Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Iain's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, December 6th, 2009
10:55 pm	Some uplifting music The theme from Tron has been stuck in my head for days (probably as a result of investigating possible keyboard purchases, and musing about different sounds and tunings—many roads lead to Wendy Carlos). I couldn't seem to find a good version online (though I did find sheet music, oddly) so I ended up digging out the DVD and watching the whole movie, just so I could properly enjoy the music over the closing credits. Possibly my all-time favourite movie soundtrack, even despite the Journey songs. In fact a lot of people seem to be suffering from the winter blues, so I thought you might like to have a listen: Tron Anthem (MP3) Make sure you crank up the bass! The Royal Albert Hall Organ deserves respect. (Just to clarify, this is the actual original music from the closing credits, not a cover.) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
2:08 pm	Son of RPG Part 2 of the Galaxy Princess saga! Last time the players found themselves trapped on the top deck as the ship was ambushed by space pirates; by the end of the session they'd managed to get one deck further down, where Fred was surrounded by pirates. For the second session I tried to make things flow a bit faster and crazier: the pirates were ambushed by yet more pirates, the artificial gravity failed, various health and safety robots tried to be helpful, and the players decided to take control of the ship. (Thanks to lpsmith for getting the transcripts organised.) ( Read more... ) Iain says, "Boffo has zero-G skill, of course." Boffo says, "hey yeah" Boffo rolls 3d6+7: 1 1 4 | 13 Boffo says, "...really I do better with my trained zero-g steed, Ruffles" Iain says, "There are about eight people in crew uniforms playing cards in one corner." Win says, "Playing cards in zero-g? Industrious." (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
7:46 am	LHC versus Doc Brown So I was just reading about the most recent power failure at the Large Hadron Collider—a near escape this time, as it switched seamlessly over to the backup national power grid. All this discussion of teraelectronvolts and "melting a 500-kilogram block of copper in an instant" reminded me of the "1.21 gigawatts!" from Back to the Future, and I got curious: What uses more power, the LHC or a time-travelling DeLorean? ( answer ) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
5:22 pm	Digital pianos So I'm finally looking into a christmas present I've been promising myself for years: a nice new digital piano. Of course there are hundreds of different models, so picking the right one is going to take a while. Here's what I'm looking for, roughly in priority order: Nice rich sound from the speakers and resonance from the machine as a whole; Really good keys and key action; Realistic sound over headphones; Something that actually fits in our spare room. I'm arbitrarily looking mainly at Roland and Yamaha. If nothing else they're the biggest and most established companies making these things. I can't find any comprehensive review sites, but I get the impression from various forums that Roland gives you more bang-for-the-buck on sound quality. On the other hand, Yamaha's range is wider than anyone else's, with ridiculous things like imperial grand player pianos with keys that move themselves if you throw enough money at them. (Luckily, even if I had the budget for that, it'd be ruled out by the "fits in the spare room" requirement.) Roland have "synthetic ivory" keys on some of their higher-end models; I saw one in a shop and the keys are very, very nice indeed. Worth a several-hundred-quid premium, though? Hmmm. Hmmm. Yamaha apparently have something similar. At some point I'll drop into the Yamaha showroom (Chappell's on Bond Street), although of course it's suddenly winter so my fingers will be too cold and stiff to test them properly. A couple of Rolands that seem to fit the bill and I should keep an eye out for: the DP-990 and F-110. If anyone has specific recommendations (positive or negative) I'd love to hear them. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
3:34 pm	RPG I had an itch for some kind of RPG. There are usually one or two games going on on ifMUD, but at inconvenient times if you're outside the US. So I thought I'd try running my own. ( Read more... ) Fred says, "Huh, and these use senidynic power sources -- those are really good for safety. If I'm going to overload it, I'll need to use a small focussing chamber with some kind of seni-refractory fluid..." Fred exclaims, "Like a bottle of rum!" (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 9th, 2009
4:47 pm	Endless business trip So I'm in Mountain View for a couple of days for our annual team get-together. Only the third trip this year, so I think I've actually been travelling less than I did last year, but it seems like more because they're only a few weeks apart. It's always the way; you put it off for ages and then three come along at once. Whatever happened to video-on-demand on planes? It seems like almost every transatlantic flight usd to have proper VOD, but these days you mostly just get six or eight channels that play stuff in a loop. (In Economy class, at least.) Bleh. Therefore I just spent the whole flight reading (when I wasn't eating or snoozing). Turns out it is possible to get sick of reading and ten straight hours is close to my limit. At least I had some decent books. Re-read Bridge of Birds—beautiful as ever. Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars, which is startling and heartfelt and insightful like all of his books. And Graham Greene, Twenty-One Stories; very good but not quite what I was in the mood for. I read Sack's Awakenings on my last trip. He brings out a really strong emotional reaction in me: waves of pity, empathy, horror, joy, nausea, "elevation" (as Ebert defines it). It's something about the way he sees into the soul of his subjects, combined with the incredible nature of their neurological ailments and abilities. Sacks is a master at pinpointing the philosophical questions that lie behind the medical facts; he's the non-fiction equivalent of Philip K Dick. If you read a work of fiction immediately afterwards, it's hard to avoid analysing the characters (and perhaps the author) in Sacksian terms. Greene's tragic, damaged characters make for interesting studies. Dick might be a little too much to bear. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
4:28 pm	Sketch #6 Long time since I did one of these. Here is some nice piano music for you! Miniature in A♭ (1.5MB MP3) In a dramatic break with tradition I actually composed this rather than just improvising. Embarrassingly tricky to play, as it turned out. ( notes ) (Comment on this)
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
2:43 pm	Wave redux So I sent out some invitations to deserving people, using @livejournal.com addresses because I figured that was simpler. But apparently that might not work if you don't have a paid account. Oops! On the other hand, it seems to have worked already for at least one person's free account. So it's unclear whether there's a problem or not. Hmm. I'll give it a little time, then figure out a way to sort it out if the invitations don't seem to be working. Sorry for any delay. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
8:06 am	Best text message I have ever received 30th june. Wembley. Spinal tap. Thoughts? Current Mood: YES (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 20th, 2009
11:47 pm	More Civ Another crushing Deity win! Cultural Victory this time, as the Greeks, in 1950. Good resource placement early on let me establish Athens as the premier city of science, and Troy as the city of gold; as soon as I secured production-focused Delphi in a dense forest of oak, that was pretty much game. I met the conditions for an Economic Victory at the end, and was busily crushing the German empire with tanks and artillery so Domination wouldn't have been far off either (although I'd have had to switch away from the Greeks' default namby-pamby Democracy). Your lead tends to grow exponentially in Civ once you're clear by a certain amount, so that isn't an unusual ending. But still pleasing. Don't worry, I won't keep posting about this, I'm just in a gleeful mood right now at finally getting my head around this game completely. (On the other hand, if you want more Civ stories, try this masterpiece on the Let's Play archive.) It's hard to remember that I was finding it tough going at King difficulty not so long ago. (Comment on this)
11:34 pm	Insufficient product differentiation I got Finish dishwasher detergent last time round and it worked pretty well, so I'm happy to stick with the same brand, but I have a hard time figuring out the difference between: Finish Powerball Quantum Finish Powerball Max-in-1 Finish Powerball All-in-1 Obviously they're all the most awesome, but one must be even more the most awesome than the rest. Luckily their website has a helpful page that sorts it all out. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
9:08 pm	I am officially half-decent at Civ Domination victory at Deity difficulty level! Aw yeah. I went with the cheesy but effective "Zulu rush" strategy. I don't usually play so aggressively, but I can see why Conan enjoys crushing the jewelled thrones of the world beneath his sandalled feet. It kind of grows on you. I met the Aztecs and the Arabs early on and swamped them with warrior armies; was rebuffed by China and India who by that point had developed archers, but had enough industrial capacity from my captured cities to get ahead in technology and eventually swamp them with knight armies. Knights are ridiculously good, I can see why so many online guides recommend them. Rather endearingly, the final battle in the game was Immortal Knight Army versus Pythagoras. Don't worry, my guys didn't cut him down while he drew circles in the sand, they just captured him. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
10:49 pm	Games games games Been spending a lot of time playing games lately. Storme got Civilization Revolution for the 360 a while back, and I liked it enough that I bought it for the DS to play on my commute. Depending on your point of view, it's either a bastardised travesty of the real Civ, or a neatly streamlined version more suitable for consoles. Me, I love it. I quite enjoyed previous versions of Civ, but I was never very good at it; I couldn't be bothered micro-managing dozens of workers, which is pretty much essential at the higher difficulty levels. Revolution ditches the workers, simplifies a bunch of other mechanics, and shrinks the game world, but keeps the overall feel of the game, and for me it really hits a sweet spot. I'm winning pretty comfortably at Emperor level now, which I never managed in any previous Civ game. (Partly because Revolution is easier, most likely, but it's not just that, I'm sure.) Time to give it a try at Deity! I also just finished Braid on the 360. All the reviewers love this game, and they're all dead right—it's fantastic. It's a platform game with puzzles involving time control: reversing time, slowing it down, even multiple timelines existing in parallel. That may sound a bit complicated, but the game does a fantastic job of introducing each new time effect and slowly ramping up the difficulty. And the puzzles are great; they're all completely logical and ingenious, and as far as I know completely novel. Man, I'd almost forgotten that games could have real puzzles in them. It also has a story of sorts—kind of a haze of symbolism, if not an actual narrative. You may love this, or you may not, but I don't think you'll hate it. I wasn't particularly taken with the story, but it didn't get in the way of my enjoyment in the slightest. The music is great, so you can always listen to that instead. Go and play Braid! It's available on the PC, and there's even a Mac version in the works, so there's no excuse. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
10:11 pm	The great question of our times Is the new Star Trek movie going to be any good? There is no end of numerological portents but I'm having some trouble figuring out what it all means. Everyone knows the "even Treks are good, odd Treks are bad" rule, even though it's mostly based on 2, 4, 6 and 5. But what number are we up to now? I've totally lost track. A dozen? More? But this is a prequel. Does that mean it's 0? (and therefore good!) But wait, they already announced the sequel! To the prequel! So this is what, -1? Okay, forget the numbers. It's a prequel, so there's the tragic precedent of Star Wars. Are there any good prequels? But it's more of a reboot than a prequel, they're saying. Reboots can work: Casino Royale, Battlestar Galactica. If it's a reboot, and we're therefore discounting all the other material, what you essentially have is the movie remake of a 60s TV show. Those are always bad, right? Simon Pegg as Scotty! I think I'm out of petals. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
4:37 pm	Two things all computers should have A what are you doing? button. When the computer pauses inexplicably and won't respond, and you don't know whether it's going to wake up again in a second or whether it'll still be frozen minutes later so you might as well reboot it, press this button and it'll tell you what the hell it's doing that's so important. An undo button that lets you undo the last thing you did, no matter what it was. It should reverse the flow of time and put everything back exactly where it was before you made some stupid mistake, to whatever extent this can be done just by shuffling 1s and 0s around (which is pretty much all that most computers do anyway*) * And they claim to be astonishingly good at it, too** ** But see item 1, above (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
10:09 pm	Strayhorn and Ellington Having lamented the lack of solo work by Duke Ellington, I figured I ought to buy what there is of it, so I picked up Solos, Duets and Trios from Amazon. It's been lovingly pieced together from fragments recovered from the archives, which means it's padded out with alternate takes and the audio quality ranges from terrible to okay. But if that's the kind of thing you're looking for, I highly recommend it. I've also been reading up on him on Wikipedia. It's absolutely fascinating reading. He had a very close but very strange relationship with his co-writer Billy Strayhorn; I'd seen his name on the credits of some Ellington songs but had no idea they were such close collaborators. Strayhorn wanted to be a classical pianist, but couldn't because he was black, not to mention gay, and ended up giving a classical edge to Ellington's jazz band instead. He was a friend of Martin Luther King, and a gay rights advocate before the term even existed. Died in '67 after three years of cancer. The album I bought has a couple of Strayhorn-Ellington piano duets, plus one take of Ellington playing a Strayhorn composition, "Lotus Blossom". It seems to have been recorded on the spur of the moment at the end of a long session—you can actually hear the rest of the band packing up in the background—not long after Strayhorn's death. It's incredibly beautiful. One take. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 21st, 2009
6:05 pm	Sticky pedal My keyboard pedal has gotten mysteriously sluggish lately. I lift my foot up and there's sometimes a noticeable lag before the sound dies away—maybe a quarter of a second. It feels weird for a simple digital gizmo to start developing analogue eccentricities, but I guess there is at least one moving part in there, so it probably is just gummed up a little. This is cramping my playing quite a bit, as I tend to use the pedal pretty heavily. But on the other hand, I now know that I could pedal much more and it would sound much worse. That doesn't necessarily prove I don't over-pedal but at least I'm not red-lining it, as it were. I guess the universe is trying to tell me one or more of the following: Don't pedal so much! Get a new cheap pedal (actually just a pad, they only cost like £10) Get a proper pedal (yikes, £30 or more) Get a proper keyboard (north of £1000 for something decent... one of these days) Get some WD40 (£2) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
7:44 am	What do you want to be when you grow up? Did anyone ever ask you that question? I always hated it because I had absolutely no idea what the answer was. Still haven't quite figured it out to this day, but I think I've narrowed it down to something along the lines of: Astronaut Scientist (any, possibly in windswept arctic base) Hotel bar pianist Civil engineer Game designer Fiction writer Artist Explorer Second-hand bookshop owner (craggy and eccentric) Beatle (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
8:58 pm	Sketch #5 Variations on a little sequence I've been playing with lately—Am, Fmaj7, Dm, Bb7+4. It reminded me of something while I was playing, but I couldn't figure out what it was; listening back, I was clearly thinking of Suicide is Painless. Prelude in A minor (5.4MB MP3) Maybe a bit on the long side, but I was enjoying myself. More random thoughts: No trouble staying in the groove this time, but it would have been nice to have some real modulation in there. I like the descending triads at 0:36, but once again I'm sure it's stolen from somewhere. Can anyone identify it? Improv win at 3:04. Wasn't sure where to go next, thought "let's just go down a semitone", and it worked. Tried a different keyboard sensitivity and piano sound this time, but I don't think it makes a lot of difference. Sounds great in the slow sections, lots of annoying clipped notes in the fast sections. Even if GarageBand can't keep up in real time, you'd think it could sort this stuff out when exporting. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
11:27 am	Watchmen, the movie Not bad. It's not the slavishly accurate shot-by-shot transliteration I feared; it's actually a pretty sensible adaptation, very faithful to the plot overall but with plenty of changes and simplifications. It reminded me a lot of the V for Vendetta movie, which I also enjoyed when I happened to catch it on TV. I'd say the two movies bear almost exactly the same relationship to their source material. My biggest complaint about the Watchmen movie is the violence: not just that there's too much, but that it's too stylised. The movie spends a lot of time making all the heroes look super cool and badass, which grinds against the tone and themes of the piece as a whole. (As a specific example, what's the point of that big fight in the corridor? It isn't in the book at all.) I got the impression that many people in the audience were confused about whether everyone was supposed to have super-powers or not, since they all seem to have the strength and speed of Spider-Man. Great acting, great design, great special effects. Dr Manhattan in particular is handled extremely well. Pretty much the only bit of design I didn't like was the two secret lairs, which both looked extremely cheesy; that's a shame, as both were particularly striking in the comic. Overall, it feels... ponderous. The comic is famously dense, but on the surface level it often moves along quite breezily, with lots of freewheeling conversations and asides. In the movie, the same material is fraught with tension and impact, with ominous sound effects and blaring rock songs (apparently chosen at random) underscoring every tiny event. I don't think it's entirely a function of the length of the movie and the complexity of the story; it's just that the "intensity" knob is turned up to 11 the whole way through. There's no room to breathe, and there's no room for wit (example: the grim fate of Big Figure could have been darkly comic, but is totally overplayed). I'd love to see something like this done as a TV miniseries. (I said this about Iron Man too.) The two- or three-hour movie somehow feels like the wrong chunk size for comic book stories. Maybe they should be aiming for ninety minutes. Not everything has to be the epic to end all epics. (5 Comments |Comment on this)