Super Dinosled Attack

Posted on 26th December 2010 in Something Daily

I’ve been eating way, way too many Christmas cookies. When I said I was looking forward to them, I think I was downplaying my excitement a bit. I feel exceedingly gross right now, due both to the absurd amount of butter I’ve been eating and the fact that I’m apparently now allergic to my own house. It’s happened the last few times I’ve visited home that I get sick within one night of arriving – it might be that I’m allergic to my pillow or something, I don’t know. Anyway, I made my way through this frigid Ontario day with a cold and some layered jackets.

Since deciding not to bring my brand-new multitool on this trip to Canada with me, I’ve been noticing tons of situations in which a multitool would come in handy. Bad decision – they don’t care at customs! What was I thinking?!

I don’t watch sports a whole lot, but when I do, it’s usually football. You could say that I’m an Eagles fan, but today, being in the company of my Buffalonian relatives, we were rooting for the Bills against the Patriots. Let’s just say that it didn’t go well. The worst part was that the people I was watching with seemed to know the Bills were going to lose before the game even started. I mean I know they suck, but it seems like there’s something wrong when you have absolutely no hope for your own team.

So if you couldn’t guess, I’m mentally very much on break. Since getting back home, I’ve accomplished nothing; the weird part is that I’m ok with that right now. By the time New Year’s comes around, though, I’ll probably be itchy to start something new. I’m tossing around some ideas for another useful programming exercise – we’ll see how that goes. I did make a good find at a Play ‘n’ Trade next to our dinner restaurant tonight: Star Fox and F-Zero for SNES for eight dollars each. Of course I couldn’t pass up that kind of deal; I feel like those prices are really good. I’ve never seen Star Fox for sale, but F-Zero is typically at least $30 at places I’ve looked. I decided after this find that collecting old games is definitely fun. And yes, it has taken me this long to figure that out.

So we’re driving back tomorrow (another 6 hours, sweet!) and then my break can officially begin. It’s busy now, but life will slow down soon. Remember what’s rad, like Super Nintendo and dinosaurs and sledding. Maybe also a Super Nintendo game where you’re a sledding dinosaur.

I think I just came up with my next cartoon.

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Happy Christmas

Posted on 25th December 2010 in Something Daily

According to mc chris, the fact that every day is mc christmas has rendered the 25th obsolete. Despite this new development, my family still celebrated. I woke up at 8 this morning (finally a bit of rest!), opened some presents, and then drove from 10 to 5:30 to Canada. I got some sweet gifts this morning though: the original Chrono Trigger for SNES, some wicked awesome knives, three different multitools, and some more external storage are the highlights. And tickets to see the Wu-Tang Clan at the Trocadero on the 30th. So there’s that. I didn’t do anything today, since I spent about eight hours riding in a car. More stuff will come tomorrow, but now, it’s time for cookies.

Thank you for reading and supporting Three Stegosaurus Moon. It’s great to know that even a few people read, especially in light of the fact that I’m just writing about my life. Merry Christmas (or happy Christmas, whichever you prefer. I like the sound of “happy” better, but nobody in America says that. I probably just like it because Emma Watson said it in a Harry Potter movie, honestly).

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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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Let me reiterate that Dinosaurs are sweet

Posted on 20th December 2010 in Something Daily

I hope I get more Dragon Ball Z for christmas! I’ve also learned the perils of being too upfront about my love of dinosaurs when I meet new people, which is a bit of a problem…but not really that big of a deal. I mean my computer background is a picture of two dinosaurs making out,

I have a poster of dinosaurs on my wall,

and a dinosaur comic in my wallet. What’s the big deal, right? Also I have a blog called “Three Stegosaurus Moon”…what does that even mean?

I just finished my paper on Zappa’s Joe’s Garage. I think it went really well. At the very least, I got to listen to album two full times while writing it. I feel like listening as I write a paper like this is actually really helpful, albeit sometimes distracting. It gives me a better perspective on what it is that I’m actually writing about. Beside that, I just love the crap out the album, and I pretty frequently jumped up to play the songs along with the record. I still remember a decent amount of the easier ones from when I did Joe’s Garage with the School of Rock (who have an incredible new website, what the heck?). That was a fun show, though. We did the whole album start to finish, with costumes and the Central Scrutinizer with a megaphone and the whole thing. I ended up playing about half of the songs on the album, but I learned all of them for fun (and just in case the opportunity arose to vampire a song from some other keyboardist). What a great album. Seriously, people, go to Grooveshark and type in “Joe’s Garage Frank Zappa” and then listen to the album. You will certainly not regret it.

And now I’m listening to Yoshimi Battles the Hip-Hop Robots and writing a blog post, having just finished that paper. I have a test tonight, which I’m only a little bit worried about, mainly due to the fact that I went to bed at 11:30 last night and was still awake at 1. I’ve been having trouble sleeping these last few days, I’m not sure what that’s all about. Hopefully that will chill out after finals (only three more to go, two after this evening). I go home on Thursday evening, after presenting the multitrack of our bluegrass “Get Low” cover, which has been finished but unpresented for a while. I’m bringing my skateboard and SNES home, which together will have to be enough to hold me over until the spring semester.

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Close to the Edge

Posted on 19th December 2010 in Something Daily

I had one of those days today. By that, I mean that I went to bed at 1:30, woke up without an alarm at 7:15, and had nothing too pressing to get done. As a result, I’ve spent the whole day in a state of lethargy and lack of interest in anything. I had an interesting night last night, for sure. Among other things, London, Bryant and I watched Shogun Assassin and ate Insomnia Cookies together. London really liked the movie, which I’m so happy about! I’ve always thought it’s awesome, and for some reason assumed that no one else would. I’ve noticed, actually, that that’s a theme of my life. I have a certain set of interests, which I think are awesome (obviously). I have this perception, though, that by the simple virtue of me thinking something is awesome, other people automatically don’t. I’ve come to learn recently that this isn’t really the case through meeting certain people and being upfront about my interests, but for some reason I have this perception nonetheless. I’m getting over it, it’s just a pretty slow process.

So yesterday I discovered that Stuyvesant town is actually a sweet place to skate, even for someone with skills as limited as my own. There are a lot of nice smooth streets with not many cars or people around. It’s a pretty secluded apartment complex, and I get the impression that it’s expensive. The people that live there seem nice enough. But I went there yesterday and today, and succeeded in not eating pavement on one of those two occasions. Like I said before, I’m getting better, slowly but surely.

I also listened to “Close to the Edge” by Yes for the first time in ages yesterday. I mean I just sat in front of my speakers and listened for all eighteen minutes. It was incredible. The bass tone on that song is unbeatable, the groove on the verses is just nuts, and the organ/synth solo segment still gives me chills. As Jon Anderson said, that song is such a journey. It got me pumped up for the evening, at least.

Today was all about catching up on last-minute homework that I procrastinated on and watching Arrested Development. I’m actually going to go finish world 8 of New Super Mario Bros. Wii right now. But first, by way of an apology for yesterday’s musical travesty, here’s a slightly better-tuned piece that I composed about a month ago with a Gameboy emulator for the video game I’m designing.

Level One by Raised by Robots

I love this piece. It’s probably the most complex composition I’ve ever written, but I don’t write that much, so I see this as a success. Check my soundcloud for another Gameboy song and some beats that I made a while ago. I’m quite, quite tired right now. Goodnight!

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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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Failing is better than not trying, but success is better than both

Posted on 13th December 2010 in Something Daily

Hi there. Let me just begin by giving a heads-up to Jen Barbosa for being an awesome person. We hung out two nights ago until way too late at night and it was quite nice. Actually we hang out often (and it’s quite nice then too). I just wanted to say thanks for being my rad friend, Jen.

Last night ended up being awesome once again – much better than expected. All around, the Upright Citizens were funnier than last week, although there were still a handful of jokes that I was embarrassed to be laughing at. It was probably a result of some of the weird, weird stories that the show started off with. They start each show by asking the audience what they did over the weekend, and last night’s stories were kind of crazy. There was one about a homeless guy who walked into a Starbucks and started setting up his clothes on individual chairs around one of the tables, and was subsequently vomited upon by a man who ran into the store. There was also a semi-pro wrestler/dominatrix in the audience who told this crazy story about a mansion she visited to do a “session” – it was just nuts. But the show itself was fantastic, as was the rest of my evening. I didn’t get to sleep until 2:30, though, as my roommate had a guest. I had to get up this morning at 7 for class, so I can expect to be pretty toasted in a few hours. I’m thinking seriously about not going to my 5 PM class – it’s finals week. Come on.

Today will involve the last stages of my electronics project design. Yesterday I finished the prototyping process and soldered the circuit to a PC board. It works fine, first try. Not really a big deal or anything, I’m just awesome at soldering. Circuits are scared of me. I also got some knobs to fit on top of my potentiometers from Radio Shack, and stopped by the St. Marks comic store for another Star Wars lunchbox to use as an enclosure. The first one (last semester) had Darth Vader on it, so this one has Luke, Leia, Han Solo, and Obi-Wan, of course. I’ll be drilling a bunch of holes in it this morning, and hopefully not hurting myself too badly with the power tools. I’m actually going to go start that right now.

I tried drawing a “hawk woman” last night, but then I realized that I suck at drawing. That was the end of that. Instead, I ate a large quantity of Kit Kat, played some New Mario Wii and watched Arrested Development.

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It Was a Good Day

Posted on 2nd December 2010 in Something Daily

Yesterday ended up being way better than I expected it to be! I started out early yesterday by assuming that the whole day was going to be crazy, frantic, and difficult. Due to a series of concurrent serendipities, it wasn’t any of those things. I mean I did have an 8 AM class, but even there, my teacher invited the class to dinner. I think I’m going to go, it sounds like fun. After that class, I hung around on the studio floor of Steinhardt for a while waiting Recording Tech. I ended up getting an email from the teacher saying that the class was canceled – sweet! The following class was also canceled, so I suddenly found myself with six hours of unexpected free time. So what did I do? of course, I went home and played a bunch of Mario, then wrote up my electronics homework so I wouldn’t have to do it at midnight. That alone was awesome – just getting that done early enough to not have to worry about it. I had another class that was kinda whatever at 5, but there were no lines at the Kimmel center for those little personal pizzas that are so delicious. They usually require a wait of about 20 minutes, but not last night for some reason.

And then we had an incredibly productive session for our Recording Tech project (a bluegrass cover of “Get Low” by Lil Jon and the East Side Boys). We finished all but a bit of touch-up tracking, leaving only the mix to complete. Last night we managed to track drums and fiddle, and to re-record the slightly ruined (my fault) acoustic guitar track. We just got a lot done last night, and it was a great feeling to finally be doing a session nice and smoothly. The past ones have had a lot of issues, but not last night for whatever reason.

If you weren’t aware, we had an issue with our music being lost from the tape earlier in the semester, so after a successful session such as last night, we’re predisposed to being paranoid and way too careful about losing our stuff. So short of making a multitrack copy on another tape, which we can’t really do, we bounced to Pro Tools. Rather, I woke up early and bounced to Pro Tools before class this morning. And, crazy as this is, it’s already on the internet. [soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="secret_url=false" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/7622869"] Get Low: rough mix by Raised by Robots (NSFW) It’s just a rough mix, everything dry apart from a bit of EQ on most tracks. We’re going to mix it next week. I’ll put up any subsequent bounces we do – at the very least the final product. Bear in mind, this is a cover, so we didn’t write these ridiculous/offensive lyrics. We just sing them because we think it’s funny.

To top off my good day yesterday, I discovered that the paper I anticipated having to write after the session (i.e. midnight) was not actually required. So I got to chill out (mario) instead of working. It was awesome – I love when you end up not having to do work you thought you had to do. It’s so rare!

So today has some big shoes to fill. We’ll see, I guess. Anyway, great job!

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Operating Systems Dilemma

Posted on 1st December 2010 in Something Daily

This week is becoming interesting. Mondays and Tuesdays are always pretty easy: I don’t have a lot of classes, and homework is usually due later in the week. So when I go home, I can hang out. Like how I didn’t really accomplish anything yesterday and just played New Super Mario Bros. Wii with Eric. I mean it’s a pretty good game – almost as good as being productive. Almost. We finished all the regular levels, including the crazy frantic battle at the end where giant bowser is running after you – we were all screaming. It was crazy. But now, since we apparently don’t have better things to do, we’re going through the game again and getting all of the star coins to unlock the really difficult secret levels. It’s not as bad as the replay gimmick in Super Mario Galaxy 2 that makes you play the whole game twice, but it’s similar. But who am I to complain? It’s fun – I mean I’m playing it, right? Anyway the week is getting interesting because I know that tonight is going to involve a large amount of frantic work that’s all due tomorrow. And the South Park season is over, so I don’t have that to break up the craziness tonight. But today’s the craziest. Tomorrow will be better. And now for something completely different.

Considering the process of building my own desktop computer has made me a bit uncomfortable with my affinity for Mac OS X. My original idea for a computer build was essentially “Make a computer that runs OS X”. Doing a little research, I found out about the Hackintosh community and the compendiums (compendia?) they keep of OS X compatible parts. This is all good, but doing a bit of research on the process outside of that community has led me to the realization that installing X on a non-Mac computer is ultimately more work than it’s worth. Choosing the correct parts seems to be the easy part, with the numerous lists of compatible motherboards and processors floating around the internet. The impression that I get is that hacking the OS, installing and running it successfully are the hard parts. I’m positive that it’s doable, and I’ll probably try to do it eventually. I won’t however, have a very high expectation of success, and I’ll pick hardware that’s compatible with both Ubuntu and OS X.

The thing is, I’m worried that using OS X exclusively will lead to me wasting money in the future, not to mention becoming married to one company/OS. I don’t want to have to ‘settle’ for an operating system that I’m not amazing with, or that doesn’t run the software that I need, because it doesn’t run on my hardware. My ideal situation is, of course, running OS X on non-Apple hardware, for the experience of building my own computer for a cheaper price than Apple and running the software that I know/require. I can see why Apple makes it so difficult to do this, though. They really don’t want me to do this. So I’ll try and make a Hackintosh when the time comes.

However, short of getting that to work, I’m practicing as much as I can with Linux (which isn’t a whole lot different anyway), because apparently Linux can run on tons of hardware types. I dual boot 10.6.5 and 10.10 on my white MacBook, and I pretty much only use the Linux partition these days. It’s good practice, and I love finding all of the downloadable packages for added commandline functionality that you can’t really use in OS X. It’s a great system, I just reeeeeally wish that Logic and Steam were compatible with it. If they were, I’d drop OS X in a second. Seriously. Watch, I’ll do it.

And no, I won’t use Windows. UNIX owns DOS and the system under Vista and 7.

Hey, I found a picture of young Stephen Colbert. Believe it.

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Make your SNES all better

Posted on 9th November 2010 in Something Daily

Last night I sat down to play a bit of Super Mario Kart before bed. As usual, it took a few manual flips of the power switch to get the game started correctly; I also had to take the cartridge out a few times and blow on the contacts. Eventually it started working, I picked my character, and as the first race was starting, I knocked the side of my desk with my foot and the screen went black. I started the game again to see what was up, since this was certainly something out of the ordinary, even for my old and partially broken SNES.

My SNES Game Collection

It turns out that with all of my games except Super Mario World, jiggling the cartridge even the slightest bit while the game was running caused an instant freeze – and, in cases where this applied, a total deletion of the save data (this is why I didn’t do the test with Super Metroid…that game is hard). So seeing that this was happening, and realizing that it was pretty unusual, I looked online and discovered that this type of problem can be caused by a dust buildup on the contacts of the cartridge holder inside the console itself. So I folded up a Post-it and slid it between the two rows of contacts while holding the little door open. I could see a lot of blackish dust and dirt collecting on the paper, and sure enough, when I inserted another game and jiggled it around as a test, it was working fine – totally impervious to freezing. So there it is – if you have an SNES (or, I would guess, any older system that uses cartridges) that’s having trouble reading games, try cleaning out the contacts where the cartridge connects to the console. I really didn’t think it would work, but it totally did the trick.

I’m exposing myself to a lot more PHP/Javascript recently, mainly by reading a ton of posts on Stack Overflow, which is a public forum for programmers of any skill level, with every post organized by tags so you can see conversations about subjects of interest. Mostly it’s a Q&A type situation, where one will make a post asking a question they’ve run into, they can be answered by the community. By the way, Stack Overflow has a huge community (it’s a top 500 site, in fact). But I’ve been reading a lot about PHP and Javascript and how they’re used in conjunction with HTML and APIs like Foursquare and WordPress. I’m not building anything yet, just learning. But this totally counts as a project in my mind. Learning is very important.

Also, I’m listening to MF Doom’s Doomsday, which is an essential underground rap album (released two days after my 8th birthday, fun fact). If you don’t know Doom, I really, really recommend his stuff, especially Doomsday and Madvillainy, which he did with Madlib. Doom has some of the most interesting and unfathomable lyrics I’ve ever heard – “I-C-E cold, nice to be old/Y2G steed twice to threefold/He sold scrolls, lo and behold/Know who’s the illest ever like the greatest story told”…what!? I’m not sure if he writes his stuff on Doomsday or freestyles it, but I think it’s awesome either way. Check it out.

I found this on reddit (where else, right?) – it’s a multitool from ancient Rome. Check out the size of the knife!

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