Suddenly the news tastes better.

It sure does..

Worth Watching

Zero Punctuation: Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Daniel Rossen makes some damn good music.

This Phone Is Tapped

Death is not a parallel move

Links to two good pictures

http://www.wallstats.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/WallStatsDATlarge.jpg

http://data.tumblr.com/n4YOZs5W4fcttvnlCEfbnHEfo1_500.jpg

Canada Goose Launches!

Canada Goose has taken off, I hope this will be a fun adventure.

Canada Goose records started in early 2009. The net label is dedicated to releasing music created outside of of a music studio. Most of the releases fall into one of the following categories:

Field Recording or Phonograpy: Think of it like an audio snapshot similar to a photograph but for your ears.
On-Site Recordings: Music recorded from by people on location be it a concert hall or outside on the streets.
Sound Art: audio with artistic quality.

Canada Goose is a small operation, if you enjoy what we are doing please purchase a physical release or donate to the label.

Satellites

Jonas Bendiksen

Between 1998 and 2005 I traveled through the fringes of the former Soviet empire, exploring the oblique stories of half-forgotten enclaves and restless territories. Many of these places are quaintly obscure, but as I came to discover, they offer stark proof that the breakup of the Soviet Union is still a work in progress.

one

One Sentence is an experiment in brevity. Most of the best stories that we tell from our lives have one really, really good part that make the rest of the boring story worth it.

This is about that one line.

This is about telling the most interesting or poignant story possible in the least amount of words.

This is about small bite-sized pieces of extraordinary lives and ordinary lives alike... the happy, the sad, the funny, the depressing.

Happiness

These are my neighbours. My wife and I have two little kids and live in a multi-cultural neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. In the hot summer months all the kids in the neighbourhood play outside together and everyone is out on their porch enjoying each other’s company, telling stories and sharing thoughts. A year or so ago I began inviting some of them over to the house for a casual interview vaguely centered around the subject of happiness. In some cases we never broached the subject directly but none-the-less my friends began to call it my “Happiness Project”.

After each interview I would listen back to the recording for moments that were interesting in both meaning and melody. By meaning I mean the thoughts expressed, by melody I mean the cadence and inflection that give the voice a sing-song quality. It has always been interesting to me how we use sounds to convey concepts. Normally, we don’t pay any attention to the movement of our lips and tounge, and the rising and falling of our voices as we toss our thoughts back and forth to each other. We just talk and listen. The only time we pay attention to these qualities is in song. (Just as when we read we don’t pay attention to the curl and swing of the letters as though they were little drawings.)

Meaning seems to be our hunger but we should still try to taste our food. I wanted to see if I could blur the line between speaking and singing - life and art? - and write music based on these accidental melodies. So I had some musician friends play, as close as they could, these neighbourhood melodies on different instruments (Mrs. Morris on the tenor saxophone, Marisa on the harp, my daughter Ondine on the violin, etc.) and then I arranged them as though they were songs.

All of the melodies on this album are the melodies of every day life.

Story Corps

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.

By recording the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we experience our history, hopes, and humanity. Since 2003, tens of thousands of everyday people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to take home and share, and is archived for generations to come at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our award-winning broadcasts on public radio and the Internet. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind, creating a growing portrait of who we really are as Americans.

The Glass House

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1906. Following his graduation from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1943, Johnson designed some of America’s greatest modern architectural landmarks. Most notable is his private residence, the Glass House, a 47-acre property in New Canaan, Connecticut. Other works include: the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at The Museum of Modern Art, numerous homes, New York’s AT&T Building (now Sony Plaza), Houston’s Transco (now Williams) Tower and Pennzoil Place, the Fort Worth Water Garden, and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. An associate of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the 1950s, Johnson worked with the modern master on the design of the Seagram Building and its famed Four Seasons Restaurant.

Before practicing architecture, Johnson was the founding Director of the Department of Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. His landmark 1932 exhibition, The International Style, introduced modern architecture to the American public. Johnson continued a relationship with MoMA throughout his life as a curator, architect, trustee, and patron. He donated more than 2,000 works of art to the Museum including works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Johnson was also a singular tastemaker, influencing architecture, art, and design during the second-half of the twentieth century. He referred to the Glass House site as his “fifty-year diary.”

Masters in Music

While being un-employed and all I found this thesis quite interesting, that being the fact that it would be something that I would have liked to learn just for the sake of it.

Zhiye Li, Air Guitar: A Feature-Controllable Physical Modeling Synthesizer, Master Thesis, Tulane University, May 2008.

AVR's and USB

This looks cool!



AVR-USB is a software-only implementation of a low-speed USB device for Atmel's AVR microcontrollers, making it possible to build USB hardware with almost any AVR microcontroller, not requiring any additional chip.

First Max Patch

My first patch using Max, it generates a random note, and sends it to the midi device you selected in Max's preferences.

My first thoughts are that Max is pretty neat, I am thinking about creating some interface for controlling my synth.

Download exe file

I love this guy.

If you have the time watch the whole thing, it's so good, and looks so simple but I am having a hell of a time getting anywhere close.

Monopoly Quick End

This method will quickly end a game of monopoly while keeping the integrity of the game intact.

1. Upon consensus to end the game each players piece is moved to the GO space.
2. Then each player rolls one dice, the player with the lowest roll will go first, from here on out all of the all of game rules come back into play.
   
3. The first person to make it around the board back to the GO space wins.

The advantage of finishing the game this way becomes evident when you analyze the method. Moving around the entire board equalized the game to what would happen if the game were to play out, meaning the player with the most property is most likely to win, but there is still a chance that any player could win.

My experience with this ending is that it happens quickly, encourages a lot of interesting property trade, and most importantly the progress that each player has made thus far in the game helps their chances in winning.

Max and Midi and a DSI Prophet

Untitled from paul sobczak on Vimeo.

Oblong Industries

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.