Wednesday, May 10, 2006
I finally finished making the .pdf of the lectures for Selections 2.0 this afternoon. Last night’s guess that it would take an hour was, of course, wishful thinking. I hadn’t factored in all the typos and other little snafus I ran into that required me to replace pages and so on. Though tedious, I learned some things about the program, made a better document, and everything came out alright in the end, which is what’s most important.
The first unexpected visitor that came to see me in the office today was Lydia, who’d gotten word through Forest that I was looking for a pianist. Word travels fast! We had an interesting conversation, I told her some ideas I had for using keyboard samples in a soundtrack, played her the recording I made yesterday, and she expressed interest in working on a collaboration, which is cool. We’ll get to that in a couple of weeks. We also talked about her research involving the “moods” found in music, which is really fascinating and I hope to be able to help her out with it somehow. She brought over an article she published on the subject that I look forward to reading very soon.
I was about to start making texts for the database in the afternoon when my friend Ali showed up. We hadn’t seen each other in awhile, so I welcomed what I thought would be a brief conversation. We were catching up when he told me he had spent the past two weeks making Flash movies, so I asked him to look at a problem I was having with an animation in Bangkok last week. Then we ended up spending at least the next 90 minutes devising a new way to make the animation work. It wasn’t what I expected to be doing, but the result was good (http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2006/bankgkok3.swf) (beware high bandwidth, again). When I got home and showed it to Amy she called it the best one yet and noted that my relations with Iran seem to be much more functional than Washington’s!
So tomorrow I’ll get to the text making, meet with John and Sau Bin about other projects. Friday’s a national holiday here in Malaysia—Buddha’s birthday—but I’m hoping for a meeting with the database folks nonetheless. Otherwise, perhaps a drive out into the countryside with gear…
The first unexpected visitor that came to see me in the office today was Lydia, who’d gotten word through Forest that I was looking for a pianist. Word travels fast! We had an interesting conversation, I told her some ideas I had for using keyboard samples in a soundtrack, played her the recording I made yesterday, and she expressed interest in working on a collaboration, which is cool. We’ll get to that in a couple of weeks. We also talked about her research involving the “moods” found in music, which is really fascinating and I hope to be able to help her out with it somehow. She brought over an article she published on the subject that I look forward to reading very soon.
I was about to start making texts for the database in the afternoon when my friend Ali showed up. We hadn’t seen each other in awhile, so I welcomed what I thought would be a brief conversation. We were catching up when he told me he had spent the past two weeks making Flash movies, so I asked him to look at a problem I was having with an animation in Bangkok last week. Then we ended up spending at least the next 90 minutes devising a new way to make the animation work. It wasn’t what I expected to be doing, but the result was good (http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2006/bankgkok3.swf) (beware high bandwidth, again). When I got home and showed it to Amy she called it the best one yet and noted that my relations with Iran seem to be much more functional than Washington’s!
So tomorrow I’ll get to the text making, meet with John and Sau Bin about other projects. Friday’s a national holiday here in Malaysia—Buddha’s birthday—but I’m hoping for a meeting with the database folks nonetheless. Otherwise, perhaps a drive out into the countryside with gear…
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 6:38 AM 
