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Archive for 2009

JBUM FOR RENT

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

The previous blog entry was a little too subtle. How’s this? Wanna hire a krazy dad? Click here to leave a message.

The end of a long commute nears

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

The headline: jbum looks for new job. For the past three years or so I’ve been commuting an hour and change to Santa Monica from the Burbank/Pasadena area. First to Yahoo! where I did front-end development for Yahoo! Music, and then to Topspin, a music industry startup that helps musicians acquire fans and sell music […]

Möbius Music Box

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Hey, remember that music box kit I was playing with a few months ago? Vi Hart had the brilliant idea of twisting the paper into a Möbius strip! This effectively doubles the length of the music and presents an interesting compositional challenge. Check out the video!

The color of us (continued)

Friday, August 7th, 2009

In order to understand the MOB Brown / orange shift phenomenon I’ve discussed in the previous post and elsewhere, I produced a series of histograms, showing the relative proportions of images in each set that average to a particular hue. In this collection of photographs of poppy flowers, you can see a clear preponderance of […]

The color of us

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I’ve been doing some new research on the “MOB Brown” or “Orange Shift” phenomenon I first blogged about back in 2006. As part of that research, I’ve produced a number of intriguing composite images, which I thought I would share here. Before I proceed, I should acknowledge that some of this art resembles the work […]

Crooked Waltz

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

A few people recently asked for sheet music to my piano piece Crooked Waltz, which you can hear on my out-of-tune piano in a living room recording here. In this piece the time signature changes all over the place, but when played properly, the changes aren’t too noticeable. Here’s a rough sketch of the piece, […]

Kasparov vs. Deep Blue Video

Monday, June 29th, 2009

A video recording of my piece “Kasparov vs. Deep Blue”, performed in Eagle Rock on June 26th, 2009. Garry Kasparov was played by Kyle Evans. C.B. Hsu was played by Richard Xin. The enthusiastic boy in the foreground is my nephew, Benjamin. More details about the piece can be found in this post..

Cranks, Cams & Computers Tonight

Friday, June 26th, 2009

I just finished setting up my installation piece for tonight’s concert in Eagle Rock. It should make for some crazy cacophony, in a room full of creative contraptions. I can tell from last night’s sound check that my two pieces are definitely on the hi-tech end of a spectrum that ranges from gloriously low tech […]

Musical Chess Details

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

A few have asked for more details about my hybrid chess/music system, so here we go. To recap a previous post, I’m working on a performance piece for the June 26 Cranks, Cams and Computers concert in Eagle Rock. In this piece, two performers will reenact a famous game of chess (Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, […]

The Voynich Manuscript

Friday, June 5th, 2009

I’ve been fascinated with the Voynich Manuscript for years, since first reading about it in David Kahn’s book The Codebreakers. Today’s xkcd comic provides a nice introduction.