This morning, I decided spontaneously that I would finally attack the problem of hooking a commenting system into this site. I figured out a simple way to do this.

Now, many of you already use the Livejournal feed of this blog for comments. I appreciate that, since they did all the hard work and I'm just piggybacking on top of that. I decided that when building the page view for individual thingo entries (which you can find by following the link from LJ, or clicking on [link]), I would scrape the LJ page for my feed and figure out what URL they're using to represent that entry. Then I can embed that link in my blog to direct people to the appropriate page for comments. For bonus points, I'd cache the URL so that I can go back later and see old comments.

Mission accomplished, sort of. If you're looking at the single entry view for this entry, there's a fair chance that you'll see a comments link at the bottom. The caching doesn't seem to be working, but I'm not worried about that problem. You see, the big issue is that LJ doesn't seem to store old syndicated posts and their comments. All the wonderful comments you've left in the past are gone! We can't revisit our discussion on whether Harry Potter can be choked underwater, for example.

I guess I'm left with a couple of options. I can write my own commenting system. Writing blog software was an interesting exercise in 2000, but at this point I can't see the point; frankly, other people have done much better jobs at this than I ever will. I can become a partial sell-out and install popular blogging software like Blosxom or MoveableType, or become a total sell-out and use a hosted blogging site. In both cases, I would want to find an automated way to pump all my old blog entries into the new system. Or I can abandon comments altogether and remain a Web 1.0 curmudgeon (as my uncle would say, I can embrace trailing-edge technology).

Er, comments?

It was a heroic tale of derring-do, and we are admittedly well into October by now. Nevertheless, it is my pleasure to offer you September's Minute (well, 2:16, but who's counting?).

Download: [ogg] [mp3]

Notes:

• Yes, I'm calling this September's OMOM. I'm hoping to have more time in the second half of the month to do an October Minute.

• Yes, this is more bleepy electronic stuff (sorry, no chucka guitars). Unlike some of the previous Minutes, however, I actually kind of like this one. I think it holds together reasonably well.
• The whole thing got started because of the beautiful sound that makes up the sixteenth-note sequences. The sound was hiding inside a complex arpeggiated Combinator in the Reason Factory Sound Bank, but I'm using it without the arp.
• Unlike several other Months, I didn't draw inspiration from Zero 7 this time. The most obvious antecedent for this song is the beautiful Aphex Twin song "Chesh", which is on an ambient compilation that Doug gave me years ago. I think the high theremin-like sound towards the end is reminiscent of a song by Aphex Twin and μ-Ziq on the "Expert Knob Twiddlers" album. So thank you, Mr. James. I also stole one miniscule idea from Tom Third.

Thanks for listening, and remember to ask your local radio DJ to play more Minutes of Music.

Those of you who eagerly watched the calendar inch over into October, hoping for the next installment of OMOM, are no doubt disappointed by now. I still haven't put one up for September, and I'm not sure I'll be able to make one any time soon. My schedule's simply too full at the moment. Rest assured that when I find some spare time, I'll devote (some of) it to music making. Interestingly, T suggested today that we should start an on-campus music production club, which would meet over lunch every two weeks or so and work on making music. That would probably help me find more time for OMOM.

In other news, I'm pleased to report that I supported the arts. Specifically, I purchased a single mega-ticket for a five night performance of all fifteen Shostakovich string quartets. Woo hoo! I even threw in a donation to help support this fairly ambitious project. And so, to our esteemed prime minister, who claims that ordinary Canadians do not support the arts, let me say this: Bite me, Harper.

In still other news, I'm really enjoying the new album Dear Science by TV on the Radio. But I don't think I'm out of line when I say that the video for the song "Golden Age" is, like, totally gay. I'm not I could articulate why exactly, but, well, wow.

With the onset of autumn, Nath brought home a book of slow cooker recipes from the library. Hurray! I love soups and stews that have been simmering all day in the slow cooker. Also, it's just about the only way that my poor nubby teeth can handle beef.

Unfortunately, this cookbook is not without its problems. In several places, a recipe will encourage you to "serve this with" some other side dish mentioned elsewhere in the book. The Chicken Cacciatore recipe suggests Roasted Potatoes as a side dish. Great, except that both recipes take hours to cook in the slow cooker (or am I expected to have two?). To be perfectly fair, I should say that I don't know exactly how long it takes to cook the roasted potatoes -- the page number you are directed to contains the recipe for Pork Chops With Winter Fruit, as does the entry for Roasted Potates in the index. I'm not sure what the deal is there.

Later, the recipe for Caramel Peaches (yum!) observes that it's "the perfect dish to whip together when unexpected guests arrive". Mind you, this is a dish that cooks on low heat for four to six hours. I can understand "whipping together" a batch of cookies or brownies. But if you have six hours to put together this dish for impending guests, they can scarcely be considered unexpected. On the other hand, making your guests wait six hours for dessert might be an appropriate way to punish them for arriving unexpectedly. Take that, guests!

There's a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sitting in my downstairs bathroom. When I'm down there I occasionally pick it up and read a few pages.

Recently, I re-read the chapter entitled "The Silver Doe". (Spoiler alert...) In this chapter, Harry discovers the sword of Gryffindor lying at the bottom of a frozen pond. He determines that he must dive to the bottom of the pond to get it. He's wearing a locket around his neck (a Horcrux) that is the sword's enemy. And then...

Harry put off the moment of total submersion from second to second, gasping and shaking, until he told himself that it must be done, gathered all his courage and dived.

The cold was agony: it attacked him like fire. His brain itself seemd to have frozen as he pushed through the dark water to the bottom and reached out, groping for the sword. His fingers closed around the hilt; he pulled it upwards.

Then something closed tight around his neck. He thought of water weeds, though nothing had brushed him as he dived, and raised his empty hand to free himself. It was not weed: the chain of the Horcrux had tightened and was slowly constricting his wind pipe.

Harry kicked out wildly, trying to push himself back to the surface, but merely propelled himself into the rocky side of the pool. Thrashing, suffocating, he scrabbled at the strangling chain, his frozen fingers unable to loosen it, and now little lights were popping inside his head...

My goal here is not to leave you in suspense about what happens (hint: there are 300 left pages after this scene, so it's a safe bet that Harry doesn't die).

No, I was wondering: does anybody else see the problem with this passage?

[update: 14 September 2008 at 07:46]: Comments here.

Tomorrow, CERN is going to fire up the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider. This device is a new, extremely powerful particle accelerator that promises to probe deeper than ever before into the mysteries the underlie the structure of the universe and the nature of matter. Indeed, the last couple of times I saw physicists speak they all seemed to pin their hopes on the LHC as the means of finally answering so many of their questions. I have no doubt that it'll raise more questions than it answers, but I wish those physicists nothing but the best.

Apparently, not everyone agrees with me. Scientists working on the LHC have been receiving death threats. Apparently, a bunch of people fear that the energies released by the LHC will create Big Bangs, or miniature black holes, or tsunamis and earthquakes, or other cataclysms.

Now, we know that the possibility of such events is too remote to even be worthy of consideration, and the fears are the fantasies of people who, frankly, wouldn't know a hadron from a hole in the ground. But let's set that aside for a moment. Let's give the person making these threats, whom I'll call "Higgs", the benefit of the doubt, and assume he genuinely believes the LHC will destroy the world when it's fired up.

If that's the case, the death threats seem really misguided (yes, aside from the basic fact that they're death threats). What is Higgs trying to accomplish? Presumably he's saying "if you turn on that machine, I'm going kill you!". Uh, Higgs? Didn't you just say the machine was going to destroy the whole world? The only situation in which Higgs can carry out his threat is if CERN turns on the LHC and it doesn't destroy the world. In that case Higgs is only killing scientists out of spite, and that's just not fair play. By the same token, the scientists shouldn't fear Higgs. Either the LHC will be safe, in which case there's no reason for anyone to kill them, or it will destroy the world, in which case they'll have very little to fear from angry kooks.

But, you know, in case the world does blow up overnight, it was nice knowing all of you. Man, I think I'm going to recite that daily from now on.

For truly, what month would be complete without a minute of music?

Download: [ogg] [mp3]

Notes:

• Holy cow, this bad boy is two and a half minutes even. This marks the first time that OMOM has broken the two minute mark (TMOM?). We're encroaching on the perfect pop song length. I wasn't especially aiming for length, I guess the melody just moves slowly.
• This piece definitely verges into the "arbitrarily awful" territory that I purposefully allowed myself access to in the Original OMOM Manifesto (the OOMOMM). It's tacky, self-indulgent pap. Oh well, they can't all be smash hits.
• I like some of the fine tuning that I did to the original sounds. The lead gets tweaked from time to time with distortion and detuning. I had to fiddle with the low drone to get the filters and echo to work correctly (note the 80s-style "sample & hold" synth sound).
• One of the more obvious sampled loops in the mix is the scratching near the end. Yeesh. I don't think you can really get a good bit of scratching out of a canned loop. I did see a YouTube video with a tutorial on creating decent fake scratching in Reason. That might be worth a try some day.
• As with June, I didn't start with any specific idea of a song I wanted to make, and it shows. Hopefully some month soon I'll have time to work from inspiration rather than random fiddling.

Special bonus! T is a user of Sony's Acid Studio, a program that makes it easy to mix pre-recorded loops together. One thing it does well that Reason can't handle is re-targeting loops for different tempi and pitches. Nevertheless, I wanted to see what I could do purely in Reason. So I cut out a few bars from a great old song ("Ole Buttermilk Sky", by Kay Kyser and his Orchestra, 1946) and mixed in some simple orchestral and hip-hop sounds (at the original key and tempo to avoid problems). I love the original song, by the way -- it's relentlessly cheerful. Anyway, the result is the following travesty:

Download: [ogg] [mp3]

Yes, this is a pretty grievous musical crime. It clocks in at less than a minute, by the way, and so (mercifully) it doesn't belong to the OMOM, er, canon. But it was definitely fun to make. It makes me eager to work in the loop mixing/mash-up style a bit more, though it's definitely unfamiliar territory. I don't have Acid (which in any case is Windows-only), but Apple's Garage Band basically has the same capabilities. That's something to play with in the future.

Incidentally, this is the 400th Thingo entry. Happy quadricentennial!

This morning, I was thinking about two words that describe the same phenomenon: "monobrow" and "unibrow". Which one do you use? Which one should I use? Clearly, I should use the one that is etymologically more pure; that is, the version that doesn't mix elements from different languages. OK, then, we know that "mono-" is Greek and "uni-" is Latin. Unfortunately that doesn't help us, since "brow" comes from the Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Old English) "brú". Therefore, we are left with a couple of alternatives:

• In Old English, the first counting number is declined either as ān or āna, suggesting that we could employ it to form "ānabrow". I like the sound of that, though it may mislead one into thinking that the subject is missing eyebrows altogether.
• Taking the Modern English construction a little less literally, perhaps a better choice would be "samodfæstbrú", with the Old English "samodfæst" meaning "joined together". I would shorten that to the euphonious "fæstbrú" (though that might be mistaken for a brand of beer).
• We could combine the Latin prefix with the Latin word for eyebrow, forming the comparatively awkward "unisupercilium".
• Likewise for Greek, arriving at "monophrys".

For the record, it's a variation of the final alternative that wins. The scientific term (at least according to Wikipedia) is "synophrys": "syn-" for "together", and "phrys" from "φρύδι" for "brow".

(No, I have no idea why I decided to share that. But as it turns out, it was an interesting exercise in HTML character entities.)

When I checked the live video feeds on the CBC website and saw that there was going to be a beach volleyball match between Rogers/Dalhausser (USA) and Geor/Gia (GEO), I assumed it was a typo, as with their accidental use of "pantathlon" (what exactly would that consist of?). Not at all! When the Brazilian players Gomes and Terceiro took Georgian citizenship in order to play volleyball for that country, they chose Geor and Gia as competition nicknames. Ha! Where are Can and Ada?

It's worth pointing out that these live video feeds from the CBC website are great. An ad or two at the start, and then uninterrupted footage without commentary (at least for the events that aren't being broadcast on CBC television). It's just the raw video from the event. That's certainly a welcome change after watching a week's worth of Olympic coverage in the US on NMPBC, the National Michael Phelps Broadcasting Company. Mind you, CBC's coverage has become a little breathless and patriotic this year too.

I was in the Netherlands from the 22nd until the 30th of July. Ideally I would have produced a Minute of Music on the 31st, but between catching up with family, catching up with work, and general tiredness, there was no way it was going to happen. All of which explains why the eager listening audience has had to wait until today for this:

Download: [ogg] [mp3]

Notes:

• This month's opus weighs in at 1:19. It was thrown together hastily, in an attempt simply to get something out there that I could label "July" before the end of the month had retreated too far into the past.
• There's not much to say about it except that it's a blatant attempt to rip off the style of David Holmes's background music in Ocean's Eleven and Out of Sight. The obvious element that's missing (aside from his much richer orchestrations) is a snippet of witty dialogue at the beginning, spoken by George Clooney. I tried to convince Nath to record a short Soderbergh-esque exchange with me, but she rolled her eyes and told me to just put it on the web already. Go ahead and picture Clooney and Brad Pitt talking about stealing something.
• As with April's Minute, I made heavy use of sampled loops here. The shaker, the congas, and obviously the guitars are all samples. I layered enough sound on top of that (drum kit, organ, flute, sax, bass, etc.) to feel like there's some "value added" here.
• It's fun to make up random drum fills.
• One person who shall remain nameless actually complained this morning that there was no Minute yet. It's nice to know you care. *Sniff*

I'm travelling again in August, but mid-month. Hopefully I'll have enough time in the second half of the month to put together another Minute. Thanks for listening!