Why Kabalevsky? Well, it’s usually regarded as a student concerto, which is fine by me: you don’t go from zero to Ysaye in a week and a half, especially when you’ve never played Ysaye before. Plus, it’s a happy little song, and emotionally straightforward.

However, being easier to play did not mean I could hit it out of the park. Apparently, I have much to learn when it comes to recording audio, because either I cannot phrase to save my life, or my room and mic conspire to deaden my sound and I just haven’t noticed because I fail at having recording space.

Oh, right, you might be interested in getting the actual recording. Maybe.

Now, the content of the recording is a little wonky. Like I said before, I can’t phrase pschoacoustically effectively to save my life (no sense in trying to blame inanimate objects), my diction isn’t very clear when the doublestops come into the picture, I had a pretty inconsistent speed, the accompaniment was arranged and recorded in half an hour, and I just plain make mistakes.

It’s not okay, but I shipped.

Storytime:

I thought I had enough time to get my ducks in order when I decided that to hell with it, I would kick off this regular release schedule one and a half weeks ago. However, it turns out that what I was originally planning to do for my first coding release was pretty difficult, but I only realized this after I pushed the deadline to halfway into the week after when the release was due. So much for starting off strong. So now I’m just taking something else I’ve done codewise and plopping it in the release box, and hoping no one notices.

So, what’s in the release? Just two of my python libraries, base92 and encryptedfile, that I’ve finally packaged for pypi, so that now one can run pip install base92 or pip install encryptedfile and run code I’ve written. Squee. Going through this process did open my eyes to the fact that pip just plain does nothing to validate packages, though, which is a problem. Why? Well, when the “moar encryption” side of my mind meets the python-lovin’ side, there might be some energy release. Hopefully enough energy to fix pip package signing, or even more hopefully enough energy to get someone else to do it.

But yeah, getting a toehold in the python cheeseshop! It’ll have to be good enough for the next 3 weeks, so you take this release and you like it!

But lo! Here our tragic anti-hero comes stumbling from a cave, covered in akrasia and regret! No matter his filthy state: he has a leaf to turn, and no wind is going to flick around that large a leaf (even Hurricane Sandy didn’t do anything to it), so he might as well start building up his spindly coding arms so he can do non-epiphenomenal tasks again.

His first task is announcing a public, regular release schedule, so he can hold himself to it and have people ridicule him when he fails miserably. But surprise! He has already set one out, but in private (which kind of defeats the purpose), where each week will bring a deadline for a different sort of project, rotating among programming, musical, engineering, and visually artistic projects. In fact, he embarked on this schedule last week, but he doesn’t know this. Shall we find out what has been released, and what is being released, and what shall be released? Stay tuned for not one, but two posts in quick succession…

PS. What the hell is this “Toljari” business? Well, it’s a corruption of the lojban Toljgari, and if you’ve been following my github, you’ll notice that I’ve been naming an awful lot of projects after lojban lujvo. Nothing to be alarmed about yet, do make sure I’m not terminally geeking out when I start typing out my blog posts in Lojban though. And the cycle part is partially inspired from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which is a pretty cool name, and why shouldn’t I have something epic in my life?

So maybe that plan will mutate, and soon. But weekly releases! With accompanying blog posts, hot off the cuff! I suppose I’m making resolutions early?

And, I’ll cover what’s been going on the last… 6 months. But later.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt

Somehow, this anime was my introduction to Gainax as a studio, discrete from the background radiation of entertainment: specifically, it started with (SPOILER ALERT)this AMV(END SPOILER ALERT) in which the music and visuals just fit so perfectly (better than the original music video) that I had to look up the anime backing it, and was surprised that it was a Japanese animation, since the style seems derived from western schools of art.

It didn’t help that it was available in full on youtube, so I went through the entire series in a few days (which wasn’t hard, it is only 11 episodes long). It started out as a pretty standard monster-a-week show, with more fanservice than your typical western animation; then it started taking increasingly absurd turns, but it settled down and turned back into your usual rough and tumble action anime for the grand finale. Well, as much as a wacky concept like P&SG could be expected to settle down. Throw in a few eyebrow raising twists, and there you have P&SG.

Overall, the animation was pretty good, and the absurdity of it all didn’t quite reach escape velocity (this being a good thing). But really, the absurdity of finals season was the perfect backdrop, and who knows if I would’ve enjoyed it some other time? Plus, apparently P&SG is one of the more wackier anime, so it’s all downhill from here, right? Right?

FLCL

So after watching P&SG, I decided to check out the Gainax TVTropes page, and found that not only were there other Gainax shows (surprise!), but more of them were also available online. And after the gentle mindfuck and silliness that was P&SG, I decided I needed even more in my life and heard FLCL would give me the requisite strange, so I decided that I’d check it out.

I will admit that yes, if I had not read the accompanying summaries attached to the show online, then I would’ve been lost for at least a while. It might also have helped that I probably read the Wikipedia summary of the show once in the depths of my past…

So, it was wacky, it was fun, and OMG CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (vs. P&SG, which was just fun and wacky). And unable to outstay it’s welcome at only 6 episodes: for my story-holic mind, it hit that sweet spot, that just right density of immersion that seems to be frequented by short stories and novellas.

But really, there are giant robot battles and a coming of age story and guitars involved: what could go wrong?

Houkago No Pleiades

After being pleasantly surprised at how short FLCL was, I decided to check out some more OVAs by Gainax: Wish upon the Peliades was short (4 episodes!) and also available online.

Well, it turned out to be too short: instead of being the usual half hour, each episode was around 5 minutes long. This meant that the magical girl premise of HnP wasn’t really fleshed out, and it wasn’t *really* anything special, without real resolution or a reveal that it was something artsy-fartsy that could lack the requisite resolution. I haven’t seen any other magical girl animes, but I imagine this would fit in the usual fare (minus the compression). However, the entire thing is only 20 minutes long, so it’s not such a big deal to just turn your brain off and watch for a bit.

As it stands, I’m not sure if Subaru (HnP was a collaboration between Gainax and Subaru (the car maker)) was trying to do this as a marketing effort to otakus (what? why?), or as a throw back to the days of patronage.

Also, while we’re talking about Subaru: who the HELL doesn’t put cruise control on their cars? Backstory: my family got a Subaru recently, and (surprise!) it doesn’t have cruise control. Cruise control is merely the most basic drive by wire automation, and not only does it abstract away the acceleration mechanics into velocity control, it also serves as a small fuel efficiency booster. However, it’s useful as a market segmentation tool, so I guess you got me there, Subaru.

Anyways…

Gurren Lagann

So after being disappointed by HnP, I decided to check out something a little longer. Evangelion seemed like an obvious choice: it’s a flagship anime, something even I’ve heard about. However, I couldn’t find it legally online, so I moved on to another long format and popular anime from Gainax that was: Gurren Lagann (I know, death to dubs. Doesn’t matter, got story).

Clocking in at 27 episodes, it was pretty long, and took almost 2 days of straight watching to finish. It wasn’t just my story-holism that kept me going: it starts out as a straightforward rough n’ tumble giant mecha anime, and then all of a sudden starts deconstructing itself. And then it reverts to a giant mecha anime again (notice a pattern?).

Really, it’s rocking fun (note: both this and FLCL have catchy soundtracks) with even more fanservice than P&SG, and a story line that settles comfortably into the full season, managing to be thought provoking (for a TV show: it seems that if books came after TV shows, they would be heralded as moving insanely fast, with writing styles mutating through stylistic space with frightening speed. And one person has complete creative control of the work?!). Plus, I now have an urge to yell “Just Who The Hell Do You Think I Am?!” at random times, so you should watch Gurren Lagann so you understand, or even yell along.

The… future?

So, my current Gainax trip ended a few weeks ago, but I’ve only cleared 4 items out of their warehouse: truly, the rate of production of entertainment is frightening, even when you winnow it down to the very best (ex. Hugo Awards count). However, I do plan on getting around to the indispensable Evangelion (eventually), and maybe another Gainax work (Diebuster? just for kicks?).

And speaking of anime, I forgot to count Studio Ghibli among their ranks: they’re accorded a spot in my mind at the same level as Pixar, truly, yet I haven’t watched half their works, so I’ll probably try catch up on that queue, too.

And then there’s things like Battlestar Galactica. Ho boy.

With A Little Help

A collection of short stories by Cory Doctorow.

I’ve read most of the stories already in here, but it was a blast reading through them again, and picking up those that I haven’t read yet. Some notes on selected stories:

I’ve read The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away (yes, based on the joco song) before, but it’s interesting to read it after learning that other people are also interested in collecting data on the self under the banner of quantified self, how we’re doing it outside of a monastery.

After reading The Right Book, it makes me wonder why no one has tried making something like The Story so Far yet: or, someone’s tried starting it, but it keeps getting buried before it reaches critical mass. Maybe we could just start it as a forum game, and keep going until it attains critical mass.

Human Readable conflicts me: on the one hand, I want the ant simulators to win, because you can’t always ask your machines to explain themselves, similar to how many machine learning algorithms are black boxes. On the other hand, giving up that control and understanding essentially means we give up the control to the “matrix”: even if there is no malignant consciousness, we give up the control to the aether. And we love control, myself included.

Pester Power ends with a magnificent line. I’m very sad to hear that /usr/bin/god was never completed. And Charlie Stross working on a book about spam? I’ll have to keep an eye out.

Epoch has another set of lines that tickle my geek nodes: “Later that night, she took me home and we spent the whole night hacking replacement parts for her collection of ancient stand-up video games.” The fact that Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth commissioned the story is also cool: when I get rich and famous, I’ll have to remember I can commission stories.

I will gripe that unordered collections have no business being flattened into a linear strictly-ordered collection, and that as an ebook we can do better. I’d love to see how people display and navigate through an unordered collection.

TLDR: THE STORIES ARE AWESOME READ THEM ALL

Postsingular

Honestly, this book kind of sucked: I only got halfway through it before the wooden dialog, random plotting, and soft scifi pseudo-science slew my desire to keep reading, and this is coming from someone that will plow through utter shit just to finish it. This either means I’m getting better at rejecting books that aren’t worth my time, or that the book is worse than utter shit. I’m not sure.

Context

The 2nd latest work from Cory Doctorow, which is merely a collection of blog posts put into book form. I say merely, partly because I’ve already read most of the material in one form or another, and also because as I’ve said before, unordered collections presented as ordered feel wrong.

The essays themselves are wonderful, and a good thing about them being short, page-long essays is that I can’t really spoiler them, so I’ll just ramble a bit:

If I ever become a parent, I hope to be as good as integrating technology into family time as Cory is in Jack and the Interstalk (corrected for technological advancement).

Beyond Censorware brought to the fore that old dream that I could lead some class in primary or secondary education, because it’s too often that kids don’t meet good technologists until what I would argue is much too late. Of course, the fact that I’m a few nines high with regards to technology means I’ve traded off some social acumen, and
it seems like being somewhat normal is a good thing for primary/secondary school teachers. Also, there’s the fact that if we treat money as whuffie (another Cory concept), then we don’t value teachers very much, and we get job destroyers off destroying jobs instead of teaching the next generation how to replace themselves with shell scripts.

When I’m Dead details how to handle deceased dude’s digital data. I once thought about creating a “dead-man’s” switch for myself/as a service so my encrypted digital data wouldn’t die with me, so it was instructive to hear Doctorow talk about why he wouldn’t use one (trust), and his solution (split the key, keep it with two other trusted people). Doctorow’s solution would work especially well with myself: I have several groups of friends that are widely physically and socially disparate from each other (6 steps non-withstanding). However, having friends maintain awareness of the key shards is problem-prone, whereas Doctorow has one closely trusted party (wife) and someone he pays to care (lawyer). I suppose this means I need to get married and get a lawyer, or get married twice on opposite ends of the globe.

The sentiments in Reports of Blogging’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated are obviously shared by myself.

It’s interesting to note that Doctorow thinks Search Is Too Important to Leave to One Company, since when I read that title I immediately think of DuckDuckGo.

Personal Data is as Hot as Nuclear Waste reiterates in my mind that we need to encrypt everything (shame on myself for not encrypting my mail! shame on myself for not encrypting my hard drives!), and with the increased capabilities of data mining, we need to add more obscurity just to keep the amount of anonymity level.

Memento Mori is an interesting look at how we fetishize old objects: aside from a straightforward fascination, they also act as ways to keep us honest about the promises of technology. I’m somewhat young (perhaps too young) to remember these past revolutions that promised the world and failed to deliver, but I’ll keep in mind curating my own memonto mori collection.

Cory also talks about sex in his books, writing for YA, his writing process/tools, email (both the problem of spam and how he controls his inbox), re-iterates the thesis that scifi is really about the present, fandom, r-reproduction, licensing, publishing MVPs, CC, Net Neutrality (since the book was published in late 2011, there’s nothing on the new challenges to the internet), the evils of DRM, why 3d movies are a gimmick, phishing, piracy (media piracy in particular), why we need statistical literacy, and 3d printing.

TLDR: I’ve you’re an avid reader of Doctorow’s blog, you might be familiar with the material, but it’s fun to go back and read this collection of “greatest hits”. If you don’t follow Doctorow, then these essays are fun, bite sized thoughts wrapped up in a nice box, which I highly recommend.

What’s next? Maybe Anathem, or the latest from Cory Doctorow (The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow), something by Charlie Stross, or something be Vernor Vinge. In other words, ALL THE SCIENCE FICTION.

If you’re interning in the valley, bikes are cool: the culture is bike friendly, and you’re likely not getting paid enough in a short time to justify getting a car. And, need I point out that walking everywhere sucks? So by process of elimination, bikes are cool.

For some reason, I opted for a folding bike, for some reason I can’t remember now. I got a Miami model from Citizen Bikes, both of which worked out. However, I could have just as easily gotten a normal bike for cheaper on craigslist, and the folding feature of the bike really only saved me once or twice on the train (you can board the Caltrain with a folding bike, even if all the bike slots are taken). Also, folders are not very fast, even when you try to pedal at top speed at the highest gear. There’s definitely a convenience-speed tradeoff there.

However, it did get me where I needed to go, and it didn’t break the bank. So a note to you prospective valley interns, give some thought about getting a bike.

If you haven’t been keeping up with tech news in a particularly frantic way, you might not have noticed that Google is changing their privacy policy. On one hand, this change will result in a somewhat longer policy, but without the fragmentation across all of Google’s services, so that one need not read 5 different policies to use 5 different Google services. On the other hand, this means that data is share-able across application boundaries, such that the bountiful web searches can be used to customize which youtube videos are shown to a person, and vice versa.

The EFF being who they are, issued an article alerting us to this state of events and how to ameliorate it, by deleting our web history. However, looking over it, I noticed that this is a ton of data. These records go all the way back to 2005; in other words, it’s a treasure trove of personal data. And you ought to know that I’m somewhat obsessed about personal metrics, and I’m not going to just straight-up delete perfectly good data if I can’t get my hands on it.

The problem is that Google didn’t offer a nice way to download the data: there’s an RSS feed, but that means stepping through an RSS feed manually, since I couldn’t just generate a feed with 29k searches in it: instead, I had to step through by 1000 items, and who would download 30 xml files? Obviously, this was a job for lazy-in-some-ways programmer.

There was some prior work, but I threw it out for dumb reasons (CSV?? Flash?? It’s like we’re back in the stone ages!) (Also, don’t tell curl I didn’t choose it) Plus, I wanted to learn how to work Chrome extensions, and by just thinking about it, it seemed like I could inject javascript into the history page, use AJAX calls to get the subsequent RSS feed files (since the injected javascript would side-step the same-origin policy), and save it using the HTML5 FileSystem API. But would this all work? Just because you work it out in your head doesn’t mean it should work, especially with technologies one is not familiar with.

After reading up on it, though, it still seemed feasible, and I spun up a git repo and started writing a Chrome extension. Then, I ran into a small snag: how should I make sure I don’t download and save more files than needed? So I tried to see if asking for an RSS feed too far into the past would just pass back a 404. Instead, I found that Google had somehow squashed my 29k searches into 5 XML files, instead of 30.

Oh.

Now, downloading 5 files does not sound like much work: neither does 30, in the grand scheme of things, but 30 somehow manages to be more fearsome with the mere addition of a brotherly digit. Cut down to size, I just downloaded and saved the XML files containing essentially my entire search history, packed into a little over a megabyte of data. Also, it was 30 minutes until midnight, and tarrying wouldn’t do me good (of course, the privacy policy might have already shifted, say, when midnight appeared over the International Date Line, but nevermind…) (also, I couldn’t find where Chromium actually, you know, saved the File data).

However, it might have balanced out to the best: I learned how to work basic Chromium extensions, and I also got my data down, safe and sound. I suppose there’s a moral in here somewhere… oh! In the title! Check your assumptions, fail fast, etc etc.

Methinks I have to work on my fable telling.