malvasia bianca

Rock Band arrived today. Despite her lobbying for Mario Kart Wii as our next game purchase, Miranda was plenty excited to see it show up; she helped me carry it in from the car (which was actually pretty useful, the Amazon packaging makes it just bulky enough to be very awkward to carry by yourself), […]

I was very sad to learn that Erik Ray died on May 14, after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend than a direct friend, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with him when we were both living in the Boston area. For those of […]

A bit video-heavy today. The power of continuous improvement. A cool-looking physics “game”: (Via BitWorking.) Zefrank on complicated stuff: Falco PA! (Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.) An fun variant on presenting minigames. Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via […]

I recently was charmed (?) to discover that Jonathan Coulton likes big butts and he cannot lie. For those of you who want instant gratification, here’s a YouTube version, but the studio version linked to above has somewhat better audio. On that vein, I don’t believe I ever linked to Alanis Morissette discussing her humps […]

I still haven’t figured out Cursor*10, but it has some neat ideas. (Via GayGamer.) An ActiveRecord tutorial; a nice little introduction to the concepts, I liked the way they get their hands dirty with showing you the SQL. Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about Obama… For no particular reason, a random bit […]

I bought my first single this week, “Still Alive” from Portal: Or at least my first online single; I dimly recall buying a few 45 rpm singles when I was a teenager, out of bemused curiosity that they existed. Buying online singles isn’t something I’d been planning to do. For one thing, I’m the sort […]

xkcd: One person, one vote in the Texas legislature: (Via Lawrence Lessig.) Starlings flocking; it starts to get good at about 2:00, though if that’s not good enough for you, go to 3:20. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Weird Hand-Drawn Game certainly qualifies on the first two counts… (Via Game|Life.) I don’t have much to say about […]

We took Miranda to her first opera yesterday, a performance of Die Zauberflöte. The costumes were absolutely stunning; they were designed by Gerald Scarfe, had gorgeous vibrant colours, were very inventive and amusing, and a pleasure in every way to watch. (I wish I could find some good photos online, but my searching didn’t turn […]

I just discovered that CD Baby is now selling mp3s. Nice to see mp3 purchase options opening up like this; also, I like both the fact that they list up front how much of the sale price goes to the artist and that the amount is 91%. Of course, discovering this wasn’t enough to get […]

Deterministic and probabilistic software product management. Pen tricks. I’ve been doing what he calls “the helicopter” for decades (though in a slightly different way); obviously I have more to learn. Beautiful movies. (Sorry about its non-embeddable nature, and for all the talking and the fact that it’s an ad; I couldn’t find anything else to […]

One advantage Amazon’s new mp3 store has over iTunes: if there’s a song I like, I can just link to it. I believe that the iTunes store is addressible via URLs, but it’s not the same: the URL isn’t sitting there at the top of my browser window, and even if it were, I couldn’t […]

I bought my first mp3s online today; I am very happy to report that I didn’t do it through Apple. I don’t plan to make a habit of it – CDs have served me well for the last 21 years, and I see no reason to stop buying them now – but “And Try” by […]

I ran across a couple of video demos of interesting music hardware recently. Both are basically sequencers with unusual user interfaces: First, Tenori-On. (Found via GayGamer): And Reactable. (Found via Lost Garden, which throws in some neat ideas of its own.) I don’t have much to add; I’m curious how they work in practice. Especially […]

I’ve been on a bit of a Christopher Alexander kick for the last couple of years. At first, I started reading his most famous books, but those were good enough to leave me curious about what else he’d written. Not all of which is great, but enough is to keep me going. Still, it’s taken […]

A few months ago, I lost the foam covers on my earphones (standard iPod earbuds). I didn’t worry about it too much at the time; they sound fine without them. A month ago, the left ear in one set of earphones died. I didn’t notice exactly when it happened; I chalked it up to kinking […]

Several months ago, the Washington post wrote an article about Joshua Bell performing in a D.C. subway station. Almost nobody noticed him; he made some money (probably a good amount for a subway musician), but certainly didn’t attract any crowds or anything. My first reaction was: I hope that I would recognize the quality of […]

Last weekend, we were driving back from the Exploratorium, and were listening to the iPod in shuffle mode most of the time. As expected, it gave us a delightful selection to listen to: Stan Freberg (“There’ll Never Be Another War”, the Civil War version as opposed to the WWI reprise); a 10-second snippet of Katamari […]

Miranda is currently under the impression that the name of The Blue Danube Waltz is “the burping song”. She practiced some on vacation; she’s not nearly as good yet at burping melodically on demand as Wakko, but she’s definitely improving. (Trivia: that’s not actually the regular Wakko voice doing the burps: they are stunt burps […]

I’ve been using a radio adapter to play my iPod in my car for the last year. Which works well enough, and is unbelievably better than having to rely on the radio or CDs to listen to music, but has its downsides. There aren’t a lot of holes in the radio spectrum around here; I’ve […]

Some songs from Striking 12 came up in shuffle mode on the way to day care earlier this week, and Miranda decided she wanted to listen to more of it. So we’ve been making our way through the album. Some rhymes I was amused by, both from “Resolution”: What’s there to celebrate about? I’d rather […]