The response to my Snakes on a Plane song has been almost entirely gratifying, as I track the blogs and forums it travels to.

Almost entirely. Occasionally I'll run across a comment like this one:

that song was god awful, just like everything over at fark.

sounds like a fucking midi file with a man who loved his weird al and country music singing over it. what a waste.

It's hard to not respond to something like that with anger, but I've managed to remember myself. Such comments are in the exceptional minority, fortunately.

I gotta do more songs in that style, even if just to use the iv-#iv°₇-V₇ cadence again; that progression kicks ass. Now if only I was capable of writing serious lyrics.

It's been years since I was able to easily use Fontographer, the Windows font-editor software I paid a pretty penny for. It thinks that 2GB of RAM (or more) is actually a negative amount, so when I try to run it, it exits with the complaint that there's not enough memory. So I've got to reduce the amount of physical memory and lower the swapfile size so the total system memory is under 2GB just to run the damn thing.

Recently, Lisa mentioned that my historical fonts don't work on her Mac. I was wondering whether or not I could justify spending the $300 to upgrade to Fontlab (which would also let me incorporate nifty OpenType features), when just for the heck of it I typed apt-cache search "font editor" on my Linux box¹. It indicated that, among other things, I could install FontForge, a "Font Editor for PS, TrueType and OpenType fonts".

Completely free.

It was written by a guy who was frustrated by the limitations of Fontographer, so he wrote his own. It's very similar to Fontographer, and seems to have all its capabilities plus all the OpenType niftiness I was drooling over in Fontlab. Oh, and it's free.

So now I'm down to only three things keeping Windows on my main machine: Animation:Master, SONAR and games.

1. apt is the Advanced Package Tool for Debian Linux, another reason that I ♥ Linux. If I want to check for updates to all my installed software² and upgrade anything that has a new version available, all I need to do is type sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade. Try that in Windows!

2. Well, everything installed via apt, which is just about everything on my machine.

I've been trying to remix Snakes on a Plane for days. I'm listening to it on four different sound sources: pro headphones, studio monitors, computer speakers and car speakers. It sounds completely different on each one.

The headphones are a new pair (beyerdynamic DT770 Professional 80Ω); they have more bass than the Sennheiser HD280s I was using (which stops me from overcompensating and making it too boomy), but they seem to almost cancel the reverb entirely — so when I mix for them, it sounds like everything's 80 feet away from the mic when I play it on the car stereo.

The studio monitors seem to get me closer to something that'll sound good on everything, but since mixing things involves playing things over and over and over again until it's sounding the way I want it, I tend not to use them much for fear of driving Karen insane (or keeping her awake, since I frequently work on music into the wee hours). Maybe when we rent a house, I can soundproof a room, or put my studio in the basement.

Arrrgh.

Today Karen acquainted me with the Robot Chicken-style "Star Trek 2.0" commercials from G4. I laughed, and then I laughed again.

• Star Trek Cribs
• Star Trek Poolside
• Star Trek Coffeehouse
• Star Trek Karaoke

Brilliant.

Well, as my previous entry indicated, I was sent up to Hail Satan Fort Wayne, Indiana, for business. The meeting was everything I expected it to be, and less. Wednesday we spent eleven hours going over data from all our various state (and province) programs, but on the bright side we managed to accomplish everything we needed to, so I had Thursday entirely to myself.

The high point of the trip was being able to see Ange and Michelle again. They were going to take me to a good Indian restaurant, but since my flight got changed, I arrived two hours later than I was supposed to, and it was closed between lunch and dinner. So we ate at a place — I forget the name — populated by hand-painted cardboard cutouts of celebrities wearing fabric clothes, who stared at us all through the meal.

I also took advantage of my free day to drive out to West Lafayette and look at the Purdue campus. Before I was out of the Fort Wayne city limits, I found myself driving into a double rainbow:

Were I a superstitious person, I'd know whether that was supposed to be a good omen or a bad one. Anyway, Purdue's got a very nice campus; big, lots of grass and fountains, and lots of brick buildings. I'm guessing this one's the chemistry building:

I went looking for a movie to occupy my time Thursday night. The first cinema I found had only one movie I was interested in seeing — but no! That movie was canceled so they could put The Da Vinci Code on as many screens as possible. The next two cinemas had nothing I was interested in seeing. The third one had recently been demolished. The fourth one wasn't where Streets & Trips said it was, so I gave up, went back to the hotel and read one of the books I'd bought for the return trip (Larry Niven's Children of Ringworld), so I finished the other one (Neil Gaiman's Stardust) while I was still in the air.

And then home to my beautiful and loving wife, who regaled me with tales of how she'd spent two hours brushing our fluffy cat, which still managed to pull out and eat enough of her fur to make a big hefty hairball.