Joachim's Blog

What I'm listening to: Spring '09

2009-04-17T10:17:00.003-04:00

I found some new music that I like a lot, and for whatever reason I've lately felt compelled to promote some music I've had for a long time. I have started writing down song titles that I think friends might like in my phone. That's great, but I never write down why I think the friend might enjoy the music, or what made me think of it. I do the same thing with Netflix, and the result is the same: I'm always wondering why the hell did I get this movie (or song)?

These songs are from my list of music for bill, one of the two (three?) readers of my blog. I had already published Mum's "Nightly Cares" here, so I left that out, and unfortunately I was unable to easily download an MP3 version of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Cheated Hearts". Perhaps the industrious reader can find it himself. Of the remaining five songs, two are old favorites: PJ Harvey's The Wind, and Cash by Sugar Ray.

The other three are new(er). Everybody loves M.I.A., but not everybody loves her new, weirder album. That's because not everybody has heard "Mango Pickle Down River (with the Wilcannia Mob)". I hope to rectify that lack here. Similarly, some may have heard Simple Kid's "Little King Kong" on the radio, while not realizing that his album is actually fantastic. "Serotonin" is a nice example, but really the whole thing is good. Last and definitely not least is the little gem that apparently made everybody's 2008 top ten list: "For Emma, Forever Ago" by Bon Iver. I'm posting Blindsided, but in fact every track on that album is fantastic, especially if you like quiet music to go into a remote shack in the woods and shoot yourself to. Well, actually I don't really think it's that depressing, but it is darkly emotional and moody. Hopefully you will enjoy it as much as me.

The Wind, PJ Harvey

Cash, Sugar Ray

Mango Pickle, M.I.A.

Serotonin, Simple Kid

Blindsided, Bon Iver

Liz Phair

2008-09-18T06:38:00.002-04:00

My friend Derek developed a sudden interest in Liz Phair. Who wouldn't? Anyway, he asked me to post some stuff by here so here it is. Not much of a blog entry, I know, but I guess my "new" music distribution policy requires me to post music here rather than distributing it secretly.

California
Can't Get Out of What I'm Into (Steady Job)
Johnny Sunshine

The Occasional Blogger

2007-09-02T13:42:00.000-04:00

The way I see it, one can't blog all the time. It helps me a lot to have two long weekends in a row and nothing in particular to do during either of them. In order to avoid feeling like a total slug while sitting around all day watching tennis, I blog.

Bill and I have recently had an email exchange about music. I don't like to be elitist or preferential, so instead of just mailing him some music I'm putting it here on my blog in the usual way. If there's anyone else actually reading this, you need not expect to enjoy this music as it has been selected to match Bill's particular tastes. Of course, Bill may not like it either. Time will tell. Here's the new music.

Sun Kil Moon: Carry Me Ohio
Loose Fur: Chinese Apple
Dizzee Rascal: Dream
Poe: Haunted
Múm: Nightly Cares
Amadou & Mariam: Politic Amagni

PS I bought a condo!

Now hiring: QA personnel

2006-09-17T18:24:00.001-04:00

I made sure to set expectations low when I published version 0.1 of Domination. Maybe they were a little too low. A few people ran it, and to their credit, they did get back to me to mention that it didn't seem to work. But I knew it had a few annoying but ultimately non-critical bugs that might make it appear not to work. Plus I had, of course, tested the program quite a bit. I'd even smoke-tested it from inside the jar file, to make sure it worked from that way, by starting it up and moving a few units around. Everything was fine. Well, it turns out if I had just tried to play through to the next turn, I would have seen the crippling bug that stopped all my friends from playing!

As if that weren't bad enough, as soon as I shipped that program, I simultaneously moved to a new source code repository and ripped the game apart for a total rewrite. This meant I was unable to even publish a fixed version (the bug was quite minor). But I haven't forgotten you my dear and unfortunate testers - I've been hard at work over the past two weeks and finally I am pleased to announce: Version 0.2! As far as I can tell, this one actually works. It even has help, kind of.

Please play, enjoy, and tell me what you love and hate about it. I'm not planning on ever getting rich off this program, and I already have the final feature set (including multiplayer) in mind, but I think it would be nice if people eventually wanted to play it a little, so I'm interested in any advice anyone has that might contribute to that. Oh, and of course, if you want to get your hands dirty and write some code, contact me and I will set you up right away!

Domination

2006-08-21T23:06:00.000-04:00

Wow, almost five months have passed without a blog entry. That's really a bit much. I wanted to put up a couple of songs a week for a while, but I guess I never got around to it. Well, at least I've finally gotten around to releasing version 0.1 of the game I've been working on, Domination. It's a cheap rip-off of some old Mac game I used to play and enjoy, but that I've forgotten the name of. It's also barely functional so be prepared for a lot of bugs, including some nasty display issues. Oh, also be prepared to have no idea what's going on, because I'm not going to give you a help file or anything. But the right mouse button moves a unit, the left button selects a unit (and the hex it's in - cities are hard to notice but rather critical!), 's' puts a unit to sleep (there's a menu item too), space skips a unit and enter ends the turn (when all your units have either moved or are following orders from a previous turn). There's no sound but there are some rather pathetic graphic effects. Oh, and the game saves automatically at the end of every turn, so if it goes kablooie, you can always select Game/Open and start where you left off. One more thing, of course it requires the Java 5.0 Runtime Environment (which you don't have) - "java -jar domination.jar". If I could release a half-game faster than Sun releases an entire major revision of their language, you wouldn't feel like you have to download 200 megs of cruft every time you want to play my 150K programs. Anyway, good luck!

PS I got a job

Fading into Obscurity

2006-04-07T16:40:00.000-04:00

I bet some of you out there would have expected me to get a job by now. Well I guess you are going to be surprised because I still haven't started looking. I guess the word is disillusionment - although spending all day every day lounging around the house isn't always exactly pleasant, it's slightly better than working (except there's no money in it). I'm not enough of a hedonist to believe this should be the case. Ideally, work would be stimulating, exciting, and fulfilling - at least some of the time. Not so with the last few (several?) jobs I've had, so these days lounging looks pretty good.

Well, at least it lets me occasionally take some time out to peruse my music collection and bring some (possibly) new and exciting tunes to you, my dear reader. I've decided to replace my music page with direct links from here, and I'm also going to retire songs once they've been up for a while, to save space.

This latest batch started as a coincidence of two musical interests. A friend went to see Blackalicious and reminded me I hadn't pushed any Quannum propaganda for a while; and I finally watched Three Kings and heard some cool French rap in the soundtrack. So all this thinking about music created an urge to update my blog.

I've been trying to track down good French rap for some time, with limited success. One band I found a while ago is called Loco Locass. They're actually French Canadian but whatever, I'm sure it's basically the same thing. So here's their song ~~Groove Grave~~. The band from Three Kings is Plastic Bertrand, and you can listen to their song ~~Stop ou Encore~~. As for our Northern California friends, many of you hopefully are already familiar with ~~8 Point Agenda~~, a song Latyrx did with backup from the Herbalizer. Perhaps you have not heard ~~Burnin Hot in Cali on a Saturday Night~~, an excellent Latyrx-Blackalicious enterprise.

Enjoy!

New Music and a New Year

2006-01-05T12:41:00.000-05:00

Yah it's 2006. So far I can't say I'm exactly fired up about it, but somehow it always feels nicer starting something new than finishing something old. I enter the year - again! - at loose ends. I haven't even started looking for a job, though after the astounding unpaid tax claim I just got from the IRS, I may have to start. But I have a couple of things to take care of first. Sundance is looming in the near distance, and I have to finish reading the Illiad. But after those items are taken care of, it's Next Stop The Future and I will be getting on with finding a depressing and menial, though well-paying, line of work to follow. One wonders where one will be in January 2007.

Check out the new music, including Imogen Heap's scarily good new song.

Lazy, Poor

2005-11-14T08:02:00.000-05:00

I know I've promised never to post to my blog, and I believe that most of you readers are pretty happy about that, but still it has been an awfully long time. Yesterday, while jogging, I was forced to run through two separate funeral processions. This got me thinking, about how short life is and how many people keep bugging me for halloween pictures. So I put them on my site. A couple of new music tracks too, with more to come in the next few days as I remember what I told people I would put up there for them.

Oh, PS I lost my job (again). Not only is this starting to get annoying, but I'm also starting to get a little too used to it. Well, whatever. I'm sure something will turn up in the next few months and last at least a few months. Who knows, my company's cost-cutting measures may even succeed and I'll go back there. But I think when you fire your entire engineering department, survival is a pretty dicey affair. At least now I have more time to blog.

Music Bonanza

2005-08-19T07:50:00.000-04:00

[Spanish, from Medieval Latin bonacia, calm sea, blend of Latin bonus, good; see deu-² in Indo-European Roots, and Medieval Latin malacia, calm sea (from Greek malaki, from malakos, soft. See mel-¹ in Indo-European Roots).]

Yes that is correct, gentle reader. You see before you (at least if you're looking at my music page) a veritable... er, calm sea? of music. Well whatever, let's don't stress the etymology because I know you have better things to do. No doubt my blog is only one of thousands that you have to get through this morning before your boss gets out of that meeting and realizes you've been goofing off. So I won't waste any more of your time. Suffice it to say that my former music folder has now become an official page, for your reading plaiseure, and that you should now go find out what I've been listening to this year, or at any rate what I have been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to get other people, people like you, gentle and musically tasteless reader, to listen to this year.

Hey, but speaking of blogs, before I go I should mention my new pseudo-blog which is the only place I really put any kind of regular internet updates. I've been trying to get into running (again), a little more seriously this time, maybe, than previously. Lucky for me I discovered coolrunning.com. If any of you out there are fitness aficionados ([Spanish, past participle of aficionar, to induce a liking for, from afición, liking, from Latin affecti, affectin-. See affection.] - I am practically bilingual today!) or are thinking of doing a little jogging yourselves, you should come check out my running log!

Humdrum

2005-06-15T11:47:00.000-04:00

Morning, walking to work. Mood (yes I do read everybody else's blogs): Humdrum, from Peter Gabriel's car album, including the fact that Humdrum rolls into Slowburn. It's morning, after all, and early morning at that, so the juices haven't quite gotten flowing yet. The staff at Twin Donut is Cambodian, it turns out, and the only customer kept up the kind of overly interested and even a little protective banter with the woman behind the counter that American men always seem to make with southeast asian women. I do it too. Reminds me of Thailand.

We're going to have to start working now. Work is heating up once again and there's weather moving in. Somehow it adds up to put me in a somber mood. Just a few days ago things seemed very different. Manic depression? Maybe, a little. With the heat, I don't need to eat or sleep, and the long days give me energy. Women are dressed sexy on the train and when they walk their little dogs. Parties become more frequent, clubbing makes more sense, and I find myself out on the street with my friends late at night. The idea of love even seems possible.

Then I kinda wake up and look around. The clouds roll back in and it gets cold. I realize how impractical some thoughts can be. Yeah, love especially. Not this spring, I guess, and it's a blue thought. But Slowburn is still just around the corner.

Speaking of Racing

2005-06-12T21:31:00.000-04:00

Today I became a race car driver. I took my car to an autocross! You can find pictures of the event here, though I'm afraid they don't do justice to the driving part.

There are a couple of things you should take with you when next you take your own car racing. First you need to understand that the People Who Take Their Cars Racing, like any powerful and secretive organization, have monopolistic tendencies. The more they can take their own cars racing, the better for them, so of course they won't let just anyone join the club. So they freely invite you to join (this avoids any kind of antitrust litigation), and then try to sabotage your effort by not telling you to bring important things.

Important thing #1: sunscreen. You figure, "I am going to race my car" and therefore you will be in your car where the nasty sunshine cannot reach you. Imagine your surprise when you find out you will be spending most of your time standing on an abandoned runway getting heatstroke! Ha, ha - you just went up against the Man - and lost.

Important thing #2: fluids. It turns out even as the Sun is grilling you to a crispy husk, it is simultaneously leaching the very fluids from your body itself! To make matters worse, recent research suggests that the removal of all fluids from the body may increase the risk of pulmonary failure, complicate pregnancy and more importantly, impair your ability to operate a vehicle! So again, I trust you are seeing the long arm of the auto-solar conspiracy in motion behind the scenes here.

Important thing #3: numbers. Now as a computer scientist, I use numbers all the time. I'm not one of these effete snobs who thinks life was better when all we had was geometry and ratios. But you need, in order to fully comprehend my complex situation here, to also understand that today is Sunday, which is part of the weekend. I'm around numbers all day so the last thing I want to do when I come home at night and relax with some ketchup and a tasty bottle of Rolling Rock or a Magic Hat are a bunch of numbers. What I guess I'm getting at here is that you shouldn't be surprised when I momentarily inform you that I arrived at this racing event, completely sans-numeric, as the Japanese say. So the numbers you may see on my automobile were borrowed, as was the tape I used to construct the various additional nomenclature and vocabulary you see liberally sprinkled around the chassis. Obviously you can tell by the state of our school system that the deprivation of numbers is another tactic used by the Bush-Jeff Gordon-Helios axis that we all loathe yet, at another level, respect.

The Rat Race, From Above

2005-06-03T08:33:00.000-04:00

People keep laughing at me when I tell them one of the best things about my new job is the view. But really, it's a good view! The skyline of Boston (and of Cambridge, for what that's worth), the landmarks, the big sky that is typically so elusive in hilly New England. I know it's not like I'm working in Switzerland - we've got our share of billboards and ugly apartment blocks in the way of our vista, but by and large it's pleasant. After living in a windowless cube for six months I would have been happy with a skylight, so this is really a treat.

In rainy weather, southern Cambridge looks like a jungle. The fog obscures the buildings of Harvard Square and gathers in the treetops like in some African rainforest. New England always looks like a forest when viewed from above. It's something I like about the place - it reminds me of home. I remember sitting in my dentist's chair and admiring the view of Evanston. His office was in Skokie, on Gross Point, several stories up. The land there is so flat that it doesn't take much elevation to get a good view, and I could see all the way to the lake. But it didn't look like Evanston; it just looked like a forest with a couple of buildings sticking out of it.

From an airplane one sometimes gets even more of a sensation of nature. From altitude the more distant suburbs of western Mass look almost completely uninhabited. Somehow it's only when you get up close that you realize nature doesn't live here anymore.

Nature doesn't live in India anymore, either. But check out the newest pictures, including some from Madikeri, my first stop in the mountains. And don't miss the new wheels I put on my car!

Episode II: A New Blog

2005-05-31T15:06:00.000-04:00

Ah, it's been too long. My travel blog came to an abrupt end when I stopped travelling. Now I am back - have been for a while, actually - and I no longer have anything interesting to say. Time for a new blog! I'll say new and improved in the hopes of attracting more readers, if perhaps less discriminating ones. Anyway for now I'm just throwing out a few posts to test RSS.