This year is an amazing year.

I’ve been employed in computer and network security for over two years.  Erica and I have been sharing a life, a house, and a future for almost three years.  She is very near completing her second session of college.

In honesty, the last little bit of it has been a because life is unfolding faster and faster.  I’d almost like to see if I can slow the roll, but, wow, it is exciting and I almost want to say, here and there, there is progress.  Where progress has never been.  Enlightening might be the only term that feels complete.  I feel that fulfilling might make it sound less than it is, as with most trajectories, you are approaching an asymptote.  To be fair to the mathematicians, an asymptote is kind of a game changer.  Your slope is undefined.  Easily as I sense it, the future has much more to unfold, and for my life experience in this relative I’m excited for much more as well.

In the news today:

We found an "under construction" sign in the tiniest bits of matter.

Not to fear though, the end of the world doesn’t have to be just that, yes, this theoretical higgs boson now found yields a finite time frame to the universe. Mathematically, there are several we haven’t found yet.

Everything is beautiful, balanced and mathematical through-out.

In other news, I’ve started to deejay in my own home.  It was time for an upgrade to the lab, a studio.  It took several hours of deliberation and research to find what might be the best bang for the buck.  The Reloop Terminal Mix 2.  Technically, I believe the 4 is possibly better, but the 2 still allows you to control 4 decks, just not with four level controls for the 4 decks.  As far as 4 level control sections go, you should have 2 inputs as well so you can run without a computer w/2 CDDJs or 2 1200s and their 4 deck controller just didn’t have that.

Onto the good stuff about it, per deck: 3 effects nobs, 3 effects on/off buttons, 1 effect beat nob, 4 cue points (might be more w/shift but i have yet to learn that portion of the rather amazing device), 4 sample buttons (again, shift might allow more), loop section with move and length with easy start/stop via nob button, one of the nicest non-motorized (almost doesn’t matter with this one) capacitive sensing dj touch deck w/scratch mode and almost a simply sublime speed adjustment mode, a pitch shift capable of 8/15/50 wide shift and digits on the .01, tone lock button, play/pause button, start last used cue, and of course booth/master/head phone controls plus more.  Seriously this controller had some very capable design team sitting on a drawing board for a while.

It executes its functions well, and while I am somewhat of a beginner to this owning a controller, I am happy with my choice.  I will note that I haven’t checked to update it’s firmware yet, nor attempt to use it with Traktor or PCDJ, but it supports both of those including Serato DJ.  I’m most familiar with Serato’s Final Scratch and DJ Intro that comes with it is similar enough to make me very happy.  It does seem to require a very specific setup.  I must start with it plugged in, computer off, and then turn on, open software.  This might seem obvious, but, this means no sleep the laptop and plug-in and go, you must must shutdown and then turn back on.  It also appears that it doesn’t deal well with less than optimal electric conditions.  First field test was in a literal green house with 110 instead of the regular 140 US outlet output and only our best DJ was able to use the device without the audible pop/click that was actually rather loud.  More or less, the more you changed up what you were doing, the more uncertain you were about your actions, the more it noisily clicked.  Once we got it back home, and tried out different methods of turning the laptop on and plugging it in, we realized that if we operated from off to on with it already plugged in, it would work and very well.  That said, I’m still hoping they desire to tune the code for this rather meticulously crafted device and honestly, so long as they ensured my warranty, I’d gladly beta test!  ^_^  Seriously happy with it.

Here’s an example of me and a friend doing a session at my house.  It has one audio in, and we plugged in a Casio electric piano to goof with.  Next time we are gonna ideally combine some righteous hardware.