The New Blather

I’m almost done plotting my next novel attempt. I’d consider it mostly fantasy, though there are some sci-fi elements to it. It might be considered YA fantasy, since the three of the four main characters are under 18, but I hope it will be an interesting story for any age. (I’m not aiming specifically for [...]

This article was printed in our newspaper today by Michael Gerson: Ayn Rand’s adult-onset adolescence The article touches on quite a few things, but I really wanted to comment on one thing, because it shows that Gerson might need to check his premises. He writes: Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with [...]

In the comments section of this post I made a while back, someone asked the following: Your criticism of the Khan Academy, as well as the current public educational systems, all the way from elementary schools up to college is not entirely without merit. I agree with your major premise. However, it’s always easy to [...]

Whew, I can’t believe it’s Friday already. This week I’ve been mostly learning Android programming. I played around with some OpenGL graphics programming for Android a year and a half ago, but that experience is really no help for what I want to do now. So I’ve been going through a book on Android programming [...]

I got some awesome writing advice last week: skip the boring parts. I’ve been always trying to write in a mostly completely linear fashion. But so often I get stuck or bored, and end up starting a new story. I’ve known there were people out there who wrote their stories out of order, but that [...]

There are still plenty of features I’d like to give my melody generator eventually, but there are only certain features I think really need to be a part of my melody generator before I work on getting it out there for the world to play around with (in the form of an Android app). So [...]

For the past couple days, I’ve been working on getting my melody generation program to output MIDI files so I wouldn’t have to convert them manually from a text file, which takes an annoying amount of time. And… I’ve done it, haha! So now I can tell my program… hey, I want 1,000 melodies, go. [...]

It’s week 3 of the great reprogramming of my upcoming melody generator! While I could continue tweaking the main algorithms endlessly, I’m at the point now where I feel I need to branch off into three directions: 1. I need to get the program to output MIDI files automatically so I don’t have to keep [...]

Here are yet more computer generated melodies from my in-development automatic melody generator. I have made a lot of changes to the algorithm since I posted the last set of examples, but I’m not sure how much you can actually hear. Still more work to be done… anyway, here are 12 more melodies… Computer generated [...]

I’m reading The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, only on page 150 of about 1000, so this will take a while. Unfortunately it’s due back at the library soon, so I might just have to buy it because I doubt I’d be willing to stop reading once it’s due. It’s an addicting book. Anyway, [...]