Blogging Ottinger (tim)

My latest quest is to try different kinds of chili peppers in hot chocolate. The reasons are two. One is that I love hot chocolate season and it’s getting cold outside. The other? While I love chili peppers and chocolate, I think that cayenne is too harsh for smooth milky chocolate.

I think that people use cayenne because it’s readily available in huge quantities and it is the pepper they know. I don’t think it’s entirely suitable for hot chocolate though.

I want to come up with two basic varieties of hot chocolate. One will be warm, mellow, smooth and only slightly “bright” from the chilis. The other will have some real heat, but still be a good representative of the smooth hot chocolate experience.

I am starting with the generic “Swiss Miss” non-marshmallow hot chocolate powder mix until it runs out. It is good enough for my purposes. We’ve a very old 3lb can to finish off, and there’s only a few good cups left in it. I may continue with same to be more scientific, or may upgrade to a better drinking cocoa later.

Process is pure hackery. I add “a little” to the cocoa, taste it, then add “a little” more. Basically no measurements at all. I keep going until I can taste it, and then drink the whole cup even though the cocoa will hydrate and “bloom” progressively. Sometimes by the bottom of the cup the pepper sediment is a little unpleasant and the drink is a little on the spicy side. It’s all in the name of recipe development, so it’s all good.

Remember my post on Delay Pedal decisions from 7 May? Well, the questions are settled.

Today I received my Digitech HardWire DL-8 Delay Looper pedal. My wife ordered it as a Fathers’ Day gift for me. She only ordered it on Saturday, and it’s here on Tuesday. Somebody has some good fulfillment logistics. The timing means I can get used to it tonight, practice tomorrow, and play on Sunday. Good thing, too. Sunday’s set needs some delay.

It came with the double-side (stick-em & velcro) for mounting it in my pedal board, and even has a big rubber block (”stomp lock”) you can put over the knobs to prevent them from being changed in transit or in the course of a show. Finally, there is a glow-in-the-dark sticker you can put on the front face so you can the pedal in the dark. Probably not much use for me, but could be valuable for some people.

Everything feels solid and precise and sturdy. I’m impressed so far.

So when the rain canceled my lawn mowing plans, I took the opportunity to spend the evening with the pedal. I played the hollowbody (SX GG5CUS) because it was handy. Tomorrow I’ll almost certainly use the strat at practice. I’m using my little battery-powered amp, so my impressions of the sound will be relative to the sound coming out of those tiny, tinny speakers without the effects.

The digital side of the delay is just what a digital delay should be. The lo-fi really is lo-fi. The loop and tape settings are just what you would expect. I’m thrilled with the lack of surprises here. The tap and loop functions work just like they said they would. I’m probably going to get used to tap tempo and live by it. I don’t want to twiddle knobs during a worship service. The reverse is pretty good, but I’m not likely to actually use it. I could get a better fidelity without delay using a volume pedal for swells. It’s novel, but I don’t know it’s useful. I’ve not tried the stereo output because I’m a small church guitarist, not The Edge. Not that I wouldn’t like to ping-pong between an AC30 and a Roland JC. That would be far too cool for my venue.

I couldn’t resist the urge to annoy my family with all kinds of ugly sounds, including crazy self-modulation and looping. Everything works. I think that the modulated digital is my favorite. The sound is totally huge when I put the vibe pedal just ahead of the delay. It’s pretty hard to sound huge through a 9v battery-powered amp, but it does. Crazy huge. I can’t wait to hear it through a real amp tomorrow.

Just because I think it’s funny.

You’d have to have a bunch of cash to get into it, but oh what fun!!

Is it the answer to the rough commute?

rc flying saucer from William McNeal on Vimeo.

You know you want one of these. You’d be flying it after dark, rigging it with LEDs, all kinds of crazy stuff. Might even find a way to rig an mp3 player & speakers for spooky space noise. You’re a practical joker. You want a UFO.

One more of the What You Ought To Know, just because.

I think it’s brilliant how they used a brilliant white background so that most web pages can embed them so cleanly. Look how nicely the video matches the decor here. And they’re funny. And can be pretty informative.

I like the opening joke about bailing out v pulling out. What’s funny is that the words can mean something opposite too. Pulling out can be abandoning a position, and bailing out can be the way you try to save a boat. But that doesn’t matter. It’s fun.

And it’s likely to get somone’s panties in a knot, which is a bonus.

One really cool tablet netbook with 10-15 hour battery life. Has ARM processor instead of the standard Atom processor. It has a touchscreen (as tablets do). It is open to several operating systems, though it ships with its own flavor of Linux. Sam Hart mentioned it to me, so I mention it to you.

Everything is amazing.

I have been borrowing an Ibanez DE-7 (Tone-Lok) delay from Phil at church, and that’s a pretty reasonable pedal too. I have always liked it, but it’s also a simpler standard digital delay. I haven’t been totally happy with it, but I’m a borrower. I started looking around to see what pedal I would like to have and at what price-point. I decided that I really like both analog and tape-style delay. I would really like to have tap tempo. True bypass would be a big bonus.

There are a lot of great pedals with all the features I want and more, but many of them are well over $300.00. If I were out making my living by playing, that might make a lot of sense. For a church guitarist, though, it seems a little over the top. I only play on Sunday mornings, and I am not part of the accompaniment for the congregation’s singing, not a solo act at a coliseum. It doesn’t make much sense for me to overplay my role, or overspend on gear.

I think I found the right answer. Pop over to Pro Guitar Shop and check out the video of the Hardwire DL8 Delay pedal If your mouth doesn’t water, then you’re maybe not into delay quite like I am. When the money comes round, I may have to look into getting one of these. With true bypass, great clarity, such lush sounds, nice looping, tap-tempo… this is really a Cadillac delay pedal at Camry prices.

I could certainly be happy with this pedal, though I would rather have some kind of remote midi pedal to choose between modes. I don’t want to be squatting at the floor to change effects between songs any more than I have to. Not that I wouldn’t be happy to do that if I could have the DL8. Nice stuff.

Kudos to Digitech on their Hardwire series.

I use Miro. I like Miro. It has great channels, has reasonable control over how many you pull down, how often, how long you retain them, etc. There is much to recommend it. I subscribe to probably more video feeds that I ought to, including web search “channels” to pull down vintage aircraft videos and guitar lessons. I pull down more old crummy movies than I watch. I should get more software videos, less old movies. There are great software videos. Duh.

Anyway, there is supposed to be a feature to click on a feed and drag it to a channel folder. That doesn’t work. Not even a little. Well, at least not on Linux if it works anywhere else. I don’t know what’s wrong and haven’t pulled down the code (but I don’t know how to code drag-n-drop anyway… it would be fun to learn). It works miserably poorly. If you click the folder, the big window that opens up says you can drag things to it, but you cannot. It is just busted.

Alternatively, you’re supposed to be able to select with ctrl-click and then right-click to move movies to a folder. If I right click, I’m given the option to move them to a new folder (which it will create for me) but not to move them to an existing folder. That’s a pain.

And when you subscribe to a new feed, you don’t get an option to create it in a folder. There is no right-click meno on the folder that will allow you to create the feed there, either. It’s kind of a pain.

If you have a folder, you cannot change the folder’s contents. The best you can do is select all the contents of the folder and the new feeds you would like in the folder, move them to a new folder (which you would name similarly), and then go delete the old folder. That’s not very intuitive.

Everything else Miro does, I love. I am saddened that this part doesn’t look better. Maybe I should pull down the source code and see if I can fix it. It seems like it ought to be pretty simple in concept. I know there are bsddb data files behind it all, which are not hard to work with. I wonder what makes drag-n-drop work so poorly here, and why we don’t get to create the new feeds in existing folders. If I learn anything more I’ll post it as a followup.

In the meantime, Miro is worth your time.