Fun with Highways: New Jersey's Finest

This one is pretty good, even for highway-saturated New Jersey:

Where is it? Maybe this overlay will help:

Pretty much at the border of northern and central New Jersey. The Garden State Parkway, with US 9 in parallel, crosses highway 440. To the east, 440 enters Staten Island on the Outerbridge Crossing, and eventually meets up with our friend I-278 near the Goethal's Bridge Crossing. To the west, it crosses I-95 (New Jersey Turnpike) and becomes I-287. It's really not as complicated as it sounds. Really.

Bandwidth and image stealing

A few months ago I noticed some surprising links from a site called neopets.com. Turns out a few users there had appropriated this October-themed image of Luna for their own works. In the case of one neopet user, she was labeled as “Brokenessence: darkhearted girl”. Another user at neopets even got her gender wrong and impugned her honor by declaring her some male dark demon character.

Regular readers know how I feel about demonizing black cats, but that's not what this article is about. It's about the appropriation of images and the corresponding bandwidth from this site. The image in the example above now carries the “catsynth.com” label, as do most of my own images used on this site – some of the art photos carry my name and a date, but the idea is still the same.

But the issue also extends to the images appropriated for this site from others, e.g., the many “CatSynth pics” contributed by others. They have been used at other sites not by copying them, but linking directly back here, thus I end up serving these images to their sites using my bandwidth costs. And they don't even link back here. For those who link back and bring more people to CatSynth, I'm generally OK eating the bandwidth costs. But for those who just grab images from this site, that's just plain stealing.

The worst offenders appear to be forums – blogs and other sites are usually good about copying the images to their own locations and/or linking back. It's the forums where people dash off a random post with an image from CatSynth that are the problem. And this month these forum sites are the most common “referrers”, even though they don't link back.

The biggest offenders for July are:

low-bee.com, where someone used a pic of Mimì.
punkas.com, where I'm paying for a good laugh at a lolbush pic (though I do approve of people ridiculing W).
biggie.co in New Zealand, again serving up a lolbush.
therocksalt.net – looks like lolbush again.
And of course the long-term offender detroitluv.com.

I will probably from now on post the biggest (monthly) bandwidth stealers at least once per month.

While I am happy to see people use images from this site to link back, or to ridicule “W”, I don't appreciate serving up images for free. The bandwidth so far hasn't really cost me much, but it's a lot of work to keep this site running, including the many images which make CatSynth such a rich and rewarding place to visit.

If you want to use an image from this site, please link back and give us credit. Failing that, at least copy it to your own site or one of the popular image hosting sites like photobucket or imageshack (I use ImageShack for sites where I don't have real storage space, like MySpace).

Alan Rabinowitz, the "Jaguar Man"

I heard this story on the radio earlier this evening:

'Jaguar Man,' Alan Rabinowitz, tells us how his story of making a promise to a big cat, and traveling deep into the Belize jungle to fulfill it.

Now this is a man who had a serious stutter until the age of 21, and suffered a lot of the social problems that come with it. He developed a strong bond with animals, including the ability to speak to them without stuttering. A supportive father brought him to the Bronx Zoo, where he made his promise to a jaguar in one of the old-school cages at the time. There is bit of irony in a man who found his way through a socially difficult childhood at the zoo, yet remains troubled about the existence and nature of zoos:

We end the hour with the story of boy who feels great sadness at the zoo. He doesn't like cages so he sets out to dedicate his life to keeping animals in the wild. In the end though, he'll find himself back at the zoo, as a zoo employee, to accomplish his mission.

We at CatSynth thought this story might be of interest to readers, a combination of overcome social difficulties, the human-animal connection, and the starkly ambivalent quality of institutions like zoos for those who love animals (the ability to admire and appreciate our closeness, while being aware of the harsh reality of captivity). And no, this story does not mirror my own life, I did not stutter as a child and probably wouldn't survive too long in the Central American jungle. Nonetheless, we can draw inspiration from it.

Today's preformance. Listen live online!

For those interested in either attending (if you're in the Bay Area), or listening online this evening, here's the vital stats on my show today:


Sunday, Jul 15 2007 12:30 PM – 11PM

21 Grand
416 25th St @Broadway
Near 19th Street BART
Oakland

7:00 Amar Chaudhary solo digital

In conjunction with 21 Grand's 7th anniversary celebration, the 7th annual Transbay Skronkathon BBQ is an all-day marathon music and BBQ extravaganza. Admission is free, but we'll pass the hat for the benefit of the Transbay Creative Music Calendar. We'll have a couple of charcoal grills out in the alleyway for your gustatory pleasure (BRING STUFF TO GRILL!) and a double load of the Bay Area's best creative musicians inside for your listening pleasure.

If you are unable to attend, you can listen to a live internet stream, provided by sfSoundRadio. It works easily in iTunes or Windows Media Player, or other standard media players. My performance will be a 7PM US Pacific time (-0700). Listen in if you can!

Preparing for tomorrow's today's performance, part 2

Things were looking pretty dire yesterday afternoon, with major audio problems on both the PC and Mac. Without going into details, I was getting intermittent pops, clicks and stutters on the PC, and the Mac was simply outputting something wrong. Eventually, I was able to get the mac working with clean audio, so that became the computer for today's performance, together with an E-MU 0202 | USB and an Xboard.

Basically, the mac is running Open Sound World, more specifically, the latest version that works with my new Python interface. Without the pesky graphical interface, the system is rock solid and a lot more efficient to program. It's more akin to SuperCollider or the practice of “live coding”, if you are familiar with either of those. So with this setup, I was able to get things up and running for today very quickly. And it is rock solid, though I don't want to jinx the actual performance too much by describing all the things that didn't happen.

The “instrument” for today allows two live recordings to be played back at various rates, controlled by the MIDI keyboard and knobs. I will be playing several of my Indian instruments to feed the recordings, in particular the ektar (single-string instrument) and the gopichand (also single string, with a bendable neck for pitch modulation).

Of course, the ketzela wants to get in the act again, too:

One last-minute change was dealing with my Xboard killing itself (something stupid on my part, really). Fortunately, I also have the Novation keyboard as a backup, and although the keyboard itself isn't as good, the controllers are a better fit.

The setup is also extremely compact. This is all I have to carry:

Well, actually, this and the folding table I usually bring. Still, it will be very light and relatively easy to set up (especially as the mac boots very quickly).

Weekend Cat Blogging #110: Preparing for tomorrow's performance, part 1

With my performance for the 7th Annual Skronkathon neary upon us, I am spending more time in the studio trying to prepare musically but mostly dealing with technical glitches.

Of course, Luna wants to participate:

But it's really about what she wants, which as always is a little love and attention:

So while we continue to get some actual prep-work done, you can go visit the WCB roundup, hosted by our friend Dragonheart, who celebrates his first birthday next week (just one day before we at CatSynth celebrate our first anniversary).

And for more feline-blogging fun, check out the Friday Ark (where we are always late), and Carnival of the Cats. And lest we forget, this weekend is the first Bad Kitty Chaos Festival (not that we would ever consider Luna or any of our feline friends to be “bad”).

And if you have a chance, Luna has been writing a few journal entries of her own over at Catster, including the much dreaded trip to the V-E-T this past week.