Alright, here’s my latest tune, Trisarje, and I’m very happy with it how it has turned out. I jotted down the first four bars of the chord progression before Thanksgiving but left it alone. Then just before the new year I picked it up again, added a second part to the progression, the main “lead” melody, dynamics, mixing, and all the rest. Even so, it is still a fairly simple song in it’s structure and voicing (only four).

But I like it. I always enjoy when a song continually taps something emotional, which is almost always by way of the melody for me. And in this case it is something about the unexpected progression shift in the last eight “wrap-up” bars that really does it. I also dig how the final note decay has an open filter sweep on it. But enough about how much I’m into my own music, yikes!

You may notice a similarity in the sounds to my previous song, Vroidan, and that is indeed so, I’m using the same main instruments for the bass and arpeggio. But beyond that I think the similarities quickly fade away. Maybe now I can get some traction on some other songs that have I’ve been unable to finish up.

I just bought Armadillo Run last night and am really enjoying it. It is a physics simulation game and, while that might not sound like much fun, it really ends up being a very cool puzzle game. Your aim is to guide a ball-shaped “armadillo” through a pathway you build from various materials such as metal tubing, rope, cloth, elastic bands, etc. Once you’ve completed building your structures you turn on the simulation to see the physics go into action. Seriously, it’s better than I’m making it sound. There is a free demo that has tutorials and introductory levels included. For the time being it’s Windows only.

Besides the obvious insidious duplicates that have been secretly created of us by the evil people at [[imdb:0216216 Replacement Technologies]], how many other people out there share your name? This website lets you search against the 1990 US Census data:
http://www.howmanyofme.com/

Pretty cool idea! I just wish they had the 2000 data available because that was the first year I directly participated.

Ok, I’m going to try a new approach to blogging: posting some of the random, fun, weird stuff I come across on the web from time to time. So for an inaugural post, here’s a hilarious video from the Late Late Show that my friend Tonica made me aware of:
[yt]zmLToYe8nRo[/yt]

Some of you must be familiar, at least vaguely, with phonetic alphabets. The various worlds militaries have developed different variations for disambiguating radio conversations, where each word’s pronounciation is very distinct from the others in the list. NATO’s standard is probably the most widely used and is well known via the media: alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, etc. We civilians often require a similar system (completely unstandardized and up to the individual, unfortunately) for spelling words over the phone, i.e. “G as in girl, R as in run, A as in apple, H as in hockey, …” So {Kimsal} at work had a funny idea: make the most confusing phonetic alphabet possible. His classic examples were K as in knife and P as in pneumatic.

So he and I went about filling out his list. There are some really great ones and some fairly weak ones. The best ones send you in the completely wrong direction. Imagine hearing someone say, “That’s A as in i, E as in ate, G as in naw, S as in c, T as in dow, W as in y, Q as in k, Y as in u”. How confused would you be? I love it! My apologies in advance to any call center workers or other customer service reps. Find my version of the complete list below…

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