I’m going back to New Orleans, my race is almost run. I’m going back to end my life down in the ris­ing sun.

2 years, 7 months ago

Just came to the real­iza­tion that if my blog was a comic, it’d be xkcd –http://xkcd.com

2 years, 7 months ago

Men As An Excuse For God

I think god invented porn before he came up with men and then made us so he could blame it on some­one else to the wife.

—John’s the­ory, as we were throw­ing around ideas for a cam­era phone that does 360 panora­mas, so that callers could get con­text on who they’re calling

Naturally, this brain­storm ses­sion turned to pornog­ra­phy, as it has dri­ven such tech­nol­ogy in the past; the lack of pornog­ra­phy on Sony’s Betamax was one of the con­tribut­ing fac­tors that helped JVC’s VHS win the for­mat war, dri­ving Betamax into extinc­tion. And more recently, Sony, hav­ing learned from their mis­takes, won the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion DVD for­mat war with Blu-Ray against Microsoft’s HD-DVD, as movie stu­dio back­ing, pornog­ra­phy, and games are undoubt­edly dri­ving this too.

sun + rain = rainbow

sun + rain = rainbow

Thanks to @mark­trol­ley I now have SSL on password-protected areas of the site. And as of this morn­ing I’m run­ning the Fever feed aggregator.

2 years, 7 months ago

the urban artist

the urban artist

Just bought my first bot­tle of Worcestershire sauce and I’m makin’ rice to cel­e­brate. It’s the lit­tle things.

2 years, 7 months ago

Attending a Tai Chi uproot­ing work­shop on this humid Sunday morn­ing. Tuition is $5 and a can of food for the local food bank.

2 years, 7 months ago

Melodica

A demon­stra­tion of the Melodica app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. There are sim­i­lar apps out there — Tonepad, Synthtopia — but none of them are as sim­ple and pol­ished. That being said, there are a few fea­tures that could make Melodica stand out even more, such as the abil­ity to save com­po­si­tions on-the-fly and layer them under new ones, or the abil­ity to change the sam­ple sound, so I’m hop­ing they’ll be added in an update. Regardless, I’ve only had this app for a day, and I’ve been enjoy­ing it immensely.

Some tips for composing/performing songs in Melodica:

  • The rests, or spaces between the notes, are impor­tant too. Don’t feel that you need to fill the board with notes. Just like in jazz, it’s impor­tant to hear that notes that aren’t played. Sometimes a melody is strong enough that a few spar­tan notes by them­selves are enough to estab­lish some­thing beau­ti­ful. Or you can places notes on every beat of a mea­sure, except the down­beat, which sub­tly implies “this silence is where the down­beat is sup­posed to be, even though no note is being played”.
  • Don’t feel that you need to use bass notes to estab­lish a rhythm. You can switch it up with high notes as well, and have the base­line as the melody.
  • Syncopation is pos­si­ble. If you imag­ine each of the 16 squares going across as quar­ter notes in four bars in 4/4 time, then you can estab­lish as rhythm by hav­ing a note at the begin­ning (count­ing as the “one”) of each bar, and the third note if you like. You can achieve a nice syn­co­pated sound by putting a note on the sec­ond and fourth quar­ter note of a bar. But be care­ful; if you decide to remove cer­tain notes, don’t remove the rhythm before you remove the syn­co­pated notes. Otherwise, the lis­tener eas­ily loses a sense of where the down­beat is sup­posed to fall, it begins to sound like you’re mak­ing a mis­take, and the song eas­ily falls apart.
  • Try to have a pur­pose, or an idea of where you want to go. Improvisation is totally one of the main advan­tages of Melodica, but you can still decide where you want to go dur­ing a song. If you can see the struc­ture then it’ll be eas­ier to work up to that ahead of time. For exam­ple, if you want a song that starts quiet, builds slowly to a cli­max, then crashes dra­mat­i­cally before re-establishing a steady pace, then you can plan out which notes to add and take away that will quickly and effec­tively achieve these changes.
  • End your songs. Instead of just stop­ping, or clear­ing the board, fade out by tak­ing ele­ments away. And if you can, end your phrases, which means remov­ing the notes from left to right as they’re being played. If you remove notes from right to left, it’ll sound like you stopped abruptly in the mid­dle of a song. Sort of like hear­ing Westminster chimes with­out the last note, leav­ing the lis­tener to won­der where the res­o­lu­tion is.
  • Use sev­eral notes of the same pitch in a row spar­ingly. This is totally a per­sonal pref­er­ence, but I find I get tired of hear­ing these quickly.
  • Songs sound bet­ter with con­trast. That means keep­ing some space between highs, mids, and lows. Or aban­don­ing the mid-range sec­tion alto­gether, since there isn’t much ver­ti­cal room to com­pose. This is because you can cre­ate the illu­sion of more lay­ers by hav­ing strongly defined parts of a song. Otherwise, it all sounds like one com­plex melody.

So glad I saw that in the the­atre. Forgot about all the lens flares I read about until the first THIRTY SECONDS.

2 years, 7 months ago

Splitting a Philly cheese steak with Bronwen before we go see Star Trek. Someone has finally agreed to see it in the the­atre with me!

2 years, 7 months ago

Stained glass bathroom window

Stained glass bathroom window

Listening to the Jeff Buckley albums Dan bought me for my non-birthday (even bet­ter than birth­day presents) while work­ing on a site.

2 years, 7 months ago

Turn’s out Bailey’s will freeze solid if you leave in the freezer for more than a few days. Oh well. Back to ice cubes it is.

2 years, 7 months ago

Barbecue on Fridays

Barbecue on Fridays