What the frak

Posted on 23rd December 2010 in Something Daily

Check it out: I got about five hours of sleep last night. This is fairly unusual for me. I have no idea why, but it seems that I’m pretty much incapable of sleeping in past 8:30. I’ve always been kind of a morning person, but it’s mornings like this that really make me wish I had the ability to sleep late. So it’s about 9 AM right now, I woke up an hour ago, and I didn’t write yesterday, so I feel compelled to update now.

Yesterday was my last day involving responsibility for the fall semester, in which my Recording Tech group and I finally presented the bluegrass cover of “Get Low” that we recorded to the class (so I can finally shut up about it! Sweet!). The teacher was late, then called ten minutes after class was to start to say that he was going to be another hour late. That was definitely a bit lame, as I came down to Steinhardt just for that class. But I had a fun lunch with Mr. Kevin Garrett and my class group. The presentation itself was pretty good, despite the fact that my board recall skills need a bit of work. We didn’t present a bounce; that is, we were required to use our multitrack and recall our mix on the board, making sure every knob is set in the position we used during our mix. This is, of course, a process that you need a few minutes to do accurately, and I didn’t really have a few minutes. As a result, the multitrack mix that we presented was a bit different than the one on Soundcloud, but I tweaked along the way. All in all, great project. Everyone actually had a great project in that class. Way to go, people.

Last night, I had resigned myself to not doing anything, as all of my roommates were, at that point, either at their houses, out studying, or asleep. As it’s the end of break, my motivation to do projects is pretty low right now, so I was looking forward to a night of reading the Tao Te Ching and playing Team Fortress…and then Jen showed up! I furthered my goal of getting her into Battlestar Galactica as we watched another episode – the one where Starbuck is stranded on a desert planet. It’s a good one. I remember seeing that episode my first time through the series – I think it’s the first where Starbuck really shreds, and it was also the first one that really made me think “Alright, this show is rad.” So I had a good night. A late one, but a good one.

Today I leave for home on a 7:30 bus. Before that, I need to pack my bags and say goodbye to some friends, as well as find some place to eat some food and hopefully skate around a bit. I just hope I don’t get hurt; I’ve been feeling kind of bold recently. Maybe not bold enough to hurt myself yet, but who knows. I’ll be careful, don’t worry! And hopefully I get to sleep on the bus, because I’m pretty certain I’ve missed my chance to go back to bed this morning.

Have a good Chirstmas eve eve!

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Life Electronic

Posted on 12th December 2010 in Something Daily

Yesterday and today were both very much electronics-themed. I went in to Steinhardt (again!) at 11 AM yesterday to help a classmate with her final project. I thought helping her was going to be pretty easy, but it ended up being a big pain due to the lack of barebones MIDI equipment available on the 8th floor. I spent about 2 hours banging my head against a wall over the apparent absence of MIDI note reception by the Arduino, finally managing to pinpoint the problem. I think it has to do with the fact that the MIDI controllers available were sending more than just note messages. Either way, she thought I was quite helpful and took me out to lunch – a place called Cafetasia that has a lot of different types of Asian food. I got something called Gyo-Za and it was nuts. Not that it actually contained nuts, but it was just awesome. Crazy delicious and covered in soy sauce. Also, this was around 3:30 PM. So once again, I succeeded in spending most of my day in the Music Tech department. That’s why I’m staying far, far away from that place today.

Also, last night was the Charlie Brown christmas special viewing in our room! I made everyone hot chocolate and we watched the special…it was awesome. It’s great to have everyone together like that, and I liked feeling like the “mom” of the situation, as odd as that may sound.

I woke up at around 9:30 this morning and got immediately to work on finishing my own electronics project, which is due on Thursday. I had originally intended to use a multiplexer to increase the possible number of controls for MIDI note sends, but upon trying it again this morning I sort of got over that idea. So I got some knobs and a PC board, as well as another star wars lunchbox to use as a case, and soldered the whole thing in about half an hour. Once again: first try, no mistakes. I’m pretty much the man at soldering. I don’t know if you knew. So apart from putting the whole circuit in its enclosure, I’m done with the project. And after that, it’s just a few more final exams and I’m good to go. I was expecting to work on this project all day, but now I have time to do whatever (that is, play TF2!). Good times. And I’m going to the Upright Citizens again tonight, hopefully it’s as good as it was last week, if not better.

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Turns out Steam games come with a bunch of raw content

Posted on 20th November 2010 in Something Daily

Hello everyone, welcome back to another exciting edition of Three Stegosaurus Moon. We’ve got a great post planned for you today. It has it all. Even dinosaurs.

After a few days of me being mentally elsewhere due to this project that I won’t shut up about, I have returned. I woke up this morning without feeling the uncontrollable urge to start coding and solving problems. I slept in (until 8:45…late, huh?), had a nice long stretch, made myself some breakfast, and have so far had a very relaxing morning. I think I’m going to avoid skating today, in light of what happened last time I did. The scratch on my arm is healing, but it still looks pretty gross. I catch people staring at it sometimes…my eyes are up here, okay?. I believe I’m going to do almost nothing today, as I feel like I deserve it due to the big amount of concentrated effort over the last few days.

Let me just say one last thing about my esync/backup project. Writing a Perl script that recursively traverses directories and copies their contents is something that I didn’t think I could do four days ago. In a way, I still don’t believe that I can. Yet somehow I managed to do it – within the space of three days – and it works exactly the way I intended it to. I must be getting better at programming, or something. I just wanted to make it known that I, Emmett J. Butler, am proud of myself. For once.

As you may know, my roommate London had a recording session for his class last night on which he asked me to assist. The first thing I found out was that the Clive Davis studios are way nicer than the average Music Tech studio. Everything is just cleaner and bigger, and in better condition. But not to compare the two programs or anything. They’re completely different.

The session was to track a woodwind/brass section for London’s hip hop track, which involved seven musicians playing live. So we had lots of mics, gobos, and headphones for everybody. I’ve never engineered a session with that many people on it before, and it really drove home the point that to make one of them work, you have to know exactly what to say to the musicians to get the best performance. It’s like you’re putting on a disguise every time you hit the talkback button. The session was great, and I ended up assisting in a pretty big capacity.

I made the discovery last night that every game you download on Steam uses an unencrypted directory full of the media such as videos, audio and textures that it needs to function. I stumbled on this folder last night during a backup, and literally everything from the games is there in raw form. Every Team Fortress 2 map video, every zombie scream and gun sound effect from Left 4 Dead, the Portal song, everything. It’s just there, in .wav or .mp4, for the taking. I don’t know what I’ll do with this knowledge, if anything, but it’s crazy to see. You definitely don’t get that with a console game.

Check out what I found. I know somebody who’d eat The World’s Largest Gummi Worm (hint: it’s Andrew)

Dinosaurs.

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Will it blend? Yes it will.

Posted on 3rd November 2010 in Something Daily

A few weeks ago, I picked up a program called Blender from these great Internets of ours. It’s a freeware 3D design environment that’s really good for learning the basics of 3D art (at least I think so, I don’t really have anything to compare it with). It gives you an XYZ coordinate plane to work on, and you typically work by starting with a basic shape and chopping or extending it. The confusing part when I started out was getting the cursor where I wanted in the 3D space, which is difficult when using a flat screen and a mouse that only moves on the XY plane.

I learned it by going through these Wiki-tutorials and just building all the stuff that they explain. So I’ve got the goblets, the penguin, the volcano, the water, the rocket launcher, the ‘realistic’ eyeball, and a bunch more from those. I also came up with a few designs on my own, which were of course based on classic Nintendo games (shocker, right? Who would have guessed?). I’ll put some of my more favorite ones up here in the next few days. For starters, here’s the Nintendo 64 3D ‘N’ shaped logo (I know there are lighting issues, but it was like my 3rd day of using Blender ever. Give me a break.).

The Nintendo 64 Logo, rendered 9/27/10

Something very interesting that I learned from making this object: It has 64 total faces (inside and outside) and 64 vertices. How crazy is it that Nintendo would hide that kind of easter egg in their logo?! I mean obviously it’s awesome…just think about that. The logo, in a way, implicitly says “Nintendo 64″ – N + 64 (faces+vertices). Crazy, man. Just crazy.

So yeah, Blender is really fun. I went about making this one in a pretty roundabout way, since I was in the process of learning the interface, but It ended up looking almost exactly like the real thing. If you’re into games or game design, certainly check it out – really if you’re just bored and near your computer. It’s just fun. And there’s a built-in animation and game engine that uses Python, so it’s possible to just use Blender to make full 3D games. Sort of confusing to learn without a tutorial, but the fact that the tutorial is a wiki really helps, since people can edit posts that were unclear and add helper comments. All around, it’s awesome. I’ll put up another one of these tomorrow.

This brought to mind another thought: I am excited for the day in the future when fully 3-dimensional displays are designed and released for me to buy. Not like a flat screen that makes images look like they’re coming out at you (like we have now), but a 3D environment that you can view from any angle in space. I’m envisioning a cubic hologram or something like that, where you can stick your hand or a cursor in and mark any point in the space by moving around it. Flat screens will be a thing of the past. Wouldn’t this be cool? It sure would make using Blender a lot easier.

Listening to Band of Horses – Cease to Begin. This is one of those albums that I used to love to blast in the empty auditorium of my high school when I got there early for theater tech. It’s “big room” music. I think it’s the reverb on his voice that makes it great for playing in a huge space.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of FreddieW, but he’s a really talented younger filmmaker who puts all of these awesome shorts on YouTube. If you’ve ever played Team Fortress 2, The Rocket Jump should make sense to you. And if not, it’s still super cool.

Get some sleep tonight. Sleep is very important. You’ll be happier if you sleep.

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Vegeta! What does the scouter say about his room number?

Posted on 2nd November 2010 in Something Daily

My room at NYU

It’s over NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND! This is my dorm room door at school. Vegeta’s pretty angry about how high the number is; so much so, in fact, that he smashed his scouter over it.

Paying attention in class is tough when there’s so much you want to learn (ironic, isn’t it?) I spent a good portion of this morning going over a PHP tutorial and learning how it’s used to generate HTML. Having been discouraged from writing HTML in the past by how apparently daunting the process was, the knowledge that PHP can be used to speed up the process is quite encouraging. I learned from the a tutorial on devzone.zend.com the basic syntax, as well as how to use PHP in HTML pages to dynamically generate the dimensions of a table. I think it’s awesome to have the two so well integrated that all it takes to make a bit of content if for your program’s output to be in HTML format – and way less work than it could be!

It’s exciting to learn a new language. I remember being probably 8 or 9 and waking up really early in the morning to sneak to the downstairs desktop computer and page through my dad’s copy of “HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide” from O’Reilly. I think I built a website explaining how to do all kinds of different card tricks. It never went live, but it might still be on that home computer. I’ll dig up the source for it if it’s still around and put it up here…it’ll probably be comedy gold. Unfortunately, maybe due to my years with the School of Rock, I pretty much completely forgot how to write HTML and any other basic coding knowledge that I may have amassed; so when I started taking programming classes last year, it was all essentially new to me. The point is, I’m excited to get into making websites again, with much more enthusiasm this time! Hopefully this works out…

I just got within 23 seconds of finishing Ikaruga again. Before, I would feel pretty good about finishing around that area of the game, because it meant I was generally improving. But now, with success within my grasp, every time I make it to the challenge stage and fail is just a slap in the face. I know I’ll get it eventually, but the sting of defeat is a new and unwelcome sensation in my gaming experience. (In Ikaruga at least – in Team Fortress 2 it’s completely the norm, for example).

I listened to CSNY’s Deja Vu this morning – that is a great album. You probably already knew that. But they just have an awesome, classic sound. Check it out.

This is another webcomic that Justin turned me on to a few days ago. It’s called “Axe Cop“: written by a 5-year-old and illustrated by his 29-year-old brother. It’s so ridiculous (some would say…random?), and the fact that it’s written by a five year old may be what makes it funny, but hey….it’s funny. Check it out.

Thanks for reading!

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