Present Perfect

day 7

Woke up, left, took the Bolt bus back to NYC. Went to SoHo, had pizza at Ben's pizza, supposedly the best pizza in New York. Went to the Apple store, as usual it looked nice but low on content.

Went for cheesecake at Eileen's, Kristien bought some SoHo boots. Went to pick up our bags at the previous hotel to move to our new hosted bed and breakfast.

Went out for dinner at the Fork and Knife, 6 course sampler menu. Afterwards, tried to get into the Greenhouse, but it was invite only. Instead, ended up at the Bitter End on Houston (which isn't pronounced as you think), which had a pretty good band called Jason Yudoff and the New Hotness. Awesome guitar player, and a horns section.

day 8

Woke up late, went out to Central Park. Convinced the bike rental guy that, no, subzero is not a problem for us to rent a bike and go biking around the park, and yes, we understood that it would be 9$ even if we brought the bike
back after 10 minutes.

Went for a burger at the Burger Joint in Park Meridien hotel, awesome burger, worth the 30 minute queue. Tried to go to FAO Schwarz, but there was a queue of over 300 people. Went back to the apartment to meet Ingrid.

Went to Rockefeller Center and up to the observatory deck, an awesome night view of NYC. Went to the East Village, passed by Caracas Arepas on the way for a yummy Reina Pepiada and a beef arepa.

Passed by St Marks comics - a comics store that is open until 1 AM ! Planned to come back there after the show.

Walked down to the Bowery Ballroom, we were late but so was the first opening band. Second opener, Delta Spirit, was awesome - best unknown opening band I've seen in 15 years, since Kitchens of Distinction. They blend an edgy Gomez and Walkmen with a distinct southern flavor. Nada Surf was excellent, which was less of a surprise. They played to a home town and played quite a few old songs, including their first single.

Afterwards all bands were very approachable, walking around and talking to people at the bar. Matthew Caws looks just like his mother, funny to see. Of course the show ended close to 1, so no more going back for comics.

day 9

Got up, got a lovely New York breakfast from our host, Ingrid. Went to the MOMA where we were on the guest list thanks to Lucille, our host at last week's milonga. While smaller than I expected, it was still an impressive museum, and our staff guest tickets got us into the special Van Gogh exhibit easily. Most of all impressed with the design exhibition.

After MOMA, went to B&H to buy the Cowon A3 player I had set my mind to, while Kristien went boots shopping. She arrived in New York with two pairs and left the city with five.

Went to Grand Central Terminal to pick up a cool t-shirt that should have been there by now but still wasn't, ate down at the food court, then took our last metro ride back to Ingrid's. Had some trouble convincing a cab driver to take us to the airport (apparently due to shift changes), stressed about the traffic, but arrived well in time for our flight.

I've taken a few plane rides, but a night time take off from New York is a truly awesome sight to behold once you've walked through its streets.

The personal in-flight entertainment makes for a romantic experience when we count down together pushing 'play' on the same show we're going to watch.

Goodbye New York. Hope to see you back soon.

day 7 Woke up, left, took the Bolt bus back to NYC. Went to SoHo, had pizza at Ben's pizza, supposedly the best pizza in New York. Went to the...

day 4

Went to Ellis Island on the ferry in the morning, impressive, best thing so far. How anyone in the US could keep up being racist after a visit here is beyond me.

Walked around Financial District a little, went to the WTC site and saw nothing. Did an incredibly disappointing NBC studio tour (advertised as 70 minutes, started with a 15 minute overview video, then a behind-the-glass look at the SNL sets, a make-up video, and then a fake news show with two
people from the tour, and that was it.)

Went to see the New York Knicks play the Portland Trailblazers. Knicks lost, but still very entertaining. They really keep you busy at every time out or break.

day 5

Got up, went out for breakfast, 2 eggs on a platter with bacon. Went to Brooklyn Bridge, walked across, clear blue sky, great view. Went to Coney Island, mostly closed. Faded glory. Had Nathan's hot dog and corn on a cob, not impressed. Walked along the boardwalk to Brighton Beach into Little
Odessa. Had Borscht and meat with buckwheat at a Russian restaurant, interesting.

Back into town, shopped a little, then went to Momofuku to meat up with Luis and Krissa. Had a nice dinner, fresh food, good ice cream. Went to a bar and scored the best cocktail, called 'Tie me up to the bed post', which had a twig of rosemary skewering some cranberries as decoration.

day 6

Up and out, leave our bags in the bag storage room for the next two days, and take a cab to the Tick Tock diner to catch the bolt bus to Boston. Had blueberry and raisin/walnut pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast. The Bolt bus is nice, clean, and has electricity and wireless.

Got off in Boston South and met up with Ward, April and Ruth. Dropped off our stuff at the Free Software Foundation headquarters where Ward works. Had a Chili-style steak sandwich, walked around Boston Commons, the Garden, Beacon Heights, and down Newbury (why can't I pass by a comics store without buying anything ?), then took the bus into Harvard where sadly the skating rink was closed.

Back home to Somerville, then out to Davis Square for dinner at Johnny D's (good food, but the live band was pretty bad, the waiter begged us to 'please take me out with you guys'), and then on for drinks at the Diva Lounge.

day 4 Went to Ellis Island on the ferry in the morning, impressive, best thing so far. How anyone in the US could keep up being racist after a visit...

Road summary for the folks back home.

day 1

Arrived around 20:00, past security, took a cab, and checked into the Morningside Inn in Harlem/Morningside Heights.

Went out for dinner at Metro Diner, great burger. Went out to Lenox Lounge in Harlem, with a jazz show in the Zebra room. Took the subway back home at 1.30, which apparently is not the sort of thing we should be doing.

day 2

Got up, went to Times Square and queued for tickets to the matinee of Speed-The-Plow with Jeremy Piven from Entourage. Walked around a bit, went back to Harlem to go to Alice's Queen of Soulfood. OK but not
awesome. Went back to Broadway to see the show. I thought it was pretty good and definitely funny but Kristien found it overacted. Walked around Times Square some more, saw the M&M store (almond and peanut butter M&M's) and Toys R US.

Went to dance tango in uptown east, nice bar, friendly people.

day 3

Got bagels, walked around Harlem. Had Gumbo and meatloaf somewhere. Saw Saint John's Cathedral, massive - apparently it's the biggest cathedral in the world and they just finished it yesterday. Suck on that, Sagrada Familia. Moved to Carlton Arms hotel, after some debating took room 12c - the spider room. Walked around, saw Grand Central Terminal, 5mins of New York Public Library, lobby of Chrysler building.

Hunted for wine and/or cake, went to Stijn. Had Thai food at Stijn's place, saw his kid. It's good to know people around the globe.

Went to the famous Blue Note, where a band had their CD release show, but jazz just really isn't my thing. And you pay 15 $ for the Blue Note privilege.

Road summary for the folks back home. day 1 Arrived around 20:00, past security, took a cab, and checked into the Morningside Inn in Harlem/Morningside Heights. Went out for dinner...

Hard to believe that next week it will be Five Full Years I live and work in Barcelona.

It seems like only yesterday that I closed the door on the empty house I then shared with three good friends, and drove our truck through the icy mist on to a new life. That night where we had no place to live I passed by my grandmother's house for dinner, a few hours late. My grandmother's not here anymore. Neither is her house. At least part of her floor is now the floor of my apartment.

Originally we planned to give it a try and see after a year. And then one turned into two, then two-and-a-half, and now five.

When I left there wasn't even a company yet to give me a contract. Now we're three companies, and our fifth move has taken us to an office of around 50 people now, and already people are complaining again about space. Par for the course.

I also guess I never actually publically informed about my move from Fluendo to Flumotion - it was just a logistical confirmation of a practical situation. Today Julien is managing Fluendo (the GStreamer/codecs/DVD company), and Elisa was always managed by Lionel anyway. And Flumotion is a full-blown commercial company.

Meanwhile, after a bit of a hiatus on my GStreamer involvement, I am slowly coming back to my plans of using GStreamer - the plans I had originally when I discovered GStreamer more than 7 years ago. I just reread my first post the mailing list, from April 10th 2001 - at least it wasn't a completely stupid question.

My original plan was to write some code that would play your music just like a radio would. Nicely mixed, correctly levelled, a good flow between songs, and playing what you like to hear. An extension of the thesis project I did a long time ago which I used in our student radio at the time.

But GStreamer being what it was at the time, I got sucked into the vortex and didn't really work on these ideas for a long time. I took a quick stab at it during 0.8 in the form of gst-python's gst.extend.jukebox which worked quite well already on the mixing front, but when it got ported to 0.10 using gnonlin it just never worked for me and was left abandoned.

So third time's a charm. After close to 10 years of random hacking, it's about time to decide on one good personal project to invest my time in before life takes over. And this time I think I want to write something that not only Linux people can use. I want to write something that my friends can use too, and that means it has to work on Windows.

My motivation comes from being annoyed at not being able to listen to my music the way I should want to. I've been lax at ripping my new CD's over the last 5 years, and a 300 CD backlog to show for it. My automatic playlists reflect my tastes of five years ago, and only once in a while do I bother to get some new tracks on one of my three computers or my Nokia, to which I then listen only in certain conditions. And every player I deal with annoys me to some extent. And none of them do any kind of decent crossfading, if at all.

I'm not promising anything yet, and I'm only at the beginning, but my experience makes me a happier hacker, advancing quicker from the idea to the code stage than way back when. That's a nice feeling. Over a few two hour nightly sessions, I've put together some code that analyzes tracks, calculates RMS and attack/decay envelopes, and puts together a half decent mix. I've written a simple example using gnonlin which allows me to pre-listen these mixes, playing 5 seconds of the first track alone, then the mix, then 5 seconds of the second track alone.

This makes it a lot easier to evaluate different mixing strategies, making them easier to tune later on. I'll have a fun plane trip with my laptop, earphones, and three batteries.

If you happen to be adventurous and interested, you can always check out the repository and play around a bit and see if it can mix your tracks at all.

So, I'm celebrating my Lustrum of Fluendo and Barcelona with a bit of code for a new project!

Sadly, the names I was considering a few years ago were already taken - pyjama is now a jamendo python application (mine would have been Just Another Music Application - in Python), and Orpheus, which also exists. So for now I recycled a name of a previous project that handled another aspect of the problem.

8 hours of plane hacking baby! Here I go.

Hard to believe that next week it will be Five Full Years I live and work in Barcelona. It seems like only yesterday that I closed the door on the...

Two Black Petes just left after cleaning my chimney. Ok, cleaning's a big word - the chimney in our apartment was probably never ever used to begin with. But at least now it's safe.

Boy, do I long for a cold winter night with a fire in the fireplace now!

Two Black Petes just left after cleaning my chimney. Ok, cleaning's a big word - the chimney in our apartment was probably never ever used to begin with. But at...