You might have noticed things have been pretty quiet here for the last week or so. Perhaps you’ve been chomping at the bit, asking yourself: when will my beloved Koda ever return? Okay, not really, but let’s say you did.

Yes, I haven’t been keeping up regular writings here, but not without reason: I’ve been busy setting up a new rig! That’s right, I finally bit the bullet and got some solid hosting at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. And I love it.

So what does this mean for Koda? Tons. Tons of new room for exploration, that is. Blogsome has provided a wonderful introduction to blogging for me, though I feel it’s finally time to grow to a real site that I have the freedom to play around in. My hope is for it to become a blog, an art gallery, a home for projects, and much much more.

Over the past week, I’ve been busy porting things from here over to a real Wordpress setup, and revamping the theme to something representative of this transition. In short: it looks fresh, runs better than ever, and is where you’ll find me from now on. Oh, and it’s all sans-serify now.

It’s time to get the word out - and look forward to some exciting new things to come. So come on in, the water’s great!

Hope to see you there,
–Chromakode

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?

日本語を勉強します。OMG! 名前は片仮名で書きました！

(I am studying Japanese. OMG! The name was written in Katakana!)

Yeah, I know it’s been a lot of fluff posts lately… I’m sorry, but I haven’t found the time to do (or write about) anything particularly interesting on the technical side. However, there are (and always will be) lots of interesting ramblings to share… so here’s some more.

Today I got to see the first video in my Japanese Culture class. It’s a neat little course, and so every other Friday I will be able to enjoy a bit more of this fascinating culture. The movie we watched today was pretty awesome… a samurai story exploring gender and social power and the ethics around them (in historic Japan). So anyway, it’s a real drawn out story about a Samurai’s son who is ordered to marry the lord’s mistress (who bore the lord a child), and they fall in love only to find that due to circumstances the lord wishes that he have her back. So of course, the father and son can’t let that happen. But long story short, we sit through 1:30 of pretty cerebral (and completely fight-free) tension, only to run out of time right before the real samurai style ass-kicking begins. You can look at the IMDB page… and yes, that movie poster seems to be showing the fight scene that will surely be bugging me all week.

This Firefox video seems fast on its way to becoming viral (omg! I used a buzz word!). But honestly, childish and poorly produced as it may be, I laughed. Hysterically. It’s kind of sad to see the anti-quicktime anti-firefox response these first contenders seem to have attracted… though it was also quite disappointing to see that the web designers had opted to use an open source unfriendly and hard to use quicktime embed instead of better distribution methods. But regardless, it’s quite silly to see some of the early adopters reacting in such a way that defaces the pages of some bravely uninvolved contest entrants. Surely there is a more mature way to express codec-induced anger than this.

Finally, if you like optical illusions, you’re in luck, because out of complete whim and amusement, here’s a feed for a more-than-daily updated blog dedicated solely to this purpose. There’s a lot of nice unique stuff there, and looking through them will certainly eat up at least 15 minutes of your time.

Yum. Mighty Optical Illusions

Good night.

Go to any computer running Firefox, click on the url bar, and type in “morbidly lazy”…

I have nothing else to say about this.

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.

Did some quick design work this evening for a friend over at HackersEntity… it was fun to just throw some ideas together quickly for a change. HackersEntity is an (ethical) source for hacking information and knowledge. We were shooting for a bit of an unconventional layout, with the navigational content at the bottom right, and nothing (for now) but a symbol at the usual top left. My idea behind this was to use the “newline symbol” as a logo/motif for the layout, as the newline could be considered as the classic character utilized by computer hackers. So, the newline up at the top left is supposed to uphold this design and point the reader down to where the real information lies. There’s not a lot of content up yet, though I’m sure there will be in the next couple of days. It’s a fun little unique layout, and I certainly had fun working on it.

School’s started up nice and busy-like, and I’m once again finding myself caught up with a good deal of homework and on-campus time. But hey, the days are getting brighter, the weather’s getting warmer - the end is within sight.

I decided to take a course on Existential Philosophy this term, and so far the readings have been suitably thought-provoking. Over the week I read “Waiting For Godot” and have been thinking about it - but the sad thing is that after the other assigned 2 pages or so of Camus, I must say that I found that Camus put forth similar ideas in a much more accessible and short manner (which is ironic considering Waiting For Godot is a play). The ideas are very interesting, and really fit with some of the things I’ve been thinking about (here and elsewhere).

However, the thing about this philosophy is, I guess I feel that any discussion I make of the ideas will come out missing the punchline of the material, and not making a lot of sense. It’s kind of strange for me to find myself thinking this, because at the same time I can see the silliness in my fear of not being able to discuss the concepts with the right level of “authority.” In light of this, I am tempted to post something about the topic now, but once again I find myself concerned about not getting it right in my currently sleepy state. Boy, what happened to that blind self-assurance I once knew and loved! I’ll let myself off the hook for now…

… One part of the course is to be writing weekly reflections/notes on the reading presented - and so I hope to post selections from those that I find most apropos. It is truly fascinating stuff, and I enjoy thinking about it… and I hope you might enjoy reading some rambling about it in the future, too.