I really should update this place more often. I say that all the time, and then proceed to not do it. I did make a stab at it early this morning, but I was ill prepared for that entry and caught off guard by having discovered at the last moment I had missed my deadline by one day. I’ll explain shortly.
In any event, since the last (visible) update the summer has flown by, even if I can’t remember a single thing about the past three months. It all sort of runs together, and while I’m sure I’ll look back on this summer and will be able to choose the highlights, at this point it’s sort of a homogeneous wash. But so what if nothing meteoric happened—it’s not like I didn’t have fun with some stuff. I’ve decided to categorize the general developments under separate headings.
Computer
Around the beginning of June I experienced a seemingly arranged series of failures which resulted in my main production desktop becoming unbootable. I was able to extract all my data using the Live CD function of the Ubuntu Linux distro, at which point I decided to use the crisis to my benefit and install a third hard drive I had lying around (I believe I wrote about this once before). A complete system reimage and case swap later, and the old girl is purring along nicely.
I also moved the system from my bedroom to the storage room in which I’m actually spending the summer (the unbearable heat in my bedroom is bad for electronics, after all). I took my keyboard and recording hardware as well, so I’ve basically got my entire studio up there with me. Related to the computer issues, my keyboard is on the fritz. Notes sustain randomly or not at all, without any input from the pedal (which happens even when the pedal itself is disconnected). Additionally, I get random delay effects when using the internal sounds, which are likely read as extra MIDI data by Cubase. Usually turning the ‘board on and off many times in succession will get it working right for a little while, but then it goes back out of whack. I have no idea what happened, though I suspect a power surge. As long as I can get it working long enough for a single recording session, it’s not the end of the world.
Music
I’ve recorded several tracks with my newly-transplanted equipment. In the first instance, I added a second verse to a song I’d actually first come up with last summer. Bizarrely, it still lacks a chorus—I like the melody so much I don’t want to just throw anything into the chorus slot. Whatever I ultimately write needs to do the A-section justice, and it’s a tough act to follow.
Additionally, I also entered into the Microsoft Bing Jingle contest. Basically, contestants had to write and perform (on camera) a short original song about Microsoft’s new search engine—the resultant videos were to then be posted on YouTube and unleashed upon the general public. I was several days late entering the contest, though I still amassed a respectable view total. The number of views inexplicably increased almost four-fold after the contest ended, which tells me the video was featured in at least one article about the competition’s conclusion.
Anyway, here it is:
Anybody who likes the tune (which I must admit I wrote in less than half an hour) can download a high quality MP3 version here. Anybody here on YouTube traffic most likely knows all about all this, as you most likely linked here from the very video above. If that’s the case, I’d like you to know that I do have a small library of legitimate material, though it’s in various stages of incompleteness and it will likely be a while before any of it sees the light of day (or public scrutiny, in other words). If I gain a moderate following, I may feel inclined to post some of it for your general perusal.
Summer so far has been uneventful. Over a week ago I listed a bunch of things I was considering doing last week. I didn’t do any of them. What I did do was a veritable grab bag of other stuff, none of which was particularly exhilarating, but likewise none of which was really that bad. For example, I’ve finally decided, through continuous trials, that prosciutto and sopressata don’t belong on sandwiches—especially the latter. It’s not bad by itself, aside from the fact that it evidently doesn’t keep very long and becomes rancid very quickly. But mixed with other meats, the flavor just doesn’t work. Unfortunately, hot capicola is anything but, and without the spiciness of the sopressata the sandwich still loses something. Maybe good ole’ fashioned pepperoni would be a suitable substitute—unless anybody knows of a good, super-spicy Italian deli meat that could take the place of sopressata.
Hotel Galbadia is down again. For the uninitiated, GH is a huge, sort of home-grown Internet repository for Anime and video game music. Yeah, it’s legally dubious, prone to the occasional malware-spreading epidemic, and sort of flaky even when on form, but you can’t deny the selection. The music for pretty much every video game on every console ever made (not including current-generation consoles, unfortunately) is featured, as well as some PC game music as well. The site has a history of going down, though, and its servers are usually very slow. Plus, its current maintainer, an alleged transsexual who fashions him/herself as “Sarah”, is the subject of some rather heinous rumors (none of which I am sure I believe), and some people hate him/her with undying passion. I never much cared, considering it’s not the fault of the composers that their music is indirectly associated with such an image. On the other hand, the whole thing seems a bit dodgy, and I probably won’t be donating any money to its upkeep. It’s a pity, though, that it’s down—something tells me the site is on its last legs.
Speaking of music, earlier I decided to give Sting’s “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You” a spin. This at one time was my favorite song, though in the past decade I haven’t been listening to it much on account of the rather lifeless remastering job on my current copy. I used to have it on cassette, and I remember it sounded glorious. Granted, that was forever ago and I’m probably remembering it better than it was, but the first thing I remembered thinking upon first hearing it on compact disc was that it sounded thin, boomy, and flat. I had tried to correct it in ACID, but I went the wrong way about it—I notched the mid-bass and shelved the extreme high treble. The actual issue, which I discerned a while ago in about two seconds, was that the midrange was severely notched. A nice healthy midrange boost breathed an astonishing amount of life into the recording—it’s pretty much how I remembered it from the cassette. Vocals and pads are warm, snare drums have some body, and the bass seems to sit better in the mix. I’m pleased, and if the devil herself had not performed a (dreadful) arrangement of the song the last time I saw her, I would be inclined to apply what I’ve learned here to the other song from the Ten Summoner’s Tales album, “Fields Of Gold.” Alas, add that to the heap of songs to which I can no longer listen.
Aw, hell, though; I used to like that one!
Oh, yeah, my one friend dragged over his Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES, duh) and demonstrated the very best 2D platforming has to offer. That is to say, he generally cursed in an unbroken stream as he died repeatedly through the entire Super Mario Bros. series. He did far better with Super Mario World, insisting that contrary to what he had said whilst playing the others, that he did not hate all the Mario characters. Just Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Peach, Bowser, Toad, Koopas, Goombas, Micro Goombas, Buzzy Beetles, et cetera. He confirmed this during Mario Kart 64, where he asserted that he was going to kill every character that got ahead of his chosen sprite (Wario). He was particularly mean to poor Princess Peach and Toad, for whom he seems to have an exceedingly vindictive hatred. Considering I have a particular affinity for Peach (also known as a crush), I was rather scandalized by this. Granted, I must be a hypocrite because I played as Bowser most of the time, but still.
I despise Net-Speak. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. I loathe it so deeply that I feel that Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, and Linus Torvalds should all get together and create a cross-platform addition to the newest versions of their respective operating systems by which any instance of the three keystrokes L – O – L, preceded and followed by a space, should cause a shaped charge planted inside the case of the computer to immediately ignite, blitzing the motherboard and taking the offender off-line before more damage can be done.
On the other hand, for some inexplicable reason, I’ve titled this entry using a bit of Net Speak that was popular in the early 2000s. I’m not aware that anybody uses this archaism anymore, so the best I can say about it is that, fundamentally, at least it’s not “lol.” In fact, its meaning is ambiguous, with the “H” meaning either “happening” or “here.” And so we bring ourselves to the point, which is that, so far today, there’s NMH.
I once referred to Net Speak as an “open source enigma code,” and I still marvel at the moment of brilliance that forged that description. Verily, Net Speak is just this—a form of language encryption that is freely available to everyone, and yet benefits almost exclusively from its obscurity among those it is trying to evade. Amusingly, the attempts of those “out of the loop” (the previous generation) to garner understanding of this language exude a level of futility matched only perhaps by marching one’s head into a brick wall. These attempts are clumsy, slow, and always just behind the mark—it’s a lot like watching a Ragdoll cat try to catch a mouse. They’re pitiful at it.
I never really subscribed to the whole obfuscation trend. For one thing, I have little to hide. For another, being highly literate (and proficient in touch typing), I tend to think in complete sentences and to employ near-perfect grammar (within reasonable standards thereof) in whatever I write. For me, I would have to actively translate from proper English to Net Speak, and on some level my brain just lacks the overhead, like a processor that has too many tasks running at once. This is not perhaps a deficiency on my part so much as a consequence of my rather deep understanding and internalization of the basic principles of the English language. Or perhaps I’m a square. At this point, I really don’t care.
Don’t get me wrong—I don’t consider myself somehow better than those who use Net Speak. Fundamentally, I don’t feel that they resort to Net Speak because they lack command of proper English. Indeed, their ability to switch between the two is quite remarkable, and to that end warrants careful psychological study. In fact, a whole new field of psychology—Internet psychology—will likely erupt in the coming decade, though it lacks a concrete definition or even a consensus name. I call it “Internet psychology,” but others might use a different moniker. Sadly, generic and descriptive names tend to lose in the marketplace to more exotic but less descriptive choices (e.g. HD DVD versus Blu-Ray), so who the hell knows what mockery will eventually emerge as the designation of this branch of study.
There is little of real import to this update, except that I’m using it to test out a bunch of new plugins I’ve installed, including one which allows me to paginate my entries. Of course this is probably the worst place for such a plugin (journal-esque blogs are probably outstaying their welcome if they need pages), but I figured I’d test it out here.
You may notice a nifty little bar beneath entries now offering several choices for promoting the current post to social networking sites. I can’t imagine saying much here that would be worthy of a Digg, but, as I said, I’m just testing the waters here. In time I will attempt to homogenize the features of all my blogs, but for now this will be the “chopping block” location. Without further ado, turn the page!
I tried yesterday to describe the events of January 15th, though the resultant entry (which I’ve made private) became something of a rant. Accordingly, though it contained nothing I couldn’t back up with fact if I really needed to, the possibility of a link back bringing about such a situation just isn’t anything I need to deal with right now (or ever). So we’ll try again, this time with fewer specifics (a name-and-shame could cause me grief).
On Thursday I awoke at around 4:00 PM and decided it was time to clean up my dorm room, as per Wayne State’s demands. At the time, the most troublesome thing going through my head was how to work this event into a Nintendo-esque title. I finally settled on “Isle Delfino is officially clean!” The deed wasn’t without its complications. I had exactly one trash bag, which once completely full would not fit down the trash chute, anyway. Regardless, I needed to get the litter out of the way so I could organize the remainder of the stuff in the room. And that doesn’t even include the 3,082 pop cans that had collected over the course of a semester, which all needed their own separate bag.
Sadly, a search of all the local campus establishments revealed that nowhere could one purchase anything even remotely resembling my quarry. I mean, you can buy bloody condoms, but apparently nothing to pitch them into once you’ve used them (thanks for pointing out that bit of logic to me, Jamie).
Defeated, I trekked all the way back to my dorm room, only to discover that my next class (in about 15 minutes) was pretty much all the way back from where I had just come, in Old Main. Ten minutes later I arrived and proceeded to entertain myself with drawing calligraphy until the professor finally staggered in (about seven minutes late).
This is where I must exercise restraint. I had heard horror stories about inept or otherwise ideologically-biased instructors. I had even had the distinct misfortune of sitting one such professor for a philosophy course I took in my freshman year. However, nothing was to have prepared me for the man who stood before me for the next half hour of my life. I could immediately tell that he was arrogant—it’s a bit like a cold breeze that emanates from his frame. Nothing entirely corporeal, but definitely a presence that this man felt he was the most important object in the room.
Unfortunately, his arrogance was the least of my concerns, though it contributes in no small part, I believe, to the pure mockery he has made of a staple of the English major, American Literature. His syllabus began with a quote by a German Marxist whose belief was essentially that history should not be viewed in context, but instead picked from and assembled piecemeal in order to form a lens through which modern-day people may view their actions. Essentially, he is an apologist for a disturbing trend of the last forty years, which is the systematic rewriting of history to reflect and justify contemporary political ideals. The professor took this quote as his mission statement, except that even he didn’t seem to really understand what he was saying. He stuttered a great deal and beat around the bush whilst hacking through an explanation. Bored with his seeming lack of command of the English language, I took the time to paw through the remainder of the syllabus.
What I saw both chilled me to the bone and angered me to a slow boil. The list was void of virtually any classic American authors! In the place of anything even resembling relevance, we instead had everything from Allen Ginsberg (noted communist claptrap from the protest years in the United States) to a tremendous share of civil rights authors (who can hardly be considered appropriate to either the subject or the time period in question), to various Marxists, socialists, and communists; to Bob Dylan. Scattered here and there, almost as an afterthought, were Emerson, Hemingway, and Dickinson (one work apiece). Absent completely were the likes of Whitman, Lee, Fitzgerald, Poe, Steinbeck, Twain, Asimov, Faulkner, Bradbury, Frost, Miller, or even Vonnegut. The list goes on and on. Basically, pick your favorite great American author (who didn’t write about either black rights or socialism), and I guarantee your selection isn’t on the list.
But should they be? Read on. In his infinite wisdom, as the professor himself explained, he felt he could not adequately construct a decent microcosm of 500 years of American literature (point taken—but then, isn’t that kind of your job as an English professor?). He also offered the rather lame excuse that many of his former pupils expressed boredom with or otherwise dislike for classic American literature. So this professor’s brilliant solution to this conundrum? Don’t teach any of it! Instead, this professor has filled the void with irrelevant selections that support his own ideologies and passed it off as a so-called “modern-day focus”. He has furthermore framed all future discussions by discouraging historical context, thereby making his own views and interpretations canon and any dissenting views reprehensible.
My main issue with this disastrous setting of the course is that whichever graduate school program I choose to pursue isn’t really interested in hearing that I had an ideologically-bent (or merely incompetent) professor; they expect me to have a working knowledge of the material that was actually supposed to be in this course. This is a required course for English majors, and since I am seriously considering switching my major, this is a big deal to me. This professor has acted in a way that is irresponsible and which demonstrates he is not above taking advantage of a captive audience to spread his extremist viewpoints by passing them off as a legitimate setting of an American Literature course. I will be filing a formal complaint with the university concerning this issue; this professor’s outrageous conduct is detrimental to anyone unfortunate enough to have to take his course, and a message should be sent that I and others like me will not tolerate this sort of garbage mucking up the academic path.
I walked out on this man an hour into his despicable caricature of a course and didn’t turn back. I dropped the class five minutes later and replaced it with another required course, English Literature After 1700. This, thankfully, seems to be taught by a very competent and conventional professor, an old favorite in the department. Astonishingly, though the availability flag did not change on this course immediately after I registered, by the time I got home the course was full. I wonder idly just how many people followed me into this new course from the first one. I hope it’s a great portion of them, for their sake.
I do get one tremendous bonus (a SHINE GET!) in that, since this new class takes place from 3:00 PM to 4:20 PM on Mondays and Wednesdays, I get not only Fridays but also Thursdays off from school. I had my parents bring me some supplies so I could finish cleaning Isle Delfino (er, my room), and I proceeded home from there. All in all, an extremely trying week, but one I had conquered. My escape from the rogue professor’s poisonous interpretation of American Literature—a more fitting title for his iteration thereof would be Survey Of Political And Social Protest In America From 1950-1980—marks my crowning achievement for the week. Keeping myself from spitting on the professor’s shoes as I filed past him—an act of protest he no doubt should laud—was just icing on the cake.
We’ll keep it short and sweet. About twenty minutes ago, I was just sitting in front of the television when a Reese’s commercial came on. As its music, it used the opening strains of Gustav Holst’s “Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity” from The Planets. This is without a doubt my favorite piece in all of classical music, if only for the gorgeous middle section. It should be semi-familiar to even the uninitiated, but if you need your memory refreshed, here’s the section in question:
Some things just cannot be expressed in words. The beauty of this piece of music is one of those things. It has been my favorite melody for as long as I can remember. To me, it is the symbol of hope before that word got trademarked by political campaigns. It is timeless, ageless, and peerless. It’s the sort of melody I hope to write someday. A hundred years from now when the majority of modern artists are all but forgotten, people will still be playing this piece of music and gaining inspiration from it. There are no words (though the British tried to lyricize it). It needs no words. It speaks in a language all who truly listen can understand.
Anybody else have a piece of music (no matter what kind) with which he or she has forged such a connection?
It has been a very long time since I updated here. I notice that, on occasion, a few people would drop in here but nobody seemed to stay long. And this makes since considering I haven’t been updating at all. What can I say? Life got busy, with college and what not. I considered going into a long-winded description of what happened since I last posted, but there’s no way I could relate it all, so I won’t even bother. It’s not really interesting, anyway; it was just time-consuming.
In any event, I just upgraded all my blogs to WordPress 2.7. There was a scary bit there where the first blog I attacked (Rydertech) threw up a fatal error after the upgrade. It turns out I forgot to replace some files in the root folder, and after scratching my head for about five minutes I figured it out. Everything went smoothly from there on out, though of course it took the better part of half an hour to do all five. This is precisely the reason I skipped the point releases; it’s just such a pain in the royal arse to update five separate blogs every time a tiny alteration in the code is announced.
Version 2.7 supposedly fixes all this with an automatic updating scheme. If true, then this will have just made my day, and hopefully it will make me more likely to update here more often.
The past few days I’ve been very busy with web development. I’ve written a new home page for this site—from scratch—and I think it’s an improvement over the original one. I’ve also revamped the family business’s website, though those changes aren’t “live” yet—I only need switch out the index page with a new one that redirects to the new site location. I’m waiting to see if everything works out well and if everybody likes the new design. I’ve based it (surprise) on a WordPress blog. I’ve ported all the original pages to the blog as, well, pages; and I’ve even created a link to download a stock list—something I didn’t really know how to do when I put the first site up. Yes, I know it’s as simple as uploading a file and then placing a link to it on your site, but remember I was still having my hand held by FrontPage at the time. To be honest, I think WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors hurt web development in this respect: they allow people to get by with only serial knowledge about web development. In other words, anything FrontPage doesn’t make obvious is a mystery to many prospective site creators. I know this. I was one.
I’ve been here at Wayne State for several full days now. I arrived Monday evening, laden with stuff, and proceeded to do absolutely nothing with any of it. Oh, I dragged out my computer, plugged that in, and raided the Grape Nuts. They look suspiciously like sawdust. My friend Saad helped me move my things in, though the current room arrangement doesn’t really afford me much room. I had planned on lofting the bed as I did last year, and then putting the desk and dresser side-by-side beneath it. No dice. The lofting materials were not anywhere in the suite. I have no sides and no pegs. I’ll have to ask for those downstairs, and frankly, I kind of like the arrangement I’ve got now, anyway. No more crawling up a damned ladder every time I want to get in bed. I can sit and type away on my computer all I want from ground level, and when I want to put it down, the chair’s right there. I can work lying down, too—something my habit of getting up and walking around to work through ideas never let me do easily if it meant crawling up and down a ladder every five minutes or so.
How many blog outlets could get away with a title like this? Anyway, that’s pretty much what I’m doing at this point. I changed a few things here at Ryderduncan.com. Mainly, I f-i-n-a-l-l-y fixed the links back to the Home page so that they’re easy to find. In all but one instance (Lampoon Lately) these can be found in an easy-to-spot tab at the top of the page. The Lampoon page’s theme doesn’t have any tabs at the top, so its link is still in the Pages section of the sidebar. I did go ahead and bold it, though, for your convenience. And I even made it so it has its own bullet and lines up with the other items in that list. Sadly, this theme seems to defy all known rules of HTML. I spent full on an hour trying different seemingly incorrect configurations of listing tags before I finally got the link to join the bulleted list.
I also fixed an annoyance with The Musical Box: a three-column layout was not really appropriate for this sort of blog. It was a surprisingly easy CSS hack. All I did was edit the widths of the primary and secondary columns, and the code rearranged everything on its own. Perfect. Also, I’ve installed a nifty plugin that logs site statistics. What’s more, unlike the statistics engine that my web server offers, this one is smart enough to sort out my own views of pages from those of others, and it doesn’t calculate my views in its results. It also seems to know that I have multiple blogs, and a convenient drop-down list allows me to monitor each one’s statistics without having to open the admin console for each blog. All in all, a great find and easily a time saver.