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raindropper

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October 10, 2011 Here’s To The Crazy Ones

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September 17, 2011 Ambient and Angle

After I decided to start publishing my music, I thought about how would I tie all the pieces of music together visually. Would I use the same set of fonts all the time, one specific color, would I create a Raindropper logo and plaster it on all the record covers?

Those all seemed too constraining, thus I opted for a more subtle idea: angle. So, let’s sneak one specific angle in all the images from now on.

The angle ended up being 53 degrees. To my eye, it just seemed the most pleasing one. The bonding angle of hydrogen atoms on a water molecule is roughly twice that (circa 104,45) so my eye missed the target with a degree or so.

Oops, here’s Void Saturday with a slightly skewed angle…

July 30, 2011 That Was A Black Swan in Norway

A Black Swan is a seemingly random event having a huge impact. It’s nearly impossible to predict one coming.

We did not foresee the success of Harry Potter, the tragic of 9/11 or what happened in Norway last weekend.

After a Black Swan, we start analyzing and searching for reasons which led to the event.

Yes, I’ve been reading the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Check it out if that’s your sort of thing!

July 29, 2011 Spot The Difference in The Studio

Lady Gaga producer/songwriter RedOne:

The Beatles:

July 29, 2011 Let It Grow (Love) – Preview

May 16, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha Test Drive

Ok, Wolfram|Alpha – the computational knowledge engine – is up and running. Granted, I’ve seen three different versions of “site is currently under heavy load”. Do remember that there’s a large amount of on the fly computation and algorithm crunching behind each result. 

These are the queries I tested it with:

Where are you? gives a good result.

Where am I? gives the correct answer.

Who am I? gives the same answer.

sin(n/10) * 100 draws a nice chart.

What are you doing? is the first computed tweet. 🙂

What time is it? surprisingly gives nothing.

green, red – minimum result.

BMW presents stock information.

Weather in Lahti Wow!

Weather in Lahti June 2003 Double-Wow!

Neuron is not that interesting for Wolfram to have knowledge about.

Are you OK? opens a “Human Discourse” functionality which is under development. What will it be?

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha provides an interesting approach and implementation. It’s certainly one to follow and use.

However, I do get “everything is a number or a taxonomy” feel from the data it contains. It mostly answers with numbers; even Madonna boils down to a straight line between two dates.

So, Wolfram|Alpha is the engine Douglas Adams wrote about. 

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

I do not know why, but the system creates an impression of an autistic Rain Man recalling phone book numbers and curated minutia with precision. Whereas Google is the outgoing guy with all the fun; its bots gathering data from the web carelessly, and giving noisy, vague answers at times.

January 27, 2009 Blog Book Hybrid – Navigation Changes

Those who follow have noticed daily changes on The Book of W. I took the final step and overhauled the navigation on that tumblr based site.

The site is now a good mixture of a blog and a book. The starting page displays recent updates like in a blog, and navigation at the top opens pages like in a book.

Main thing was to add page tags to each post. Now I can control which blog post belongs to which book page. In a way, this is a misuse of tags but…

With tags, users can link and refer to a certain page easily and intuitively, like in a book. As you probably know, blog pages are something one can not link to because they change dynamically.

I removed timestamp of the posts: books don’t have dates under their chapter titles. I like to think the contents are not glued to a certain time period, they are valid also in years to come.

Some things to prepare for are:

  • Sooner or later, as the page count increases, I will notice that the page numbering at the top will need some changes.
  • The cover page contains a water related photo from Flickr;  for some reason it doesn’t load 100% of the time and displays only some white space. Then it doesn’t look that good. Anyway, it’s great to have a dynamic cover page. Although, sometimes, the photo is not that close to the subject matter.
  • One of the worries is that users find themselves lost caused by the duplicate page concept: there are book page numbers and blog page numbers. This is something that needs to be addressed.

I’m pretty satisfied with the end result. Next task is to fill the blog book with top content.

December 6, 2008 Onion Joke That’s Not

Uncannily good prediction from The Onion archives, dated January, 2001.

November 30, 2008 The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from The Tree

Funny thing happened. My 11-year-old daughter just came to me and said: “I want the new Banjo game for Christmas. I want all the games made by Rare, because they make Viva Piñata and it’s so good.”

The funny part is this: when I was a young boy in the mid-eighties and playing with my friend’s Sinclair Spectrum, all the Ultimate games were must-haves. Ultimate was a company created by Stamper brothers – later they started Rare.

October 7, 2008 The Guy Working At The Top of The Tallest Building

Have you heard about the guy working at the top of the tallest building?

On his office wall, he has a map of the world. There’s a knob on top of each country. On the spur of the moment, he turns knobs left and right. Rain pushes into the windows. Lights of the city low around him flicker as he slowly moves his gaze to another knob.

His telephone doesn’t ring.

As he turns the knobs, commands are sent down to the stories below for an army of his minions to execute. This country goes in the red, this into black. Rates of the currencies change. He releases a knob, goes to sit on his chair. Looks outside.

His companies have many names, his products are made from iron and binary digits. You wouldn’t recognize him on the street. An inverse Domino effect gathering all the money from the world, from your pockets, ends to where he stands.

He doesn’t play golf, he plays the world. After the deeds of the day are done, he enters the elevator, goes down, crosses the street, grabs the evening paper and silently goes into a taxi. Arrives to his home where his two kids and wife are already sleeping deep. In the night, his dreams are like the dreams of any other person.