The Joys of Parenthood (and MIDI)

One of the fun things about being a parent is that, on occasion, your child will become interested in a topic that you yourself love. I've been especially lucky in this respect: my daughter loves spicy food, my son is becoming a talented guitarist, and other things.

But the other day Number One Daughter has decided she's going to build an alternative music instrument controller as a science project. I won't / can't go into any details, but I've been a nut about synthesizers and such since I was 11yo, and I spent a lot of time in graduate school tinkering around with digital electronics, so it is with the utmost restraint that I'm keeping myself from being an obnoxious parent and taking over the project. I'm only providing support, advice, and (of course) $$$ to finance the effort. And, of course, the benefit of my vast experience. But as a dad, the kids both get that all the time. Not that they listen ... but I digress.

And so I placed an order last night and in a few days we'll be discovering the wonderful world of the Arduino. I'm jazzed. Cool stuff like this simply did not exist when I was a kid. I'm soooo excited (and so proud) about this. And I'm hoping that Number One Son will get involved, as well.

Good Speech / Bad Speech

I didn't care much for Obama's "memorial" speech last night. I had originally written something that went into details, but I'm trashing that and just providing a table and some minimal commentary. See how you feel Obama compares to a few other American Presidents:

President	Occasion / Video Link	Word Count / Transcript Link	Duration
Ronald Reagan	Challenger Disaster	652	4m10s
George W. Bush	Columbia Disaster	375	3m20s
George W. Bush	9 / 11 Attacks	599	4m20s
Bill Clinton	Oklahoma City Bombing	916	9m10s
Barack Obama	Tucson Shooting	2762	33m30s

(Durations are approximate, based upon youtube videos of the speeches in question. Word counts were done with wc and thus may be slightly off due to punctuation).

Note that Obama's speech used more that 4x the words that Ronald Reagan used when he spoke to the nation about the Challenger disaster. More than 4x the words that George W. Bush used when he addressed the country on 9/11/2001. More than 3x the words (and time) that Bill Clinton used in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.

In short, Obama seems incapable of using one word when he can use four.

When the President of the United States addresses the nation in the wake of a tragedy is when the President is really working hard for his paycheck. Failure is not an option: his words must be a comfort to those who grieve; they must work to heal those who are wounded; they must reassure the country that despite this awful event, we will not give up; they must promise justice if appropriate. The President's speech must be heroic, memorable, timeless, even poetic, and sombre in the gravity of the event.

Ultimately, the question of whether or not Obama's speech achieved those objectives is a matter of opinion. My opinion is no, it did not.

If you've got the time, I'd seriously urge you to watch the videos of the Reagan and Bush speeches. Reagan and GWB are both in the Top 5 on my List of Least-Favorite Presidents, but I have to give them credit: when their country needed them, they delivered, speech-wise.

(GWB's Columbia speech is surprising -- he uses few words, but the man is obviously affected by the tragedy. I don't think he's good enough of an actor to fake it).

Obama's not likely to start attending Toastmasters to bone up on his speaking skills just because of me. But I really wish he would. I'd like to be proud of the President's statesmanship. I do not know it for a fact but I suspect that GWB got some professional speech-coaching, and while it didn't make him less of a jerk, it seemed like over time his skill at addressing the nation visibly improved.

Maybe the saddest thing about Obama's speaking skills is that he doesn't realize he has a problem.

All:	We are the mediocre presidents. You won't find our faces on dollars or on cents! There's Taylor, there's Tyler, There's Fillmore and there's Hayes. There's William Henry Harrison,
Harrison:	I died in thirty days!
All:	We... are... the... Adequate, forgettable, Occasionally regrettable Caretaker presidents of the U-S-A!

iPad Music Apps: A Non-Comprehensive Overview

I still love my iPad -- to quote a friend who'd probably just as soon not have me mention her name, "it's the first thing I touch in the morning and the last thing I touch before I fall asleep", and that's as true for me as it is for her.

I have this fondness for "musical toys", and the iPad is probably the best platform for such things that's ever existed. Seriously. I mean, a PC is pretty good, but you add in the touch-screen and the light-weight hands-on aspect of the device, and it's just amazing. In fact, my plan is to use my current 32GB iPad as a dedicated music device when I upgrade to the iPad 2.0 (presumably) sometime later this year. 32GB will hold a lot of samples.

So I've spent a semi-embarrassing amount of money on music apps, and some of them are fun, but to date I've only found one, maybe two, that I'd really consider "musical instruments". There are a lot of "keyboard synthesizers" out there like minisythn PRO ($8.99), Pro Keys ($2.99), and NLogFree (free), and they're fun but just drawing a keyboard on the screen doesn't necessarily make it "musically useful". Thereminator ($2.99) scratched my Theremin itch, and Soundrop (free) is an entertaining and unique toy, almost a game: you draw lines on the screen and little dots drop down and make sounds as they bounce about.

TOPLAPapp (free) and iGendyn (free), both by experimental music pioneer Nick Collins will create some very "unique" sounds, based on some very interesting principles:

TOPLAPapp is ... a virtual machine for sound synthesis. This machine accepts a few valid instructions ... The machine rushes through the instruction set to create output sounds, which are usually of a somewhat noisy character, hopefully interestingly so. The historical antecedents include instruction synthesis as pioneered at the Institute of Sonology in the 1970s, and the live coding movement, of modifying a running program as it acts.

Cool, huh? I've had fun with it but it makes my wife leave the room, usually in a very bad mood. I'm not making this up.

MorphWiz ($9.99) comes close to being a real musical instrument. Jordan Rudess, who's the keyboard player for Dream Theatre, is one of the developers. It's more or less an iPad implementation of the Haken Continuum Fingerboard and it's fun to noodle around with -- but until they add MIDI output and / or the ability to load your own samples, it's sort've limited.

There are many "groove generator" apps out there, and I'm sure some of them are awesome -- but the few I've looked at tend to be a) very complicated and b) very poorly documented, with c) questionable levels of support. I won't single anyone out, but one thing you have to watch for in this space before you spend $9.99 or more is that no matter how spiffy it looks, the app itself may well be the creation of a single individual -- who may run off chasing another brilliant idea instead of releasing a new version with bug fixes.

All that having been said, the one app I've found so far that I consider to be a seriously useful musical tool is Reactable Mobile ($9.99). That's a screenshot of it at the top of this post, and here's the Reactable website with more video, pictures, and other information.

$9.99 is a little steep for an app, but IMHO, Reactable Mobile is worth every penny. It's a "smaller" version of an actual physical table device that costs about $10K:

I think I've actually played with one of these for a few minutes at SIGGRAPH, but the environment was so noisy that it really didn't make an impression on me. Suffice it to say that the concept maps really well onto the iPad, and that it's well documented, fun, easy to use, and full of features -- for instance, it has a built-in HTTP server that allows you to load your own samples. They have a moderately actively user community and a forum where people can share their compositions -- and the app includes a function to automagically upload shared compositions from the 'net. The basic concept is that you have little icons that represent samples, oscillators, filters, and other synthesis objects, and you connect them together on the screen -- it's kind've like a visual programming language for something like SuperCollider, although I'm not sure if that's really a helpful description.

I love it, but it's probably not for everyone. You need to understand a little bit about how a synthesizer works, and the musical results tend to be either "grooves" or "ambient soundscapes". You can interact in real-time with the modules but really the system seems to promote improvisation more than repeatability. Again -- and speaking purely for myself -- I love it.

If you're curious, here are a few snippets I concocted with Reactable, none of which are destined to "make the charts, with a bullet!" But I had fun, and these days, the only reason I make music is to have fun doing it.

Krell 1 (1MB MP3)

Spooky 1 (672KB MP3)

Spooky 2 (602KB MP3)

[if you listened to these, especially the Krell sample, you'll hear one of the outstanding bugs in the system: it has a function that records the generated audio and renders it as a .WAV file, and for some reason it tends to be "noisy". I'm hoping they'll fix that soon. On the plus side, the Reactable developers seem to be interested in providing support for the app versus running off chasing butterflies].

Soundtracks

Something I've noticed about my music collection over the past decade or so is how much of it is *cough* composed of movie soundtracks. I don't mean John Williams' theme for Star Wars. But there is a lot of exceptionally good music out there that was written for the movies by some very talented people. It almost seems like an evolved version of the "patronage system" of yore, but the patron is movie studio, not a king. It's interesting to speculate that, centuries from now, musicologists may look back on the movie music of our time as the "serious" music of our era, dismissively relegating The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, etc to the category of "pop music".

And while I guess that a lot of people keep current on the latest music via Pandora or last.fm, I seem to pick up on new music from movies and television shows. Like, the other night, Number One Son and I were watching Death Race and about 15 minutes in I'm like "so is it just me, or does this soundtrack kick butt?"

But I digress -- here are some examples. I'm not attempting to be comprehensive (some of these people have scored hundreds of films, I'm not going to list them all here or pretend that I've seen most of them) -- these are just the ones I like and / or own:

James Horner - Braveheart, Titanic, Aliens

Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Danny Elfman - The Simpsons, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Beetlejuice, Futurama, Edward Scissorhands

John Williams - the Harry Potter movies, television shows Lost In Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land Of The Giants (Williams has been milking the Star Wars franchise for many years, and I am not a fan -- but the man has a serious CV)

Thomas Newman - The Green Mile, American Beauty, The Shawshank Redemption, Meet Joe Black

David Newman - Serenity, Anastasia, Heathers

(The Newman family alone is probably worth a post -- you've got Lionel, Alfred, Thomas, David, and Randy Newman, who, between them, have scored a list of movies that reads like "A Comprehensive List of Every Hollywood Movie You Ever Heard Of").

The above are all "established" names -- and I'm only scratching the surface, there's an entire ecosystem of popular film music composers. And then there are the some names you really don't expect to see on a soundtrack:

Toto - David Lynch's Dune (Brian Eno wrote / performed the "Prophecy Theme")

Daft Punk - TRON: Legacy

Wang Chung - To Live And Die In L.A.

Tangerine Dream - Risky Business, Miracle Mile, Firestarter

Paul Haslinger (ex-Tangerine Dream) - Death Race, Crank, Underworld

Mark Mothersbaugh - Big Love (2006 season)

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - The Social Network, (upcoming) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Jed and Joss Whedon - Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

I could go on.

I have to wonder just how some of these matchups came to be. How did William Friedkin decide "hey, let's get these Wang Chung boys in here". Or when Hugh Hudson was directing Chariots of Fire, did he tell people "yeah, Vangelis Papathanasiou -- you know, the Aphrodite's Child 666 guy"?

Finally -- since I surf the web and watch the occasional short video, and also occasionally request some of the lesser-known titles from Netflix, I've lucked onto some not especially well-known (but still quite talented) composers -- people like Rob Simonsen, Ian Dorsch, and Scott Glasgow. Sometimes their websites will have lovely free downloads of their music.

Experts Agree: Emperor Google is Naked

In case you were wondering, no, you're not alone: a lot of people are becoming unhappy with the amount of "spam" in Google's search results (see this article on Metafilter today). During the holiday gift-buying season (ie, the last couple of months) my wife and I wondered aloud just what was going on: we'd try to find information on, say, bicycles, and Google would give us pages and pages of junk. Was it just us?

Apparently not -- I'll trust that you can click the link and read the Metafilter article and associated links on your own that speculate on details about why this is happening (summary: spammers and "search engine optimizers" are getting too good at gaming Google). I'm not happy that this is happening, but in a small way, it's nice to know that it's not just us.

Some people suggest using alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo or Blekko, and Blekko's "slashtags" seem like an interesting idea.

I've seen complaints that it's hard to break the Google habit because it's become second-nature for many of us to use Google, but I'm noticing that Firefox's searchbar defaults to Google but also allows one to add / manage additional search engines. So maybe I'll add Blekko and see how it goes.

One of the Metafilter commenters ponders that it'd be nice if Google would allow one to permanently remove a given website from search results, and then (on the Google end) analyze that information to push trash results to the bottom, thus leveraging crowdsourcing to beat the spam invasion. Sounds like a good idea (actually, I've had the same idea myself); I wonder how well it would work?

While I'm bitching about spam: I'm getting really tired of ads that try to trick me with fake "download" or "begin" buttons. Case in point, here's what I got this morning when I went to http://speedtest.net:

Note that there are buttons / links for "Start Scan Now", "Test PC Speed", "Start Test", "Begin Test", "Start PC speed test", "Free PC Speed Test", and something that may or may not be a button labeled "Pingtest.net". Mea culpa, I know that I'm part of the problem, that my goldfish-like attention span pushes me to attempt to speed-read the page. But I've been seeing this "technique" popping up more and more lately, and it's annoying.

Happy 2011!

Another new year's eve, another year. I don't drink or "party" or do much to celebrate the new year; it's actually something of a sad time for me, as it means that a) my next birthday is in a couple of days and b) that my holiday vacation time is coming to an end. Ah, well -- in truth I should be happy that I've got a good job to go back to.

That said, and on a totally different topic altogether, for awhile I've been thinking of some "interesting" follow-ons to some popular culture media that I'd like to see -- follow-ons that will very likely never happen unless I write them myself and publish them as anonymous fan-fiction (highly unlikely). Still, I'd like to make a note of them here:

• Star Wars: The Droid Liberation Wars - Ever since the first Star Wars movie, I've been bugged at how the droids -- who for the most part seem as sentient as any of the organic characters -- are very much "second class citizens". Remember that scene in the Mos Eisley cantina where the bartender says "Your droids. They'll have to wait outside. We don't want them here."? I wondered if Lucas might move the series towards "droid liberation", in the end leaving the Empire to be more or less on par with Iain M Banks' Culture. To the best of my knowledge -- I'm not a big Star Wars fan -- this has not happened. But I'd sure like to see it.
  
• Harry Potter and the Wizard-Muggle War - I mean, haven't you ever wondered? It'd sure be interesting if J. K. Rowling and Jack Clancy collaborated on something like this. Rowling has shown she's not afraid of getting very dark -- all-out us-or-them genocidal warfare could get very very very dark indeed.
  
• Sookie Stackhouse: Dead During Wartime aka True Blood: The Human / Vampire Wars - As with the Harry Potter concept above, this could get really dark and "interesting". I mean: homo sapiens encounters a superior apex predator ... this is a situation that's gonna go downhill fast.
  
• Invaders of Gor - Earth takes on the Kurii, Priest Kings, and alternative (and highly non-PC) human cultures of John Norman's Counter-Earth as described in his Gor series of novels (I think he's up to #30, God help us all). You may laugh, but seriously, this could be rather interesting. The non-human Kurii have this habit of kidnapping humans from Earth and transplanting them to Counter-Earth, so there could be a nice X-Files vibe to this.
  
  I once wrote up a short teaser on the concept (which reads rather like a mashup of Gor with Vinge's Marooned In Realtime); I may wake up in the morning regretting this, but here it is:
  

  Jessica Qin was born in 1960AD on Earth in a small town in a province called Illinois, located in the United States of America.
  
  Advances in medical technology -- especially the Big Breakthrough in the mid-21st century -- have kept her youthful and fit. Despite what you may think of her appearance, in 23rd century America, she blends in with the crowd. But in 2235AD, bored with life, she opted for a century-long solo mission to the star Wolf 359, 7.7 light years away.
  
  Arriving in the Wolf system 47 years later, Qin emerged from stasis to find herself under fire by unknown entities. With 80% of her defense capability down and drive severely compromised, she found herself free-falling on a tight hyperbolic path around an object that appeared to be a Tipler Cylinder. With no drive capacity, she had no choice but to bobble herself and her remaining resources into stasis and go for a ride.
  
  Emerging from stasis, Qin found herself with good news and bad news: the good news was that she was on the fringes of Sol system's Oort cloud, rich in raw materials and just half a light year from Earth. The bad news was that the open time-like curve she'd traveled had displaced her 277 years into the past, back to 2005AD.
  
  After her ship self-repaired, she headed back to the inner system, where she was amazed to find Counter-Earth, which at first glance seemed an ideal place to stay completely out of the light-cone of Earth for the next 277 years.
  
  Then she became acquainted with the local customs and the political situation.
  
  Shocked and appalled by what she saw, she thought long and hard and concluded that her most fruitful course of action would be to align herself with the Priest-Kings in their war against the Others, repairing and in some cases augmenting their decaying technology -- Ship engineering AI de-briefs on recovered Priest-King technologies invariably included terms like "idiosyncratic", "baroque", and "paper-clips and silly-putty" -- in return for concessions that would soften the harsher aspects of Gorean human culture.
  
  By necessity feared more than she is loved by humans and aliens alike, she is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. And yet unswervingly faithful to those few she considers her true friends. She has an unpopular cause but near-infinite time and resources to devote to it.
  
  And Jessica Qin is an extremely patient woman . . .

  
  The scary and difficult thing about writing this would be the necessity of having to ingest (and take notes on!) the 30 volumes of "reference" material in the existing Gor novels. I once inadvisably read all 6 volumes of Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant over the course of a weekend and made myself sick. 30 volumes of purple-prose propaganda urging women to accept their place as loving slave to their Master ... that might kill me.
  

So there you have it. I notice that these all involve some kind of war. So be it -- most interesting narrative involves some kind of conflict, and war is about as big and in-yer-face as conflict gets. There's also a pronounced "what if God and Superman got into a fight?" flavor to the last three -- but That's Entertainment.

Holiday Movie Wrap-Up

For some reason I've seen a lot of new movies these past few weeks. Some capsule reviews:

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 - It seems as if each successive Harry Potter movie is darker than the last. I expect that for Deathly Hallows Part 2 they'll finally push the saturation knob all the way down to 0 and it'll effectively be an audiobook that you listen to in the dark. Aside from that -- frankly, this was the most boring, angsty Harry Potter movie I've seen so far. I think that breaking the final book of the series up into "Part 1" and "Part 2" is a rather obvious effort on the part of the studio to extract every last possible penny from our pockets. Also -- I'd strongly advise not seeing this unless you have at least a passing familiarity with the rest of the books. My family made the mistake of taking my father to see this while he was visiting, and he didn't know what the hell was going on (and I was a bit fuzzy on some of the plot details myself).
  
• Night of the Demons - Any movie that uses Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting as the background soundtrack to scenes of New Orleans debauchery automatically gets a +1 from me. But the rest of this movie was just pointless. It failed at least half of the rules Mark Twain laid out in Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, primarily the one that mandates that the reader / viewer care whether the characters live or die.
  
• TRON: Legacy - An expensive disappointment. And by "expensive", I mean I dropped $56 to take the family to see this in "Real3D DX" and it really wasn't very good. Frankly, it was like watching the original TRON re-rendered at 8x the resolution with .25x the plot. The Daft Punk soundtrack (and their brief cameos) were the real standouts. Visually, it looked like a Syd Mead wet-dream -- but somehow it still managed to be trite and forgettable.
  
• Predators - As with Night of the Demons above, this was pretty much pointless from the beginning and totally lacking in sympathetic characters. There's a "surprising plot twist" near the end that I'm sure anyone with an IQ over 100 figured out 15 minutes in. There's one cool part where this Yakuza guy takes on a Predator with a samurai sword, but beyond that, there's pretty much nothing of interest here. Disappointing. I sure hope Machette is better than this.
  
• Get Him to the Greek and Forgetting Sarah Marshall - I really enjoyed these movies (perhaps because I had low expectations). Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a pretty basic "boy loses girl" plot but I found myself actually liking the characters, and I enjoyed the quirky humor (for instance, Sarah is the star of the television show "Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime"). Also, I cannot lie, it was also nice to see Kristen Bell wearing a lot less than she ever wore on Veronica Mars. Get Him to the Greek is something of a spin-off, based loosely on My Favorite Year with Russell Brand's unflappable, burnt-out rock star "Aldous Snow" playing the part of Peter O'Toole's "Alan Swann" -- but with a lot more sex and drugs. Again, a lot of quirky humor (and a fun little cameo from Metallica's Lars Ulrich) and likeable characters. But beware: you don't wanna watch either of these movies with the kids.
  
• The Ring - Again, I'm one of the last people in the world to see this. And I know a lot of people think this was just an awesome horror film. But it left me with a big "meh".
  
• Scott Pilgrim vs The World - One of -- maybe the best -- movie I've seen this holiday season. And, oddly enough, my teenage kids enjoyed it too, and I had fun watching it with them. My only criticism is that they could have trimmed 15 minutes. But don't let that put you off of seeing this gem. I've seen a lot of movies that are based on comics--errr "graphic novels"-- but this is the only movie I've ever seen that managed to successfully pull off "graphic novel look-and-feel" in a manner that was fresh and original throughout the entire film. A fast-paced movie that's fun and sweet at the same time.
  
• The Box - I'd read the short story and also seen the Twilight Zone version. The movie succeeded in taking a simple concept and making it, well, sorta stupid. It's the kind of movie where you get hooked watching it, trying to figure out WTF is happening -- and then at the end, it's like "oh". Visually, I'll give the movie points for capturing a genuine 1976 look-and-feel, and some scenes were a very effective homage to the whole 1950's Cold War / Bodysnatchers kind of alien paranoia (I assume this was on purpose).
  

So I guess I'm kinda hard to please. I could go on -- I've been working my way through a number of lists of "most disturbing films ever made" (which probably deserves a post of its own -- I'm finding myself surprisingly un-disturbable)(although Martyrs certainly left an impression) and also watching some mindless-but-fun action movies (2 Fast 2 Furious, District B13, the Transporter movies and some horror classics like Final Destination and Hellraiser).

That said, I watched a few trailers last night for upcoming 2011 features that look somewhat interesting:

• Limitless
  
• SuckerPunch
  
• Battle Los Angeles
  
• The Tree of Life
  
• Vanishing on 7th Street