The Double A Lounge

Just about any music recording from at least the past 10 years has some sort of editing done to it. The most common one is something called Auto-Tune. It essentially auto corrects any pitch deficiencies in music. It can used as a plug-in on software like Pro Tools or as a stand alone unit. Normally this can only be done with a single sound otherwise if there are multiple sounds, all of them could be pitch shifted. All of that is about to change. A company called Celemony Software is creating a new feature of its Melodyne program called Direct Note Access that can change pitch on any part of a sound. If there is a guitar playing, you can change a single note in a chord. Not only could you change the pitch, you could mute a part of it, change the time placement, etc. This video gives a great demonstration of how it works. Here is another article describing it as well.
It’s gotten to the point where you don’t even need to know how to play or sing correctly to make a recording. To me, that’s cheating and always will be. Any sound recording has errors in it. Some are so subtle you would hardly notice. To me, using things like this just dehumanizes the recording. Before long, we will be figuring out how to take humans completely out of the equation. Support real music made by real people whenever possible.

Many companies will hire people where even if they don’t work out, just allow them to drag along for the ride. Variety of reasons given why they do this. Many are afraid of improper termination lawsuits or perceived discrimination issues. As this article shows, there is one company that decided to take a different approach. If at the end of the initial training period you don’t think it’d a good fit, then they give you a cash payout to quit. Makes me wonder if other companies did the same how much better it would be for them.

I’m not sure what to file this one under. Maybe I need to create a category for what people do when they have way too much time on their hands. That poor creme egg!

Creme That Egg!

I don’t think anybody who pays taxes in this country hasn’t at one time or another wanted to control where those tax dollars go. Well, now is your chance…sort of. It’s a game called Budget Hero and it lets you do just that. I played a few minutes of it and it already said my policies would essentially make the national debt so bad it would essentially bankrupt the country. Make sure you have your sound on.

They say you can drink in calories all the calories you need for a day. After all, aren’t even healthy drinks good for you? I would hold that thought after you read this article from Yahoo! Health. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by what I found. I did like mention of that fact that a Mojito is a much healthier option for one of the drinks listed. Plain water is a great drink and can even be flavored with lemons or limes if needed. No calories, little to no sugar, and no fat. That’s worth drinking about!

I’ve pretty much lived around trains much of my life. In fact, pretty much anywhere I have lived in this area I’ve been within walking distance of train tracks. The railroads in this country are still going strong after all this time. The steam trains of yesteryear have been replaced by their diesel and electric counterparts. One thing that hasn’t changed are derailments. Found an article on Slate where someone asked why trains go off the tracks.
Some answers I knew already but others surprised me. A good read for the rail curious.

With the economy the way it is currently, we’ve had to contend with soaring prices for basic items. Employment has become much more contentious. Many people are finding out that the golden nest egg they had for retirement is inadequate. We struggle with increasing costs for health care. So you end up asking yourself - how bad is it really?
People from my generation have grown up to think we are entitled to basic things. Here is a list of what we feel we are entitled to:

• Stable employment
• Decent income
• No or low cost health care coverage with decent coverage of basic items
• Reasonable prices for basic goods and services
• Protection from all forms of crime and fraud

I could all to this list ad nauseum but I think this covers the basics. We expect these things without question. Now that we are at a point where these basic entitlements are being challenged, we find ourselves not feeling so great about it. I think a quote from this article from Newsweek sums it up pretty well:

We middle-class Americans are in a funk. “The overarching economic
narrative of the 2008 campaign is the idea that life for the middle
class has gotten more difficult,” writes Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center,
which has just published a massive report on middle-class anxieties. By
its survey, more than half of Americans believe they either have not
moved ahead in the past five years (25 percent) or have fallen behind
(31 percent).

I see this as a larger movement for something I call the Middle Class Big Correction. This is more of the social version of what happens in the financial markets where prices for things fall back in line with reality once we’ve played out this fantasy of something that seemed better than it really was.

Now reality hits home. Things cannot stay the same all the time if they are to continue evolving into something more akin to what we expect. We’d all like to think it would be like the days of yore where you got a great job right out of high school or college and that was your career till your sunset from the working world. We’d like to think that we would never have to pay for things like health care or contribute to our retirement. It’s all costing us more to maintain our middle class lifestyles. I’d like to think that being middle class today is nothing like it used to be. I get the impression that today’s version of middle class would be more akin to at least a lower upper class from the past. Our standard of living in this country is still very high. Feel free to visit any country where they don’t enjoy the things we do and you will see what I’m talking about. We have things like electricity, good running water, telephones, heating fuels, gasoline, etc. We used to expect these things for such a small slice of our expenses. Now that those costs are ratcheting upward, it infringes on our sense of security.
We find out this stuff really costs serious money to provide and consume. We also find out how much we are really consuming. There is such a concept in economics as scarcity. With scarcity comes trade-offs. We have infinite needs, but only finite resources. In my view, we are facing that dilemma right now more than ever. We are having to change our choices on what we use and how we use it. The middle class will need to choose wisely to navigate these troubled waters.