to be talking right to me. It was really reassuring at the time to see a guy on stage, that talked and thought so much like I do - only funnier - For months I wanted to write him, saying - hey, remember me, I was the guy in the red sweater??

My 15ms of fame.


  ¶ 10:37 AM