Tom 7 Radar

Pac Tom website and Level 2

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:44:01 -0500

I'd like to introduce you to the Pac Tom website, where I'll be organizing my project to run the length of every street in Pittsburgh. New look, look:

If you go there right now you'll see this very blog post, which contains a picture of the site, which is what you're already seeing, which etc. Maybe you got here from somewhere else and you're wondering why the site tells you that you should visit itself. That's cuz it shows all Pac Tom news, and this is Pac Tom news. But there's other better stuff there too, like a new description of the rules, downloadable KML files of my routes, and brand new maps. Here's the main one:

	Pac Tom project:
	site · all · map

In post 1039 I congratulated myself on finishing Level 1, which is all the roads between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers (conspicuous sinuous voids in the map above). That was over a year ago, and since then I've made significant progress on Level 2, which is the rest of the city. Each of the colors in the map above is a different trip, though some trips get the same color because there aren't that many colors and they're assigned randomly. I finished off the remote colony of Lemingon-Lincoln-Belmar that's across the river to the far Northwest in one go. (It's pretty weird that this is part of the same neighborhood or even part of Pittsburgh; it's almost entirely a shopping plaza. Must be a tax thing.) The rest of the year has been spent on the neighborhoods to the south of the Mon.

This is way harder than Level 1 was. Obstacles: It's about 6 miles of running just to get from my house to new roads, which I also have to do on the way back, so a minimal trip is 12 miles; they're usually more like 20 so that I can get deep down there and then cover some streets. You can tell from the map that I've been favoring the roads that closest to the borders. I like to do this so that I can "finish off" the periphery and not have to worry about it again; on the way there and back I can pick up some new roads shotgun style. (I'm almost done with South Side flats only via taking different routes through it on my way to other places.) The furthest points imply about a 30-mile round trip (you can see them way off to the West). I haven't done those yet, but I have done some 30-mile trips, so I know it will be possible and painful. Obstacle #2: This area of the city is ridiculously hilly. Level 1 sure had some steep streets but the South Side and West End are worse. Just getting there means running up the Slopes or Mt. Washington, and then the hills roll on. Garmin Connect, which is what I hook my GPS into, pretty much always assumes that the physical activity I'm doing is "Stair Climbing" based on the elevation change. The steepest paved road in the world is there, in Beechview! I'm not complaining, though. I love it.

One of my favorite things to do with the thousands of miles of GPS data that results from the project is various visualizations and computation. There are some more maps on the site and some more coming. I'll post about these soon.

Sick Ridiculous - Duckles Chuckles

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:52:55 -0500

Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous — Duckles Chuckles

Here's a newly recorded Sick Ridiculous & etc. song, Duckles Chuckles. We wrote it for Stephen and Laura's going away (eventually everybody gets married, gets Ph.D., and gets outta Pittsburgh) party; the cover picture above is from when we debuted it the first time in public (with dance routine) at Club Café on New Year's Eve Eve.

In order to fully understand this song, you need to know that Duckles Chuckles is fringe local slang for Washington, D.C., where Stephen and Laura moved, that Stephen's login ID was "smagill", and that "all up in my Chevy Chase" is like a quadruple entendre, with Chevy Chase being cockney rhyming slang (which you might consider "Duckles Chuckles" akin to) for "face", and also the name of various towns and neighborhoods and agglomerations thereof in the DC area, and thus an example of the confusing geographic status of common to the area, referenced in the first line. Nice one, doods.

Of course if we were writing this song today it would have to include Snowpocalypse, but rest assured that one of our newest unheard songs may or may not be about winter weather!

Nopocalypse blogventure

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:46:03 -0500

Most of the Northeast is drowning in flurricane right now. I am missing it, stuck in a Hotel (California)^* because all of the flights to Pittsburgh were canceled. I'm sad about this because huge ass snowpocalypses are one of my favorite weather events; I just love when the sky is like STFU noobs! and everything shuts down and becomes intensely quiet and all regulations (e.g. traffic ones) are deactivated. Not that I'd rather be flying; several of my friends are or were trapped in motels by the airport, taxis on the highway, layovers, etc. I just want a coldtastrophe while I'm already in the city and in my apartment. Also, would prefer that my replacement flight was not during the Superbowl.

^*This is one of my least favorite songs, no question. Other songs that might be my least favorite are:

"I Will Survive", mainly because of pervasive karaokacophonies, but also especially the Cake version, which is weird because I like or don't mind most real Cake music

"Jack & Diane", because of the combination of pure insipidness and unavoidability, though here I'm pretty sure there are no J.C. Mellencamp songs that don't make me want to shoot myself. I thought maybe the more mild idea to just set off firecrackers near my ears to make myself deaf, but then there's the possibility that the song would be stuck in my head for eternity with no way to replace it. Oddly, the annoying "life goes on" refrain appears to be cribbed from the unusually infuriating Beatles song "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da."

I basically have nothing to do so I went for a long run, as I am prone. Usually in the Bay area (meaning outside of realsville) what's immediately accessible to you is just strip malls, the incessant possibility of being run over, and suburbia. But there's some great stuff both on the Bay itself and in the mountains, if you can handle a 20-mileish round trip. Today I went to the Stevens Creek reservoir in Cupertino, where I had never been before. The reservoir itself is nothing to blog home about, but the trail system and surrounding terrain is pretty great, especially on a misty/drizzly day like today was. There's a quarry right next door so a periodic explosion to wonder about what it is until you see the signs indicating quarry. What made this a blogventure (which is the phrase that Mike and Cortney and I used to use when they lived in Pittsburgh I mean to describe an adventure whose purpose was to generate a story to write about on the blogs, which by the way I am still saying "blog" in every occasion in this post, including inside the word "blogventure" (doubly so), ironically) was when I came upon this crazy scrap metal collection in the woods. There's piles of weird stuff there, like old grills and mechanisms and Your Tax Dollars At Work signs that have been plinked full of bullet holes, piles of old lockers: Such discoveries are kind of the point of exploratory running, so I'm used to it. But I see an ammunition box among the refuse and for some reason I check what's inside, and it's a hidden geocache! Geocaching is kind of like cross between World of Warcraft for hiking. People take weatherproof boxes and fill them up with one man's treasure, then hide them in weird places and post the coordinates (sometimes there's a puzzle or something involved) online. People usually find them because they went to the spot with the coordinates and started looking. Maybe it's not that strange that I'd find it by accident, since first of all I guess I am kind of a nerd so maybe I look in the same kinds of places, and second there are apparently 1,000,00000000000 geocaches in the Bay area because of all the other nerds. But it was not what I was expecting. Spoiler alert: (If you're feeling like my World of Warcraft jab is maybe not called for, let me just point out that the thing in the upper-left is a licensed Harry Potter fan accessory.) I did think it was neat to find this cache, so maybe I should be leaving surprises around as part of my Pittsburgh running. I know lots of weird spots.

After running I played through a game called VVVVVV all in one sitting. It is excellent. Really its only problem is that it should be 2–3 times longer than it is. (For a similar game that does not have that problem and that you should have already played by now, enjoy Cave Story (P.S. now available on your Ti-83 graphing calculator??))

Pac Tom Level 1 Complete, trophy

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:21:22 -0500

pac tom level 1 trophy.pdf

	Pac Tom project:
	site · all · map

Hey, this post is to officially announce that I completed Level 1 of my Pac Tom project. That's a big deal for me but I'm kind of over it because I finished over a year ago, in November 2008! I've been strangely silent on the project since I announced almost being done in the August 2008. It's part of a weird pattern of behavior where I finish or almost finish big projects but then never announce them because my announcement ambitions exceed my announcement wherewithal, which would be such a tiny fraction of the total effort expended (which is weird) so I never actually announce them. This particular case is strange because I'm well on to Pac Tom Level 2, spending many hours every week busting my ass on it in various ways. I'm trying to fix this behavior. Pac Tom Level 1 is done! Soon, the Pac Tom website and my substantial progress on Level 2.

Pac Tom is my project to run the length of every street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. I've been doing it for many years now, accounting for many thousands of miles and many hundreds of hours of running. Level 1 is the area of the city between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers (see map above), which is 23.5 square miles. Those black lines are the routes I ran, tracked with my wrist-worn GPS device. I always start or end at my home or work, usually both. The background map is my old Map of Pittsburgh Neighborhoods which I made for Wikipedia. Click for a PDF so you can zoom to your heart's content, as long as its content does not exceed the limits of IEEE floating point. I have new maps now which are not as sloppy, but also not as colorful.

And then I have to do this:

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
Every street, continental Pgh

Updated: Escape 200912250

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:00:36 -0500

Escape is a block-pushing puzzle game I've been working on (in various forms) for over ten years now. Over Christmas break I quietly built a new version, the first in a few years. It wraps together a bunch of minor changes that I had made since the last release and switches some of the development tools, which means it's easier for me to now make new releases. Nobody cares about that kinda stuff, but I did also finally draw and add animations for teleporting (both the player and Dalek):

The game upgrades itself, or you can download a fresh install if you don't have it and want to try. I got one report that someone had trouble upgrading, so you might want to save a copy of your game files before doing it (on Windows, just make a copy of the game's installation directory, on Mac, just make a copy of the Escape application icon, which is just the game folder). It works smoothly for me. If anyone has trouble, please post here with as much information as you can, so that we can fix it. Sorry, no linux binary for the new release, for now.

Despite no releases for a while, there's been a steady stream of activity in the Escape community. There are almost 3,000 levels built by dozens of different people, many with clever speedruns or creative subversive solutions. Some are just fantastic. Thanks everyone for their contributions!

Album-a-day #25: everylyyly everyy must it & & than an

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:44:05 -0500

Happy New Year! Please enjoy the bold studio music sound of my 25^th solo Album-a-Day, called everylyyly everyy must it & & than an.

Tom 7 album-a-day #25: everylyyly everyy must it & & than an

Like last time I got a massive response to my request for song title suggestions, using the Facebook. Thanks everylyylyone! Of course I couldn't use them all, but many of these are based on suggestions, and also there are many that made it as lyrics, or that I make oblique reference to in the lyrics. Hear it for yourself by putting the bold studio music sound in your ears, but you'll probably have to wait until tomorrow for me to post the lyrics, cuz I don't have internet at home due to a billing mishap which is a separate story.

Song key:

Why we don't allow eleven year-olds to run mining operations. Love this one. In these intense guitar-detuning and partial capo configurations, it's a miracle to be able to be able to find multiple parts with different feels, like the major-key chorus. Lucky. One regret is that I didn't let the improvized coda go on longer; I should know better because these often become a favorite part of the song (e.g. Poison Control.)

Sane clown posse ‽. I like the verse motif in this song. I wish it had a more distinct chorus, but I can only blame myself. Would have been called "hot interrobang" (interrobang is the ‽ symbol, which is like a contracted !? only used by nerds and tasteless typographers) by popular request, but I wanted to make sure that my favorite line in the song made sense, so it needs help from the title.

Once upon a tonic clonic. Techno dance party.

A mundane baking event that became a dessastert/confectastrophe level incident. Based on a true story from New York City that Copix or Spoons can tell you about.

Prophet solves the case (it was easy). I felt like this one was a little bit too sparse to be an instrumental, but too spacey to be filled with words, so it has the odd quality of having an instrumental "chrorus", but that doesn't make it less snoozy.

Sistema de entretenimiento de Tomas Siete. Sing me Spanish techno?

My brother's cat which is called Dr. Turtledog, Ph.D.. Mike and Erin are getting a cat and they've already decided to call it Dr. Turtledog, Ph.D., which was my idea.

Regretted purchase. If I was allowed to axe songs from Albums-a-day, this would be the one I'd axe, though it is not entirely without merit.

Watermelon Town, technically Watermelon Township. Okay, here you can really tell I'm making a logorrhea joke in general, because there's just no reason to clarify the incorporation status of this fictional township in the title, especially since that's never referenced in the song. But I do like the logorrhea jokes.

Mr. Natural vs. the Clothes Fascist. At the piano roll recently I have some ailment regarding triplets and polyrhythms. This worked out fine in Once upon a tonic clonic, but this song has at least three failed experiments crammed into it. Likable for a dumping ground though.

Wrecking the ghostlines. This mysterious title was Amy's suggestion. I like writing songs around mysterious titles because it helps me avoid my undesired tendency towards literalism.

^* This asterisk coming up is a footnote, which should read "Actually I do endorse these two."

As always, the Tom7.org Foundation would like to remind listeners that the opinions or events expressed in lyrics do not represent the official position or behavior of the lyricist or singer-man (same), and that the Foundation does not endorse drug abuse (prescription or not), improper disposal of handguns, flouting of mining statutes, illegal fireworks or nudity^*, or baking with the wrong equipment. Safety is the biggest rush.

Club Café show, new year's eve-eve

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:04:59 -0500

We will be playing the new year's eve-eve (that's Dec. 30th) late show at club cafe with our real-life friends Slingshot Genius (acoustic version) at Club Café in the South Side. I've always wanted to play at Club Café; I think it's my favorite venue in Pittsburgh. (In particular I always love the sound there.) So I'm pretty psyched! Also psyched to play with Erika's band. Come down South if you're in town! (Facebook event for the web-lifestyle enabled.)

Song, scissors

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 10:18:35 -0500

Here is another new T7ES song, Theme from alaplantine.

Also, remember those mega scissors from post 976 that allow you to shred important papers quickly and easily? Probably not. I do, though, so when I'm at my friend's house for dinner and he's like, guys, mystery time: WTF are these mega scissors that I found in the drawer and what are they for? I know the answer. And then I shredded an important credit card, which was not easy:

New T7ES song: 12% of 360kb

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:37:05 -0500

New Tom 7 Entertainment System tune, 12% of 360kb.

Tom 7 Entertainment System - 12% of 360kb

Action Jackson MS

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:00:27 -0500

It was a special shame/privilege (tried to come up with a good sounding portmanteau expressing this sentiment; failed; any luck?) to find myself looking at cplusplus.com and to see an animated Microsoft Windows VII advertisement that uses my 13 year-old font Action Jackson:

It is truly my most popular child. I looked around: It turns out that the font is actually part of Microsoft's current enterprise software branding campaign "the NEW efficiency". You'll see it in whenever they try to sell their expensive stuff by the hundreds to CTOs; e.g.

I like to imagine some guys in suits trading whitepapers. The most surreal is their launch event hooha which has extremely boring videos of señor people giving powerpoint presentations which include this branding. For example, join them for the launch event (warning, you need Silverlight and then you gotta wait to download a LOT of this animated lady that's going to be your personal liaison).

(In old, non-ironic sightings news, Tadbot spotted One Constant used on the Scribblenauts site, which game looks awesome.)

Sick Day video

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:31:07 -0400

Behold! A new music video by my band, Sick Ridiculous (&c.). Nels and I filmed this a few weeks ago and I just finally got the time to put it all together this weekend. The song is Sick Day, which is sort of our band theme song, and easily one of my favorites. Watch: Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous — Sick Day Please consider watching in HD at Vimeo, or even downloading the 1080p original from that page. This is some life-size pro shit we're talking about here. The recording is new, too; get the Sick Day MP3 for your growing collection.

Also: We are playing this Thursday at Smiling Moose in the South Side, upstairs. We're opening for Sound Of Urchin (and others), who themselves opened for Tenacious D on a recent tour. Yes, we are now in the Six Degrees of Billy Joel territory. If you're in the mood to rock, come see us! The Facebook event has all the deets. Costumes encouraged.

30th birthday: Cake Quest

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:21:47 -0400

Sunday I turned 30, as in years. The celebration started Friday when we had a great combo-party (Brianne's birthday on Saturday) in my space age bachelor pad. I hardly ever host parties in my place so I was a little nervous. It turned out almost ideally; like maybe 50 people and never got out of hand. I have one room, now known as the Observatory, which is basically empty since my brother moved to Boston, and so that room just now has a secondary colony of San Pellegrino bottles (kind of ran out of space in my own room), my answering machine (full, useless) and two seats for "Observing" these objects, like a minimalist art project. (This was great. The San Pellegrino collection really drives some people nuts and other people happily make new interactive art with it.) On Nels's suggestion we made the Observatory a bit more partied up for the party, using the projector to show Robot Jox, a classic Robots Gone Wild cold-war-forever piece. No real sound setup in there, but I could only find Spanish subtitles, so I Google-Translated those back into English, so the whole movie was subtitled in this broken doubly-translated language which was especially delightful if you also listened closely enough to the computer speakers for the original EN audio, until the text inexplicably transforms into Spanish because Google Translate gives up once it gets a certain ways into a document that you upload, cuz I guess it gets tired and is like ahem you finish this. But only a few people in there at a time because of the two seats. Most people party 4 regular in the games room, or Gallery, or murder Prof. Plum in the Kitchen with the candlestick.

The highlight for me was the Great Race, a 10K which I run every year. This year it was on Sunday morning, my birthday. Last year I ran it real hard which qualified me as a seeded runner this time, but I'm not in as good shape and anyway have retired from running 10K for speed. So I decided it's costumes. I have pretty complex requirements for a race costume. It has to be pretty conspicuous, so people spot it. It has to not get in anyone's way or be race-ejectingly illegal, because I don't want to interfere (except maybe mentally) with anybody who's taking the race seriously. It has to clearly impede my ability to run, but should also be actually harder than you'd first think. This time I also wanted a birthday theme. I mulled a bunch of ideas with friends (bunch of helium balloons was a frontrunner for a while) and eventually settled on Ryan's idea to run with a birthday cake. So I got a half-sheet cake and decorated it, and ran the whole six miles carrying it:

I can put on a smile for the camera but it didn't feel that good in the arms. It is pretty weird to run a race and for that to be the primary focus of pain. Harder than the H1N1 marathon costume, I'd say, though a much much shorter race. But running with a costume is basically always worth it. For the people you run by (observers or if you start in the back, folks you pass) the costume is new and funny, so the whole race people are laughing or making comments and in this case wishing or singing happy birthday. They love that shit because they're either waiting in the rain for the one person they know in the race to pass, which is otherwise totally monotonous, or they're hurting from running in the race and want to be distracted. And I love overhearing or having other people overhear, "You got beat by the guy carrying the cake?!" Oh yeah so it was raining, and this made the cake very wet, and the cardboard it was on start to have deteriorating conditions and buckle, so this was a disadvantage for ways one could carry it because it needed Total Underbody Support. Eventually there were only like two asymmetric (dual) ways and one symmetric way to hold the cake and I'd cycle between them every 15 seconds as my arms and back were burning up. I made it downtown with the cake about as intact as it could be, which isn't saying much:

9-27-79 NEVER FORGET

Even my birthday hat has melted. News like spectacles, so some people interviewed me. The best coverage was on KDKA (near the end, though the anchor foreshadows). There's some interviewing of me in the otherwise extremely boring (like it's mostly just video of people standing around?) WPXI Web Exclusive. See 1:55 and 3:30.

Lots of friends helped make this the best birthday weekend ever with their party-going and fun-loving and organizing and driving me to-and-fro since my license expired and I have another flat tire, and the cake eating and wearing hats in the race and writing on me and watching Steelers and not giving me presents that make me feel uncomfortably materialistic and rearranging the art bottles and taking photos and everything. Thanks!!! :)

Death Row Candyland

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:32:48 -0400

Here's a new Tom 7 Entertainment System song, Death Row Candyland. It's possibly most ambitious one ever, except for the cover art:

Tom 7 Entertainment System - Death Row Candyland

I couldn't figure out how to easily get that diagonal candy cane stripe look in 10 minutes, so instead purely vertical bands which are like their own mini prison inside the letters.

Now you want to hear me overanalyze? This song is kinda like theme from rt2i in that I spent a lot of time on it (like multiple nights), a lot of which was on texture. This is highly unusual for me. I'd go back and listen to it and think, hmm, this particular transition seems to lose too much bass, and then fix it. I didn't stop until I listened through the whole thing and thought there were no undesired jarring moments, cheesefest notes, boring off-pace repeats, or missed opportunities. (Usually I just crap it out in an hour or two binge with all default settings, and hope for the best.) I like the song better than rt2i though because I feel like the basic tune is more sound. I started with what you hear in measures 1–28 (intro, intrigue theme, main echo theme) which loop so nicely and which would easily have been the whole song in 1999-era T7ES. I really liked the twisty uneasiness of the chords and (especially) the echo theme. So I decided to embrace and extend, and the end product has at least 5 distinct parts, and maybe counting the counterpoint something like 9 or 10.

Another way this is similar to rt2i is the way that the melody from the main echo theme shows up in 3 totally different places, changing its meaning each time. I am in love with this trick these days. (For sure it's in Zürich bigtime.) It is a good challenge to pull it off (usually it means adjusting something rhythmically or melodically, and can easily lead to a muddle if clumsy) and I think that the self-reference is so damn satisfying. IMO the part in the coda where the echo theme comes back (gently telegraphed in the square waves in the prior pattern) is completely fucking epic. To me in the narrative of the song it's like something odd but familiar finally making sense.

Crapversity Marching Band – Upright Base

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 23:58:01 -0400

One of my longest time buddies (since I think 1998) Jason (aka jcreed) is leaving Pittsburgh tomorrow, having graduated and now needing a post-doc. In the spirit of doing things that we should have done a long time ago, we had a One Night Band, which was actually two nights, to write and record a song. Our band is called Crapversity Marching Band for our dream to some day make a university formed upon Crap Art philosophy and then to be its marching band. Here is our album cover:

caption: man plays drum with butter knives illustration: jcreed
MP3: Crapversity Marching Band – Upright Base

The song is called Upright Base. We wrote the chords together, me using the guitar and my illiterate florid language to try to try to describe what I was getting at chord-wise, and him with the keyboard eptly naming those funny fingerings and then being like, "Oh well if we have B♭m6 then obviously Dadd9 will go next," which is funny and also really useful when you get stuck off in chord lala land. Today we wrote the words and recorded it. Jason did the keyboard playing (basically improvising all that fancy shit on the spot) and I did the guitars and the singing. Jason was going to do some singing too but then he started guts-clutching like always and it was getting urgent since he needs to get up at 7am to drive to Philadelphia. So just me on sings. I think it came out pretty well.

Two more new recordings for other projects in the queue.

Lausanne... Jealous?

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:12:59 -0400

Lausanne... Jealous? by Sick Ridiculous & etc. Photo Marcus S.

A few weeks ago our friend Donna successfully defended her thesis and threw a party, even waiting until a Tuesday night so that Nels and I could play at that nice party, so of course we wrote a song for the gig. It is called Lausanne... Jealous? because Donna is about to take a post-doctoral position at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. More than usual—which is saying a lot—this song is loaded with detailed in-jokes and difficult puns. I will provide some hints, since we received positive feedback about the fact that we did this before playing the song at her party. There are three national languages in Switzerland: (Swiss) German, French, and Italian. The Swiss invented the Swatch watch, which you are encouraged to wear multiple of on your arm, for fashion. (Nels and I predict a Swatch fashion resurgence, soon.) They also invented the Swiss Army knife and cheese. Donna always serves mostly cheese at her parties because she has a gluten-free diet. Donna's dissertation is about some objected oriented programming stuff. At EPFL she'll work on Scala, a maximalist language which combines all known programming ideas into one Java-like syntax. It was made by Martin Odersky, who also made a Java extension once called Pizza. That's probably enough to get you started.

Still in queue: ICFP contest report (very soon I'll even be able to include the final results, heh), new T7ES song, Pac Tom update, pics from various events. Shame.