It is done.

After a long while, I’ve finally finished uploading the entire archive contents of my old Xanga site here (one by one uploading xml files and waiting for wordpress to process them), so this will now serve as the definitive archive for my Xanga for the time being, all the way from September of 2004 until June 2013 when Xanga went bust and became a premium-only service.  All 3,780 posts across 10 years.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have went for the premium route–$48/year really isn’t that much, to be honest, and it would let me preserve all of my post links, which is actually quite important as I now I have a crapload of links in my xanga_favorites.txt file that don’t work anymore.  Maybe if there’s still a chance, I might join in, though I guess that’s also contingent on them surviving alright and not going bust again.  I’d be losing the ability to format all of my posts nicely the way they were supposed to be, as well.

It’s probably safe to say for now that I’ll still be blogging at http://ddrkirbyisq.blogspot.com/ for the time being, even if I do get the xanga premium membership.  Yes…it’s always sad to think that what I had can’t keep on lasting, but I won’t dwell on that here as I’ve already written about that.

Here is to the preservation of the past.  Hopefully I’ll at least be able to use a wordpress site search to find specific posts that I’m looking for in the future, when I try to recall what I wrote (this has already helped me out once).

Thank you for stopping by.

We’re moving…

This blog is finding its new home at http://ddrkirbyisq.blogspot.com/.  Please follow me there.

I’ve been here for 9 years, and haven’t regretted it at all.  It’s been great, Xanga.  It’s been really great.

Everything is being archived, so don’t worry…the history of this little corner of the internet should be preserved just fine.  But now is your chance to take a peek around and say a final goodbye, because it might all disappear from here…

Will probably be moving over to Blogger, or something.  Trying to settle on life balance again; some parameters have changed.  Don’t know how I feel about certain things, but I think the best way to feel is to just be happy, so I’m trying to go for that!  Being at peace with myself is really important.  PLUR and everything, whatever.  This is really uncharacteristic, I know…

Xanga shutting down

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/31/4384598/journal-site-xanga-tries-to-fend-off-an-impending-shutdown

Wow.  We’ve been going for many, MANY years.  Really sad to hear.  I’ll have to make sure I have everything properly archived before this happens…

My hobby: Blasting 9-bit chiptune music out of my windows whenever I’m on Stanford campus.

You know how there’s music that makes you cry because it reminds you so poignantly of certain things?  Maybe it reminds you of a loved one, maybe it reminds you of an experience you once had…maybe it reminds you of a breakup, or of graduation, or of a last dance, or anything.

Yeah…but there’s also music that makes you cry simply because of itself alone.  It doesn’t even have to have words.  Who needs words to express emotion???  Isn’t the larger part of emotion expressed via non-verbal communication anyways?  It’s not because it reminds you of anything…it’s not empathy that you’re feeling.  It’s just the things that are embedded in the song itself.

Do you have songs that are like that?

I feel like it’s unfair for me to point out songs that are written by myself, so I won’t.  I’ll point out some other ones instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeuMHOZ_bcY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVcFztNKCWQ

I’m not sure if they’ve -actually- made me cry before, but they’ve certainly come close.

It’s less about what is right or wrong, and more about how it affects people’s feelings.  Feelings are subjective, but to me, they are also objective…they’re very real, very important, very practical, pragmatic even.  “I cried because of it.  That must mean I feel strongly about it, because I only cry over things that I feel strongly about…”

My whole world is spinning

Note to self: detuned square waves make a good chord stab sound.  Same as detuned saw waves, but you don’t need a filter envelope on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWeurU22GXo

Writing this was pretty damn awesome.  It’s a remix of the main themes from the title screen and first level of the indie game I’ve been working on.  I used a multiband compressor on the layered snare to give it a lot of beef and meat–first time I ever tried that.  I learned the technique from one of Flexstyle’s project files for the FL Studio Remix Gauntlet at OCR and I don’t even quite remember how it’s supposed to be done, but I just gave it a whirl and I was really happy with how it turned out, so yay!

The song just evolved naturally.  Yes, I was doing some planning, but it was all spur-of-the-moment planning, as in “okay, what should I do next?  maybe……this?”  and of course, it all just worked.  You just kind of have this sort of intuition for what might work well for a song in terms of what direction it wants to go, and then you just make it work.  It’s pretty awesome.  Drums here are pretty awesome, I feel like this is definitely a step up from anything else I’ve done in terms of beefy drum work.

Anyways, the detuned square waves come in at the last section of the song.  Pretty cool, right?

Whole thing, made in 3.5 hours, pretty much.  Making music is exhilarating.  I mean, I MADE this.  Jeez!  Like…yeah…..

In the end, who would judge us, but ourselves?

Pseudocode is amazing.  I never realized how great it is.

When you’re drafting up the design for a class, you just write it in pseudocode first.  This lets you skip all the stupid details and focus on what each method is actually doing.  This also means that it’s super-easy to change your mind if you figure out that your initial design needs to be tweaked, because you haven’t actually written any real code.

Then after your design is finalized, all you have to do is go back through each method and fill in the method body by translating the pseudocode to real code.  And that’s SUPER EASY.  Remember back in the days of CS106X or CS107 or whatever when your homework assignment would look like this?

// Implement this function.  Given an input of 2 integers, it should do (blahblahblah)…
int BitWiseOr(int a, int b) {
   // TODO: Set up your data structure as a (blahblahblah)…
   // TODO: Perform the actual math by (blahblahblah)…
   // TODO: Return your result.
}

Those were the good old days, right?  Everything was all setup and laid out for you, and all you had to think about was that one little method that just needs to do whatever it says it should do right there in the comments.

Well, guess what?  That’s exactly what you get when you write pseudocode for yourself.

But it gets even better!  Once you write your actual implementation, you’re already done commenting it!  See, look:

// Given an input of 2 integers, this function does (blahblahblah)…
int BitWiseOr(int a, int b) {
   // Set up the data structure as a (blahblahblah)…
   …

   // Perform the actual math by (blahblahblah)…
   …

   // Return the result.
   return result;
}

 

Awesome, right?