Author Archives: Captain Shenanigans

Feb23

A Moment for Music

Posted on by
A Moment for Music

I seem to be able to think of nothing other than music right now.  I think its because I picked up the Tron: Legacy soundtrack today.  It is easily one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in a very long time.  Google Music has it on sale right now for $4.  I highly recommend a purchase.  Daft Punk‘s blend of orchestral and electronic music is seamless and so epic.  It’s music on a grand scale and it stands not just as an amazing soundtrack, but also as an excellent stand alone album.

Speaking of soundtracks, I’m reminded of the soundtracks to two shows I’ve been watching recently, The Walking Dead and Being Human (US Version).  Both are in their second season and both feature a standout score.  The Walking Dead’s soundtrack is done by Bear McCreary, who did an unbelievable job with the Battlestar Galactica reboot.  His soundtracks are so atmospheric, yet incredibly engaging.  He can set just about any mood he cares to with just a few notes.  The soundtrack for the US version of Being Human (which, BTW, is REALLY diverging from the UK version) is done by FM Le Sieur.  He’s previously done the music for a little known South African sci-fi show called Charlie Jade.

Let me take a moment to talk about Charlie Jade.  This show tragically got only a single season and was already cancelled by the time it made it stateside.  It was one of the more unique shows I’ve seen, with a real eye towards cinematography that really helped sell the concept.  Briefly, the main character found himself moving between three alternate universes.  Aside from the obvious differences that would arise from a parallel world story, the look of each world was very heavily influenced by how it was filmed.  You knew instantly which world you were in, and the music really played into that.  In some aspects, it was like FM Le Sieur was scoring three different shows, with little musical hooks to tie each one together.

Getting back to Being Human, the music in this show is almost like another character.  It somehow manages to be both immediate and upfront while intertwining with the story and characters on the screen.  It steps back when it needs to and knows when and how to fade away, but there’s that ever present feeling that it can pop back up at any time.  Every dramatic moment in the show is accompanied by a unique strain that still fits into the whole.  Its a whole pile of contradictions, but its damn good contradictions!

Moving away from soundtracks, I wanna highlight an artist I first heard at Electric Zoo this past year.  He goes by the name of Pretty Lights and his music is a pretty cool blend of hip hop, lounge, and electronic.  A lot of what I’ve heard so far is definitely not fast paced and has a very cool groove to it.  I’ve only heard a few tracks with vocals so far, and as often as not, the vocals aren’t words, but voices blended with the music.  That’s actually something I really enjoy.  For whatever reason, it makes the song stick in my head that much more and I find myself humming it when I can’t actually listen to music (like when I’m slowly withering away at work).  I was at his website moments ago, and it appears that most (if not all) of his music is freely available to download from there.  There’s a donation button there that you can use to give a little to help defray bandwidth costs.  I don’t know about you, but the high quality of music aside, I’m inclined to give just because I want to show my support for an artist who isn’t terrified of piracy.  A musician who isn’t hostile to his fans coughMetallicacough definitely deserves wider exposure.  As I write this, I’m listening to his first album on Rhapsody, and if the rest of his music is this good (as I suspect it is), then I’ll be downloading it directly from his website and donating a sum of money greater than what I would have paid buying it from my usual music peddlers (Google Music, Amazon, eMusic, Rhapsody).  The best part about that is that he gets the entire amount.  I highly recommend anyone reading this give his music a listen.  If you like what you hear, download it!  And maybe it happens you want to send something his way for the aural delight.  Everyone wins!  Except for the major music labels execs.  Those guys can get right the fuck off my lawn.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some listening to do before I go to bed.

Feb20

Already?!

Posted on by
Already?!

Shenanigans! I missed my goal already and its only been a week! I am irate with myself. In my defense, I was working overtime the last few days of shift this week. And I probably would have updated yesterday, but I got so frustrated and fed up with my Droid Charge (thanks for the support and your TouchWiz garbage, Samsung!) that I ended up getting a new phone. I have the Galaxy Nexus now and it’s a dream. This is what Android should have been from the start! It’s superior to the Charge in every way except one: battery life. I knew this going in however, so it’s not like it’s a shock. I’m getting about what everyone else is getting, so I think my next step is to try out some custom kernels to see if I can get some underclocking and undervolting going to improve battery life. The phone is so fast already, and with GPU acceleration, it’s so silky smooth. I wonder how low I could go before I noticed a performance hit. Gotta find that balance!

I had my OG Droid several months before I rooted it. I wanted to try it and see what it could get me. I also wanted to experiment with overlooking that bad boy. I had my Droid Charge about a month before I rooted it and that was mostly a desperate attempt to get rid of TouchWiz. I had this phone almost exactly 24 hours before I rooted it. I am debating whether or not to drop a ROM on this phone. I’m really happy with the stock ROM. The only thing I’d want is something that puts toggles for things like wifi, bluetooth, etc in the notification area. Other than that, I’m good. I got this phone for the pure Android experience and that’s exactly what I’m getting. It’s the first phone I’ve had that I haven’t really had a burning need to root, and ironically its the phone that I’ve rooted the fastest.

I’m going to try some different kernels aimed towards power efficiency and see how that goes. If it’s not really effective, it may be time for a dock and extra battery, but that’s something I’d rather avoid… Although I do want the dock, even though I don’t really need it. Maybe when I get my tax return.

And now, kernels!

Filed under Fun and tagged | Comments Off on Already?!
Feb16

New Photo Gallery

Posted on by
New Photo Gallery

A quick update today, since I have to head in to work early.  I went with a plugin called NextGen Gallery.  It doesn’t use WordPress’ internal media library.  Instead, it adds in an entire section for photo management handled by its own section on the dashboard.  It’s not a bad solution, once you edit it’s configuration files to allow for greater memory usage.  Apparently, it requires an absurd amount of memory to create a tiny ass thumbnail.  Other than that, and the slightly broken English its written in, its a pretty decent solution.  I would have preferred something more native, but it seems such things don’t exist.  I’m still in the process of uploading my pictures, but here’s the gallery so far.  Sometime tonight, I’m gonna have to integrate that link into the sidebar.

Feb14

Work Proceeds!

Posted on by
Work Proceeds!

When I first decided to undertake this major overhaul of my site, I thought that I could just have my new domain redirect to my old one.  That works, after a fashion, but it didn’t really give me what I want.  I could either have it as a simple redirect, which would mean that the site would end up displaying my old URL and all the scripts would rely on it, or I could have it cloak or mirror the old one, which eliminates the display issue, but doesn’t do anything to address the remaining issue.  This means I pretty much had to rebuild my site at the new address.

Joy.

Fortunately, it wasn’t too bad.  I’m still using WordPress, so I was able to export my site from the old location and import it to the new one.  That brought over just about everything.  I just had to tweak a few settings and decide what I wanted to do with my gallery.  Currently, I have a Gallery2 installation at http://www.mytwistedmind.net/gallery/main.php.  That’s all well and good, but I don’t know how to effectively migrate that over, or even if I should.  I certainly have enough server space to do so, but its kind of a pain in the ass.  Gallery2 isn’t the most user friendly software ever made, and it comes with a ridiculous set of options that may or may not actually be useful. It also randomly slows down for no apparent reason and every so often I have to run some kind of database maintenance on it, even if no database changes have been made.  I’ve been annoyed with it for a while, but I’ve been using it so long that I was used to it.

With the recent versions of WordPress, its got built in media handling, and its pretty decent.  I can do almost everything I want, but the major hurdle I’m running into is that while I can make a page that displays a gallery of images, I can’t seem to make a parent gallery that shows a thumbnail and link to each of my galleries.  I managed to get something close, but there are no options to configure anything at all.  I can’t arrange the thumbnails in a grid, and reordering them is something that involves a tedious process.  Gallery2 simply displays them better.  I’ve debated trying some other software (Coppermine, ZenPhoto), but one of the things I’d really like is a consistent visual style throughout the site, which isn’t something I’m going to get with an external solution.

That leaves me with plugins for WordPress itself, which have so far been underwhelming.  Most of them don’t support the native media library functionality and end up replicating that in a less awesome way, and there seem to be some that promise some feature, but for whatever reason, said feature doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the plugin’s setup or configuration settings and documentation is pretty much non-existent.

And that’s where I am now.  I’m going to investigate my options further.  Maybe there’ll be a way to integrate some of the external gallery management scripts into WordPress in a manner that doesn’t suck as bad as Gallery2’s implementation.  Maybe my endless searching will turn up a plugin that does what I want.  Maybe I’ll be abducted by aliens, given powers that far exceed those of mortal men, and return to Earth as a masked vigilante.  What I know for certain is that in a couple of hours I’ll have to go to work, but all I’ll be thinking about is messing about with this site.

Feb12

Welcome to Project Anaphase

Posted on by
Welcome to Project Anaphase

New year, new site design. I’m still tweaking this setup, and more changes to the layout will probably be made, but the theme and overall structure is set. I’ve got a new URL http://www.projectanaphase.com) that should be active shortly that will direct to this site. The old one will remain active for the foreseeable future; quite a lot of history there! Aside from the shiny new interface, you’ll see I’ve removed the Twitter stream and replaced it with a link to my profile. Gone is Facebook, since I don’t use that steaming pile of turd for anything. I’ve added a link to my Google+ profile along with a link to my Pinterest profile (which has become my new obsession, btw). I’ve got more pictures to add to my gallery (including the 2011 Electric Zoo — my swan song!) and a ton of things to update. My goal is of course regular updates, but this is something I’ve tried and failed before. I think it’s partly because its mostly been a rather vague goal, as shown here:

Me: “How often should I update?”
Myself: “More than I do now.”
Me: “Brilliant! I’ll start right away.”
6 update-free months later…
Me: “Bollocks.”

Yea, trying to avoid that this time around, so I’m setting a concrete goal. One post every other day. I’ve got WordPress apps installed on all my Android devices, and I’ve got at least one of those with me at all times. Plus, there’s my Chromebook and it’s 3G access. There really isn’t any reason I can’t meet this goal short of being a terrible human being. I am going to avoid being a terrible human being.

That said, I’ve got another responsibility I’ve been failing at. I’ve pretty much completely neglected I have certainly eaten since my last update there, and I even have a pile of pictures for reviews that are rattling around in my head. I’m not going to be redesigning that site because I still love how it looks, but I am going to stop being a lazy fatty and start updating there. The goal? One post a week. I think that’s a good target for the kind of site that it is.

Now, its off to tinker a bit more, then go to bed. I’ve got some shenanigans scheduled for tomorrow, after which, there will be blood updating!

Aug6

Google+ Profile Suspension

Posted on by
Google+ Profile Suspension

So Google suspended my Google+ profile because they didn’t think that Daljit of NORN, the name I’ve gone by online for some 13-15 years, wasn’t real or some such garbage. I had to fill out a form with links to “reputable” websites online where I go by this name to prove that I’m not a spammer or business entity or whatever. Hey Google+, how about you look at the Gmail service I’ve been using since you launched it? I’ve been Daljit of NORN on there for always. And yes, Daljit is my real first name. In fact, I’ve even been called Daljit of NORN by my friends on many occasions! In a hilariously ironic twist, I gathered the list of links to reputable sites by… wait for it… doing a Google search for “Daljit of NORN.” Yeah. Nice job, Google+ account clowns. I wanted to include links to my PS3 and X360 user profiles, cause guess what name i use there…

Daljit of NORN!

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to share that info via a link. Oh well. I hope Facebook, Twitter, foursquare, my personal website, and a wiki that dates my use of the name back to the late 90s are enough.

There isn’t a roll eyes graphic big enough. I am so disgusted right now. And this from a company that I’ve come to look to for doing the right thing. I guess we’ll see what happens once they review my petition.

Update 1: Oh, I almost forgot! On the form I had to submit, there was no text entry field where I could write a well reasoned few lines to state my case. I had a choice, submit links or a photo ID. Great. I really hope they do the right thing, because to have a company tell me that the name I’ve used online since before they existed is a bit ludicrous.

Update 2: Hmmmm… you know, the internet is a pretty cool place. Using the Wayback Machine (I think it’s called the Internet Archive Project now?) and (irony!) Google Groups, I’m trying to track my first use of the name. It looks like it was either late 97 or early 98, but I’m trying to pin it down more precisely.

Update 3: From what I can tell, it looks like the first time I used the name was November 9th, 1997 on alt.games.creatures. Embarrassingly enough, I’m using it in an exchange of… I don’t even know what to call it. Me and another poster were having an argument (but not really, no one was actually angry, we were just being silly) and instead of yelling at each other in context, we wrote sort of stories of what our imaginary army of computer game artificial life organisms were doing to each other, and (now here’s the really embarrassing part!) in it I refer to myself in the third person. Ugh. Apparently I was too cool for school. Ah, the indiscretions of youth! 😉

Apr1

Not Dead… Again

Posted on by
Not Dead… Again

So yeah, it’s been almost a year since I last posted. I believe there was a World Cup going on. Its surprising how quickly you can fall out of the habit of doing something. I stopped posting because (if I recall correctly) I had a series of social and work things that hit all at once and took all my free time. It also got tiresome doing the play by play of each game. I decided to go back to the recap format, but because of the lack of time I mentioned, I never got around to it. That lead to falling out of the rhythm of regular updates. For months, I thought about restarting my updates, but I never got the motivation to do so. I did almost start once! I had the beginnings of a draft, but it wasn’t much, and I’m not even sure I have it anymore. Fun fact: This is being typed in the WordPress app for Android. Don’t know if I ever mentioned it, but I got a Droid about a year ago and I love it! The thing is phenomenal, especially after I rooted it, overclocked it, and installed a custom ROM on it.

Anyway, I finally found the motivation to start up again (so damn lazy!) and there’s two things on my mind (and a third that I can’t talk about yet) that have finally broken me out of this silly no-posting slump. Briefly, I want to tell you about completing my car payments and about my good friend Paul leaving the area. Both of these deserve their own posts and they’re going to get ’em. I just wanted to finally post to actually get back into the habit. This also serves as a test of the WordPress app.

So that’s it for now. I’m wrapping this up because its late and I have to finish watching Lord of Illusions on Netflix before it expires!