A while back I took the image of the poster used when Psychotica was in Spain and cleaned it up to make it look like the cover of the first album since I couldn’t find anything online in decent quality. There is some detail loss from the despeckling in GIMP and tracing done in Inkscape but it came out pretty good. If I get around to scanning the 12×12″ poster I have of the same but zoomed in image I can fix it up. Until then… enjoy.

• PDF
• PNG
• Original

http://psychotica.bandcamp.com/

Currently available:

• 1996 Psychotica
• 1997 Espina
• 1998 Pandemic
• 2010 Black Dahlia

If anyone knows whether the lossless (FLAC) Black Dahlia is actually sourced lossless please pass the word along.

Article modified for clarity and updates.

Previous setup: individual ONT in the basement of a small apartment building, ran MoCA coax around the outside of the building into all apartment units. Provisioned at 25/25.

Current setup: Motorola 6000 MDU ONT using VDSL1 to run to the units. Motorola 6000 VDSL router with 20/5 provisioning.

Order: over the phone, 25/25 FiOS Internet. No mention of the inability to provision 25/25 given the MDU ONT used.

Install problems: Tech shows up at 1:30pm for a 8am – 12pm appointment. Isn’t familiar with VDSL installs. Leaves by 3pm. VDSL modem won’t pick up the signal. Says a friend of his will finish the job later. Other tech shows up 7:30ish carrying a Motorola 6000 router and replaces the ZyXel 681 installed by previous tech. Finishes up by 8:30pm. Speed tests indicate a problem. Only 15/2 max speeds. He tells me to call tech support.

Next day I spend 45mins running speed tests for the tech. Tells me Linux is not supported so I use my old Mac Mini to run tests. Agrees to send someone out to investigate. Note that I indicated I was pretty sure it was a provisioning problem but was ignored.

Next day tech runs some speed tests.  Keeps telling me that it may need to be “optimized.” Network tech on phone finally realizes its provisioned to 15/2. Sets it to 20/5 and the speed tests give back expected results.

Tech problems: its a garden apartment complex. There is no physical or technical reason to use VDSL to the units. Either by using individual ONTs and existing coax for MoCA or ethernet or a MDU ONT outputting either would bring everyone up to default tiers. VDSL2 would do more or less the same.

It should be a simple upgrade. These MDU ONTs appear to use individual cards which presumably can be individually upgraded. If I ask for some provision above the 20/5 VDSL provides then upgrade my circuit. Or ramp up the VDSL provision offering some. It should handle 52/16 over phone and 85/85 over coax.

Pricing problem: I ordered 25/25. I got (in the end) 20/5. No warning. If I wasn’t tech savy or paid attention to the details it is easy to imagine that I would have missed this fact and been charged for far less than I asked for. 4/5 the download and 1/5 the up and they want to charge me $65/month instead of the 25/25′s $70/month. I called back and was told that they could probably discount it more but needed to wait for promotionals to be added to the system. The “You are about to get FiOS” paperwork that I received *after* the install indicated I was to get FTTP_20M_5M meaning they knew but never told me.

So… why shouldn’t I go to my neighbors and ask them to get an individual ONT, run coax across the yard and have the bill come to me? Why do they refuse to look into upgrading to the unit systems on demand?

So if you live in a multi dwelling unit be sure to check if you get FTTP/FTTB or FTTH. You want the latter. Your options though are limited if the former. Verizon seems unwilling to upgrade or work around the existing install limitations.

Purchase at Amazon.com: http://goo.gl/wGRR

1. Black Dahlia
2. Telephone Line
3. Palandrome
4. I Will Survive
5. Ocean of Hunger (Live in Spain 2009)
6. Monsoon (Live in Spain 2009)
7. Too Late (Live in Spain 2009)

Part of the Erlang/OTP model is a separate naming server called epmd (protocol info) which is used to keep track of all Erlang nodes local to a machine and the ports to which other nodes may utilize to make direct connections to. A problem with the current design is that epmd stores data in memory only and should it crash all the data related to previously connected nodes is lost. Nodes already connected won’t be effected and new nodes will be able to reach each other but old and new nodes will have no ability to link. epmd is designed to be simple so that crashes are very unlikely but for a system which is supposed to provide nine 9′s reliability I find it odd that a simple retry isn’t even attempted .

http://blog.ulfurinn.net/2009/1/17/emergency-epmd-reanimation

After finding out this I scanned Google to confirm and ran across a few mailing list posts which recommended placing epmd in /etc/inittab so that should it ever die or is killed it will be restarted but this doesn’t solve the problem where the old nodes are no longer registered with epmd. The link above shows how to use the erl_epmd server to reregister the node but one needs to know the name and port which the Erlang instance is listening on. After digging around in lib/kernel/src/erl_epmd.erl I found that the name and port were kept in it’s state and there was an undocumented call which would return them call ‘client_info_req’. So rather than using netstat or lsof and remembering the node name as required above one can automate the process.

Which I’ve done. I through together an OTP app which will poll epmd and scan for an entry for the node. If it’s not found it will reregister itself. Optionally it will also attempt to restart epmd in daemon mode. An event based implementation would be best but I currently don’t know enough to know if that’s even possible. For the time being this will help maintain that nine 9′s uptime.

epmd_monitor-0.1.0.tar.gz

http://www.sons-of-liberty.net/

CHARTARUM is the first feature film by Think Twice Productions. John Shaw – Writer/Director/Co-Producer, Jason Osborne – Producer/Actor

From the insert to the new single from Psychotica “I Will Survive”:

For those who give a shit:

Along my voyage, unexpectedly I met one of my soul mates. Her name was Carrie Louise Hamilton. She was the kind of person who could light up a room upon walking into it… She had pink dreads, tattoos billowing over her shoulder, long legs, a big smile and could diffuse any potentially bad situation immediately. I left my career, my friends and my family to sit by her side and watch her die from cancer. It ripped serveral hearts out and left me a shadow of what most of you once knew.

I spent the next few years shooting a lot of speed and following a spiral downward, throwing my giant temper tantrum. At first I made it all about you/them, then all about me and now I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know who the fuck its all about but the speed eventually lost its charm and using Carrie’s death as an excuse got old.

Luckily I have some friends that I happen to be in a band with (Ena, and Enrique) and a couple others that I apparently didn’t alienate (Raven O. and Heidi Follin) that are better people than I am and who rescued me and showed me that there were still reason to want to be alive, acted in totally selfless ways completely above and beyond the call of friendship and to them I am very grateful and owe them my life. Thank you guys! I Love you!

It feels good to have my head finally out of my ass and I didn’t write this to make any excuses or apologies for any of my behavior. It’s all part of my life and I have always had an extreme one from the day I was born

It might even happen again cuz life isn’t perfect. I’m somehow dumber than I ever was but it’s kind of refreshing and if anything it all taught me two major things…… 1. If you pull your head out of your ass, you find there are other people in the world to experience and………..2. I WILL SURVIVE. ………..I hope you enjoy “Black Dahlia” and the subsequent music we made as a result and fuck it, now there is nothing to gossip about so let’s not speak of it again!

Pat Briggs.. Live and die rock and roll!

and Psychotica performing a sound check with Little Prince