The Blog of Matt McCabe

Why is it that the batteries in our smoke detectors only start to die in the middle of the night? Does anyone else have this problem?

Last night at approximately 4 a.m., I awoke to the sound of our smoke detector periodically beeping, gently telling me it is time to change its battery. From bed, I reasoned it must be our hall smoke detector based on the reverb decay properties. Seriously. Not bad for 4 a.m., huh? This has happened before.

I stumble out of bed. Trip over something on the bedroom floor. Find a step ladder. And remove the battery. (Don’t worry, the smoke detector is AC powered with a battery back-up!) I wait a few moments. Silence. I figure I’ll replace the battery in the morning. I put the step ladder back and head back to bed.

BEEP!

What the? I go back into the hall and wait. Motionless. Like a ghost.

Silence.

Silence.

It is 4 a.m.

Silence.

BEEP!

Huh? Was that from West’s room or Siena’s? I wasn’t paying attention.

Silence.

It is 4 a.m.

BEEP!

Okay. Definitely the one in West’s room. I quietly remove its battery. I wait. Silence. Followed by more silence.

Great! I put the step ladder back.

BEEP!

You’ve got to be kidding me! I remove the battery from the smoke detector in Siena’s room. That should do the trick.

BEEP!

I swear that was the hall smoke detector. It’s mocking me. It is 4 a.m.

This has happened before. Always in the middle of the night. The smoke detectors are interconnected in some sort of artificial intelligence, Skynet like network? It’s spooky! They talk to each other.

Out to the kitchen I go. Thankful Kristy buys those Costco “bricks” of 9 volt batteries.

It is 4 a.m. I replace the batteries in ALL of our smoke detectors. I head back to bed. I trip on something on the bedroom floor. I wonder why this always happens in the middle of the night.

We may have found a winner! We both enjoyed our recently procured bottle of Sutter Home Muscato California 2007. At a mere $6 a bottle, it’s not to hard to imagine enjoying it again.

As a bonus, Muscat grapes have been found to have high levels of antioxidants - similar to many varieties of red grapes. Go Muscat!

Yes, I do believe we will soon be seeing musicians using their iPhones as a musical instrument. In fact, I may be one of those musicians! I also see the iPhone as being a great way to introduce children to the process of creating music.

Case in point.  I recently downloaded two great music creation apps for the iPhone.

First up is PaklSound1. Music is created by touching various dots on the screen that correspond to pitch and time. A vertical row of dots moves left to right “playing” the dots you’ve selected. There are three layers or sounds, melody, bass and drums. The sounds are pretty simple, but it is really easy to create catchy songs of bleeps and bloops. It costs a whopping $0.99.

Next up is Bloom, or as I like to call it, Eno-In-A-Box (Brian Eno is the co-creator of this app). While PaklSound is cute, Bloom is awesome. You can either “create” your own music or “listen” as Bloom creates a constantly evolving Eno-esque ambient soundscape on it’s own (people in the know call this generative music). When you touch the screen, notes are created and represented by dots that ripple, or bloom, outwards. You can select between nine different moods that change the harmonic structure of the music and the colors on the screen. It’s pretty mesmerizing and costs a very reasonable $3.99.

My kids, West (age 4) and Siena (age 2), both love Bloom. This is probably due to the fact that the user interface is so visually compelling. West also enjoys Paklsound, but the interface isn’t quite as intuitive and I don’t think he really understands what it is doing (you have to wait for the notes to play within the sequence).  On the other hand, Bloom has an immediate one-to-one relationship between touching the screen and the creation of sound - which he totally gets.

Got a couple of bucks burning a hole in your pocket? I don’t think you can go wrong with either app.

We’ve finally had some success on the wine front.  We just polished off a bottle of Polka dot Riesling 2006 from Germany (look for the blue bottle with a pink dot on it). I’m wondering what the logic behind the name is. Anyway, we both agreed we liked it and would buy it again.  

It is described as medium sweet and balancing floral aromas with rip fruit flavors of pear, nectarine and apricot.

Just for the record, Kristy picked it out.  I would have never purchased a wine called Polka dot, much less one bearing a pink dot!

Uh…but powered off!

I literally just finished hanging my guitars and some artwork.  The acoustic panels were hung over the weekend.  I actually did some test recording yesterday and everything works…and sounds wonderful.

Okay, enough of my rambling!  I know you just want to see the DANG picture.

I still have a few more things to rack up and some miscellaneous organizing, but now I can get back to creating music!  The back half of the room, which is a total disaster of various drum pieces, stands, and boxes can wait!

How can two blankets disappear from the face of the Earth? I believe there is some weird science or funky mojo at work here. For an hour today I turned the house upside down. Nothing.

This really wouldn’t be a big deal, except for the fact that they belong to my two year old daughter Siena. And she loves them deary. I have a feeling it is going to be a very long night.

The wine quest continues!

We recently branched out and tried an international wine. Unfortunately, Saint M 2006 Riesling (Germany) wasn’t what we were looking for. It tastes like wine!

Honestly, I’m okay with that because I would rather support a local winery. We’ll call it the McCabe Economic Stimulus Package…one bottle of wine at a time.

Mine does. Well, at least one short story of science fiction.  

The story in question is called ”Sensory Overload” and it is one of five finalist in the Warren Adler Short Story Contest. It’s a fun read with lots of important sounding made up “tech” words. If you like it, vote for Neil McCabe’s “Sensory Overload” here.

Good luck Dad!

The studio that is.

Just downloaded the free app Wordpress for iPhone.  Let’s see if it works…. Hey!  It does. Uh…now I guess I can write and publish posts from anywhere.  I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not.

I also recently downloaded the app 1password for the iPhone. This is a cool app that remembers all your website username/passwords and autofills them for you.  This is especially helpful, dare I say essential, if you have some impossible to remember “strong” passwords.

The only hiccup with getting 1password to work was correctly defining the field names that it looks for.  On one website this meant looking at its source code to discover that the “Online ID” field was really called “j_username”.  This is probably an isolated case, and now that I know what to look for, it’s not that big of a deal.