A recording studio in my living room

One of the coolest applications I’ve run across for the iPhone is FourTrack, which, for about $20, turns your iPhone into a four-track recording machine. It’s easy to use: you just pick the track you want to record, press a slide button to start recording, and then press the stop button when you want to stop. While it (apparently) can be connected to fancier recording equipment, you can record with the built-in microphone that comes with the latest generation of iPhones. The recording quality isn’t great, but it’s serviceable – and it’s way better than the cassette recorders that were all that was available when I was a kid.

Earlier this week, I tried FourTrack out. After a few false starts, I realized that the only practical way to record multiple tracks was to create a guide track of myself singing and playing guitar. I then created a separate track of me just playing guitar (with the guide track playing through my headphones), and then another track of me singing. I then recorded a second guitar track to accompany the first.

The results were nowhere near professional, as I had a lot of background noise. (And, to be honest, I wasn’t always able to keep in time with myself. I’m nowhere near professional level as a musician.) And the strings on my electric guitar are old (and, again, I’m not that good a player) so there were a lot of squeaking sounds as I changed chords. But it wasn’t bad for an hour and a half spent in my living room.

FourTrack provides two ways for me to work with the finished tracks: I can either mix the tracks in FourTrack to produce a single recording and upload it to my computer, or I can upload the individual tracks to my computer. Uploading the individual tracks allowed me to use Audacity, an open-source audio editor, to turn the tracks into a stereo mix: I put one guitar part over to the left a bit, the other guitar part over to the right, and added some echo to my singing voice. I then exported the result as an MP3 track. The finished product is nowhere near studio quality, but then again I was using the iPhone mic in my living room, and it didn’t cost me anything other than the original investment in FourTrack. And I was able to listen to it without flinching too much (note to self: I need to sound less breathy when trying to hit any higher notes). I may try to see if I can use Audacity to get rid of some of the background noise.

The possibilities when using FourTrack and Audacity are almost limitless: FourTrack allows you to “bounce” your recorded four tracks down to two, which means that you can then record two more tracks. Another approach is to keep a single guide track in FourTrack and repeatedly record new tracks and upload them into Audacity – using this method, I can have as many recorded tracks as I want. And I always have the original imported tracks to work with, so I can experiment with different effects in Audacity if I want to.

I may try seeing if I can harmonize with myself – though, given my musical abilities or lack of same, I don’t plan on inflicting the results on anyone else!

In a way, tools such as these bring the world around full circle. Before the invention of the record player and the radio, and before people were regularly attending concerts, the only way anybody could gain access to music was to play it: popular songs would sell a lot of sheet music. Now, anyone with an iPhone and a computer can record themselves. And playing and recording your own music – even if badly – has got to be better than listening to some of the heavily packaged dreck that is being forced on consumers by the major record labels.

Technophilia

So I finally broke down on Saturday and bought a 3G iPhone – after first worrying a bit about whether the Telus/Bell 3G coverage would reach into my apartment (it does). I’ve always been fond of gadgets, so my new phone has sent me into a state of nerdvana.

Two features that got me interested in the phone were the Maps feature and Shazam. The Maps feature, which comes with the phone, is basically Google Maps plus a GPS locator. If I’m somewhere in Toronto, and I want to find out where I am, I can click the Maps button, and it will display part of the Google map of Toronto with a bright blue button indicating “you are here”. For somebody like me, who likes to wander around side streets and doesn’t always know whether the side streets lead anywhere, this is very useful. And, if that fails, the phone comes with a compass that also indicates the latitude and longitude. (I am typing this at 43 degrees, 40′ 38″ N, 79 degrees, 21′ 36″ W.)

Shazam is one of those applications that doesn’t have much practical use but is kind of cool. If you’re out somewhere, and you hear a song and you don’t know who it’s by, you can summon Shazam. It will capture a chunk of the song and then try to match it with its database. (While I was out to dinner on Saturday night, it matched an obscure smooth jazz artist and something by Men At Work.) As a side-effect, Shazam will expose artists who lip-sync to their recorded songs: Shazam can’t match anything performed live, but will be able to match pre-recorded songs.

Other stuff I got (either free, or relatively cheaply):

• A decent backgammon playing program (it’s beaten me 4 times out of 5 so far)
• Scrabble
• Bejeweled 2 (yes!)
• A free application that keeps track of earthquakes happening all around the world
• A drum-machine playing program (which seems to have mysteriously stopped working for some reason)
• An electronic TTC schedule
• An application to synchronize with my Google calendar
• Interfaces to Facebook, Twitter and Gmail
• Stanza, which is an electronic book reader which comes closer to simulating the feel of a book than anything else I’ve seen (I downloaded some public domain books for it, including lots of Sherlock Holmes)
• Electronic versions of the Globe and Mail and the New York Times
• A couple of restaurant guides (three, actually)
• Google Earth

My phone also has an iPod in it – I’ve got about 2000 songs on it so far. There’s room for more – my phone holds 32GB – but I want to see how many books and applications I am going to load onto it first.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot: I can make phone calls with this device. Which I won’t do much: I don’t have a lot of minutes, and I don’t really like making phone calls.

Lest this sound like an infomercial for Apple, I should mention that I have noticed some downsides. One is that I’m still not convinced that the touch screen will hold out for an extended period of time, especially given that I am large and clumsy. Secondly, I feel uncomfortable owning something that would cost a lot of money to replace if I dropped it. I bought the strongest phone case and a screen protector for it, but still. And I don’t get all that much data per month (only 500 MB), unless I want to pay more.

To solve the last problem: I didn’t realize, until after I got the phone, that the iPhone supports Wi-Fi. If you are within reach of a wireless network, you can configure your phone to use it instead of the 3G network to which it is connected by default. And it turns out that, for a little more than $40, I can buy a wireless router that allows me to use my Rogers broadband connection with both my desktop computer and my phone.

Mind you, the wireless router came with the worst set of installation instructions I have ever seen. I was told to unplug my modem, connect it to one of the LAN ports on the router, then plug in the router; nothing happened. A better set of instructions, in the manual in PDF format that was shipped with the router, instructed me to unplug my modem, connect it to the WAN port on the router, connect my computer to a LAN port, then plug my modem and the router back in. This worked better, but my problems weren’t over.

The next glitch: their installation wizard bailed out partway through the configuration process and told me to abort the process, take the installation CD out of the drive, reboot my computer, then try putting the CD back in the drive again. After doing this twice, I noticed that the web page for the router actually came up, which meant that the router was installed; this web page provided better configuration instructions. Even then, it took several attempts before I found the security setting that matched my iPhone. Eventually, the phone was connected to the wireless network, and all was well.

However, I still don’t believe that this really works – that I can use my iPhone over the Internet without burning through my phone plan’s data allowance. (Burning through my broadband data allowance is not a problem: I get 60 GB a month from my broadband connection, versus only 500 MB a month for my phone.) Until I’ve seen a couple of days worth of usage reports from Telus, I won’t be convinced that I am not simultaneously using up both broadband data and phone data. It can’t be that easy; there’s got to be a catch.

Phone versus computer

So I tried out another technological innovation this weekend: I bought a USB headphone for my computer, and installed Skype, which is a service that enables you to make phone calls over the Internet. For $2.95 a month, they offer free calls to any landline or cellphone in North America.

I tried it out this morning using my parents as guinea pigs, and it seems to work pretty well. They had no problem hearing me, nor I hearing them, and I didn’t burn up cellphone minutes talking with them. I did burn up bandwidth usage, but I have more of that than I have cellphone minutes, so it’s all good. So it looks like one of the primary uses of my computer is to serve as a phone. At the very least, it will serve as a backup if my cellphone gets lost or something happens to it.

Yesterday, I was at a party, and I got someone there to show off her iPhone, which she was totally in love with. It has all sorts of interesting applications, including the ability to use Google Maps to pinpoint exactly where you are right now – which would be very handy for me, since I like to walk all over Toronto. It’ll only be a matter of time before I get one – especially since all the major cellphone providers now offer it.

To summarize: the iPhone’s features mean that you can use your phone as if it was a computer. Skype makes your computer more like a phone. I suppose, eventually, there will be no real difference between a computer and a phone.

By the way: somebody at work discontinued her Bell phone service, and got the same sales pitch I did: the claim that landlines provide more reliable 911 service than cellphones do. That seems like the only advantage to having a landline these days. And it’s not much of an advantage.

Flu shot

So I went yesterday and got the H1N1 flu shot, since members of the general public are now allowed to go and get one. I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to get it at all last night – it took me until nearly 6:00 to get to my nearest flu shot clinic (the North Toronto recreation centre at Eglinton west of Yonge), and I figured that the lineup might be huge. The City of Toronto has a website up in which they keep track of the lineups at the various clinics; some lineups were 90 minutes long even before the end of the work day.

When I got there, I discovered that their system went like this: I got into a line outside the building, at which point a hard-working volunteer gave me a ticket for 7:00. I had the choice of staying in line, or of coming back at 7. I chose the latter so that I could go and get something to eat.

At about 10 to 7, I went back and rejoined the outside line, which took about half an hour to make my way through. It would have taken a little less time, but one of the security guards was allowing people who were coming back with tickets to join the front of the line, which slowed things up a bit. Eventually, someone else took over and put a stop to that.

Inside the rec centre, the main North Toronto gym had been turned into a flu clinic. It was actually quite efficient – there were half a dozen people at a desk in front of the gym who were taking down information and putting it into their online records. They even had a swipe machine to automatically enter your driver’s license and health card information.

After that, prospective vaccinees (is that a word?) were led into the gym in groups of roughly eight. We were directed to chairs to wait in. There were about 16 people giving out flu shots, and one person in the room was in charge of directing people to these stations as they became free.

The process of getting the shot didn’t take long at all. The nurse asked me the standard questions, including whether or not I was pregnant. I said no. The shot itself is administered in the shoulder – it wasn’t particularly painful – and then I was told to wait 15 minutes in another group of chairs to ensure that I didn’t have some sort of unexpected reaction to the vaccine. I passed the time by reading about Total Recall: apparently, in the future, memory and broadband capacity will become so cheap and omnipresent that we could all choose to record every moment of our lives and everything we ever read or saw, if we decide to do that. Hmmm. During the time I was there, out of the dozens of people I saw who got the shot, only one person had a bad reaction to the vaccine.

When I got home, my shoulder was a little sore but not too bad, and I felt some fatigue: I don’t remember the hour between 10:00 and 11:00 pm. (Mind you, I was very short on sleep yesterday, which would have affected this.) But I feel okay today. As I understand it (from reading a Globe and Mail article on the subject), the vaccine works by tricking the body into thinking that it has contracted the H1N1 virus when in fact it really hasn’t. The body goes to work producing antibodies to fend off a non-existent invader, thus producing immunity to the virus (and generating some fatigue). This apparently takes 7 to 10 days to work. I wonder what would happen if I actually caught the virus during this period – would I heal more quickly? I hope not to find out.

Going in, I had no worries about whether the vaccine is safe or not – by now, millions of Canadians, most of whom are the most vulnerable to disease, have already been immunized. While I understand that it’s a good idea not to trust the government (especially when the government is led by the Conservative Party), some of the anti-vaccine commenters on various web sites seem to be exhibiting unusual levels of paranoia.

I got the shot because (a) I don’t particularly want to get the flu (I got seasonal influenza in 2007, and I don’t want to go through that again); (b) I felt I had a public health responsibility to do so. If I got the flu, I would likely feel like crap for several days, but nothing really bad would be likely to happen to me; however, during the time that I was contagious, I would run the risk of infecting someone in a high-risk group.

Old and new technology

So today is a landmark of sorts: I got rid of my landline, after having had it for nearly nine years at this location. I hardly ever use the phone, and I was spending $47 per month (including tax) on my landline and a nearly equivalent amount on my cellphone, which I decided was a waste of money. Since I can take my cellphone with me wherever I go, I went with it.

When I called the Bell service centre to cancel my phone, I was expecting their representative to try to talk me out of it, and I was not disappointed. The tactic he used was this: if you call 911 from a landline, your location is automatically detected. From a cellphone (apparently), this doesn’t happen – so what would I do if an emergency happened, I was choking and unable to speak, and I needed emergency services? I worried for a second, but realized: if I couldn’t speak and therefore wasn’t able to breathe, even if they could figure out where I was, I’d likely be dead by the time the emergency response team made it to my apartment building, waited for an elevator to arrive, and then waited still further for the elevator to travel up to my floor. I decided that I wasn’t living life too far out on the edge if I took the risk of doing without that service.

I think I have mentioned this before, but I am constantly amazed by how cheap disk space is these days. I wanted a new external hard drive, and found one for a little over $200, including tax, that offered 1.8 terabytes of space. (A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes or a million megabytes, if you’re having trouble keeping track of metric prefixes.) That is a mind-boggling amount of space: all of my photos, music and videos, put together, take up just over half of it.

When I was in grad school – a little over twenty years ago now – I needed six milk crates to store my music collection, and my computer – an Atari 1040ST – had no hard drive at all. All of its software was stored on external 1.44 MB floppy disks, which were loaded into disk drives as needed. I recall feeling like I was living a luxurious life because my computer had two floppy drives. Now, all my music fits on a piece of plastic that is smaller than a deck of cards, and all of everything digital fits in a box that is smaller than a large textbook. I like this, but I’m still not quite used to it.

Two randoms

On Saturday morning, I had to go to the medical clinic near where I live to get some blood work done. The drill is that you have to go at least 12 hours without eating before they can test your blood, so I hadn’t eaten breakfast when I got there. The clinic was crowded, as it was full of people like me who didn’t want to or couldn’t take time off work to get their tests done.

I had to wait a little over an hour to get everything done. As I was sitting there, reading, I realized that I was in a room full of people who hadn’t had breakfast or morning coffee. The room gave off a distinct low-energy aura. I then realized that the lab technicians who worked there had to spend day after day dealing with hungry, grumpy people. Over and over again. All their working life, unless they got promoted into another medical task or gave it up to become computer programmers or something.

In the basement of my laundry room, there’s a table that, by tradition, is the place where people leave things that they don’t want any more. (Once, there was a giant plush cow left behind, about the size of a small dishwasher. It was unclaimed for over a week – I nicknamed it Laundry Cow.) Last week, someone left behind a copy of Cosmpolitan magazine, with this headline:

Guys Rate 125 Sex Moves

My thought when I read this: women don’t really need to learn 125 sex moves. Most guys are perfectly happy with the following three (3) moves: (1) Show up. (2) Remove some or all of clothing. (3) Do what comes naturally. The other 122 aren’t really necessary.

Fire alarm

Last night, the fire alarm went off in my building at about 1:00 or so. I’m never sure what to do in these situations – should I wait in my apartment for instructions? Take the stairs as quickly as possible? Ignore it and carry on with what I was doing?

When I first moved into the building, one of the superintendents told me that residents should wait to be notified what to do: if there was a real fire, fire or smoke could be spreading up one of the stairs, so trying to get out of the building might be the wrong move. On the other hand, the instructions posted in each hallway instruct residents to leave as quickly as possible. My own opinion is that it would take a while for the people in charge to figure out exactly what has gone wrong. If there is a real fire, I figure it’s better to get outside right away before things get worse.

However, when it’s the middle of the night and it’s cold out, “right away”, for me, meant “after I put clothes on over my pajamas, put on my shoes, and grabbed my winter coat, my wallet and my keys”. So I would probably be doomed if there was a flash fire. Hopefully – because the building isn’t made of wood – a flash fire is a very unlikely occurrence.

As usual when there is a fire alarm, only about a couple of dozen people actually went out of the building. Most of the building’s residents are used to the fire alarm going off regularly, and automatically assume that it’s a false alarm (as this one was). While nobody was happy to hear the alarm go off, one guy living on the south side was especially unhappy. When I made it outside, I heard him opening his balcony door and yelling “Fuck! Fucking false alarm! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”, and then hitting something very hard in frustration. I wonder what he was doing when the alarm interrupted him.

As it turned out, the interruption actually seemed to readjust my sleep cycle – I’ve been having problems with insomnia lately, but I managed to sleep well last night. Hurray.

Hierarchy of needs

Today, one of my Facebook friends mentioned Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which I have always found interesting. Here’s a diagram of the hierarchy, lifted from Wikipedia:

Hierarchy of Needs

The basic idea is that the needs at the bottom of the pyramid are higher priority than the ones above it. If you can’t breathe, or are desperately hungry or tired, you have to deal with that first. Then come safety, health and security needs, and so on.

What struck me about this hierarchy is that some people won’t – or can’t – prioritize their needs in this order. Some intensely creative people prefer self-actualization over love and belonging, and will sometimes risk their safety or even their health to bring their work into the world. And there are some people who are forced to place love and belonging lower on the hierarchy – these are people who want to fit in but can’t. I’m fascinated by people who want to belong, who want to be loved, but for some reason or other can’t be. I see them on the subway all the time. What are their lives like?

Arthur Murray Dance Studio in LIFE magazine, 1936

Google Books has scanned every issue of LIFE magazine for free online viewing, and I’m enraptured, basically. I’ve been reading old LIFEs for years, ever since I first discovered them in the University of Waterloo book stacks as an undergrad.

This afternoon, when not napping (colds are fun), I’ve been reading one of the first issues, especially the photo series on the Arthur Murray Dance Studio (which, by 1936, had instructed 60,000 wannabe dancers, and a total of 700,000 by mail order). The captions for this article are interesting all by themselves. First, there’s a four-part series of photos of a new Arthur Murray student:

• A Murray pupil, after signing up, first learns correct posture with the help of an instructor and a mirror.
• On his way to ballroom success, he now dances with his expert, tactful teacher.
• Back before the mirror, he tries the new swing step which is applicable both to the waltz and the fox-trot.
• In a few weeks he is good enough to appear in a hotel ballroom with a friend. A strict Murray rule prevents his taking his teacher out alone unless she wishes to retire permanently from the Murray faculty.

You could write a Ph.D. on just that last caption alone. Other photo captions in this article (all grammatical errors theirs):

• A regular twice-a-week pupil at Arthur Murray’s is Mrs. Roy Howard, wife of the publisher. Here she is shown brushing up on her rumba.
• Mrs. Roy Howard fox-trots happily with Murray Instructor Anthony De Ghillany, onetime shot-put champion of Hungary.
• In the Murray building, 128 studios occupy eight floors. Curtains are drawn for individual lessons. A loudspeaker phonograph system provides a constant choice of four kinds of dance melodies.
• Mr. Murray likes to dance with his wife, but gives personal lessons only in exceptional cases to very special people.
• His coat-tails flying authoritatively, the man on this page is Arthur Murray himself, at right with one of his instructors, above with Mrs. Murray. Chic, petite, competent, the latter edits the house-organ Murray-Go-Round, is the mother of twin 10-year-old daughters. The instructor at right is from Virginia. Southern girls, says Mr. Murray, make the best teachers, are forceful, gracious, properly extraverted.
• The Murray faculty must attend a weekly one-hour meeting at which the dancing master discusses new methods of teaching and handling pupils. Here he demonstrates a difficult new step while making a wisecrack which spreads smiles all around.
• Between lessons busy Murray teachers relax informally in restrooms like this one, play cards, discuss their pupils, briefly remove shoes from hard-working feet.
• Montclair, N.J. Country Clubbers get weekly instruction from a Murray expert.

If you want to see this issue, you can go here. The Arthur Murray pictures start on page 32.

According to Wikipedia, Arthur Murray, who was born in 1895, died in 1991, just short of his 96th birthday. I guess all that dancing is good for you.

Stories from the big city, #207

I was at the corner of Broadview and Danforth at lunchtime today, as I was out buying various supplies to help me get through this cold that I have. I was waiting at the corner for the light to change as a streetcar was about to head south on Broadview. Then, a man rushed up to try to catch the streetcar. The driver didn’t notice him gesturing wildly to open the door, and started to pull out. Frustrated, the man pounded, hard, on the door.

The streetcar stopped, and the driver started ringing the streetcar bell loudly. This caught the attention of a nearby police car – probably coming from the speed trap at the City Adult Learning Centre just west of the intersection. The police officer got out, and listened to the streetcar driver describe what happened. The officer then took the disgruntled passenger off for an interview, and the streetcar left.

When I came back, the police car was gone, and the wannabe passenger was having a conversation with three of the people hanging out outside the co-op housing building at Broadview and Danforth. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I would guess that he was complaining about how unfair all of this was. I went back home and went to sleep as I continued to recover from my cold.

Colds are strange things; while you have one, you don’t really realize how much energy they take from you, as the feeling of tiredness and unhealthiness becomes the new normal. Only when you start to get better do you realize: oh, that’s what healthy feels like – I’d forgotten.