So Eileen and I have been talking about doing a long distance music project for sometime (as she has a tendency to live in far away places)  in a similar vein to the way the Postal Service stuff was done.  Because I like to think up band names and I really like nerdy stuff and Eileen doesn't seem to have the good sense to stop me from combining those two things I've been calling this project Packets and Waves (see here and here for explanations).

We finally finished our first song last night, a cover of Janis Joplin's "Piece of my Heart".  It was actually a pretty cool process.  I recorded most of the music first ( acoustic guitar, bass, shaker, piano, and organ ) then sent her the GarageBand file.  She loaded that up on her computer in Taiwan and recorded her vocals, then sent it back to me.  I did some editing, recorded my vocals and a guitar solo and BAM! finished song!  Yes it's a little low-fi, but for using built in computer mics for everything I think it turned out REALLY cool!  This song also brings back all sort of memories of karaoke nights... good times...good times...

This was a really fun project to work on and I'm really hoping that we do more stuff like this.  I really like layering stuff together and my weakness for female vocals is well documented.  I've linked the song below, let me know what you think.  Enjoy!

Piece Of My Heart (Janis Joplin cover) by Packets and Waves

So this week started off with an email from a client who's site we recently launched.  It contained a lot of "minor adjustments" that felt very uninformed and many of which were detrimental to the site.  After a while, you just get tired and frustrated of explaining to clients why you know your job better than they do.  People, I know it's your business, but I have a degree in computer science, I (almost) have my master's degree in human computer interaction, I have launched a TON of websites.  I know what I'm doing!  You tell an architect what you want the house to look like, you don't tell him where to put every wall and support beam.  If you did the house would fall over.  A website is not much different.  It has really made this hit all too close to home.

In the midst of abandoning all faith in humanity I stopped to remind myself that building websites really is fun.  It's really cool to see something come out of nothing, just by means of your ingenuity and code.  It's fun to try new things, play with new technologies, and put things out there for other people to see/use.  I think it's really important for all developers/designers to take time to work on pet projects.  Build something that you want to see exist and set your own rules for it.  If you want it to just be functional and not worry about style (at all yet...) build that! Enjoy the code!  If you want to make something pretty, but not worry about getting it to work in IE, set your own browser requirements!  If you do nothing but take change requests from clients, you'll go nuts and loose your love for your craft.

While I don't have much free time now (school + work + grading + random leftover freelance > available time), I will in the future and I really want to wrap up my PHP library, a central feed generation service, and maybe a Facebook application for GIGS, actually get some code down for Dull Roar (which I might work into a class project this term!), and find something to code in Python!  It's things like these that stop me from murdering people when I hear suggestions like "I want a site that, you know, pops more.  Something with edge!".

January 20th, 2010|5:37pm

I just wanted to tell you how cool I think the GIGS project is. If/When I get a website built for The Van Goghs, I'll totally use it (and your php parser if you've built it yet!). Keep in mind you're the reason I got into web development in the first place.

Bryan

January 20th, 2010|7:10pm

Hey Dave, thanks for writing this. I haven't kept tabs on your work in a while, but I really appreciate this. I'm much much more of a novice, but I also do print design work and let me tell you......nothing is more obnoxious than having people hover over your shoulder telling you what fonts to use or how to align something or what colors to use. It sucks even worse having to "stop the presses" when clients make last-minute choices.

I've been emo for the past few months always worrying if I'm doing something wrong or if I'm not cut out for this, but I'm slowly regaining my confidence working on a few personal things and I'm thinking I should even go to school again to be professionally trained in design/web. So it's just good to hear another perspective on this, and that it's ok to assert myself as a professional and even take it a bit further.

Thanks! I hope you're doing well, and hang in there. :D

Dana

So now that work and school are back in full swing things have gotten really busy. Along with working 20 hours a week, taking 2 class (plus homework), I've also gotten bumped up to a full graduate assistanceship. This is pretty sweet because it now covers tuition for both of my classes, but it also requires me to grade for two classes, which seems like twice as much work as grading for one. All of this is on top of my normal band and nerd commitments, as well as a renewed motivation to go to the gym more (now that I've checked out DePaul's gym and it's pretty nice). Somewhere in there it would be nice to get out and see people every once in a while, too.

I think this will all be doable. Crazy, but doable. It seems that weekends will just have to involve a lot more homework/reading/grading than they used to and over all this will involve A LOT of coffee.  I suppose I like being busy, it makes me enjoy doing nothing all the more when I have time for it. Classes are cool and work is going well. I've got some new music coming out soon (both from The American Autumn and from another little project) so keep an eye out for that stuff soon!  Also I might be doing a little traveling soon.  I'm working out the details for all the now, but it should be really cool.

The next few months are going to be a lot of fun if they don't kill me!

Hey everybody, happy 2010!  Now is when people typically take a look back at the previous year and see if they really did anything or if they just spent most of their time watching cartoons and drinking beer, so let's give that a shot:

Things I Did In 2009

• watched cartoons


• drank beer


• ran a half marathon


• started going to school full time (and working part time)


• released a record


• ate a turducken


• started some cool projects


• pretended to be a teacher


• and probably lots of other fun stuff that I really can't remember!

The idea of ebooks is certainly nothing new.  Good electronic ink technology has been in development for a while and from what I've heard the Kindle and the Nook are fine devices.  The idea of being able to distribute books the same way music and movies are now commonly distributed seems like an excellent idea, but I just can't get that excited about it.

Part of me is worried that this is the same apathy I felt about iPods back in the day.  An mp3 player seemed like a good idea, but my Diskman worked just fine and I wasn't in a big rush to spend $300 to listen to my music.  Now, the benefits seem pretty obvious and the digital format makes a lot of sense for music.  Like many people, I resisted the loss of a tangible product that went along with my music and this is a pretty common argument for resisting ebooks now.

In many ways I think this is a more justifiable argument when talking about books than it is for music or movies.  When you buy a CD or DVD, you're not actually in contact with that disk while you're listening or watching, you're listening to speakers or headphone or watching a screen, some sort of delivery system for the media.  With a book, you actually hold the book, turn the pages, maybe scribble in the margins.  Books feel different and come in different sizes.  Books (just as a vehicle for the literature inside them) have more dimension and personality than CD cases or even record sleeves.  You don't always sit and look at the cover art while you're listening to an album, but you're always looking at a book when you're reading it.  I think this physical relationship is going to be harder to overcome than it was for music and movies.

That said, the idea of having a lot of books in a very small package is really appealing.  I love reading on the train to work and always have a book in my bag.  When traveling longer distances, it would be great to be able to bring as many books as I wanted for a long plane ride without the weight of dead trees in my bag.  I've had to read a bunch of academic papers for school and it would be nice to load all those up on an ebook reader rather than printing them out to read on the go.  Being able to do full text searches on all these things would be great, too.

Like most awesome ideas, DRM is one of the main hurdles preventing ebooks from being totally awesome.  Just let me buy something that I can read on whatever I want and don't mess with it after I've bought it.  Also, offer ebook versions of books I've already bought (Amazon, B&N, I'm looking at you).  Take my whole history of Amazon purchases and let me have an ebook version of whatever books I've bought.  This would be the best equivalent of ripping CD's that you already own.  Don't lock me into a single device with one format (think about how many times Sony has shot themselves in the foot with this mentality).

I really want to like ebooks.  I think the Nook looks cool, if it were $100, I'd probably buy one right now.  But there's still something that just doesn't feel right about them yet.  I don't know if this is just a natural resistance to a disruptive change in media or if the whole concept is still just not quite ripe.  I really hope ebooks keep maturing and work out their awkward adolescent kinks.  I'd really like to have all 7 Harry Potter books in one small, discrete device.

December 11th, 2009|4:04pm

I am not a big fan of eBooks. Your comparison to the iPods of the world intrigued me, but there is a difference in how a person consumes music and how one consumes literature. I think it really comes down to the time investment and the volume of media you need on you to fill up your free time. Most of us aren't reading more than a few books at a time. Even if you do have five or six going, it still takes a significant amount of time to finish them. (One book a day, if you're really quick?) Music, on the other hand, is consumed much faster. One CD is, maximum, a little over an hour, right? That's only if you listen to an entire album at a time. Each song is 2-5 minutes on average and how many of us live on the shuffle setting? If I had to carry around the CD of each song I listen to in a given day... well, it'd be a lot of CD's. So, where you save yourself the space of three or four books with an eReader, you save yourself... dozens or hundreds of CD's!

I think that they're being marketed the wrong way. I would consider getting an eReader for something like a magazine or newspaper subscription. Something that I could read through quickly and was updated regularly. If you read the paper every day, why not just download it podcast style. Same thing for monthly magazines or TV guide or your favorite tabloid. Print media is dying out anyway thanks to the internet. Here's a way to convert traditional print media to an electronic format. Then maybe I'd consider putting a novel or two on there as an aside. Who knows, maybe they're just doing it backwards. Sell the eReaders as Book devices and then start introducing subscription content later.

Long story short, it's an interesting product, but for me, personally, not worth the money or the hassle. One last difference between the iPod and the eReader. People were already used to batteries in their discmen. Charging your book seems like kind of a hassle.

Mike S

So last week I finished up another trimester in for my masters program.  This was my first terms as a full time student, and I must admit it was a bit more demanding.  There were quite a few late nights and a great deal of reading, but I think it went pretty well.  So now what?

Well, school doesn't start again until the beginning of January, so my schedule's opened up a bit.  I'll be picking up a few extra hours at work, as it sounds like they've got plenty of projects that they need me for.  This seems like an OK idea, what with tuition and everything.  An old high school buddy of mine hired me to do the website for his company, so I'll be working on that a bit as well (hopefully getting it launched before XMas).

I've also picked up work on GIGS again. I just like this idea a lot and I'd really like to see it get some use.  I'm working on a parser library in PHP right now.  I need to finish up documenting the specs for the format and style the GIGS site a bit.  Once I have something that's ready for people to use, I need to figure out how to get musicians and music sites to start using it, but I guess I'll just worry about that later.  I have quite a few more ideas to go along with this format and hopefully I can see them come to fruition.

Finally, I'm going to be spending some much needed time promoting the new American Autumn record.  We're really close to having things squared away for iTunes, which will be a lot of fun.  It's exciting to have record that you really want to push out to people, so there's lots of stuff to do in that process (talking to fans online, submitting to labels, radio stations, zines, blogs, fliering, setting up promotions, etc).  I couldn't do this for anybody else's band, but I love doing it for my own stuff.

I guess this time off of school will still be pretty busy.  I really want to get a ski/snowboard trip together before Xmas, too, so let's find a good day for that!

November 25th, 2009|10:24am

Maybe we should take December 18th off, and head up to Cascade bright and early!

Bryan

A lot of my web developer friends get frustrated with Internet Explorer and in their rage vow to refuse to create hacks in order to make sites work under IE's archaic rendering engine.  But this never works, expect on personal sites.  No business wants to alienate the vast majority of their market by not supporting IE.  No company has a strong enough web presence that they can people it's the browser's fault that the page looks like crap.  Well, almost nobody.  Google could tell people this.  They are ingrained in enough people's lives that maybe people will question the browser that came with their computer back in 1998 .

Now that Google has firmly establised themselves in the browser market (not to mention their many complex web apps that require the capabilities of modern browsers), they really have good reason to try this power play.  All they would have to do is redesign the default, simple Google home page using technologies that most modern browsers support but don't fail gracefully.  In fact, I've gone ahead and done this for them.  I've recreated the Google homepage using a bunch of HTML 5 tags.

I give you....  HTML 5 Google!

Go ahead and look at it in a browser that supports most HTML 5 (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) and take a look at it in one that does not (any version of IE).  It's functional in both, it just looks pretty stupid in IE (and tells users why).  If Google doesn't work well in IE, then either people will switch or Microsoft will catch up quickly.  Either way seems good.

Yes, I know that HTML 5 doesn't have an official spec yet, but basic elements can be supported to encourage use of obviously set elements.  This is just a proof of concept for someone like Google putting some pressure on Microsoft to catch up with the times (they're already doing this a bit, try visiting YouTube in IE6, it gives you a warning about having a sub-optimal experience and suggests upgrades).  IE isn't going to go away, so they need a good reason to make it better.

Feel free to swap this out for the regular Google page that your tech-resistant friends/family member have set for the home page of their browser.  Google, if you're reading my blog, feel free to use this idea.  You're welcome.

November 21st, 2009|11:13am

Like.

Mike Sherry

November 23rd, 2009|11:51am

Dear Google,
Please hire my friend Dave.
-THX Juli

Juli

Today I was checking out a link posted by an HCI friend of mine.  The site was about World Usability Day, which seems like a pretty good idea; make technology easier for people to use.  I work with HCI, I like things that make technology more user friendly. Usability good.  Yes.

What struck me as obtuse was part of their explanation behind the motivation for World Usability: "...Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob."

Is that really true?  That's like saying Photoshop should be as easy to use as Paint.  If you want a cell phone that just makes calls, these exist and I'm sure they're really easy to use.  If you want a cell phone that's also an mp3 player, video player, note pad, calendar, gaming platform, web browser, email client, camera, photo editor, etc. then perhaps you're going to have to deal with more complexity.  This is not to say that these complex systems can't be made easier to use, but it seems unrealistic to expect a device with multiple (sometimes unrelated) functions to be as simple as a device with a single function.

Perhaps this is just an extension of  my frustration with people who claim that technology makes life more complicated.  Nobody's forcing you to update your Twitter from your phone.  Nobody's forcing you to be in constant email contact (and if they are, perhaps for a work situation, then you should be getting compensated for this in some way).  If you think that using a microwave makes your life more rushed, don't use it.  Write a letter instead of an email if you really want.  Call someone rather than texting them if you want more personal communication.  Technology doesn't necessarily force people into more complicated lives, but it does provide them the option of "complicating" things if they choose to.

People, we're working on making things more user friendly.  It's harder than one might think for the technologies that provide the most benefits/features.  If you think that the cool features outweigh the added complexity, use cool new devices.  If you want something that does one thing simply, use that, they're out there (and then maybe check out the next version of the cool new device... it might have gotten better).

November 12th, 2009|1:32pm

I agree with you 100% here. People aren't born with the ability to write. They have to learn how. Every aspect of life has a learning curve, and technology is certainly no different. Just because you can't pick up a device and instantly know how to use every aspect of it doesn't mean it's hard to use. It may just take a few minutes of learning. And if you're that opposed to learning new skills, well, then you're pretty much done living.

Bryan

So being in a Psych (Cognitive Science) class this semester along with having a casual interest in math got me thinking about the real expected value of simple gambling (yes, this is honestly what I was thinking about right before I fell asleep last night).  Earlier in my Psych class we touched on the concept of perceived diminishing returns, how the more of something we have, the less "valuable" each increment seems.  Basically, if you have $100 and receive $100 dollars this is perceived as a more positive gain than if you have $1000000 and receive $100.  This can be extrapolated down to say that if you have $100 and receive $100 it is perceived as better than if you have $101 and receive $100 (technically).

Now, take simple .5 probability gambling (a coin flip).  You flip a coin; heads you win a dollar, tails you loose a dollar.  Mathematically the expected value of this action is 0 [ (.5 * 1) + ( .5 * -1) ].  So, based on probability you will break even financially from this gamble.

But you might not break even psychologically.  Based on diminishing returns, the $1 you would loose by flipping tails, is psychologically worth more than the $1 you gain by landing on heads.

Let's say you have $50 to your name.  If you flip a coin and win $1 you'll have $51.  If you loose, you'll have $49.  The $1 between $49 and $50 is perceived as more than the $1 between $50 and $51.  A more obvious example (values increased to make the point more clear) would be that you have $50000 to your name, and if you win you get $50000, if you lose you lose $50000.  The benefit of having $100000 compared to $50000 does not outway the benefit of having $50000 compared to have having nothing.

So my point is that from a psychological point of view the expected value of a coin flip gamble is negative.  What's more interesting is that if 2 people are playing this game, it would still be perceived as negative for both people, as both have an equal chance of losing (though it would be less negative for the person who currently has the most money).  Obviously this is just a little thought experiment in a closed system, but I still think it's interesting that an act that is probabilistically neutral seems to be psychologically negative.

Hmm... I guess this was kind of a weird and random blog entry, huh?

This last week or so, things have really been wrapping up for the release of The American Autumn's new record, Do You Like Me? Yes/No/Maybe.  I finished our MySpace redesign last weekend, and it turned out pretty nice.  I really hate working with all the hacks that are necessary to customize MySpace pages, but the end result is cool.  I uploaded a few new songs to our page as well.  You can check out the new design and new music at myspace.com/theamericanautumn.

I've also uploaded the info for this record to Last.fm (one of my favorite music related sites).  You can find some info, streaming tracks, and free downloads on the Do You Like Me? Yes/No/Maybe page there.

Finally, the shipment of CDs came in this week.  I had them delivered to my parents house because packages usually aren't left at my apartment when I'm at work, so I didn't get to actually look at the CDs until last night when my parents came downtown for dinner and brought me the boxes (and then we went out for some great Japanese food!).  They look amazing!  It feel so good to hold the finished product after all that we've put into this project.  Here's a picture of the box of CDs:



I couldn't be happier with the art that Marky did for us and Sooper Dooper did a great job with the printing.  I've been really busy with work and school lately, so I've been squeezing in time to promote this record where I can.

It's kind of weird to see the culmination of about 10 months of work.  A lot went into the song writing for this record and it contains some things that I'm very proud of for both my own writing and the band as a whole.  The recording sessions ranged from awesome and relaxed to stressful and frustrating.  There were times when I couldn't stop listening to the song we were working on and there were times where I couldn't listen to our songs for weeks.  Working with a 3rd party artist was a totally new experience, too.  I don't think I could ever do this kind of work for a band that I'm not in, but I LOVE having my hands in every element of our record.  This is, by far, the most involved record I've ever put out.  It's a big milestone for us as a band and I'm really excited to see what we can do with it.

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