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May. 27th, 2008 @ 11:43 pm
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In continued a sample/source frenzy, I've decided to run a specialty show on WXYC in the same vain: songs, and the songs the that sample them. It's been done before, but I feel I can bring my own spin to the turntable with a smattering of sources of genres. Here's some other gems I've unearthed since yesterday: sampler: Busta Rhymes - Dangerous
sampler: Mr. Magic - Rappin' with Mr. Magic
sampler: DJ Shadow - You Can't Go Home Again
sampler: Notorious BIG - Hypnotize
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May. 26th, 2008 @ 01:17 am
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If Dr. Dre eats beats for breakfast, then this track could solve world hunger. |
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pun oh-so-heavenly intended
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Mar. 17th, 2008 @ 09:31 pm
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What's the deal with this 1983 electro hit by Laid Back? By all appearances, this track dropped clear from the blue sky like a freak lightning bolt and straight onto the dancefloor mixing decks of confounded DJs everywhere. I mean… they're white, they ain't from anywhere near Brooklyn, and they sure don't sport it like it's Adidas. But my god do these Danes rock a beat box to light your socks on fire.
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Jan. 23rd, 2008 @ 10:38 pm
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"Intensity" doesn't even begin to relate what the hell's going on in this new Black Dice video. This one packs enough psychedelic overload to give even Timothy Leary acid indigestion.
See for yourself:
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So I just set up a really simple experiment in Illustrator to generate what I thought would make an op arty design. I set up two visual elements, like so,
and then apply to them what's called a "blend," a filter that (supposedly) produces a specified number of transitional objects as one object morphs into the other. Perhaps a picture will better explain:
So blends are usually fairly predictable. Not this time. When I applied the blend command to that sine wave/bar above, hell broke loose. Observe:
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There's been a slew of robot videos on news sites this week. Here's three from this morning, all involving their disembodied arms doing cool shit:
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So my sister is getting married (huzzah!) and I've decided to help her design stuff for the wedding. I just finished the save the dates, and I think they came out quite sharp. The 19th century type matches quite nicely the quatrefoil pattern she had in mind. See for yourself:
There's a serious buck in the invitation design business. What am I doing in school!?
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Boxcutter – Glyphic
Prince Jammy – …Destroys The Space Invaders
Monolake – Interstate (Remastered)
Matthew Dear – Asa Breed
Boom Bip – Sacchrilege EP
DJ /rupture vs Filastine – Shotgun Wedding Vol. 6
The Budos Band – The Budos Band II
Battles – Mirrored
V/A – Carolina Funk
Daft Punk – Alive 2007 |
KitchenAid mixers: God bless em. Just now I was enjoying me a deep dish of stove-top popcorn, cooked using none other than my fresh, home churned butter! Who knew making butter was so easy. The recipe was more or less as follows:
Place a pint of heavy whipping cream in a freezer-cold mixing bowl.
Set your mixer to a medium speed until the milk thickens slightly.
Set to max for 4-7 minutes.
The buttermilk will separate suddenly within 5-10 seconds from the solids.
Squeeze off the excess buttermilk with a cheesecloth or fine mesh strainer.
Salt to taste.
And there you have it! Butter! It's easy enough to be a children's kitchen science experiment and the cleanup is minimal (assuming splatter control). Not to mention the buttermilk tastes really good! It's a lot sweeter and not so puckeringly sour as the hormone-laced tripe the grocery sells. No wonder folks way back in the day drank this as a regular treat. Highly recommended for those both in need of some quality time with their mixers and have a half-hour to kill on a Sunday afternoon. |
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Hers & His
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Oct. 27th, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
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Again with my admittedly nerdy knack for coding microscopic TI-83 programs. This time it's a teeny prime finder that barely fits in four lines. You might call the whole thing hopelessly esoteric and maybe a little inane—and it is—but, hey, I know my calculator in and out, which at the end of the day means I can write efficient programs on the fly and finish, say, a mid-term that much faster.
32 bytes
:Input A
:If not(min(seq(fPart(A/B),B,2,√(A
:Disp "NOT
:"PRIME
The program's key line is this: :If not(min(seq(fPart(A/B),B,2,√(A.
It tells the calculator with the sequence command seq(fPart(A/B),B,2,√(A to generate one of my nifty Fingerprint Sets, then to check whether the set contains a 0. It does this first with the min( command to return the generated set's minimum value, and then the not( command, which will return a true if the returned value is 0. If it's true, the third line executes. The fourth line executes no matter what.
Compare this to the my first pair of prime finders as appeared way back in the second entry of this blog. Note that the old programs have embellishments (i.e., "Your're my hero, zero!") making any size comparison less direct.
For those of you into efficiency analysis, this things runs at worst-case scenario every time, since there's no way to interrupt the seq( command: that is to say, if we find a prime-indicating zero before the command finishes, tough luck. You could write your own, but thanks to the TI's high-level BASIC language, the necessary loops would run several times slower than any built-in statement.
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Not that I'm all about some lolcats, but I found this particularly cheeky:
LOLTHEORISTS |
Another one from the link bucket, this time via bOINGbOING.
German biologist Ernst Haeckel's (1834-1919) illustrations of flora and fauna are about as artistically rendered as any I've ever seen. A lot of the details in his drawings are apparently made up to support "his wacky theories about evolution." This site hosts a hi-res, full scan PDF of an original edition of his 1904 work entitled Art Forms in Nature (warning: 260+ megs and German only). What's most impressing to me here aside from the sheer beauty of the drawings are the colors, still vibrant after a century. The technical expense in setting up a four color process must have cost a fortune back in the day. Amazon has some current editions of his work for sale.
Today in Hillsboro, just a couple miles north of Chapel Hill, resides Ippy Patterson, another nature illustrator-cum-artist. She seems to take a more realistic tact, as opposed to Heckel's more stylistically-bound renderings. None of her works have migrated online, which is a pity, cause they're simply wonderful. For the locals, she's had some on display for a while at Sandwhich, where you can also view her Japanese brushwork. |
If you take Peanuts and sift away any drop of innocence and hand it maybe an indulgent, underaged dose of whiskey, the errant mixture might resemble this:
It began as a mistake.
The first time that Charles Branaski met Lucy Van Pelt, she was holding a football. He didn’t care for the game, baseball was his thing. Still, she held out that old football.
“Just kick the fucking thing,” she said.
“Listen, babe. You just hold that thing steady and I’ll kick the shit out of it.”
She threw her head back and laughed. She laughed long and hard and propped up the football. Charlie took a running start and he reared back his leg and kicked as hard as he could. Lucy was laughing too hard to hold the ball steady and it slipped out of her hand. Charlie missed the ball and flew straight up in the air and landed flat on his back.
More. |
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Oct. 6th, 2007 @ 02:08 am
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You should've seen me at the Matthew Dear show… I was busting MOVES!
I'll back up and give you some perspective. It's like 2:30 right now. I've been more or less running on 5 and a quarter hours rest since 7:30 am yesterday. I miraculously mustered the energy to pull off a tight, slick set at the station before moving on to the show around midnight. And MAN! does Dear rock a stage! His gig tonight included a couple friends on drums and bass/guitar. "These guys are both rockers but I'm a DJ." The energy kept stacking bit by bit till finally by show's end I found I'd cleared quite a bit of space on the dance floor.
And I'm STILL on autopilot overdrive. I just NEED some four-on-the-floor bass. Don't worry, the volume's low so the wife won't wake. Woah! Who retrofitted my booty with a V8? Shaking it's REQUIRED.
Wow, what a welcome reprieve from such a stressful week. HURRAH! |
The Monday before last I broke into a big smile. I turned to my wife and said, "Man, school starts tomorrow!" The summer's been fun and jam packed to say the least — ha, only a marriage and a honeymoon (not to mention 14 weeks) separate now from last semester — but I'm sharpest during the semesters and enjoy the challenge.
I've completed a good week's worth of classes at UNC, biking to and fro everyday and around town a whole bunch, which does wonders for muscle tone. Class discussions always wind up in thought provoking territories and my profs are all too enthusiastic about the material. Interestingly, none except one of them are interested in providing syllabi or an assignment calendar, which I was shocked to discover wasn't mandatory on their part.
Another surprise was the teeming monoculture that is the student mass. Chapel Hill/Carrboro is a place I've called home for 5 years. Since then the UNC campus has remained this large and mostly unexplored quadrant irrelevant from my day-to-day interactions, and all the while I've enjoyed the galleries, the farmers' markets, the vibrant music scene — with half a dozen independent radio stations to boot — &c., &c. The student body (or most of it) seems pretty hermetically sealed off from all of this. So now there's whole lot more blue-eyed Polo Shirt-ery letter caps filling my incomplete sketch of the town.
But that's merely a blip from what otherwise appears to be an upward two-year trajectory. I've got Friday night shifts now at the station, 9PM-12AM, which is considered prime time and coveted (lucky me!).
You'll notice details about the wedding &c. are conspicuously missing, this being my first post in 2 months. To the reader I ask patience as I still wait for the photographs to get in and I assemble an online gallery. Till then, cheers.Current Music: Juno Reactor: Bible of Dreams |
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tracingtheta's journal
