Radified - Indulge your Technolust

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Radified - Indulge your technolust

Indulge your Technolust

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08apr2002 - This page has been discontinued in lieu of a new & improved how page that takes advantage of style-sheet formatting .. which uses less code and therefore saves bandwidth and loads faster. This page was left posted merely for purposes of making comparisons with the new page .. which is posted here.

This (old-style) page was generated with Frontpage (Microsoft), whereas the new one was made using Dreamweaver (Macromedia).

07apr2002 - Posted more photos .. these from the second day of shooting (yesterday) .. at 10th Street Beach, Laguna Beach .. also known as Thousand-steps beach (actually, there are only 214 steps). Some cool images. See here.

06apr2002 - Wendy posted photos from yesterday's shoot. Nine individual pages. Each page contains about 8 thumbnails .. linking to larger images. See here. One full-sized sample image posted here (490kB) to get idea of the camera's quality. Don't click on that link unless you have a broadband connection.

05apr2002 - Posted another update to Wendy's adventure's at USC Film school. Second of the semester. See here.

04apr2002 - Madness has descended as everyone is showing up for tomorrow's first day of shooting .. for Wendy's thesis project film. A crew of about 20 people will here for the next several days. Amazing how much work goes into making a film. A million last-minute details has Wendy oscillating between ecstasy & terror.

The living room is full of two truckloads of camera equipment. Lani showed up in a mermaid outfit that she designed & made herself, after driving down from Santa Cruz.

Alex & Despina are in the kitchen going over each of tomorrow's 150 shots. Wendy is reviewing tomorrow's scenes in the back bedroom with her lead actress (Jessica). There is enough food piled up in the kitchen to feed a small army for a week. Everyone has a different dietary regimen. Filmmakers don't eat regular food. More photos posted here.

03apr2002 - Burned my first compilation CD today, from songs ripped & encoded the last several days. Been a long time coming. It was back on the 11th of last month when I originally ordered the new drive (checked Rad news for March to verify), planning to use it to store songs compressed with a lossless codec.

Began having trouble almost the minute the drives arrived, which (after much frustration) eventually led to a new CPU for the venerable Rad rig, and new system install, which takes me a long time to configure.

Figured that if I had to re-install everything from scratch, I might as well do it with the new CPU & chipset I wanted. Fortunately, that venture turned out surprisingly well, rendering $600 performance for a measly $134 (P4 1.6A @ 2138 MHz). Actually, you can't even buy an official 533-FSB system yet, which is why I had to use the wire trick.

After ripping & encoding songs from ~500 CDs, the first thing I did was decode a bunch of *.ape files back to waves .. which was kinda weird. But that went fast, and before I knew it, I was building a new CD, using CD Architect (getting creative).

Those of you who've used this program know how sweet it is. And since I still have a ancient 8X burner, it's still supported by CD Architect, which has since been discontinued by Sonic Foundry.

I was starting to get burned out after ripping & encoding some 500+ CDs. If I never rip & encode another music CD, that'll be okay by me. I was even beginning to get cranky. But after the first compilation .. with cross-faded songs, it suddenly all seems worth it. Listening to it now .. on the home system. No skips or pops. Flawless quality, equal to that of the original CD (via lossless codec).

It contains all my favorite songs, with one song beginning just before the current song ends. Can't buy CDs like that in any store. I was just going to make a label for my new CD, but first Wendy wants to make a CD for herself .. after I did all the work ripping & encoding. =/

I'm surprised by how many songs you can store on a 120-gig drive .. even using lossless compression. If you figure that the average music CD contains ~600MB worth of songs, and I usually only like half the songs on average (some CDs more, some only have one good song).

And if you figure that lossless compression is good for ~50% reduction in file size, that means you can store the songs from ~800 music CDs on a 120-gig drive. If you were to use either MP3 or Musepack, or another lossy codec, you could easily multiply that number by 3 or 4, which means you could store the songs from 3200 CDs on a single hard drive. Amazing.

I feel that making custom, compilation CDs is one of the cooler things you can do with a PC .. and the quality that comes from using lossless audio compression makes it all the better.