The Prince Of Swords

Between starting to read Godel, Escher, Bach… AGAIN (a super brain bender about Strange Loops) and listening to “How to Think Like Leaonardo da Vinci”, I decided to play with music/time this weekend.

About a year ago my favorite music store in SA, Hermes Music, sold out to Guitar World. Since I’ve bought a lot of light gear from them, they dropped me a post card letting me know they were having a sale. I went there looking for some XLR cables, speaker stands, and some new lights for Halloween but I ended up carrying out an M-Audio Trigger Finger(a USB midi drum pad controller) and a set of conga drums. Conga drums? Yep. DRUMS!

So I used to bedroom DJ techno/house parties in Indiana and got really into tribal house. DJing gave me a musical outlet although I can’t sing or play an instrument so I’m not sure how strong an urge it could really have be satisfying. Then there’s drums, the beat of the whole show, those low frequency grooves that grab you by the chest an pull you in. Plus, one of my favorite scientists, Richard Feynman, used to play bongos in the desert to go think about problems Considering he was playing with subjects like Quantum Electrodynamics, I imagine he became a good drummer for a physicist.

I’d also Amazon-ed some Conga books so I flipped through them to see which one made the most sense. So using Conga Drumming by Alan Dworsky, Garage Band, my Trigger finger, and my Congas, I set to learn a little drumming.

Here’s what I did.

The Conga book has a nice abstract notation to learn with which was perfect for me since I have no musical training, at all. It looks like this:

Rhythm 1-1: Calypso high drum part
| 1 | + | 2 | + | 3 | + | 4 | + |
  0   0           0   0
  R   L           R   L

This means on up-beat 1 in 4/4 time, play an open tone, with your right hand. Simple to read. Me likey. The book came with a CD where the dude plays each rhythm in the book (175 total), but they aren’t recorded so you can loop them. I have two programs that would let me make loops, Ableton Live 6 (free version with the Trigger finger) and Garage Band (free with my MacBook). Turns out to use Ableton Live, I’d need to learn a lot of stuff. Like most things Apple, when I plugged in my Trigger Finger, Garage Band just worked.

After reading a little bit of the Garage Band Help, I was able to add a new track, use the Jazz Drum Kit, and create the beat pattern for Rhythm 1-1. Then I just set the pattern to loop and drummed along with it. Kinda cool. Now I just have to practice for the next ten years.

I’m thinking about grabbing the Garage Band Jam Pack: World Music since it may have a Conga Drum Kit in it. The Jazz Kit works, but I’m faking the open tones, slaps, and bass tones by adjusting the velocities, where it might be more important to use more accurate Conga drumming sounds to learn the complex patterns later in the book.

One and Two and Three and Four and… Rock out!

Here is proof we were at RailsConf2006 in Chicago! That would be us guarding the door at DHH’s keynote representin’ with Fanatical Support!

RailsConf 2006 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

So I’ve been offline for a few days except quick checking of the email while my back heals from heavy lifting. Hi Bloglines, I missed you! With 212 feeds and 11,398 articles you must have missed me too. I know you have so much to tell me about, so much has been going on. But, I don’t really care today. I’m not sitting here for hours trying to catch up! Please shut up. I just want some quiet. You are so yappity yap with the talkity talk.

[Mark All Read]. Bloglines has a mute button!

FYI: If you’ve written the wittiest, funniest, coolest, sexiest, or first post since last Thursday I’m not ignoring you I just didn’t see it.

Here’s another test I happened upon during what is apparently becoming “Who are you? Day”.

WARNING. It’s 70 questions where you select from a pair of responses. They give you a summary of your results but for $14.95 you can see the whole report! Whatever. Looks like this may be some Myers-Briggs action with some interpreted archetypes sprinkled on top.

Temperament Sorter Registration @ AdvisorTeam

Here’s what they say:

Idealists, as a temperament, are passionately concerned with personal growth and development. Idealists strive to discover who they are and how they can become their best possible self — always this quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement drives their imagination. And they want to help others make the journey. Idealists are naturally drawn to working with people, and whether in education or counseling, in social services or personnel work, in journalism or the ministry, they are gifted at helping others find their way in life, often inspiring them to grow as individuals and to fulfill their potentials.

Idealists are sure that friendly cooperation is the best way for people to achieve their goals. Conflict and confrontation upset them because they seem to put up angry barriers between people. Idealists dream of creating harmonious, even caring personal relations, and they have a unique talent for helping people get along with each other and work together for the good of all. Such interpersonal harmony might be a romantic ideal, but then Idealists are incurable romantics who prefer to focus on what might be, rather than what is. The real, practical world is only a starting place for Idealists; they believe that life is filled with possibilities waiting to be realized, rich with meanings calling out to be understood. This idea of a mystical or spiritual dimension to life, the “not visible” or the “not yet” that can only be known through intuition or by a leap of faith, is far more important to Idealists than the world of material things.

Highly ethical in their actions, Idealists hold themselves to a strict standard of personal integrity. They must be true to themselves and to others, and they can be quite hard on themselves when they are dishonest, or when they are false or insincere. More often, however, Idealists are the very soul of kindness. Particularly in their personal relationships, Idealists are without question filled with love and good will. They believe in giving of themselves to help others; they cherish a few warm, sensitive friendships; they strive for a special rapport with their children; and in marriage they wish to find a “soulmate,” someone with whom they can bond emotionally and spiritually, sharing their deepest feelings and their complex inner worlds.

Idealists are rare, making up between 20 and 25 percent of the population. But their ability to inspire people with their enthusiasm and their idealism has given them influence far beyond their numbers.

The Four types of Idealists are:

Healers (INFP) | Counselors (INFJ) | Champions (ENFP) | Teachers (ENFJ)

Interesting as well. Lot of “Harmony” going on in this result. According to Gallup’s StrengthFinders, Harmony is my #32 of 33. I guess ideally I’m into harmony, but realisticly not so much. As usual, everything depends on the situation.

Every once in a while, I enjoying thinking about myself. I ran into a blog and found this site. The quiz is ten pages of 8 or so questions. The interesting part is the widgets they have you answer with. Instead of the usual 1-5 or Strongly Agree/Strongly Disagree, they use sliders, grids, and this container of vote juice you distribute across two or three conflicting values.

Here’s my full report:

PersonalDNA | I am a BENEVOLENT CREATOR

It was fun to think about, be honest with myself, and I’d generally agree with their results.

Not sure how they correlate this to Myers-Briggs since their results are very different from the INTP I was last time I took that test back in 1999. Can a person transform that much? Interesting.

Consider this simply a comparison of the answers from the sample population (3200+) and based completely on your interpretation of the question without any situtational context.

How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily

Just marking this to checkout later.

I’ve been working on remodeling my master bedroom for almost a year which has been a fun and frustrating design project. Being in San Antonio there is limited access to modern and minimalist elements besides pieces that have been toned down, mass produced, and offered up at Home Depot. Although there are fabricators around, purely custom work is more expensive than I’m willing to dole out right now. The solution?

I’m going to make some of it myself.

The first project is in the bathroom. I have two vanities 24″x 33″ with a 38″ gap between them. The idea is to find a tall chest of drawers (sometimes called a Gentleman’s Chest) to sit between the vanities to break up the horizontal surfaces where the sinks will be. The bathroom originally had a one-piece counter top/sinks. After Googling around for sinks for a while and looking into materials, I’ve decided to cast my own concrete counter top and sink.

I’ve picked the Kohler Purist line for the hardware to match the shower and intend on tinting the concrete to match the grout in the Travertine flooring, an Alabaster color. To start this project, I sketched some designs in a great software package called “SketchUp”. SketchUp works like I think which is in surfaces and solids. Most cad packages I’ve played with tend to deal more in lines which make mocking up a room design super tedious and I’m just not that patient or absolute. SketchUp lets you define a rectangle, then flip orientation, grab a surface, and extrude it into a 3D shape. Very easy. Very intuitive for me. My sketches came together in a few hours and I got a basic idea of what I want.

Sketching on a laptop screen is cheap and easy but runs its value when you try to visualize proportions and context. To help get a better sense of perspective, I decided to prototype the vanity top. Thinking about how to do that, I needed a material that would be easy to work with and cheap since I’d be throwing it away. At a local hobby shop, I looked at foam core board and sheets of Styrofoam but I needed to span almost three feet and carving Styrofoam is very messy and not very exact. Heading to Home Depot I found a nice solution. In the lumber area, I grabbed a piece of insulation sheeting. For about eight bucks I got a 4′x8′ sheet of 5/8″ thick pink boarding by Owens Corning.

Over the weekend, I gathered up some tools (hobby knife, tape measure, fine point Sharpie, tape, calculator) and set out to build a fake counter and sink. Since I was designing around proportions, I whipped out Phi, the golden ratio, 1.618 which is supposed to define intrinsic beauty by resonating with geometry of nature. My sink is minimal so taking the length and width of the vanity and dividing them by Phi gave me the sink dimensions. By taking these base dimensions, I then divided again until I had all other dimensions.

Using cardboard from a 12-pack of Coke I cut out place holders for the faucets and handles based on the Rough-in diagrams from Kohler. After seeing the sink in its real environment, the sink looked too deep. I took another dimension, divided by Phi, and cut out a new sink wall. Much better. With the depth was set, I cut out the other three walls and the sink prototype was done.

I’m leaving this fake pink sink in place to live with it for a few days and see how the proportions in context work out. To complete the illusion if the pink throws me off, I’ll paint it with some off-white latex paint. Then all I have left to do is figure out how to actually make this sink.

Just in time for the holidays! Phat Cock Tees is now served up via Ruby-on-Rails! (Is it just me or does Ruby-on-Rails sound dirty?) Pay attention, the site will dish you a shirt every two seconds.

PHAT COCK TEES - Rock Out with Your Cock Out

What started as a little art project to see if I had any tee shirt ideas has proved that I do. 1623 so far.

“But they are offensive and immature and sexist and…” Save your breath.

Maybe some time I will get around to actually making some of these shirts…but today is not the day. I’ve not been a good boy so I don’t see a six station screen printing rig or computerized embroidery machine under my Christmas tree either.

Enjoy!

Numenorean

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Sometimes I feel like I’m going to catch on fire and run off a cliff.

Something I need to come back to and play with…

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