Mint Condition

A friend of mine, who goes by red_herring on IRC, has got me very interested in the concept of the Reactable. We decided to do a little loose collaborating so we’re both building Reactable-type systems for sound and music generation, and we’ll be sharing code and ideas. I’ve set up a page for my work on the project here (aptly named reMactable since I am using it on a Mac, although really it’s platform-independent). If you search for Reactable videos you can get an idea of what these systems can do, and it’s amazing that it can all be done with free software too!

To clarify, the company that makes the official Reactable does not release its software to the public except for reacTIVision, the object tracking software. However, there is other free software to get the job done, namely the SuperCollider programming language and a couple Python libraries.

I’ll be keeping my project page updated as I make progress, and hopefully I can put up some video of the system in action. It’s really fun to work with and has some great potential.

A friend of mine has begun teaching himself Japanese in preparation for a trip to Japan. This rekindled my interest in the language, since I had taken three courses in it. A couple days ago, I dug out my old Japanese workbook and dictionary, and I’m hoping to recall what I can in my spare time (which, unfortunately, is hard to come by these days). We’ll see how that goes, though I do have a keen interest in languages. Perhaps I’ll write a few things in Japanese as I relearn. Wish me luck!

I have a pet peeve: referring to bands as plural entities when they’re not. For example, the sentence “U2 are a band” isn’t right, and yet I see it all over the place. Would you say “the group are productive” or something like that? No, because “group” is not plural. On the same card, a band name like Supertramp is not plural either. Band names are typically singular nouns that refer to multiple people. Also, you are breaking grammar rules by putting a singular noun after a plural verb. The exception comes when the band name is actually plural, like The Beatles. It’s perfectly acceptable to say “The Rolling Stones are a band,” but it’s wrong to say “Led Zeppelin are a band.” Led Zeppelin is a band. Get it right people!

Although, some may say Led Zeppelin was just a band, like this guy:

So I managed to get a comment on my blog. It is from the ever-elusive Rufor. The meaning of the comment is quite mysterious:

Hi there,
I have already seen it somethere

Thank you
Rufor

What does it mean? You decide! Meanwhile, I have already seen it somethere, thank you.

So I really like that you can update Twitter via text message. I know Facebook has that feature too, but it doesn’t support my carrier, T-Mobile.

So I decided to give Twitter a try. We’ll see how that goes. I’m looking into combining my Twitter and Facebook status updates. There’s a piece of microblogging software called Gwibber that updates Twitter and Facebook, among other services. I really would like someway to either gather all my updates in one place (like this blog), or be able to send updates from this blog to all my other services. Maybe there’s a WordPress plugin for that…