Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Practicing Music Composition: What I've Been Composing

    I got back into practicing music composition again. I wasn't very good at composing before, and relied too heavily on piano, something which I still have trouble composing for, but this time I'm exploring more musical styles and instruments, like string and wind quartets. A lot of my musical style that I'm developing is highly influenced by film music and pop/rock, but with classical phrase structure and functional harmony. I like the simplicity and emotional expressiveness of pop, the ambiguity and coloring of film music and post-minimalist music, and the structure of classical music.

    Anyway, I decided to share some of my pieces, some of which are short, and some of which are unfinished. Here is one of the first real pieces I created in an attempt to move toward something more cinematic, and to try practicing with both piano and strings. The piece is very simple and repetitive. Originally, it was just strings with piano playing the chords, but I felt there needed to be a bit more variety, so I added a piano counter-melody that I quite like. Another thing I was experimenting with in this piece is the use of melodic doubling and harmonies that are panned in different ears, which pop music uses a lot, particularly in songs that are rich with harmony. For example, you'll hear one violin play a melody in one ear and a beat or two later, the second violin comes in the other ear playing either a variation on the melody, or a harmony. It's one of my favorite things to listen to in pop music.

  • connect us

         connecting the dots           
              the dots connect us           
                  in more . .               
                   . .. ways                
               than. . . .... .             
                  ... .. .one
    

  • From Braunwald to Glattalalp

    Today we went for a hike from the canton of Glarus to the canton of Schwyz. We went to Braunwald, up with the funicular, and then on with a chairlift to Gumen. There, we went above the tree line and got into a Karst landscape. Far below there are large caves. The snow melts in spring and provides the moisture for summer. Any remaining water disappears into the caverns below.

  • Recognizing my parents

    My parents are good people, and I think about this often. About how lucky I am to have had a childhood free from abuse, trauma, or neglect. To have had an adolescence where I was encouraged, supported, and redirected towards interests and passions that have stayed with me into adulthood. In this life I have been blessed in many ways, and nowhere is this more apparent than with my family and especially with my parents.

    My parents accomplished what I imagine most good parents hope for: to create a foundation for their children's future that is better than what they themselves were given. My dad is of the generation where corporeal punishment was very much his childhood experience: he was beaten routinely, and in those days nobody though anything was particularly wrong with this. I can remember being spanked once, ever. As an adult, I asked my mom about it. Why was I only spanked that one time? Her answer: your father and I learned early on that we didn't want to be the kind of parents who hit our kids.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Analogue Photography in a Digital Age

    About 10 years ago, while visiting the beautiful city of Prague, I rediscovered the joy of taking photographs on film. Since then, I've acquired a little collection of cameras, from sophisticated SLRs through to simple pinholes, with quite a few stops in between. I've self-published a few little zines, booklets and postcards, though I still wouldn't really call myself a "photographer". I am someone who enjoys photography, though.

    In some circles, there is fierce debate about whether analogue photography is superior to digital. To my mind this is a completely pointless conversation for one very obvious reason: almost all my photos whether taken on film or not, become digital at some point. I start with a negative on a piece of celluloid, I scan it to get an image I can see and maybe share. If I print the image at home, it gets sent via wi-fi to my laser printer or ink jet. If I make a zine, I put my images into a pdf before I send it off to be commercially printed.

  • The Thrill Wears Off

    My employer spent the last month cleaning out surplus inventory and getting rid of old items they no longer have a use for. We've been allowed to pick it over and take home what we want. As a result, I've acquired a mountain of electronic equipment. This includes everything from cables and adapters to flash drives, network switches, old smartphones, Raspberry Pis, two-way radios, a DVD cloner, and even a VCR. The biggest score came yesterday, though, when I received an Asus T100 series computer. This is an ultraportable laptop with a detachable keyboard; it has the physical footprint of a Chromebook, the form factor of a tablet, but is fully capable of running Linux. I've already installed DietPi and XFCE onto it.

    The rush of getting free all those free devices was thrilling. But once I got them home and had to unpack them wall, the dopamine was soon replaced with cortisol. Where on earth and I going to fit all this stuff?

    As it turned out, some of the equipment ended up being a bust regardless. The VCR was non-functional, and a relinquished Google Pixel 10 was locked with factory-reset protection, so they were unusable to me.

  • Self-hosting git repos

    SourceHut recently made a policy decision that i don't agree with, for reasons i don't agree with. I can't tell which i find more frustrating, but this post is not about that.

    This post is about self-hosting my git repos so that i can be free.

  • Manifesto detritorum

    This is version 0.1 of my personal computing manifesto. Stress on _personal_, it is not my intention to tell people how they should use their computer. It is a set of heuristics for myself, or perhaps, a declaration of intention.