Book Review: Ode to Kirihito

Ode to Kirihito by Osamu Tezuka
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Interesting...

That is how I would describe this work. This is a strange story about a doctor who is researching a disease. The story then unfolds with betrayal and corruption in the medical world of Japan. At the same time our main character is taken on an emotional and physically brutal trip through several countries enduring the bigotry of the disease he has caught.

The cultural sentimentalities come across strange at times, dated even. There was a passage early on in the book where a female lead character is raped and no one seems to care. The perpetrator, whom she knew, just walked away and she gave into it as if she was supposed to. It was odd to me and actually unbelievable.

The artwork was extremely well done though and at 800 pages has to be one of the longest graphic novels I have ever read. I won't put myself in the camp of "masterpiece" as others state, but it was a good book.

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Book Review: The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, I don't know quite how to rate this book. There were a lot of things I liked but there were also a number of things that pulled me out of the story.

Audiobook
Let's start off with the audiobook itself. The audiobook was really well produced. It was read by Philip Pullman and fully cast with actors, resulting in a pretty immersive listening experience. Some of the characters in the book came across better than others, but most were quite good.

Philip Pullman also did an excellent job as the narrator and he has quite a good reading voice.

The Story
The story left me a bit mixed. I felt that there were too many instances of the narrative had to be resolved by a "deus ex machina", where Lyra just happened to have the right tool, or set of words to get her out of a situation. The alethiometer was a really cool device in the story, but often times was just too powerful of a plot device for Lyra.

Lyra's character also really left me mixed at times. I liked that she was portrayed as a strong female protagonist, but she sometimes swung from a helpless child less than her age, to someone who had the intelligence to outwit most of the adults around her. I was able to believe the latter, but the former felt out of place for the character that Pullman developed.

Most of the supporting cast I truly enjoyed. They were well developed and people you could love our hate truly based upon their character. Lyra's parents we come to find out are absolutely crazy. I enjoyed their insanity, but I did have a bit of trouble trying to understand how they fell in love to begin with. Their personalities seemed so far apart and they were insane for different reasons.

This was a pretty solid book, but I wasn't quite "wowed" by the hype that has proceeded it. I am not sure if I am going to go onto the second book in the series.

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Ridelog - February 17th, 2017



It has taken me a couple of weeks to get this posted. The weather was in the upper sixties a few weeks ago in the middle of February and the Mews group for out for a quick Sunday afternoon lunch ride. We rode out to Sycamore Illinois and ate at the Courthouse Bar and Grille. 

It was a great lunch ride for a an odd day in February, but a ton of fun.

Goodbye Flavors.me

This past week I received an email from Flavors.me that it was being shutdown. Flavors has been one of my favorite website tools over the past several years. It was bought out by Moo.com about four years ago and it appears that they have put the team on Flavors over to their own Monogram app. 

Flavors has been a wholly unique platform that unfortunately there is no good replacement for. It started out as a sort of landing page website, similar to About.me. Flavors.me had the great feature though of aggregating social media sites into a page for you. It didn't just link to your social media, but it actually brought the content in. They had links to dozens of social media sites, so it was really a great tool to bring in all of those platforms that musicians and artists are already using. Flavors really was probably the best website photographers, musicians and artists could have used. 

In my photos above you can see how i used it to bring in content from my blog via RSS, Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Instagram, etc. It is unfortunately a site that isn't replaced by anything else and at $20 a year it was quite a deal for the service it was. 

After spending several weeks trying to find a replacement I have settled on a Wordpress.com site. The basic Wordpress.com site can be had for about $2.99 a year. It won't give me the same features of bring my social content into the page, but it will allow me to have my landing page setup once again. I am still in the process of building my new page, but you can find to at http://matthewsupert.me.

So you may be asking yourself why do I use Posthaven for my blog if I am going to be using Wordpress for my main site? Well, in short I have years worth of posts here at Posthaven now. The other thing is that for the $5 a mont I pay for Posthaven, I have nearly unlimited content uploads for my blog posts. My motorcycle trips and vacation blogs wouldn't happen unless I paid for substantially more for Wordpress. Could I go for a self hosted site? Yes, I could and I have done that in the past. The problem with those is that I have to stay on top of security updates and keeping the plugins, widgets and CMS installation up to date. Quite frankly, I just don't want to have to deal with that sort of stuff right now. I struggled for years trying to find the best place for me to blog. For me I need things to be as simple as possible. Posthaven allows that for me and continues to allow that. For now, Wordpress seems to be the best place to build an affordable personal landing page. 

Journey into Modular Synthesis - Part 2: Cases

So the process into researching a modular synth is now ongoing. The apparent cost of this endeavor is striking, so this will not be something that will be completed in a short run. 

Research is the name of the game going forward. What modules do I want and how do they fit together.

One amazing resource online is a website called modulargrid.net. It appears to be THE place to go when researching modules and it has a truly fantastic community around it. Not only can you view modules from the hundreds of manufacturers, but you can also build your setup and get information on price. 

Before you get into modules though you need to first get a case and power supply. 

The Case

The first hurdle in this process is going to be the case for the modules. Cases as it turns our are expensive. These units from Doepfer and Pittsburgh Modular cost $700 or more. Some are custom built, while others are manufactured. There are some truly great ones out there that are really robust and will fold up for travel. For my purposes though I won't be traveling with the unit so I am going to opt for something a bit more basic. 

The best "bank for the buck" I could find  seems to be the TipTop Audio Mantis. It is two rails of 104HP and can be had online for about $340 with a power supply. Not too bad.

The other top contender for me seems to be a 7U case from Intellijel. During my research I have found that there are various 1U modules that are also available from various manufacturers. Some of these act as mixers or other CV routing options. Not all cases have the 1U space available though. It's unfortunately just another layer of complexity to add to this process. 

The Intellijel 7U case has this option. Here there are two rows of 84HP plus 84HP of 1Up modules. Price is almost twice that of the TipTop Audio Mantis, but it also is a hard travel ready case. They also have a very reasonable joiner to link two cases together, which seems interesting for a future investment on a case. 

So, these two options seem to be the directions so far. I have been doing my research on Modulargrid.net into modules. I'll have another post shortly to explore that. For now, I need to eventually make a decision on a case before dong anything else. 


First Bicycle Ride of 2017

The weather was great in Illinois this past week. Highs were in the upper sixties all weekend long, which meant everyone was able to get outside. 

Megan and I both got out and enjoyed a quick ride at the nearby Centennial trail. It is a great afternoon ride that we have done on numerous occasions. It is an all paved bike path for about 13 miles. A section of the path that was closed and under construction for all of last year had just opened up and we were able to experience it for the first time. It was a nice six mile stretch on the I&M canal which had water on both sides of the path. It was really fantastic. 

We also had the opportunity to try out both of our fitness watches for the first time cycling. Her with her Apple Watch and me with My Fitbit Charge 2. 

Both worked out great, but there were a few hiccups along the way. Megan's Apple Watch has built in GPS, but it seems that the Strava app on it has not yet leveraged that. We left her phone in the car so we missed the first few miles of recording for her. Instead we used the watch's built in fitness recording and that ended up working out great without the phone. Lets hope Strava updates their app soon.

On the Fitbit Charge 2, the connected GPS to my phone worked out well. I had to record the route using the Fitbit app instead of Strava, but the data did push over to Strava in the end, including the heart rate data. Very cool and something I hope to use more of in the future. 

Book Review: The Children of Hurin

The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

They don't write them like this anymore. The Children of Húrin is a work completed by J.R.R. Tolkien's son, Christopher. The story reads like a Greek tragedy or legend, as if it was being told around a fire.

The story follows the life of Túrin, son of Húrin, covering his entire life, and focusing brief passages on his key adventures and misadventures. The book does not give you an in depth "play by play" of everything that occurs and it will summarize years passing in a paragraph or two.

What you get are broad strokes about the feats performed by a single man and the tragedy of his life. Rather than a book written for us, this almost reads like a book written for the denizens of Middle Earth, shared with its inhabitants about a tragic hero from the first age.

The readability this book rates high compared to some of the other incomplete works of Tolkien. This is by no means as easy as the Hobbit or LOTR, but it is much more digestible than any of the Unfinished Tales. The stories will be easy to follow, but the locations and names of many of the characters will leave you confused. The book assumes that you are familiar with the locations of places in the world, (again, perhaps it is written for the people of Middle Earth) and doesn't give you much reference.

Christopher Tolkien does an excellent job providing detailed annotations and notes on his father's work along with background information about how he pieced partial manuscripts together.

Overall, this is a great story for anyone who is a fan of Tolkien. If you have read The Hobbit and LOTR and you are looking for a story to make the jump before getting into the difficult ocean of the Unfinished Tales, this is a great bridge book that will give you a good story and also give you the background information about how the world was created.

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2017 Motorcycle Show

Megan and I went to the motorcycle show at the Stephens Convention center this past week. It has been a few years since we last attended. 

Last one...promise 😏🏍❤️ #rninetracer #bmw #motorad #theultimateridingmachine

A photo posted by Megan Supert (@nutmeggily01) on

#yamahaspirit

A photo posted by Matthew Supert (@sup909) on

A photo posted by Matthew Supert (@sup909) on

This was also the first year I have bought something at the show. The illusive Transitions lens for my Shoei helmet apparently has actually made it to sales and they had it at the show for a decent $150. I ended up biting the bullet on that one to buy it. 

As I noted in my post a few weeks ago, I need some new boots this year and I also wanted to pickup a Sena 10c camera. They had both at the show for great prices, but I couldn't really justify spending $600. I'll just have to wait and see if I can get those for a better deal somewhere else. 

Overall a fun show and a great time. 



Journey into Modular Synthesis - Part 1: Why Modular Synthesis?

I'm always on the lookout for trying to expand my musical creation capabilities with my synths setup. If you recall, a few years ago I was exploring a change in my groove box setup. I researched a lot of ways to try and mix up my sound. In the end I ended up getting a Waldorf Blofeld and a Tech 21 Flyrig 5. 

Fast forward a couple of years and I am now once again looking for something different for music creation. This time around though I am not going to try and change my core musical setup. Instead I am going to try and create a new "workstation" of sorts. Now, I have been exploring some various options over the past year ranging from the Korg Volca series, to the Teenage Engineering PO boxes, to even a workstation keyboard like the Roland FA series. 

I put most of those thoughts off to the side as I tried to finish my album last fall, (buy it btw) and I am once again back looking for something new. 

I have looked at modular synths in the past, but they have always frightened me off. The shear cost alone is intimidating and the completely opened ended nature of the market, with hundreds of modules, by dozens of different manufacturers is confusing. Coming from a "traditional" synthesis world I have a better grasp than most on what VCO's are and how envelopes and LFO's work. But modular synths, are something radical.

Music Listening: CD - The Wilderness - Explosions in the Sky

 

I was at the library this past week, checking out some new CD's to listen to and I came across this one sitting on the "New Releases" rack. 

Before I get into talking about this more, if you haven't been to your local library lately you should really go. There is a good chance that they now stock all sorts of music, DVD's, Blu-Rays, etc. that you can check out and listen to. It is a really great way to find some stuff. Some libraries even have online resources where you can do this on an app right from your phone/tablet. 

Back to the album, I saw this new CD sitting on the rack entitled "The Wilderness" from Explosions in the Sky. The cover art is what immediately caught my eye and I decided to go ahead and check it out and see what it what was. I was very pleasantly surprised to find a great album here, so much so that I actually went online to find out more information about the band. 

Explosions in the Sky is an instrumental rock band. Pitchfork has them identified as a "post-rock" sound. I have no idea what that means, but I could see how some of the music here would be familiar to those of you who listen to Mogwai or Tycho. There is an ethereal quality to the music, but it still comes across as "rock". Not hard mind you, but there is no mistaking the instrumentation as being guitars, keyboards and drums. I can see this album as being a great one to listen to when you are wanting to relax, perhaps unwind after the day. A vinyl version would almost certainly be excellent for this sort of album as well. Thankfully, they are on Bandcamp so definitely take a list to the link I provided above. I think you all may be as pleasantly surprised as I was.