Sudo Take Me to New York

Posted on 21st January 2011 in Something Daily

I made it back to the zone last night, arriving at 9:45 totally exhausted and irritated from carrying my disgustingly heavy skateboard backpack apparatus. It was a long trip because of that. For whatever reason, I had an unfounded assumption that I would be able to grab some time to myself upon arriving at my room…no, people wanted to do shots. I didn’t, of course, but I ended up going to bed close to 2 AM after watching Amelie – fantastic movie, by the way.

My time to myself came when I woke up this morning, when I got to clean house obsessively, finally catch up on some Chrono Trigger, and grocery shop (meaning that I just bought bagels and cream cheese and orange juice. That’s pretty much what I mean whenever I say “groceries”). I’ve decided that I will hold myself to the rule of doing my own dishes as soon as I’m finished using them, and keep the kitchen as clean as possible on my own. Not because it’ll encourage people to be neat, more just because I’m compulsive about the kitchen being tidy for whatever reason.

Proof that I do go outside sometimes:

I played EA Skate for more hours than I care to admit today, because I figure that’s what this part of my break is for. If there’s any time to play video games for way “too long”, it’s right now. Skate is a really hard game for someone used to playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater. There are no button controls; rather, everything’s done by flicking the two analog sticks around. It’s a really tough system to get used to, but interestingly enough, the difficulty of the controls makes it a lot more rewarding when you do land tricks in the game. I feel like the controls of Skate mirror the actual act of skateboarding a bit more than those of Tony Hawk, if only because it’s based on a system of mimetic motions rather than just button presses. That having been said, I am very bad at this game. I get hit by cars very frequently, as well as hitting curbs and “spraining my head”…I don’t know, but that’s what the game said. It said my head was sprained. Now, wikipedia tells me that sprains affect joints and ligaments, and I’m pretty sure your skull isn’t either of those. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they meant the neck. You can’t sprain your head. Come on now.

It’s wonderful to be back in “the zone”. “The Bro Zone”. “The Brone”. “The Chill Zone”. “Room Nine Thousand Fifty”. “Room Over Nine Thousand“. Now let’s just get my mind back here with my body. Ok, sounds…..great!

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Afternoon Delight recorded in dead of night

Posted on 18th December 2010 in Something Daily

I went out to breakfast with London this morning. I woke up at 7:30 for some reason, and hung out until about 9:30 when we skated to Silver Spurs. It’s a very tasty place to eat breakfast, especially the bacon, egg, and cheese on a bagel. They make their bacon just perfectly every single time, and that’s a very important thing for a breakfast diner to do. As we all know, bacon is the most important food group, as it is delicious, nutritious, and turns any meal into something that you can’t wait to eat. Also, during our trip to and from the restaurant, I avoided looking like an idiot on my skateboard, which is kind of rare for me. This can only mean one thing: I must be improving.

I was feeling very lethargic last night, a state that was only amplified by the fact that I was home alone for a number of hours. I was worried that, due to my mindset, I was going to let the evening get away from me without accomplishing anything. Luckily, when I was in the shower, I (for some reason) had the idea to complete my recording of my one-man version of “Afternoon Delight”, the song they sing in that one scene in anchorman:
[funnyordie id=f5ab70baec width=480 height=400]

Anchorman – Afternoon Delight from Ron Burgundy

So I spent about two hours last night tracking this with Jen in the room and noises all around my suite, working off of the clip (I didn’t listen to the original recording of the song). Rode NT1-A, Fast Track Pro, Logic Express. Why? Because I can, and because it’s funny to me.

Afternoon Delight by Raised by Robots

Apparently now this is the kind of thing that I do with my spare time. My singing needs a bit of work…just be glad you’re not hearing the takes I didn’t use. I experimented with tuning in Logic, but it sounded too artificial with the plugin that’s included in Express. So it’s just me with some reverb.

In other news, I practiced my crontab skills last night when I made London’s computer have a spoken conversation with mine at a certain time. I got the idea because Bryant’s computer says the time every hour on the hour, and I thought it would be funny to schedule mine to, about five seconds before the hour, say “Hey Bryant’s computer, what time is it?” So I did that and it was easy, and then got the idea to have my computer talk to London’s. I had them have a silly little conversation, and when London came back and heard it happen for no apparent reason, he was a bit confused and definitely got a kick out of it.

So the point is, I didn’t think I was going to do crap last night and actually ended up accomplishing a few minor things. Today is the day for not doing. Rather, today is the day for Resident Evil 4.

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Bagel MIDI

Posted on 4th December 2010 in Something Daily

My recent weeks have been marked by a marked lack of concern for the impending wave of school work that’s going to come with finals week. The projects that I have to do by then have been weighing on me slightly since before thanksgiving, but I haven’t been worrying about them too much. Specifically, the Recording Tech project of recording a “Get Low” cover, the Audio for Video postproduction sound for a film, and the Electronics MIDI controller are the big ones that I haven’t been freaking out about. I woke up this morning and realized, though, that while my audio projects are far enough along now, the MIDI controller wasn’t really started at all. I still haven’t even bought all the parts I need for it, in fact. But at least I woke up this morning wanting to get something done. I spent about two hours configuring everything needed for MIDI transmission and reception with the Arduino, successfully generating MIDI output from the Arduino with a series of potentiometers that determine repetition speed, MIDI note, and note length, and then playing MIDI notes in Pd. So it’s going quite nicely as of now. I’m going to try and incorporate the multiplexer into the design a little later to allow for more comtrols. This thing is going to be bristling with knobs. I need a creative case idea though. Last year my compressor was inside a darth vader lunchbox, and I need something equally awesome this time. If I had that project here with me, I’d totally take a picture of it, by the way. It’s fantastic.

Here’s the MIDI controller project right now.

So that project is due in less than two weeks. Honestly though, I think I’ll be done with it by tomorrow evening. At least the design part. Soldering is another story. Which reminds me my soldering iron is a piece of crap! It’s Craftsman, so you wouldn’t expect that. But the tips it came with are slowly melting under the heat of the iron. When I was making the compression circuit last year, every time I touched the tip to a bit of metal, part of the end would just slough off. Now there’s a little horseshoe shape in the end of my once-square iron tip. Lame! But I used it today and it still works, it’s just a bit of a different technique now. So yeah, I’ll try to modify the code for the multiplexer tonight. But right now, I’m playing Nintendo 64 with Eric. Mario 64 and Ocarina, namely. These games will never get old even though they’re two of the first I ever played.

On an unrelated note, today was the first day that I bought breakfast food from Food Emporium in about two weeks. I’d been subsisting on Dunkin’ Donuts bagels and paper-tasting cream cheese for that interim period, and it’s amazing not have to do that anymore. And real orange juice! Tropicana Pure Premium forever.

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Turn it on

Posted on 23rd October 2010 in Something Daily

Today is going to be a good day, I believe. I’m listening to the Flaming Lips right now, “Turn it On” from Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. It’s always been one of my favorite Flaming Lips songs. I love when a band has a catalog of material that you can look back on and see how many different changes they’ve gone through from album to album. These guys started out making noisy punk-type music, and it slowly grew more and more mellow and theatrical from album to album, an recently we’ve seen a return to some heavier styles in Embryonic and, to a lesser degree, At War with the Mystics. But the thing about the Lips is that despite all the artistic phases they’ve gone through, you can always tell a Flaming Lips song when you hear it. Obviously it’s Wayne’s voice, to a degree, but they’ve so often got that heavy overdriven bass sound and drums that sound like they’re right there in the room with you. I think the Lips have accomplished something that’s really tough to do here. So have the Mars Volta. One could make a very similar argument for their catalog as well. In the words of Tim and Eric: “Great Job!”

I stretched this morning as soon as I woke up. It was awesome, and I recommend it highly. Other things that are awesome: the Street  Fighter II shirt that I’m wearing right now (see yesterday’s post), cinnamon raisin bagels, orange juice, Dragon Ball Z, and Left 4 Dead 2. By the way, that’s not an inclusive list of things that are awesome, it’s more of a primer in case you wanted to get better at knowing what’s awesome. These updates will continue, I just decided. I’d think about renaming the blog “Things that are Awesome”, except I think its current title is essentially synonymous with that already, so it would be overkill.

Another thing that is awesome is the game that I’m currently working on. In case you didn’t know (how would you know?), I’ve taken a total of one year of programming courses in college, and that was last year. The rest of the knowledge that I have about computers is pretty much entirely a result of reading programming books on the beach when I should have been relaxing, or independent projects that I’ve worked on in the last half a year. So the idea that I would make a game that one would, you know, sit down and actually play may be a bit of a stretch. And, in fact, it’s proven to be really difficult so far. I’m teaching myself basically everything I don’t already know as I go along. Now obviously this is how pretty much every programmer works, the difference is that I know a lot less than your average programmer. Also, did I mention that I’m not using any APIs and I’m doing it all by hand? It’s really a learning experience, so it’s slow going, and I’m not really ashamed to admit that I’ve been working on this for a few months now.

But, as it turns out, it appears that this project will indeed be finished one day, probably not too long from now. It’s about dinosaurs who live on the moon and have to escape to show their existence to the people of earth (add to the list of things that are awesome). The gameplay is/will be similar to Ikaruga or 1942: like an upward scrolling fly-around-and-shoot-guys type game. All the graphics (drawn by me in Gimp) will emulate NES/SNES graphics with a pretty large pixel size, and all the music (composed by myself) will be from a Gameboy. So it’lll have a real serious 8-bit old school vibe. And it’s getting there. And it’ll be on this blog…and you’ll play it!

This is, according to reddit, the best version of the “order a bunch of pizzas for some other house” trick in history

Ok, sounds great!

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