How Does It Know?

Quick note to mention this:

Worldmapper

This site has a ton of world maps with the sizes of the countries adjusted to show various attributes proportionally. The map above is the one for world population. I first found this when I was directed to the site of Mark Newman, a physicist at the University of Michigan. He did maps of the U.S. like this showing the results of the presidential election, which are really interesting too. He also wrote the software that is used to generate these maps, which is interesting to look into if you’re a geek like me.

I recommend looking at the malaria deaths, rabies deaths, and alcohol and cigarettes exports for how interestingly imbalanced they are.

That last post was pretty ugly, eh? Those images are way too big for my blog format. I am thinking about switching to a theme that’s wider… But I spent so much time customizing this one that that’s a time investment that I’m not sure I’m ready for.

Well, Friday again. My plan is to finish the Marshmallow Mission* 2-song EP this weekend and post that up on Part Time Songs (need to make some cover art too…); other than that, my family will be celebrating a late Diwali by having Indian buffet on Sunday. Other than THAT, I am hoping to get some sleep and hang around the house. I love hanging around the house, lazing about with no agenda. Except that I always seem to give myself an agenda (”record stuff by Sunday”, “vacuum out car”, “read for fun” — yes, I actually have that on a to-do list… what is wrong with me?). I tend to feel a little guilty when I’m not doing SOMETHING. You’d think I’d be more productive.

Happy Halloween.

And please please please make the effort and go vote.

*”Marshmallow Mission” consists of just me and Dan. The idea is to do these songs together where it’s really quick and easy. But it hasn’t been that quick**, due to my time restraints. Anyway, so it’s an easy mission, easy==!hard==soft==Marshmallow. There’s other reasons for the name when it came into my head, but that’s the rational, makes-sense answer.

**Though it’s coming together fairly easily, now that I’m learning/using/exploring Sonar 7 and the workflow is a lot smoother and easier than FL Studio***

***Though I did end up purchasing the VST versions of the FL Parametric EQ2 and other plugins that are built into FL, so I could use them in Sonar, because they are really awesome… I mean, showing a graphical signal analysis in the paraEQ alone is worth the money.

I love maps. This blog has all kinds of crazy/bizarre/interesting maps that people send in. I love this blog.

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com

Looks like King Filament (my musical moniker from 1995 to 2000) is making a comeback…

Have you checked out Sunil Sawani’s semi-fake record label, Part Time Songs? Here is a song by King Filament… “Killer” (part time mp3)

(from Gimme Tinnitus)

Someone brought it to my attention that they could not listen to the songs directly from Part Time Songs, and they get an error having something to do with the ID3 tags when it opens in Windows Media Player… Anyone who reads this, could you test that out and let me know? I haven’t been able to get it to happen on my computers. Just go over there and click on the MP3 and let whatever media player you use open it and see if it plays. Also let me know if you get an error?

I swear this is a testing thing, and not a way to drive you to my other site that you might not be interested in for my own nefarious purposes. Or is it…?*

click here to go there (direct link to mp3)

*It’s not.

Posted a new song up at Part Time Songs. Check it out.

A couple weeks ago, I went out for Chinese with some people, and the conversation turned to how un-Chinese American Chinese food is. There were a couple of Chinese people in the group, and they confirmed what we all knew about American Chinese — it’s obviously been altered to suit American palates, and many of the dishes are completely invented “Chinese food”. I found this interview with New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee, where she answers questions about American vs. Chinese Chinese food that was pretty interesting.

Another thing that I’ve found happens a lot, and apparently Manish at Sepia Mutiny agrees, is that people not totally familiar with Indian food will refer to anything Indian as “curry”. Not everything is a curry, and there are different words for different styles of dishes, but I can understand why people wouldn’t necessarily know. Heck, I don’t always know what stuff is called “officially”… But I found that an interesting post as well, along with the comments people posted.

One thing I had been wanting for WordPress blogs for a while was a way to have the comments I reply to get sent to the original commenter’s email. So that they have some kind of notification that I’ve replied, and that they can come back and sort of continue the conversation. It’s one of the great things about LiveJournal — it does it by itself, because it’s made to foster more of a conversational community than WordPress was.

Anyway, I did some searches a few months ago and found this Comment-To-Email plugin. It worked well for a while and it was cool, but sometime in April, I started getting browser errors when trying to use it, and basically it didn’t work anymore. I did a quick search this morning for an alternative, and found Comment Email Responder, which apparently has gone through more testing and more versions, and the author is interested in improving it, so I’m hoping it continues to work reliably, because it’s pretty cool. Allows you to set up a standard footer for the email replies, and lets you configure what the subject line should say when replying.

So if anyone’s been looking for this type of plugin, I recommend Comment Email Responder (unless it stops working sometime in the future).

My original intention was to be done with the newest Part Time Songs EP before we left for Paris, but alas, that is not going to happen. I still have vocals to sing and bass parts to redo, and a tambourine part that just won’t work. But, I have decided that once I get back, I am working on it every night till it’s done, and the done date will definitely be April 29th. So check out Part Time Songs then for that.

Also, Wife made us a Blogger blog for our Paris trip. I dunno how much I’ll actually be writing in it, but we are bringing a laptop, and there will at least be some cool photos. That’s at Ou Sommes Nous (literally, “where are we?”). So there’s that.

The New York Times has a series of blogs out there by various songwriters where they talk about…. (wait for it…)… songwriting.

I’ve only read the one by Andrew Bird, but it’s pretty interesting. Like me, he too has a head swimming with melodies for all occasions, but when it comes down to words, the writing gets tough. Though, this is slightly surprising to me, because I’ve always liked what I could make out of Andrew Bird’s lyrics. But the stuff he says about how the meaning is only truly apparent to him after the song is done rings true for me too. Which is why I often don’t like to talk about the lyrics or print them on the CD/website, etc., or even with bandmates I might be playing with at the time.

I kinda got that from way back when (like 1992) I listened to R.E.M. almost exclusively (along with They Might Be Giants, who always publish their lyrics)… I always liked that you could hear what you wanted and interpret it in the way you wanted. It was always somewhat disappointing when I read the lyrics (and people’s interpretations of them, usually on a Usenet R.E.M. fan group, where I also traded bootlegs) and they no longer fit what I wanted the song to be about.

Anyway, I have gotten off track here, but basically you should read this blog if you’re a songwriter and/or Andrew Bird fan. The insight into his process is fascinating and you can probably relate if you write songs anything like the way I do. I haven’t gotten a chance to read the rest of them (they are by artists I am not really a fan of, but I don’t doubt they have some interesting insight as well)…

Words Will Tell, by Andrew Bird