Photos from our wedding reception
Maria and I were married last Wednesday and we held our reception on Saturday down at her families’ house in Cave Junction, Oregon. I’ll have photos from the actual wedding online as soon as I can get them in a digital format.
We’re doing great! Thanks to all that attended!
It’s OK to wear socks with your sandals!
Geeks rejoice! It’s OK to wear socks with your sandals and Birks. According to new evidence, the Romans did it over 2000 years ago in Britain, so apparently socks + sandals has always be in style… 🙂
I’ve posted on my computer graphics portfolio webpage a preview of a UI experiment I’m working on that explores alternative forms of input for a video game. The game, which only runs on Pocket PC 2002 devices, allows you to interact with the screen directly using the stylus as input. Check it out!
The real reasons the recording industry is down
In just three years, sales of pirate CDs have more than doubled, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Every third CD sold is a pirate copy, says the federation.
In some countries it is hard to find legitimately produced CDs. Ninety percent of CDs in China, for instance, are pirate copies. Counterfeiters have forced the price of a fake CD down to about $4, which only makes CDs in the music shops look even pricier.
Finally, music just isn’t as important to young people as it used to be. There is more competition than ever for the cash in a teenager’s pocket. “Youths are no longer defining themselves by music in the same way they used to,” says Mr Mulligan.
Senator Wyden Calls for Immediate Disclosure on Non-Competitive Bids for Iraqi Reconstruction
An especially interesting point was made during this speech Senator Wyden gave before Congress:
It is also becoming increasingly clear that U.S. taxpayers will shoulder much of the cost of America’s involvement in Iraq. This week civil administrator Paul Bremer said that just over the next six months, Iraqi oil revenues will be $2 billion short of what will be needed to finance occupation and reconstruction. U.S. taxpayers will fund the difference – for these six months, and for the foreseeable future. Yet the rationale behind much of the cost is unknown. Companies have been given contracts for work in Iraq with little or no competition, and no explanation. The process is not only suspect, it’s historically financially unsound.
So, the U.S. is skimming oil revenues from Iraq, as I had long suspected. This was the first hard evidence I’ve read of this. The war really was about oil, and the Bush Administration underestimated the costs of occupation; a losing investment.
Where are all the far right-wing anti-tax wackos? Why aren’t you all up in arms about this? If you hate paying taxes so much, why aren’t you fuming mad at your President?
Another quotable from the speech:
…my colleagues and I detailed the daily reports of closed-bid and no-bid contracts being awarded for Iraqi reconstruction. They ranged from a $2 million deal to rebuild Iraqi schools, to a $600 million mother lode of a contract to reinvent Iraq’s infrastructure.
That’s right tax-haters, the Bush Administration gave out over $600 million of your hard-earned tax dollars without any justification! Your administration is giving money away behind closed doors and answering to no one for doing so!
I don’t get it. Why do conservatives allow this happen?
Jack Valenti on… p2p networks or ?
“The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology,” Jack Valenti said, threatens an entire industry’s “economic vitality and future security.” Mr. Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, and he was ready for a rhetorical rumble. The new technology, he said, “is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone.”
This is not about the internet or file sharing, it was in 1982, and he was talking about videocassette recorders. If Jack Valenti had his way back then (he almost did as the Sony BetaMax case went all the way to the Supreme Court) we wouldn’t have VCRs today, Blockbuster wouldn’t exist and 50% of Hollywoods income wouldn’t exist.
> Hello!
>
> I visited your computer graphics website and read about your music
> visualisation tools where you use beat detection. I have tried to find
> information about this but all I’ve found is hard-to-understand mathematics
> tutorials…
>
> If you have any tutorials (C#, VB, C…), links or other information that
> could help me in my beat detection project I would appreciate it a lot!
>
> Best regards from Sweden
Beat detection the way I did it was quite simple. In fact, I wouldn’t really call it beat detection, it was more like cheating. There is no beat counting or rhythm prediction, it is all done in real-time. But heck, CG is all about cheating… 🙂
From winamp you’re given every “cycle” a buffer that contains the left and right channel spectrograph, or FFT of the current time slice from the music. This is the exact same data that winamp displays in it’s main window.
At first, all I did was write a simple plugin that displays the spectrograph in 3D. I wasted many hours in awe of my silly creation, studying the way the spectrograph behaved with different music.
After a while I noticed that with hip hop and most techno the beat is really apparent in the lower 2-6 bars of the spectrograph from winamp. I guess in hard-to-understand mathematics they would say that a band-pass filter on the FFT from 10Hz-50Hz would isolate the beat frequencies. All I did was snag this from winamp’s buffer.
Now that I had the bass frequencies as regular integers from winamp, I just spent a lot of time experimenting with different methods of averaging their values and incrementing a counter based on this average. When the counter reached a certain point I made the conclusion that I was in a “beat” and told the graphics engine to display… whatever it pleased. Once the average died down I decremented the counter and informed the graphics engine. That’s about all there is to it. The trick is in where you pick the cut off points for “in a beat” and “out of a beat”.
So if you want to do this yourself w/out winamp you’ll need to borrow a discrete FFT algorithm from somewhere. Otherise, winamp does 90% of the hard work for you, you just need to play with the numbers till you get something that looks right. 🙂
Best of luck, show me the results when you’re done! 🙂
Wedding: August 20th, private ceremony
Reception: August 23rd, open to friends and family, it’s gonna be at Maria’s house down in CJ
Be prepared for Scots wearing kilts. 😉
Maria and I just arrived safely in New Haven for the World Transhumanist Association’s first conference on transhumanism. Hopefully I’ll be blogging the conference as events unfold. I’m looking forward to this conference as it’s really the first of it’s kind, and all the “leading minds” in the transhumanist arena are expected to be here.
All last week were in Manhattan, where we enjoyed great food, some great broadway shows (front row center seats for Phantom of the Opera–what a blast!), and some excellent comedy at the Comedy Works. Good times!
Transhumanism for pets?
Genetically modified, glow-in-the-dark pet fishes. No, this is not a test. This is for real, and you can buy them in Taiwan right now.
I should make a “Countdown to Blade Runner” website. 🙂 This is clearly step one, for better or for worse…