Karen Mae Kurchoff RIP

JWise Moments

Karen Goff and John Wise at a Great Lake in the Eastern United States

This is my mother, Karen Mae Kurchoff. She was a difficult person with questionable decision-making processes, but she was still my mom, and now I will only be able to look back at our lives because hers has passed. In October, she experienced a stroke that affected her left side to an extent that, without her concerted effort, would leave her paralyzed; she chose paralysis. A couple of weeks ago, she made another poor choice when she stopped eating, followed by the stopping of drinking any fluids four days ago. So tonight, with little struggle and no fanfare, she quietly and by herself, through the haze of a morphine-induced stupor, took the exit ramp.

Should my short note of memorializing my mother seem distant, she effectively chose suicide by self-neglect instead of taking the more difficult path. That is how she lived most of her life. I cannot know what ultimately made her the person she was, but I know she had plenty of blame for nearly all that were a close part of her life. I can’t say I really ever knew her to be genuinely happy, as there was always an undercurrent of frustration and wanting things to be better because good enough was never enough.

While my mom was affable and could endear almost anyone to her loud Buffalonian screech, she often honestly tried to be a good person for others she respected. For those she was supposed to love, there was conflict and tension. I will wonder in the years to come what was it in childhood that impacted her ultimate happiness. Why, at 14 years old in 1962, would she get pregnant and then, six years later, abandon her children? Why did she take the easy road and endure the pain and suffering of abusive husbands? Why didn’t she fight to live to a ripe old age?

In the end, she would never explain a thing, though when my sisters and I asked her a week ago why she chose the path she was most recently on, she said, “Because it’s easy.”

Is it really so easy to just go die?

Facebook

JWise Moments

Facebook

I read a lot of negative stuff and listen to far more about how bad Facebook is. It may have its flaws and experience growing pains that verge into areas of behavior that could be questionable, but I hope these blemishes are repairable. Social media is evolving and is the first platform of its kind to connect so many people in the largest gathering ever. To me, it’s a kind of Woodstock, and the information fills in for the bands. Earlier today, I wrote the following on someone else’s post:

“What makes Facebook valuable to me is the diversity of people who have congregated in a single location; it is up to the individual to choose who to hang out with and what qualities of people meet their needs. Is this really so different than the real world?

For example, I go to a nightclub where 300 potential friends are also at. Statistically, some of those people are going to jail; others will go home to abuse a spouse; there are radicals to the left and right; some have crap diets, limited intelligence, or are poor dancers. I DON’T friend them all. I have to filter them, and if it’s the only club in town, then I can either bitch about what I have, move to the village that doesn’t have a club, or open my own.

Facebook is what we make of it. I’ve not friended 1.5 billion members; it’s only 180 people. Then I rub shoulders with maybe 500 others in places like Synth and Eurorack forums on Facebook. Occasionally, I bump into someone, and I think, “Yeah, this person might be interesting,” and so I join a conversation.”

Why does this have to be so difficult and rife with drama? Could it be because we are missing something in our own lives and need to blame anything else instead of taking responsibility for our own decisions to eat all the junk food, be it social or edible, that is within our grasp?

Difficulty and Ego

JWise Moments

Calibrating the Ornament & Crime Eurorack Module

The pain of learning something complex is exacerbated by the risk of exposing oneself to the perceived notion that ridicule could be an outcome of accomplishing anything less than perfection. This dilemma and fear of allowing others to see your incompetence as you struggle forward are real and unfortunate.

I have endeavored for more than a year to learn about making electronic music on an incredibly deep and complex machine where I’m confronted with difficulty every time I turn it on. For example, just last night, I spent a couple of hours trying to calibrate my Ornament & Crime modules. While I’ve had these for quite some time, it has not been necessary prior to now to have them properly calibrated.

As a matter of fact, it was not my intention to even start that process last night; I was simply looking for the instructions on how to change the time until the screensaver kicked in because one of the units was set to 15 seconds, and the other 25 seconds(?). So I set them both to 30 seconds, but while I was on the instruction page, I saw the information regarding calibration. I didn’t build these modules (they are DIY units), so I figured the two guys who built them surely calibrated them before they shipped them to me. They may have, but as I would come to learn, other factors can interfere with how accurately they are calibrated.

On my first pass, I had to contend with the fact that my Mordax Data Oscilloscope only reads out two decimals of accuracy, and the instructions were telling me to take it to four decimals. I started the process and decided to get as close as possible. After finishing the second unit, I glanced over the instructions again, but this time, I saw that it clearly says that as you go from, say, 3.99 to 4.00 volts, there could be a flicker of the numbers; rotate the dial just until the flicker stops, and you’ll probably be extremely close to 4.0000V, and so I started over and readjusted my calibration. For the calibration point around 0.0000V, as soon as I got to -0.00, I adjusted the encoder until I had a solid -0.00V without flicker.

Mostly done with the second unit and my eyes straining in the poor light, I turned on two LED USB lamps that are mounted directly in my Eurorack case. They each have 10 LEDs, so I get some great bright light on my instrument. There’s a problem, though: as I turned on the lights, the calibrated voltage shifted. I turned off the lights, and the voltage returned to near-perfect calibration. Turned them back on, and sure enough, I was seeing a shift in voltage that would have a small, maybe imperceptible impact on the notes being sent out of this module.

Lucky me, I was also starting to think about that -0.00V reading and got to wondering if there wasn’t a point between the negative zero and positive zero. Seeing I was going to start over again anyway, I sent directly to the zero reading, and sure enough, there were quite a few turns of the encoder before I got to the point where the readout was flickering between -0.00V and 0.00V. Once the minus sign stopped flickering on and off, I figured that I had a near-perfect zero voltage point. With that, I had to calibrate these units one more time.

This issue arose because I finally took time to look for something in the manual, and upon finding one thing, I casually and not very accurately read another and because I didn’t even try to be meticulous in the slightest, I moved forward without enough information to do things right the first or second time.

Now, finally, we get to the gist of why I started this blog entry. Eurorack synths, foreign languages, electrical engineering, coding for things like deep learning and complex network systems, and a host of other non-intuitive endeavors/hobbies can tax our faculties and make us scratch our heads about why we sought out something that at times feels impossible to excel at.

Our egos at these weak points ravage us with uncertainty and can make us not only angry with ourselves, but with others around us. Case in point: forums!

How many of us want to be mad at a thing and its creator because the version we bought is obviously broken? Most often, it is not broken; on the contrary, it is us that is broken. We have been set up by a system that doesn’t have much room for mistakes and failure. You have one chance to win, one chance to get good grades, one chance to get things right, or risk getting fired from your job.

We then apply this to the things that should bring us a sense of personal accomplishment, but our conditioning from a relentless march into incremental, often meaningless rewards is then applied to our passions. From the inability to master difficult situations and complex learning scenarios, we don’t want to risk our egos and allow shame to hammer away at us, so we lash out and blame something or someone else. We are not adulting when this happens. Instead, we go to a forum and rant as a poor exercise in a catharsis that only works to alienate the hostile blowhard who is likely feeding the anxiety of those who would like to help but are put off by the toxic volatility of the poster.

This then begs the question, “So what do we do as a society to correct this broken process?” The answer is too complex and would require another few thousand words to start to offer my thoughts on some of the structural and cultural issues that could be part of our dialog, but this blog entry is already too nerdy and long, so maybe that’s a topic for another day. It’s kind of like starting the calibration process only to recognize there’s more to know, and you’ll just have to do it again and again anyway, so persistence, at least, should be a large part of the key.

Stillson Hammer Time

JWise Moments, Photo of the Day

The past couple of weeks I was offered the opportunity to beta test a new firmware for the Stillson Hammer MKII from Industrial Music Electronics. The Stillson Hammer is a Eurorack format modular synthesizer piece of gear from Scott Jaeger out of the state of Washington.

I first learned of this device in the late spring of 2016, and by the summer, I was ready to place my order. The Stillson Hammer had a rocky start when it first shipped in March 2016, with more than a few bug reports and frustration getting it to play nice. By the time I made my order in July, the firmware had been updated to version 1.5, but it was still less than perfect. Hot on its heels was firmware version 1.666, which was poetically appropriate, seeing that the list price of the Stillson Hammer was $666.

Even with its share of wonky behaviors, this sequencer was building a dedicated fan base. In mid-September, I finally received notice that my unit was shipping; my enthusiasm had not been tarnished by the negative reports. I guess my many years of testing software braced me for dealing with a product that is evolving.

Stillson Hammer MKII from Industrial Music Electronics

What made the Stillson Hammer so desirable was its emphasis on live performance and modulation possibilities. While the MakeNoise Rene was arguably more popular that summer, it wasn’t suited for live shows. The other big point of differentiation was that this sequencer had four CV and four gate outputs. In addition to the 16 sliders for snappy adjustments of gate and CV values for each of the steps per track, it appeared that we were on the verge of a huge shift in sequencers for the modular market.

The ER-101 from Orthogonal Devices may have been more fully packed with features, and it was certainly out a lot longer than any of the competition, having been released in December 2013. The companion device known as the ER-102 followed a year later, but with the full system price at over $1000, it was out of reach for many. What it had going for it was deep programmability, four tracks, 99 steps, eight CVs, and four gates; with the ER-102, the capabilities skyrocketed. While this module remains a strong contender as the best sequencer for serious composers, it is a bit difficult to program on the fly during live performances. Colin Benders is certainly the exception to the rule regarding this last claim.

So, creating something that went beyond the one track, one CV, and one gate-dominant design that could be had for only $566 on sale was something the market was hungry for. Scott Jaeger hit on the right design at the right time. Keeping an impatient fan base happy while he nearly single-handedly dealt with the pressures of manufacturing, creating new products for the next big trade shows, maintaining existing products, dealing with customer service, and having a life may prove as difficult for him as it does for the majority of small companies operating with between 1 and 5 employees.

When my Stillson Hammer arrived, it may not have been perfect, but I was even less so. This was my first dedicated Eurorack sequencer, and I honestly didn’t understand the first thing about tracks, steps, gates, scales, ratchets, delays, and transposing. As I stumbled through some rudimentary tutorials in exploring this thing of complexity, I had plenty of other options within my rack to distract me from the other things I didn’t understand.

Around the same time all of this was happening, I was expanding my company that had just gone public and was taking my employee count from 20 to 30 people after raising another round of capital. I was busy. As the end of the year rolled around, I was mostly oblivious and unaffected by the issues I was reading about the Stillson Hammer in the forums, as the topics were mostly beyond my comprehension and fully in the domain of people who apparently knew what they were doing. I’ve since come to learn there are a lot of people new to Eurorack who also have no idea what they are doing.

January 2017 saw a lot of chatter about pending firmware updates. I took the opportunity to order a Picket 3 device for $20, so I’d be ready when it arrived. In April, firmware version 1.777 was delivered along with my skill set having to come to grips with updating my Stillson Hammer.

To someone already lost in the confusion of this modular synthesis entanglement of complexity, it is easy to feel updating your device is a near impossibility. First, I needed this strange little red electronic device known as a Pickit that I’d never used before. Next, I needed an application called MPLab IPE, that’s a 600MB download and, at first glance, is intimidating. The Stillson Hammer user manual offered nothing in the way of help. Fortunately, some friendly soul on the internet shared his story about how to update the firmware.

Still being a green user of sequencers the advances from 1.666 to 1.777 were invisible to me. Then, in September, Scott started releasing a quick succession of updates, starting with 1.85 and culminating with 1.852. By this time, I had cultivated enough familiarity with the Stillson Hammer that the improvements earned quality of life points for me.

Just a month later, Scott reached out to me after he and I exchanged a couple of emails regarding an order I had made for a Plexiglas window replacement for the red film that shipped with early units. He asked if I’d be interested in testing firmware 2.0. My answer was an enthusiastic yes.

How Scott thought I’d be a good candidate to test his firmware is beyond me, but as I accepted, I was determined that I was going to give him some kind of feedback.

What was great about the next few weeks was that I had to methodically go through every single detail that I could explore to the best of my ability. My familiarity with the Stillson Hammer was going up exponentially. The previous year spent learning about the multitude of other things I needed to understand was starting to pay dividends in my overall understanding.

There were a lot of rough spots and inconsistencies still in the firmware prior to this push for 2.0. There were probably many things I reported to Scott that were not issues but design choices for things I wasn’t familiar with enough to understand why they worked the way they did. All the same, Scott took the time to read each of my short missives and, on occasion, explain why something was the way it was. As I progressed from beta 1 to 2, 3, 4, and finally released candidate 1, I saw more than a few things I’ve reported fixed and at least a couple of new additions. The capability and maturity of the Stillson Hammer is now rock solid, in my humble opinion. With the new firmware, it will be an interesting next couple of weeks as others start to dissect and push the boundaries of what this sequencer does; I hope to learn a lot more from these enthusiasts.

Through all of this, the tutorials from Robotopsy and a Japanese language tutorial from Clock Face Modular were watched more than a couple of times each. The user manual in its first incarnation didn’t help me that much, but it promises to get better with the final release of the 2.0 firmware. Giving yourself some dedicated time to methodically dig into a sequencer while reading and watching all that you can ultimately pay off, but it’s a tough slog when you come from knowing nothing about music composition prior to diving into the world of Eurorack.

Itay and Rotem

JWise Moments, Photo of the Day

Itay and Rotem in Arizona making shakshuka

Meet Itay and Rotem – newlyweds. I met Itay nearly two years ago due to my VR project that he was drawn to. A student at Arizona State University at the time, he had hard limits on how he could help us, but talk about VR we did more than a few times at his favorite coffee shop in Tempe, Echo. Along the way, we learned of his fiance, Rotem, but it would be a while until we met this smart and beautiful woman in person, and before we knew it, they were planning on getting married. Then, upon his graduation, Itay took up a gig in Los Angeles. Just before they drove out west, they invited us over for a favorite of ours: shakshuka. This typical Middle Eastern dish is rather simple with eggs cooked atop a tomato base, but enjoyed in the company of these two, it is and will remain one of our favorite dishes. Itay and Rotem now live in West Hollywood, California – hopefully, soon, we’ll take a drive out their way and maybe convince Rotem to make us some of her amazing eggplant that she made us the first time they invited us for a meal at their place. Miss these two.