Shoot me: I’ve been watching Jay Leno

Come watch with me… (The “head line” bits are actually pretty funny)

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Movie Review: St. Vincent

The following was written November 30th, 2014:

A fairly succinct review of the movie St. Vincent. No spoilers.

This was an enjoyable film. It was aesthetically pleasing to watch. The plot was both cute and serious.

The main character, Oliver, had the plights of any young boy in a new city. This element of the plot was fairly generic. His joining of a private catholic school, despite being jewish, was a nice piece of comedy. Despite the fact that there were very few people in the theater when I went to go see the film, were were a good number of chuckles and laughs at the ironies.

There was little scored music in the film, most of it was american folk and rock. For this type of film, the feel of this kind of music fit very well.

The ending was the typical sentimental tacky crap you expect from nearly every film, the epilogue went on for longer than I prefer.

My score: 8/10

 

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Hand-Picked Memes Vol. I

Dank. Continue reading

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The Lost Tapes of Delia Derbyshire

The subject of Delia Derbyshire and her music has always fascinated me. I was surprised at the lack of journal articles, books, and even websites. For those of you interested in Delia, you may enjoy perusing this (although it isn’t anything spectacular or new) and I hope the collection of links in the sources at the end may be useful. I suggest going here to listen to recordings: https://wikidelia.net/wiki/Audio

The Lost Tapes of Delia Derbyshire

Delia Derbyshire was born in 1937.  She was a composer of electronic music and was most well known for her works with the BBC Radiophonics Workshop.  Her works were heard on all genres of radio and television from the British Broadcasting Corporation, the most well known of which was the theme to Doctor Who.  Many of her works seem almost too sophisticated to be considered musique concrete.  Some are better described as soundscapes, some ethereal, some are dense and complicated.  

Before Delia was equipped with a tape player and an array of tone generators, she played piano, and later after she started work at the BBC she took up double bass (Brennan).  She studied music and mathematics at Girton College in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK and graduated in 1959 (Hodgson).  

After graduating, Delia went to the career center at her school and asked what she might do.  She explained in an interview, “I said I was interested in sound, music and acoustics, to which they recommended a career in either deaf aids or depth sounding,” to which she decided to apply for Decca records, only to find that they did not employ women in the recording studio (Surface).   Continue reading

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#MyUI

I call this parody. This is the Administration Building at the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho. Constructed around 1907.

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2018 Return

Some time in 2014 the server I had operating this website went down. It was quite some distance from me, and I just never got around to doing anything about it. I wasn’t writing as much at that time, and utilized my spare time with other hobbies.

After several cocktails one evening in June, I opted to pay for some hosting and get my blog back up again. Here we are, on HostGator, at a grand total of about $80 spent returning here again.

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MacGamut: Typical Chord Progressions Cheatsheet

MacGamut is such a godawful program that I cannot find a way to justify academic institutions using it.

When notating Harmonic Dictations in MacGamut, these are the progressions you will see for harmonic dictations of three chords:

 

Bass Chord
Do Re Mi I-V 64-I6   /   I-vii06-I6
Do Re Sol I-ii-V     /   I-ii-V7
Do Mi Fa I-I6-IV
Do Fa Mi I-IV-I6
Do Fa Re I-IV-ii
Do Sol La I-V-vi
Do La Fa I-vi-IV    /   I-vi-ii6
Do Ti Do I-V 65-I    /   I-V6-I
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Bumptop (Windows)

Many of us bleeding-edge computer geeks were excited to see Bumptop, a program that Bumptop screenshot allowed one to completely change how you interact with your desktop. Unfortunately, the honeymoon did not last long and Bumptop got eaten by a larger company for unknown purposes (in this case, Google).

It disappeared from the web and left many of us stuck Googling “where do I find Bumptop free” to no avail.

But now, I am pleased to write, Bumptop is once again available for download through Google Code (download link). It isn’t being very actively maintained and is still as buggy as it was when it originally became available, but you can (finally) get it again.  Continue reading

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Thought for the Day

Familiarity is a dangerous thing.
Most people do not deserve to have political opinions. Either they don’t know enough about their own views, or they know nothing about the “other side”. 

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UNIVAC I

Univac I (image)

The Univac I

Read about it!
This model was used from 1951-1954. 

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