cowboyrushforth.com

oil spills suck but math does not

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:22:00 -0700

Life has been weird lately to say the least. The oil spill really is very sad and unfortunate, and it seems like there has been quite a bit of natural disasters recently too which is a bummer. On top of that, I have for better or for worse, come to the realization that (imo) the economy is probably never going to go back to the good ol' days. I hypothesize it will probably make a very slow recovery as some of the other glooming problems in our country are slowly resolved. When people are all employed and things start picking up, I suspect people will be spending their money in different ways.

Taking that all into consideration, I was sort of feeling bummed for a bit. Business has been slow and tedious as we as a small company try to pick up new clientele. It seems as though everyone is trying to cut corners and just try to stay afloat right now. In previous years, our company has thrived from the constant desire of any business to turn their ideas into a reality. We specialize in providing custom software and we will turn anyone's idea into a good program. These days, people do not want to innovate as much, and the ones that do, have a large pool of people like us to pick from currently. It is a hard game out there.

Recently though, I have decided to not just going to sit around and pout about it. As things evolve around me, I must evolve too. So I have decided to arm myself with a significant amount more math. Math is one thing that when you are a kid you just have no clue how this will apply to your life later. You also probably don't (or maybe you do) think sitting around all day writing code is fun, but turns out it can be extremely rewarding at times. I feel like math is one area that I did not take seriously enough as a kid, and now in my career choice I am finally starting to pay for it as I want to expand my programming into different realms.

I am not going back to school or anything extreme like that, but believe it or not I have hired a personal tutor, and plan to be really hone my skills in linear algebra, trigonometry and calculus into hopefully a sharp toolset that will help me take my coding to new places.

Besides all that jibber jabber of work/career/etc, I am also still trying to have some fun. I will be going to element11 here in just another week where Bat Country will be representin' and I will get another chance to DJ, which is very exciting for me. Hopefully I will remember to record my set this time!

That's all for now!

time flies fast

Tue, 04 May 2010 11:37:00 -0700

Wow I can't believe we are almost 1/2 way through the year! Life has been so busy it has been hard to keep up lately! Lucky for me it's a pretty even split between work and play so I can't complain much!

Work wise we just launched our new website to give us a bit fresher of a look, and we also just attended a tradeshow in hopes of drumming up some more business. Other than that we have had an ebb and flow of business lately, but we have built some really cool things this year!

In other news, Bat Country's final plan was submitted to Burning Man a couple weeks ago! I am very excited about this year, and we have a ton of momentum so far.

Thats it for now!
-s

latest mix

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:50:00 -0800

Just uploaded last nights mix for your downloading pleasure... Starts out a bit minimal and works it way up to be a bit more housy and progressive near the end.

Click Here To Download! (105M zip file)

Traktor plus Icecast plus StreamTranscoder plus Shoutcast

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:45:00 -0800

I have been running an internet radio station for the greater part of the past year now. Originally I had hooked this up to be a mostly auto pilot project, and my setup consisted of uploading mp3 files to one of my co-located servers, and then having mpd stream to shoutcast, so that it was sort of like iTunes in the sky.

As the year has progressed I have been getting more and more into music in ways I could never have imagined. I have been learning how to mix, and gathering an insane amount of music. Needless to say, after the first few sessions I was determined to figure out how to broadcast traktor straight to shoutcast.

At first this seems trivial right, because Traktor has support for internet radio broadcasting, yay! Wrong. Turns out Traktor did not want to pay royalty fees to license mp3 technology in a way so they can stream it so they decided to cheap out (it's not like Traktor is free, c'mon N.I.!) and only support the less popular (but totally decent) Ogg format.

This being the case, that means that to successfully plug Traktor into shoutcast we have to run a middle man program, via one method or another. The first method I tried was Nice Cast which is a mac friendly application that simply takes the raw output of your soundcard, transcodes it to your desire, then sends it to shoutcast for you. In practice this is not too bad of a solution but there was several reasons I was not feeling it, including added latency, wonky gain levels, occasional distortion, and the fact that its closed source and a mac only app (no running it on a unix server).

More after the break...

RMine iphone app

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 10:25:00 -0800

I just released RMine, an open source iPhone application for interacting with a Redmine project management server over on github. This is actually the second incarnation of RMine, the first one was a bit more basic and was pretty much our first iPhone application.

This version is newer and snazzier and comes with its own redmine plugin for now. Eventually the goal will be to have it run with out-of-the-box redmine 0.9 or 0.10 when the restful api is far enough along where nothing else is needed. I am told that progress is being made every week on that front so it should not be long now.

Screenshots:

Check it out..

holy twenty ten batman

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 09:57:00 -0800

I can't believe that its 2010. Just saying it is mind-blowing enough, rather than believing its really here, but I am stoked!

This year I managed to not delete any pictures from my phone, although I could have taken a lot more, here are some highlights:

If I could only have a nickel from all the awesome moments from this year I forgot to photograph I would probably have enough to buy a pitcher, sigh. Alas, it was a very busy year and it had epic highs and a few lows too. The economy this year did start to effect us, but we have pulled through and things are starting to pick up.

In other news, this year we bought our first home which is super awesome and exciting! We are finally getting all settled in and are really enjoying it.

Besides slinging code, we just bought our burning man 2010 tickets (woohoo!) and are getting ready to go to Frostburn 2010 to be part of Bat Country PGH! Maybe there I will remember to take some more pictures :)

new house new house mix

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:23:00 -0800

Well its official. I am now a homeowner. Exciting. Thrilling. Terrifying. And in leu of that, here is a new mix:
Click here to download!
Definitely far from perfect, but making small bits of progress each time! This one runs about 58 minues. To be played at full volume.

thursday morning mix

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:13:00 -0700

A couple weekends ago I had the awesome opportunity to go to a small gathering in the middle of the mojave desert and heard some of the most amazing music ever. All said and done, it was one of the most awesome experiences I have ever had, complete with a run in with a 12" in diameter tarantula!

Since then I have taken up my music interest to a new level and have started trying to learn how to mix and get more into it. Having a BALL.

Check out my latest mix: thursday Morning Mix (38 min)

evolution full speed

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:18:00 -0700

Back from Burning Man, and back to the real world! Definitely not the same. It is hard to believe that this was my 4th burning man, and that it was yet again totally worth it and unbelievable in so many ways.

Post-Burn I have been surprisingly productive, and finally am feeling pretty cleaned up and back to full speed. Last weekend I had the epic opportunity to get back to off roading as well.

In other news we are getting pretty close to buying a house, so between that, San Diego decompression, and the Barstow Poker Run, I am staying busy and keepin the post-burn blues under check!

over & out
-spotman

T Minus 36 hours

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:39:00 -0700

In about 36 more hours Slinkerbell, + the fisholution, + some of our awesome campmates at bat country, + myself will be leaving for the playa!

I will be sporting a purple mohawk and camped with bat country at 9:30 and esplanade. Yee-Haw!