April 2007
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Month April 2007

Entries 9 Total

That’s So Nidhi

Apr 29, ’07 4:59 PM

Nidhi and Rajiv

The Kiss

Joyous Onlookers

The Quarry

Dancing

This weekend featured a quick jaunt to the New Zealand Embassy to the United States.

This may sound odd, and indeed, it was. To be honest, it’s not the sort of place I would normally expect to find myself. But I have come to expect the unexpected from Nidhi Kalra, fellow Cornell alum and close friend, who was married to Dave Ferguson (son of New Zealand Ambassador Roy Ferguson) last night. The ceremony was a combination Christian/Hindu wedding.

This was the fifth wedding involving people from my house from my final year at Cornell; this pushes us to the 50% married point. Another two will be married this August.

All the best to Dave and Nidhi.

Photos: Dave & Nidhi’s Wedding

Comments (0)

Good God Given

Apr 26, ’07 7:50 PM

Back in 2004, a Nickelback MP3 made the rounds of the webinets. This was not your typical Nickelback MP3 – or perhaps it was doubly typical. With one Nickelback song in the left channel, and another in the right channel, it mashed into itself beautifully. It was an indictment against formulaic pop music, presented simply and plainly. As Ryan at Dead Parrot Society wrote:

The mesh is freakishly, almost unbelievably, perfect.

It was referred to at least once as “musical incest”. The idea of doing such a mashup has never left my brain.

Today, I was listening to Year Zero, the latest Nine Inch Nails album. I haven’t listened to the album enough to have formed a complete opinion on it, so I’m still in the “feeling it out” stage. While I’ve started having a few songs grow on me, something felt off, and I tried to put my finger on what. And then I realized that I was having a hard time telling two songs apart.

Twenty minutes in Live made the point even more defined than I could imagine.

This isn’t a finished bootleg – I don’t know if I’ll complete it, to be honest. It’s also not as straightforward as the Nickelback mash was – some instrumental sections are looped to start the vocals at the same point, and there’s a little bit of an edit going into the chorus. Still, I think it gets the point across pretty well.

On the left channel: Nine Inch Nails’ “The Good Soldier”.

On the right channel: Nine Inch Nails’ “God Given”.

Constructed in Live 6, BPM set to 100.

Pop on some headphones and enjoy.

Download: Nine Inch Nails vs. Nine Inch Nails – Good God Given (Conceptual Edit)

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Coda

Apr 23, ’07 2:38 PM

Panic may now hold a record for fastest conversion cycle with me now that they’ve released Coda.

To echo comments I’ve made to a friend, it’s what iWeb should have been.

If you have a Mac, and you do anything resembling web design or programming, you need to at least give this a spin.

Comments (1)

The Jumpty Dance

Apr 22, ’07 6:28 PM

What do you get when you cross the freeform acrobatics of parkour, the self-proclaimed rebellion of skateboarding, and the suspension of self-respect of most DDR freestyle routines?

You get jumping, or “jumpstyle”. And friends, it is not a crime.

I was inflicted with this plight by Chelsea Peretti. Not the plight of doing it, but the plight of not being able to look away from these magnificent videos.

One or two videos of this and you will have the same question I did. What is that catchy mix of gabba and hard house? It should be no surprise that it is yet another subdivision of electronic music, dubbed “jumpstyle” (ah ha!) or simply “jump”.

In a hotly contested Wikipedia entry, the dance associated with Jumpstyle is called Skiën:

Skiën means kicking one’s feet forward and backward on the bass-line, while the torso goes the opposite way (right foot forward, torso back), once in a while lifting one foot significantly higher than usual to indicate a break in the beat.

Skien is not to be confused with skanking, because skanking is done to ska and reggae, and this is done to electronic music. Don’t worry. It’s a common mistake.

This is not just a few kids screwing around. Oh no. This is a bone-fide craze.

This craze needs to come to NYC. Why? Because here, social dancing IS a crime.

Might as well jump, kids.

Comments (1)

My Pokemans. Let Me Show You Them.

Apr 21, ’07 3:26 PM

My Pokemans. Let me show you them.

Many gamers – the sorts of who proudly label themselves as gamers – snicker when the subject of Pokémon comes up.

Those poor souls are missing out. For Pokémon is the same kind of hard-nosed, level grinding RPG that so many people remember fondly in their more formative years. While the trappings may be cartoon, and the mechanics simplified, it is a good time that can be had by all.

The US release of the first true DS Pokémon games, entitled Diamond and Pearl (Prince must be pleased), hits US stores tomorrow. Buttons has connections, and thus we are currently cranking away on our respective games. I have Pearl, Katie has Diamond.

Everyone with a DS should buy one of the two games.

My WFC friends code is 0430 4738 4617. (You won’t get your Wifi code until you reach the fourth town, where the first Gym is.) If you’re someone I know, or would otherwise recognize the name of, please leave your code in the comments, over IM, or via email.

Let’s catch them all.

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The Rate Of Google

Apr 20, ’07 12:16 AM

I subscribe to the Official Google Blog; it’s normally an interesting look into life at Google. But there’s been an odd pattern over the last week.

Notably:

Friday, 2:36 PM – “The next step in Google advertising“

To that end, we are truly excited to announce our acquisition of DoubleClick. DoubleClick provides a suite of products that enables agencies, advertisers, and publishers to work efficiently, that will enable Google to extend our ad network and develop deeper relationships with our partners.

Monday, 5:33 AM – “An agreement with Clear Channel Radio“

Today’s announcement of a strategic multi-year agreement with Clear Channel Radio, the largest radio station group owner in the U.S, is an important milestone for us.

Tuesday, 12:01 PM – “We’re expecting“

First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we’ve just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia.

Thursday, 8:10 PM – “Collaborating with Marratech“

As a company, we thrive on casual interactions and spontaneous collaboration. So we’re excited about acquiring Marratech’s video conferencing software, which will enable from-the-desktop participation for Googlers in videoconference meetings wherever there’s an Internet connection.

Three acquisitions and one multi-year agreement in one week.

If this rate continues – which I’m praying it won’t – Google will purchased 156 companies a year. (Are there even 156 companies worth buying a year?)

This is as they’re destroying earnings predictions, have nearly 12 billion dollars in the bank, and have a market cap of 146.86 billion as I write this.

I realize this number has no bearing on anything, but if you divide the amount of cash Google holds by the number of employees the company has (listed in the Forbes article as 12,238), you’re left with a ratio of $972,381 per employee.

Mind-boggling.

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Gentlemen – BEHOLD!

Apr 18, ’07 12:02 AM

Over the last week, an acquaintance posted Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules For Short Story Writing. Number 7 starts with “Write to please just one person.”

This is not a short story, nor a short film, nor anything that could really be treated as art. This is another stupid mashup. But if it pleases just one person, I will feel at least mildly pleased.

Last week, Katie and I went to see Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters. I will spare you more of a review than to say that if you’ve ever liked ATHF, you will enjoy this movie. And if you haven’t ever watched ATHF, or have never enjoyed it, you will hate this movie.

Anyhow. During the movie, a plot device of the movie is nearly always accompanied by a somewhat catchy dance tune. I checked the soundtrack after returning home, and the song is titled “I Like Your Booty (But I’m Not Gay)”.

The following bullet points explain my train of thought after learning this.

  • That’s fucking hilarious. And this song IS good.
  • You know, the beat is pretty well defined. This would be easily manipulated by most music programs.
  • This is easy mashup material. But what do I mash it with? What’s a song I won’t mind ruining?
  • Of course. Daisuke.

Daisuke may be the most joked about Beatmania IIDX song in history, largely due to its over-the-top para para video.

I loaded everything into my freshly upgraded Ableton Live 6, and started hacking the bones. Fifty minutes later, I had compelling evidence that I need help.

So, ladies and gentlemen: I give you Insane-O-Flex vs. Y&Co. I give you my seventh (good lord) mashup. I give you…

I Like Your Booty, But Daisuke

Previous Bemani-related mashups:

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The Day The World Ended

Apr 12, ’07 5:43 AM

NYT:

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Not the sort of news I like starting my Thursday with.

EDITED TO ADD: The Metafilter obituary thread is worth visiting, more than any other MeFi obit I can remember.

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Quicksilver Trick: Strip Clipboard Formatting

Apr 11, ’07 11:14 AM

It’s been a while since I did a Quicksilver one-off, but with all the recent crazy hype for QS beginning once again, it seems like a good time. Plus, this literally just happened.

Do you know what my biggest pet peeve in OS X has been? It’s that it’s too smart for it’s own good.

Let me be more specific: when you copy something to the clipboard, it almost always holds the rich text formatting of the app you copied it from. If you paste it into another rich text app, you end up with something that looks like this:

This, undeniably, sucks. Yes, there are a few times where you want the format to copy, but this is rarely the case with most apps. I’d say maybe 5% of the time this is useful, and 95% of the time it makes me want to snap my MacBook Pro in half.

My solution to date has always been “copy from source app, paste into TextMate, copy back out of TextMate, paste into target”. I love TextMate, but this is needless abuse of a lovely app.

Was talking to Mikey (he of Think) this morning, and he explained the issue thusly:

>”It’s a side effect of copying rich text to the pasteboard server. The app copying it doesn’t know you’re going to take it to another app, and the other app doesn’t know where it came from – just that it’s on the pb.”

And then he threw out his solution to the problem:

$ pbpaste | pbcopy

And I thought, “well, I could alias that I guess, but then I’ve gotta keep jumping into terminal and typing. And I really want a hotkey for this. You know, like a QS trig…”

Oh. Right.

So, friends, if you too are affected by the horribly crippling brilliance of OS X’s rich text pasteboard, simply make the trigger shown at right. If you don’t know how to do this:

  1. Invoke QS.
  2. Type Command-’ (that’s a single quote) to go to the Trigger preferences.
  3. Create a new trigger by clicking the + button.
  4. When the trigger pane drops down, press the period key to enter text mode.
  5. Type “pbpaste | pbcopy” into the text field. (Or, for the slightly meta, you can copy and paste it from this post.)
  6. Press tab – select “Run Command in Shell” as the action if it’s not already selected.
  7. Save the trigger and then assign a hotkey as normal.

I bound mine to Shift-Option-Command-V, since I’ll tend to hit it right before I paste something out. You can choose whatever you find most comfortable. In case it’s not clear, this takes the contents of your clipboard and pastes them right back into the clipboard. Because this is being run as a shell command, the formatting falls right off.

If you’re entirely unfamiliar with triggers, you might be in need of a read of my trigger tutorial.

Thanks again to Mikey for his help in turning the lightbulb on over my head.

FIRST EDIT: I’ve been reminded (thanks, Suw!) that you need to have the Terminal Plugin installed to have access to the Run Command In Shell action. Also, note that this trigger does not paste for you; it merely strips off formatting while still in the clipboard.

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