Andy Chase

The price of the Compact Disc format's high fidelity was the loss of real estate for cover art and inserts... posters, tattoos, and cardboard spaceships, stuff to obsess over while you listen (until you have to get up and flip the LP.)

Now half the surface area of the average CD insert is taken up by piracy warnings and UPC symbols, and you can certainly forget about anything beyond the booklet and the CD itself! Print is so tiny it's hard if not impossible to read the microscopic lyrics and/or list of people each band member wants to thank.

With electronically purchased music you might get a PDF booklet if you're lucky, but what are you supposed to do with it, really? Painstakingly attempt to print it double-sided, cut it out, then staple it together? Most tracks on the iTunes music store contain a single, low-resolution image of the front cover, and that's all... no personnel notes, lyrics, or anything else.

I do love having all of my music in digital format, playable in seconds from a device I can carry with me at all times... but sometimes I miss the ritual of picking out something to listen to, pulling the album out of the sleeve and setting it up on the turntable, then settling back and just listening to it while turning the sleeve back in forth in my hands.

I am not alone.

zinjammies1
Originally uploaded by Kimhotep.

The new Google Blogger Web Comments plugin for FireFox is pretty slick, but I can already see the potential for interesting kinds of astroturfing and web search result spam.

Tagged:

• firefox
• plugin
• google

Tom Waits' Take it With Me is simultaneously the prettiest and most haunting love song I think I've ever heard, and it only gets moreso every time I listen to it. Specifically, the recording on Mule Variations.

I don't know how it was accomplished, but the piano in that recording sounds dusty. There's no other way I can think of to describe it. You can hear the dust motes, and I think it's a big part of why the track has such a grip on me.

Tagged:

• tomwaits

Get Lamp looks like it should be an interesting film.

Interactive fiction continues to fascinate me, although I really haven't played much over the past year or so. What few Inform chops I developed during last year's Hours of Inform minicomp have atrophied, and I still haven't fixed my first humble effort's significant bug.

::sigh.::

I can spend time playing my instruments, spend time trying to build instruments, or spend time hacking around with IF. If I limited myself to one of those activities I'd probably make some good progress. Lately I seem to be limiting myself to two, and having fun but sometimes feeling like I'm spinning my wheels. No way I could get away with a third, so lately IF has been put back on the shelf.

Tagged:

• interactivefiction
• if
• inform
• documentary

It occurred to me today to write some Java classes to represent western musical scales; starting with the 12 tone system and then providing methods to build scales in a given major or minor key, (and eventually different modes,) and build chords.

Classes like this could also become the basis of any number of other utilities or applications; chord chart generators, midi generators et cetera.

Plus it would be good reinforcement for a person (such as myself) teaching themselves the fundamentals of music theory.

While conceptualizing how such a package might be broken down, one of the first things I wondered was, "When building a scale in a given key, is there a formula to determine whether the accidentals in that scale will be sharps or flats?" Sure, I could hard-code all of the scales by note as constants in some core utility class, but that would be a crutch, and inelegant.

Anyway, while Googling this very question one of the first things I came across was Steve White's weblog, specifically one of the entries about his Voices project. Steve appears to have had almost exactly the same idea a while ago, only he's doing it in C#. It will be interesting to read how he's approaching the problem.

Ed Dumbill, on behalf of the "Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group", writes:

"HTML isn't a very good language for making Web pages."

That's the dumbest thing I've read in a long time.

I know what they're trying to say, which is that HTML/CSS does have its quirks and limitations, whether a function of the standard specs themselves or crummy browser implementation, but for crap's sake... of course HTML is a good language for making web pages! In case the WHATWG hasn't noticed, there are umpteen billion of them out there, each of which were written with HTML.

It's like saying "English isn't a very good language for writing books in English."

Tagged:

• html
• whatwg
• rant
• web

I just re-read Wil Wheaton's The Trade for the first time since he posted it, and it still takes me right back to my own ill-advised Star Wars toy trade.

It was nothing on the par of giving up a Death Star for a Land Speeder, but I always did miss the figure that I lost in the bargain: A Snow Trooper. What did I get in exchange? A measly little Jawa.

At the time, it seemed like a great deal; you couldn't get Jawas in the store anymore, whereas everybody had Snow Troopers right after The Empire Strikes Back had come out. Plus, the Jawa had a cloth robe, which was kind of cool. It didn't take me long to wish I had my Snow Trooper back; I tended to be rather sentimental about my possessions and that would have been the first time I lost custody of one, so to speak.

I never did get another Snow Trooper, and to the best of my recollection I never traded any more toys. (Although I strongly suspect the same kid I traded my Snow Trooper to of stealing two of my favorite Go-Bots from my pencil box a few years later.)

Tagged:

• toys
• nostalgia
• childhood
• starwars
• snowtrooper
• jawa
• gobots