I’m in Toronto for 2 weeks (half-way through now), for the occasion of Mike Livingston and Brieanna Enwiechter’s wedding… and also to launch some new websites for work. I’m having a serious case of highs and lows… some evenings are spent with friends having a great time, other evenings spent late in the office trying to get this project completed. I’m missing home, missing the family… and am feeling a bit distant from God at present.

It’s interesting to me… I find my experience of Christ changes over time. At present it seems intricately linked to my family, to my home. To the day to day. Tidying, working (from home), playing with James, loving my wife, are all spiritual matters. I believe life is inherintly spiritual. Now that I am removed from that usual climate, the forms of worship now typical for me… I feel empty, drained, exhausted, lonely. The struggles at work seem harder to clime over… the battles harder and faught with less support.

But as I said… highs and lows. I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel where I’m staying for the weekend (currently waiting) for the wedding of one of my best friends. He was my best man, in fact. We’re going to have a blast. 2 hours from now I won’t feel or sound so melancholy at all.

Also… a friend of mine passed away from cancer this week, so I know that’s weighing on my mind and my soul.

Aghh… I’m rambling now. I know this reads very melancholy… I’m really not depressed… just trying to vent a little of my frustration/sadness/low energy, before the rest of the wedding party arrives :)

When I tried installing the latest stable OpenVPN (2.0.9) in Windows 7 RC1 x64, I received a message stating the TAP driver is unsigned, and this version of Windows ONLY supports signed drivers. That may prove to be an interesting gotcha… I’m trying to think of what other hardware/virtual hardware I have that may have unsigned drivers.

Anyway, here’s a fix.

Basically you want to download from here http://openvpn.net/release/openvpn-2.1_rc15-install.exe and then set the compatibility (right click > Properties > Compatibility tab) to Windows Vista, and set it to run as an administrator. The install went fine for me, and the TAP driver is now signed in this RC. As mentioned in the brief note, but is quite important, you need to also run OpenVPN GUI as an administrator, otherwise any of the network level stuff (such as routing of networks) won’t work.

I’m posting a quick shout-out to Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock (video game publisher). They made waves recently by announcing a new title would be completely DRM free, and the sales figures seem to indicate this has been a decent approach. Here’s what he had to say, and why I’m giving the man respect:

“Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you’re playing a pirated copy right now, if you’re one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you’re a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way.

The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don’t buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary — our customers.”

Absolutely spot on. DRM only harms your real customers, which is exactly what not to do. I’d like to see more companies/bands/RIAA-like-organisations follow suit.

A quick post… I’m in Toronto and having a good time. Missing my darling and my son, though.

I got a new laptop, a Dell Latitude E6500. It’s great, but I’ve been having problems getting it to suspend or hibernate. It would just sit there and try, but fail. The fix was to roll-back to the prior version of the Creative integrated webcam driver. I had updated the driver from Windows Update, and evidently the new one is no good. The version that’s working is 1.3.2.919, dated 9/19/2008. Thanks to “eprosound” on the Dell forums for the tip.

I’ll be spinning at Sencity 2009 here in Jyväskylä. I’m seriously looking forward to this gig for a number of reasons. First off, this is my first gig in my (new) home town… so that’s wicked. I haven’t gotten my ass out the door enough since moving here to find any cool clubs… I know they’re here but I’ve never visited them. Fixing that problem :)

Second, I’ll be busting out my Numark Stealth Control, which has turned out to be a lovely piece of hardware. I’ve been playing with lots of different configurations, and have settled on one that works for now. I’ve opened Pandora’s box though… controllerism is the way forward, friends!

Third, Sencity is unlike any event I’ve ever played at, probably unlike any event most DJs have played at… being that it’s heavily marketed to the hearing impaired. The idea of Sencity is that it’s a club event for everyone, targeting all 5 senses. Deaf, blind, giften with both sight and hearing… everyone will get something out of it. They have DJs, VJs, live performing artists, a vibrating dance floor, on-site massage therapists, dancers, aroma DJs, and even hair-stylists.
It’s very cool. But it also poses some challenges when thinking about tracks and “packing my crate”, knowing that a decent percentage of the crowd will be only fealing the music, and only feeling a certain spectrum of the music at that.

(I put packing my crate in quotations because I’m a digital DJ… no crate.) Anyway… downloading music now. I can’t wait. There’s too much good music out there.

The Numark Stealth Control doesn’t ship with a TKS/TKI file for Traktor3/Traktor Pro. I’m sure an official one will be released at some point, but I’ve got mine working just fine as it is. The only tricky part was the LED mappings, for which you can’t use the regular midi learn feature in Traktor. I just mapped them out manually one by one.

Attached are the fruits of my labor:

Standard (without my own customizations) TKS file for the Stealth Control
CSV file with the mapping matrix for the LEDs

I ordered a Numark Stealth Control (midi controller for Traktor DJing software) from Thomann.de last week. Here’s the unboxing.