Author Archive
Friday, May 9th, 2008
backtrack on trackbacks
so there have been a few times when people have linked some of my writings here, and as such, i would get trackback notifications. until today i didn’t understand what was going on, and thought it was just botspam attempting to create a malicious external link.
oops.
i guess this hurts me more than anything else as [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by darknote
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
mutli-episode stories in the New Who
In the history of the revived Doctor Who series, there have been ten multi-episode stories thus far. If we classify these multi-episode stories into three rough categories of “hits”, “misses”, and “neutrals”, most of them frustratingly fall into the category of misses than anything else. The most recent two-parter helps to [...]
9 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by darknote
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
irregular regularity
the biggest difference between being employed in an academic medium versus a corporate medium is what i’m dubbing “irregular regularlity versus regular regularity.”
as an example, in my second year at the UofO, even though my weekly schedule was fairly regular, my daily schedule was highly irregular. my mondays were 8:00-23:00 [...]
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Monday, April 21st, 2008
automatic paper dispensers
in the past year or so, automatic paper towel dispensers were invented, mainly for use in public restrooms.
At our workplace, the motivation for switching to automatic paper towel dispensers were touted as helping to “go green”, the new term for environmental friendliness. I suspect that it had more to [...]
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Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
replacing the electoral college
many will agree that the electoral college is an outdated system for determining our presidency, but no one can figure out what’s the best way to replace it.
here’s my idea:
everyone who decides that they’re going to vote has to take a comprehensive aptitude test. but not an aptitude test like the GRE or the [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by darknote
Monday, March 31st, 2008
crooked windows
whilst sitting with katie in my favorite place to get hot chocolate, she noticed that there was a painting on the wall in which the frame was not flush with the floor. Ansel Adams on a slight tilt.
we’ve had this debate before about how i like to have a small degree of deliberate chaos [...]
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Monday, March 31st, 2008
snapshot analogies
some years ago i quoted this passage from Issola in my other journal, but it seems appropriate to quote again as it and what it signifies has been on my mind lately.
You know, Loiosh, if anybody had told me yesterday that thirty hours later I would have rescued Morrolan and Aliera, nearly killed the Demon [...]
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Saturday, March 15th, 2008
a different music video game concept
if you look at the evolution of music video gaming, some of the execution styles may be different (stomping arrows with your feet, playing fake drums or guitar) and some of the judgement granularities are different (guitar freaks gives you perfects/greats/goods/poors where guitar hero is you-get-it-or-you-don’t), but all of them follow a similar model: the [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by darknote
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
teaching drums without the teacher
yesterday my brother forwarded me an article from New Scientist entitled Robotic drumstick keeps novices on the beat. I’m still wrapping my head around what i think about the whole thing, but i can initially say that even though i’m a pretty big promoter of technology in music and music learning, i believe that there’s [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by darknote
Friday, March 7th, 2008
breaking in the new blog
i’ve had a blog through livejournal for almost six years now. it’s time to change it up a little bit.
the design of my banner went through a lot of failed attempts. the original idea was to take a particularly visually appealing portion of one of my modern-notation pieces and contrast-gradient the music [...]