Koda

And now for something completely different… free music!

Over the past week I’ve been working on a four minute piano piece. It’s part of continuning composition projects working with my piano teacher. This week, I finally got my act together and wrote something I feel is whole, and recorded it well enough that I’ll let myself get away with it.

In my opinion the song is about that experience when the weather can’t decide whether or not to be sunny. This is the first jazzy piece that I feel this satisfied with… so it’s a bit of a happy thing to get it out there. Oh, and everything was recorded and edited using Open Source software.

If you’d like to check out this piece of music, it is available for streaming and download on the Internet Archive.

Yeah, it drags in some places and occasionally I hit extra notes, but hey - it was a joy to create. Isn’t that what counts?

To be contemporary, one must mount an opposition to the old-fashioned.
To be old-fashioned, one must mount an opposition to the contemporary.

The joke is that what was once old-fashioned will soon become contemporary again, and the cycle will repeat itself.

To be modern, one must develop an appreciation of both the old-fashioned and the contemporary.

But while contemporaneity is brief and transitory; Modernity however, lasts.

Infinity != Infinity

…?

I never did remember what it was I thought I forgot…

Four days ago, I wrote about an icon project I was working on for gmpc, the music player. A few hours of work and experimentation later, here’s a second (nearing completion) take on the artwork.

24x24, and labeled.

My main goal with this redo was for the server to look less like a piece of paper and more like a reasonable tower. Not surprisingly, the hardest part of the design was choosing a perspective and composition that looked good at the size. After a bunch of trial and error and Inkscape crashes (probably over 15 at this point for the project), things fit into place.

Version 1. Looks like paper!

At this point, I’m quite happy with the status of these icons - though I’ll probably find a few things to change in the morning.

For a few weeks I’ve been thinking about and working (on and off) on an icon for gmpc. Similar to a previous vectoring of a logo for pympd, the program is an interface to a networked music player system. However, where with pympd the icon was descriptively referencing both the python code and phonetic “pimp’d” pronounciation, I wanted to do something more generic for gmpc, more suitable as a tray icon. I also didn’t want it to be just another music note, like the other popular players; because under the hood it’s fundamentally performing something different: networked media control.

24x24, for an accurate view.

Surprisingly, the hardest part of designing the icon was deciding how I wanted to represent the “networked” aspect of the program. I must have spent a huge chunk of time simply staring at that music note and trying to figure out what else I would put there. Earlier versions of the icon were littered with contorted music notes, and cables and ethernet plugs, which got really blurry and really didn’t do it justice. Putting in the tower made things so much easier! Once I realized the tower made a space for status indicators, everything just clicked into place. You’re looking at what I was finally able to come up with.

It’s still a little rough around the edges, but all in all I’m pretty pleased with the design. Right now, the tower looks a little too much like a piece of paper for my tastes - to be fixed tomorrow. Also, I probably won’t get a good idea of how well the icon fits until I see it up in the GNOME system tray. Though all given, not too shabby for a Wednesday night.