Firstly, some new recordings. They're from rehearsal, leading up to our (damned awesome) performance at St John's church (halifax st, Adelaide City).

The gig was to help them raise money for their new Steinway grand piano, a laudable investment any time. My darling wife Jodie and myself headlined, singing up a storm, with Tony Lillywhite on piano, Claire Oremland playing some cello, Greg Crawford on the organ for our oratorio numbers, and about 15 members of the Prospect Singers bringing some choral goodness. Man that was a cool concert.

Secondly, my daughter's friends found this site recently apparently, and perhaps mildly teased her about it, I assume because it's slightly geeky. To that I reply that it is far geekier than you suspect and I HAVE POWERS OF NERDAGE FAR BEYOND YOUR MORTAL KEN. So there.

<quickly googles for evidence>

I'm mentioned in the Humanity+ FAQ, in the acknowledgements (with my name spelt wrong). Read that FAQ, then accept my mighty nerd rating.

The blogs I'm maintaining have changed. Point7 survived, the others didn't, but on the other hand there is a new one too.

point7 is a blog where I mostly ramble about my life. Jodie used to post there, and may in the future, but for now it's just me. It centers around downshifting, materialism, and maybe the possibility of finding an authentic life.

EmlynTech is my technical blog. If my propeller hat spins up when I start writing about something, it goes here.

Also, I'm not updating this site much; the real stuff happens on my blogs, on facebook (yeah, embarrassing, I know), and tentatively twitter (wow even worse). On twitter I'm "emlynoregan".

I've started glorious new blogs and vlogs!

Actualizer is mostly a link blog of stuff of interest to people who do stuff, culled from the zillions of lists and feeds and nonsense that I subscribe to in this eWorld.

point7 is a serious blog that Jodie and I are doing together, on downshifting, materialism, and maybe the possibility of finding an authentic life

Speaking of Freedom - Great speeches of our time is a video cast/blog which is really a link blog again, strictly for talks and speeches loosely about freedom and creativity in the internet connected world. Very specific, but I do run across these things, often long and excellent. It might become a miro channel if things work out, but in any case you can subscribe to the cast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpeakingOfFreedom .

I was thinking of playing some chess the other day. We have a coffee-table chess board, but no pieces. In the process of shopping for some pieces, I thought "hmm, origami chess set. That should be possible". My next thought was "I bet it's been done". And after that was "I bet there's a long list of variants, all explained in exquisite detail, online". So when I got home I googled "origami chess set". Try it.

Or, if you're interested but can't be bothered googling (because, you know, it's on another tab and you have to click a thing and what were we talking about?), then check out Joseph Wu's set.

Joseph Wu's origami site (nice!): http://www.origami.as/home.html
And his Origami Chess Set Is Here.

Update: Here's a video, I don't think it's the same set, but fairly similar (both use a bird base throughout).

Our family TV is, of course a computer. It's an old pc (althlon 2000 based machine), retired from the desktop, with a USB TinyTwin plugged into it, and of course with full internet access via a wireless card. So, we watch (digital) telly on it, we watch online video, we watch DVDs, whatever. (It also doubles as a halo server and as a spare machine for lan gaming around the house when we have visitors, but I'm rambling...)

We're always looking for good new online content, so imagine my delight stumbling over the news that the ABC has a new online service, called ABC iView: http://www.abc.net.au/iview/ . It's a subset of what they broadcast on regular tv, but moddled after the BBC's iPlayer service (which I would desperately like to access but can't watch due to it blocking dirty foreigners). Unlike iPlayer, it appears open to all, something which might delight our expats.

I'll be trying it out forthwith, although the TV is currently 0wned by the first series of Monkey...

(btw if you like Monkey, let me just say "The Water Margin". Apparently the brits know what this is, but it looks like an undiscovered treat for Aussies)

Atheist though I am, from time to time I suffer from the need to search for meaning in existence. It's a dreadful idea on the face of it; it's hard, it's unsatisfying for the most part, and makes one prone to intermittent release of the emo that quietly lurks inside us all. Existential angst, it's like, so whatever. No wonder people way back when gave up thinking about it, and invented religion instead.

And then, sometimes, you have a fruitful patch, where you hit a bunch of things you haven't seen, or haven't put together in quite the right way before. Maybe the universe isn't just a meaningless dance of atoms (atoms wearing black, with piercings and self image issues) after all?

I haven't finished reading the bits and pieces that I'm onto at the moment, but I thought I'd blog the links as a group, for, you know, posterity...

I fell over A Guide for the Godless - The Secular Path to Meaning by Andrew Kernohan - I found it in Richard Dawkins's links. You can buy this book, or just download it under a Creative Commons license if you don't need the dead tree stuff. I'm reading the downloaded pdf, only a little way in, but it's already great, I'll definitely buy a dead tree copy (although I might request he not actually send it to me, just want to show my appreciation financially).

Overcoming Bias is a blog ostensibly about, well, overcoming bias; particularly it is focused on how to be rational, where we are not rational, what that even means, etc etc. Eliezer Yudkowsky has been writing a series on morality in a reductionist universe (dip into it here, and note that he's not finished yet), which I've found quite thought provoking, even if the tone is fairly arrogant at times.

Also, this is a very cool little article, "How to do Philosophy" by Paul Graham. It's about approaching philosophy in a functional way; "Of all the useful things we can say, which are the most general?" I'm still getting through this one too, but so far so good.

All big and good stuff. But the scariest question of all is, why do we blog? I'm not touching that one...

I showed my daughter how to make a flash animation tonight. It was a pretty quick and superficial introduction, but I thought it might whet the appetite.

She disapeared into her room, and an hour or so later came out with this:

Sometimes people are just naturally good at things!

I'm playing with ideas for a Solar System game, check it out here. Here's a screenshot:

Awesome web comics you should be reading...

http://angryflower.com - If you don't keep up with Bob The Angry Flower, why are you even alive?

http://xkcd.com - Excellent geeky, netty humor (is netty even a word?)

http://explosm.net/comics - Always gross, not usually suitable for the kiddies or work, funny!

http://russellsteapot.com/comics - One I just discovered, looks promising.

xkcd.com is my favourite webcomic at the moment. 5 star geek content there, inciteful and intelligent (except for all the perl and python crap, but nobody's perfect). My favourite comic from it is this wonderful map of the online world:

I'm sure it'll date quickly, but a lot of thought has been put into it. Excellent! Note the compass rose that explains that north <-> south is practical <-> intellectual, and west <-> east is real life <-> web.

Personally, I'm trying to emigrate to SourceForge at the moment.

I had a performance (with my darling wife Jodie) on 1 December 2007, at the CD launch for SASSY. Amongst other things, I did two covers, "With or Without You" by U2, and "As the years go passing by" by Gary Moore. Well, that's not so interesting, I hear you thinking in the future...

However, what is interesting is the technique I used. I used a microphone, a laptop, and an audio module called a Mobile Pre, plus Ableton Live 6, to allow me to perform these songs solo. The general technique was to build a full sound (many tracks) by layering up loops of sound one after the other.

With or Without You is a song based on a repeated 4-chord pattern. I was able to create the four chords by successive loops, or layers, of single vocal lines, each doing a "voice" (in the technical musical sense) of the harmony. In fact, some of these were doubled up, I ended up doing 7 seperate vocal lines to make up the chord, starting from the lowest in pitch, and rising to the highest.

As the Years Go Passing By is a blues number, which I orchestrated with a simple "drum" track, "bass guitar", "lead guitar", and lead vocal. All these instruments were actually my voice, with real time effects applied, which I layered up one line at a time. I started with pre-recorded "drums" (need the timing to be there beforehand), then sang in the bass, then the guitar, then started the main vocal from there.

I've recorded the actual live performances of both songs, have a listen. There are tuning issues and whatnot (this was the first live performance, a proof of concept, not super polished), but if you can listen through those, see if you can hear how I've built these songs up one line at a time.

With or Without You: http://www.emlynoregan.com/Music.aspx?code=24540553

As The Years Go Passing By: http://www.emlynoregan.com/Music.aspx?code=50829551

As The Years Go Passing By:

 

I've recorded something new. Yay! I got some groovy new equipment (mainly new software, amazing), and this popped out.

The interesting thing is, although it sounds like it uses a bunch of instruments, it's all my voice, with effects on it.

The song is my usual miserable fare... check it out: Requiem for Hopelessness

My darling daughter drew me a beautiful dragon:

Click the thumbnail for the larger version. Not bad for an eleven year old, ey? Better than I can do, by a long way!

Fair Use Worth More to Economy Than Copyright, CCIA Says

"Fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright laws account for more than $4.5 trillion in annual revenue for the United States, according to the Computer and Communications Industry Association. "
...
"Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion, said Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion. "

Intellectual property continues to irritate me as a concept, and findings like the above are no surprise. The great commons of publicly available knowledge in the West is built, brick upon brick, by relying on what has gone before, and supports all endeavour, be it freely available or not. To take great body of knowledge, add your own miniscule contribution, then lock up the result, even preventing others from trying a similar path (via patents)... how can you feel anything but miserably mean about that?

I'm surprised I haven't seen anything about this before... I just
stumbled across it because they used it in the search for Steve
Fossett:

Amazon Mechanical Turk (Amazon MTurk) - Beta

"Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human
intelligence. The Mechanical Turk web service enables companies to
programmatically access this marketplace and a diverse, on-demand
workforce. Developers can leverage this service to build human
intelligence directly into their applications."

I've written more about the Amazon Web Services here.

I built a little web app to decode automatically generated .net assembly version numbers into the date+time of compilation of the assembly. I think C# developers (and other .net folks) may find this useful from time to time, when they are looking at a version of their code wondering "when exactly did I build this?". Using this tool, you can find the date+time, and thus retrieve the correct source code from your source control system.

If you don't understand any of this, that's entirely normal, don't lose any sleep over it...

There's an easter egg in Google Earth, a hidden flight simulator. On a windows machine, hit Ctrl-Alt-A to kick it off.

Read more about it here.

This is my first post on my front page blog.