CatSynth

Well, I am still in New York this weekend, and meanwhile Luna is home at CatSynth HQ in California. I thought it would be appropriate to share some photos taken during some previous trips by our pet sitter Ronni West:

It's great getting to see these photos from Ronni, knowing that Luna is happy and being herself. Here we see her kneading some laundry left on the bed, which remains one of her guilty pleasures:

I make sure to leave some laundry out when I go away, I think it gives her a sense of familiarity and comfort.

Even though I do enjoy travelling, it's always great to come home and be reunited.

Weekend Cat Blogging #121 is being hosted this weekend at masak-masak.

The Bad Kitty Cat Festival of Chaos is going on the Mind of Mog. The theme this week is catnip, and while I know Luna is getting to enjoy fresh catnip during my absense, I don't have the photographic evidence on hand (yet).

The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted this week at Life from a Cat's perspective. And of course the Friday Ark #158 is at the modulator.

Finally, thank you to everyone who sent their kind thoughts this week, through comments here at CatSynth as well as via email or other media. I will try my best to answer individually as well, but wanted to say something here for everyone.

As a rule, I don't talk about family on CatSynth (except for Luna). However, I am making an exception for my grandmother, Millie Poris, who passed away this weekend.

She was the “quintessential grandma”, very warm and full of life and doting on her grandchildren even into their 30s. As young kids, that included bring us treats, taking us out a lot, or letting us get away with things, that were otherwise forbidden.

Despite numerous health challenges, I have to think this last year was a happy one for her. A huge baseball fan, she was a VIP for her 90th birthday at a professional baseball game during a recent family reunion. And earlier this year, she celebrated a grandson's wedding:

Yes, it was in Texas, and she was enjoying the whole cowboy-hat thing with the rest of us from the New York contingent.

The wedding was also the last event where we were together.

I will be going to New York this week for the funeral and to be with family. This site will remain quiet for the next few days out of respect. We may get some guest posts at the end of the week, and of course Luna will be here next weekend.

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Weather is always a risk with an outdoor event, and so it is with Woodstockhausen 2007. As suggested earlier, we are having some unusually bad rain, which affected both the stage as well as the roads in the Santa Cruz mountains, so the event had to be cancelled.

At this point, I haven't heard any plans to reschedule…

As usual these days, we are consolidating our weekend cat blogging activities. Weekend Cat Blogging is being hosted by Kate and Puddy (one of Luna's look-a-likes) at A Byootaful Life.
This weekend's theme for the Bad Kitty Chaos Festival, hosted by Pets Garden Blog, is pillows and beds. Well, soft cushions are one of Luna's areas of great expertise:

Of course we have seen her curled up on the bed many times:

And it is one of those days where curling up on a bed or a cushion seems like the perfect thing to do, with a steady cold rain coming down around us:

That wouldn't be much of a problem, except that we have an outdoor music festival tonight! September is the usually the hottest, driest month here, so something is wrong…

In addition to WCB and the Festival of Chaos, we also have the Carnival of the Cats, hosted this week by This That and the Other Thing, with Amber, Kosmo, Mouse and Indigo (another fellow black cat). And of course, the Friday Ark at themodulator.

It's only two days until the return of Woodstockhausen.

I am going to try and keep things simple, given that the performance is out in the middle of the woods, and a total of 12 minutes in length. In fact, I am going for something very similar in setup and programming to the performance we did at the Skronkathon back in July:

It's just the MacBook running Open Sound World (the new version), the keyboard, mic, and the E-MU 0202|USB interface. The program is the same series of wavetables, with several minor modifcations to make the FM patch work without going unstable. For the math and DSP geeks: I simply changed the modulator from a sine function to a sine-squared function, and added a hyperbolic tangent to control the output levels. For the rest of you: I made it so the sound doesn't blow up constantly.

The input sources will be my workhorse Indian string instruments the ektar (on the left) and the gopichand (on the right). In addition, I am using these "acoustic" sources:

That duck has been a great instrument, and a mainstay of my live setup the last couple of years. I'm worried that the batteries will run out one day, and I won't be able to replace them unless I figure out a way to safely open the poor ducky without destroying him in the process.

So we've tried everything out, and should be ready to go. We'll have to make sure this is still the case tomorrow, and again on Saturday. My first performance at Woodstockhausn in 2002 (and at last year's related "micro-hausen" event) have been plagued by unexpected technical problems, so I'm a little cautious. Actually, I will probably make reference to that fateful 2002 performance on Saturday...

For those who are in the Bay Area, or anywhere in California for that matter, and wish to attend Woodstockhausen, the information is printed above. You can also visit the official website for more information.

From Ivan, we have Rudy the Rack Cat:

I am curious about a couple of the items in the rack. For example, the unit labeled as a “PCA-200 Low-Frequency Synthesizer”, and it's neighor below. Anyone know anything about them? The only references I can find to “PCA200″ are a measurement device and an old ATM networking device.

Those folks over at dreamchimney are all over the synth tatoos again:

No cat, but we did get a nice shout-out anyway.

So…we at CatSynth will welcome all your synth-related tatoo fun, whether feline or not. You can use the current submissions page for synth and electronic-music themed body art.

I hope we don't regret this too much…

Submitted by jacksin of jacksin music:

Luna wanders into the (somewhat messy) studio, where I spent much of this weekend working on several projects, including music you will probably never hear and the Sunday podcast. It's a rare shot of both the PC and Mac laptops along with the keyboards and other gear.

Actually, I think the ketzela is more interested in those cushions and bedding than in any musical or technological mischief.

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midnight monday