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Entries from June 2016

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Another failure (30 Jun 2016 at 23:14)

Oh, shoot, another month has run out of days, and I didn't finish anything to share yet. Probably nobody cares about my house projects, but how about this cryptic spoiler?

untitled.png

Too soon to tell whether it will turn into anything interesting, but at least it's not a dead end yet.

On a positive creativity note, tomorrow starts a 5-day weekend. It's traditional to do an Album-a-Day over Independence Day weekend, so I'm getting myself psyched up in hopes that I'll feel the prerequisite energy tomorrow. Song title suggestions go in the comments! (Or crickets.)

(6 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from May 2016

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Birdus Migratorius (31 May 2016 at 23:23)

Sorry team, not much new to lay forth for May. As usual, the gears turn, the projects mature or go into cold storage, the TODO list continues to demonstrate its asymptotic superiority to my work output. I have a brief story about a bird,

At the start of the month this bird showed up and started trying to build a nest in a pretty silly spot, right in the corner of a window near my front door. However, its nesting was totally ineffective; all the straws just fell to the ground and accumulated on my porch:

Straw everywhere

It got a lot worse than this, the pile I mean, and while I'm pretty cool with a bird building a nest on my house, it just seemed sad and useless for it to be trying all day to build a nest and making no progress. And why doesn't it just get the scraps that fell on the porch and try again with them? I mean rather than root around the neighborhood for new bird sticks to drop on my porch? To deter the bird from returning in a humane and brand-appropriate way, I put this sculpey monster on the window sill right next to where she was trying to make nest:

It DOES have a mouth. It IS a frowning mouth.

It DOES have a mouth. It IS a frowning mouth.

Which, kind of amazingly, worked:

And I didn't see her for a few weeks. BUT THEN a few weeks later, that bird learned how to make nests, or a different bird who already knew, came back and was not scared by the tiny motionless monster any more, and set up shop for real. Since she is not so easily spooked, I put my Nest camera (née Dropcam) up there instead of the monster, so that I can check on her antics and make the pun "Hot Nest-on-nest action" (the camera does really get pretty hot; someone should check on that). Example:

I've since cleaned up the mud on the window and inched it much closer when she's away eating worms. If I get any good nature on camera that's not too heart-breaking, I'll post pictures or video. We've already got some eggs which I'm pretty sure is the first step in nature:

Two Robin's eggs in a nest

These eggs remind me of the color of a song.

And don't worry, I'm not in danger of becoming a bird-man. But I did learn one funny fact; the scientific name of the American Robin is... Turdus Migratorius.

(5 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from April 2016

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New T7ES mini-album: DTMF Jam for Dummies for Dummies (30 Apr 2016 at 20:13)

Good day! Since moving (I think I have mentioned here that I bought a house last year?) I have not actually hooked up much of my music gear, probably because I'm wary of the outcome where they get shittily fixtured because it seems like too much work to organize them into some modestly better arrangement, and so they stay embarrassingly messy (i.e. XLR cable across the middle of the floor) for years. So I'm trying to only take stuff out of the boxes when I have a good place to put them. This includes my Roland SC-880, which is a fancy MIDI machine that I pretty much only use to generate sawtooth waves and square waves for my Tom 7 Entertainment System "band." So for a while I've been without the sawtooth waves, and this is weird because a very common habit of mine is to sit down for an hour and write a little idea of a jam and then not finish it and leave it on my hard drive. So since this thing is not hooked up, I've been screwing around with software synthesizers, which are of course completely capable of making sawtooth waves and so much more, but also have way too many knobs for my liking and often generate stupid and annoying sounds. So I made a bunch of songs and left them on my hard drive, and then today I gave myself a monster headache by finishing some of them up and dodging the clipped bits and putting together a mini-album, since it's been a few years!

DTMF Jam for Dummies for Dummies

All these songs use ridiculous synthesizer sounds, which I feel is sort of cheating, but maybe you like. Heart emoji indicates favorite, with Facebook Phone being like on the rainbow dolphin sex end of the spectrum and Wires comin' out being on the alien death disco side.

1. Theme from Facebook Phone

2. Permanent signal
3. Superior olive
4. Theme from Bosch proportional servo valve
5. Wires comin' out everythin' ev'where

You can of course download the whole album in a zip file. I also just updated the T7ES site which it turned out was missing my second-most-recent album. I believe it's comprehensive now.

Categories: t7es mp3

(5 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

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SIGBOVIK 2016: Snacks, 3D Zelda (02 Apr 2016 at 12:57)

Sup team! Yesterday was SIGBOVIK 2016, and as usual I had some entries that were more work than warranted by a joke conference.

The minor work was Reordering the Snacks is Effective and Just, which concerns an operational and ethical question in office snack behavior. Probably not worth it unless you go for the deep cuts.

The thing I poured a month into is The glEnd() of Zelda, which is a hack to automatically emulate NES games in 3D. I spent a lot of time crafting a video demonstration and explanation with my typical non-SAG "acting", which even seems to go over well with non-nerds:

Click here for Automated 3D NES

I sort of ran out of time on this one, so I hope to have some more refinements to the code and to then post a download in a more user-friendly form. But you know how these things go!

Categories: sigbovik hacks video

(11 comments — 7 years ago) [ comment ]

Entries from March 2016

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Null / undefined (31 Mar 2016 at 23:19)

Hi, i have been working all month on my SIGBOVIK project, but i can't reveal it until tomorrow, so I have nothing to post. Check back tomorrow!

(2 comments — almost 9 years ago) [ comment ]

... Mar 2016 continued

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