mh-z | web-log

Cool things:

1. http://www.mvelopes.com/“>Mvelopes: Finance tracking system. Excellent website-scraping abilities to get your bank and credit card transactions into their system, where you can drag each transaction into a folder to assign it. Steep learning curve, however, and the site is still under development and somewhat buggy.

Thoughts:

1. Annoying Bad Data: File sharing programs like http://www.winmx.com/“>WinMX should never automatically share a song anyone has downloaded until they have listened to the song and “certified” that it is error free and correctly named.

2. Annoying Bad Data: Websites which post song lyrics should indicate whether the lyrics were obtained by someone listening to the song and writing down what they thought they heard, or whether they were actually transcribed from liner notes or copied from some official source. Most of the time if I search for song lyrics, I’ll get several pages showing slightly different words.

Also see: anyone who tries to transcribe Cocteau Twins lyrics (because the singer doesn’t, on purpose, actually sing words that make sense).

Ideas:

—–Original Message—–
From: Regina Ryu

there were a bunch of cops across the street from my house today, one of them was holding a rifle. never did find out what happened. oh well

—–Original Message—–
From: Michael Hecht

Don’t you wish there was a news service where you could search by latitude and longitude to find the events that were reported closest to you?

You could record your coordinates if you happen to be out and about (you could easily find that of your home) by hitting a button on your GPS enabled cellphone to record your current location.

Check out Google Maps, their satellite photo feature is cool. Underlying the map, I think there’s a way to get latitude/longitude. The only remaining step is hooking coordinate data up to the newswire services. Also, there should be a news service where regular individual people can submit news in relation to coordinates, sort of like blogging. Geo-blogging, as it were.

—–Original Message—–
From: Regina Ryu

that’s really cool! i was just going to give my neighbor a call. whee

—–Original Message—–
From: Michael Hecht

But we need more technological solutions so that nobody has to actually talk to anybody. You know that, right?

I heard the most annoying cell phone ringer I’ve ever heard in my life, today. It was, nice and clear, as if over a cranked-up speakerphone: a female soul-singer’s voice with the following words sung perkily: “ring ring ringggg-ah!!! ring ring ringggg-ah!!! riiiiiaaaiiiiing riiing-ring, ring-ring” (repeat three or four times) (I didn’t even capitalize it for emphasis.) I don’t remember the rest of the melody (thankfully) after the part I’m about to describe, but the first three words were C-E-G followed by C-E-G again. To compound things, the person whose phone was ringing DID NOT PICK IT UP or make any motion to turn it off. He just left it sitting on a bench in front of him. Could he possibly have been PROUD of this? Was he enjoying the tune? Or pathetically attempting to SHOW OFF his “cool” “ring-tone” which he probably wasted $5 on? See, the sound did not even have the benefit of filtration through pants-pocket material, for whatever slight reduction in amplitude and sharpness of sound that provides. Horrible, just horrible. I’m glad I came out of there alive. This lousy excuse for a male person should be glad he did, too. See, WHEN I WAS A BOY, you could get a pint of ice cream for FIVE CENTS!

I went to a USC Film School Animation Festival at the Hollywood Director’s Guild which is located around the corner, practically, from where I live, and I’ve gotta say, why haven’t I find out about things like this before? Open to the public, free admission, free parking, free food, and a very interesting stylistic mix of about 20 short films, which in this case all involved hand- or computer-animation, to provide the main course of the evening’s entertainment. My friend Peggy invited me, and her friend Hy (not sure if that’s how her name’s spelled) knew about 90% of the people there and introduced us to a bunch of the present and past student directors as well as other people she knew. I wish I’d had business cards, as well as a more professional-looking website to show off. (Projects for the near future…)

The show was an impressive mixed bag, with what I felt was a severe glut of films of overly symbolic or implicative nature. Sometimes direct, fun, fast-paced graphics are what’s needed. Maybe even a music video or two; computer animation lends itself well to that. (I was hoping for something along the lines of http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167176/“>The Gate to the Mind’s Eye, but no one came through… That’s like what I’d (attempt to) make, at least. I’d do the music for it, too… Move over, Mr. Dolby.) And speaking of which, I was impressed by the musical scores, since the student directors apparently had teamed up with student composers who had in turn teamed up with student musicians. The image and sound quality was impressive too; image resolution was good enough to avoid any stair-steppiness and whatever sort of LCD projector was used was very clear. The Director’s Guild, folks. I’ll definitely be checking out what other sorts of films they’re screening there.

Next, friend (and new friend) and I went our separate ways, and I discovered a parking ticket on my car! I had deliberately spent some quality time scrutinizing the parking sign like an eagle-eyed lawyer, looking for any possible ticket-consequenting note before I had left my car there, and so when I saw the ticket under my wiper blade I eyed it testily from afar but then thought, there’s no possible way I’m parked incorrectly, so I’ll just contest it, so whatever, happy day! But you must be curious (as I was): what was it for, then? Expired tags. And I just had gotten new tags in the mail a couple weeks earlier. More evidence that it’s clearly a conspiracy, as I’ve been saying all along.

Next stop: I saw some extremely bright green laser beams being used as beacons/searchlights originating from The Grove area, so I went to check out the source. Talked to one of the guys running the equipment out of the backs of two white vans parked at the edge of an upper story of the parking lot. Each beam is only 10 watts, he said, so I wondered why anyone would use those rotating searchlights which use tremendous quantities of power and bulbs which burn up after a short time. The reason is that those can be safely aimed straight up or in arbitrary directions, whereas laser beams, although relatively harmless at that power level (we put our hands in the path of one of the beams) can still be dangerous when looked into or could cause some chance interference with aircraft due to the concentratedness at distance (due to coherency) of the light. Each of these beams was aimed at a bare location in the Hollywood hills (rather than upwards), so the hills would terminate the beam. The locations were picked so a beam wouldn’t be shining into someone’s home, for example. (http://www.call4ideas.com/“>Website of the laser effects company. Odd domain name.)

And, that’s all. The lasers were part of a promotion for Batman Begins, which could be… Batman Falls Down and Skins His Knee for all I care. Nah, I’ll probably see it. Probably has some good computer animation.

I hate when I look back on a block of code I wrote and it’s so complicated that I have no hope of understanding it.

But then next time I find myself writing a block of code that I know when I look back on it I won’t have any hope of understanding it, I say “pshaw… who cares? If I really really need to, I’ll figure it out”.

Also, part of my rationale is that it’s usually a small function, and it’s meant for a specific purpose. So it doesn’t matter how it works, all that matters is that it works. And given that it works just fine, I won’t be testing it and trying to debug it any further, so it might as well take up as little space as possible (while still conforming to some plausible stylistic guidelines).

Contrast this to source code in some public projects I’ve seen, where each line of code is preceded by one or two lines or three lines of explanatory comments, even when a trivial operation is performed. The PEAR source code is like this. I guess that’s helpful when collaborating on an open project.

In Excel when I want to “Move or Copy” a sheet by right clicking the sheet’s tab, it says that if I have cells with more than 255 characters, those cells will be truncated in the copy and that I need to use a different method to copy the sheet. Now… I say, why? What lazy Microsoft programmers decided that such a basic function needs to have such a trivial-to-fix limitation? Of course when you have a database or something where you need to limit the data per field, it makes sense to have a limit on the number of characters. But for a copy-from-here-to-there operation, where the method of how it’s done is irrelevant, what possibly rationale could there be? Someone get Matt Lee to look into this!

I had an odd dream today; this morning, actually, so let me see how much detail I can recall. I was driving, and stopped because I saw a kitten in the road. Then by the side of the road I saw an adult cat, except it looked very large. Too big to be a normal domestic cat. It had fiercer-looking features. And in the way that dreams have of things changing without your being aware that they change, and where the story is continuous in that something turns into something else but then it was always that thing that it turned into, the large cat was now a small mountain lion. At first I wasn’t sure if it was a mountain lion, because it seemed like a cross between a cat and something else. But then I was sure it was a lion. I wasn’t scared though because inside the car I’d be safe. I regarded it and it regarded me, and then it starting scratching the side of the car. Not wishing to have that permanent souvenier of the encounter, I drove off. Then I looked back (but really somehow this was in front of me) and saw the lion limping on a paw twisted at an unnatural angle. I realized that I had run over its foot. I felt sorry for it and didn’t know what to do, so I went home to look in a phone book for an animal help service I could call. I wanted to ask my family members for advice, but they seemed like they were in shock or mourning for something. I was afraid that a relative had died. The sense of the story changed, and after this I don’t remember what happened.

Cascading Style Sheets, so far in my experience, involve a great deal of pixel-twiddling. I hate doing that. Given the power to make something pixel-perfect, I’ll do it, because when something I’ve made looks wrong and I have the ability to fix it, then I’ll fix it. It just takes a lot of time.

It also seems like some common functions one performs using CSS are hacks. For example, stacking up elements using DIV tags with an associated “float: left” style to act as containers for paragraphs or elements which we wish to align in columns requires the use of an additional element in the HTML document (”<div class=”clear”></div>”), which CSS was supposed to avoid. “Separate the content from the presentation”, they said, although that doesn’t seem to be the case, here.

I also believe that most anybody encountering the above paragraph will have no clue what I just said there. It’s clear to me because I’ve been twiddling pixels with regards to this thing for the past few days.

Introspection can be a way of avoiding action. The time you spend thinking about how you do things and how you work and what you like and don’t like and why you can’t work on something one way but you can another way would better be spent just doing the thing you were thinking about your relationship to. At the moment I admire people who aren’t introspective and who just do things without caring what anybody thinks, especially themselves.

The above paragraph is a form of introspection too, isn’t it? But since I set out to write something to post online here, it’s also the task itself which is getting done, so therefore I’m just doing the task without thinking about it. How paradoxical.

Someone ought to put together a service for helping people find the identity of songs that were played on the radio, or heard in certain venues while out wandering about the wide world. It’s often the case that I’m flipping radio stations and hear something I like (particularly on http://www.kcrw.com/“>89.9 FM or http://www.indie1031.fm/“>103.1 FM over here in Los Angeles), and I want to find out what it is so that I can download it. Or, who knows, buy the CD. (Rare chance of that. Actually no, because the kinds of things I tend to like are rare and not conducive to over-the-wire procurement, and although I tend not to like mainstream music, I’m definitely open to buying something I very much like. If only I could find out what it is…) While the former station has a website that lists what’s playing at current times, the latter doesn’t, and although the former’s playlist service is hard to find within the site, that doesn’t help me if all I remember are a few words from the song I heard.

Usually what I do when I hear a song I like, therefore, is send a text message to myself (from cell phone to my e-mail address) with the current time or with some words from the song (if there are (intelligible) words, which sometimes in not the case), so that when I get to my computer I’ll check my e-mail and be reminded to try and find the song, either by looking it up based on the exact time and date it was on the air (which should theoretically be possible) or by sites which have posted song lyrics. Most of the time I fail in both endeavours, but at least I tried. And so the tune I heard and which gave me momentary enjoyment is lost to eternity in the sea of songs which exist out there, because there are so many of them…

It would be nice to have an online service whose purpose is to help others identify songs which they’ve heard. Users could log in and post as much information as they had: (1) some lyrics, (2) a musical genre, (3) a radio station where the song was heard, (4) the exact time of day the song was heard, (5) notable characteristics of the song (i.e., miscellaneous notes (no pun intended)), and finally (6) a recorded audio snippet, if available; this could even be a recording of someone humming or singing part of the song.

Upon log-in to the system, a user would have the option to share with the community his or her expertise, by reviewing a set number of queries posted by other users and identifying perhaps one or more songs (s)he user recognized. Going through the entries would be quick and easy, and would perhaps earn the user points for some kind of redemption. Or they would simply be ranking-points serving no other purpose than recognization of that user’s contribution to the community. Much like the “reward” given to prolific reviewers on Amazon.

The system could grow beyond that, but those are the fundamentals. Music is an important force in many people’s lives, and yet so many are trapped in the little boxes of whatever’s popular, or whatever they can describe to their peers. There’s so much more out there than the same Top Forty songs you’ll hear on the radio, and part of encouraging musical appreciation of a more diverse nature is actually being able to identify what you’ve heard that you liked so you can talk about it, or get it and share it, or at the very most fundamental just be able to listen to it again.

I’m going to post my massive text file of unknown songs I’ve noted down something about, next time.

I’d like to program such a system. But if someone gets to it before I do, or if something like this already exists, remember that you read about it here, first.