January 2012
1 post
2 tags
How Messing Around With A Camera Gave Raul A Heart...
Raul snapped the picture. Invisible protons from the pre-existent future gathered behind his crazy lens. They rested on the CCD, burned an image into binary code. Raul fiddled with some of the buttons on the back of the camera and squinted at the digital display. His smile turned to a frown, the frown turned to horror. The camera fell and broke. Raul died of cardiac arrest. I haven’t had...
October 2011
2 posts
4 tags
You Are The Reflection - Part II
A scientist sees into another world, and runs into some unwanted consequences.
Read part 1 first.
The next day, the phone rang. “Hello?” “Hello. Dr. Emmit Gilkus?” “Yes, this is Dr. Gilkus. How can I help you?” “Dr. Gilkus. One of our agents will be arriving at the door of your laboratory at 7:55 PM tonight. Make sure you are the only one in the laboratory. You are to give our agent the...
4 tags
You Are The Reflection - Part I
A scientist sees into another world, and runs into some unwanted consequences.
If you’ve already read this, read part 2.
Dr. Gilkus glared at the long man in the mirror. “Not working,” he mumbled. He waved his right arm and saw the expected response reflected back at him. “It’s not working.” Behind him, his young assistant fidgeted. “I have been telling myself that this would be...
September 2011
3 posts
The Thing Under The Bed
My wife made me feel like a kid, but not in a good way. I should have bought that bat.
“Gage. Gage! There’s someone under our bed,” she whispered.
Her words touched a cold can of soda to my neck. I remembered all those other times in my childhood bed, waking up in the middle of the night, realizing that I had kicked off my armor, the bed sheet and comforter that had been my...
3 tags
The Sun Kills Itself
I wrote this one for a 78 word story contest in Esquire Magazine.
The sun kills itself like no one expects it to. First it gets real hot, like 95 degrees in winter, but the people are okay.
They build these huge power plants that shoot lots of light-waste into space. They suck up as much sun as they can. The sun, pissed, burns up the ocean.
Then it starts getting tinier. Lots of clouds come...
The Blackener
Stone-faced, I stared out of the porthole at the small star cluster where I was born. It was gone; it had been gone for almost a year already, but the light of it’s death was just beginning to reach me.
I blinked. When I opened my eyes, Celo 2 had disappeared, the entire system was left in the cold.
Celo 1 nova-ed from the sudden change in gravity and incinerated what was left of it and...
May 2011
2 posts
2 Single Paragraph Stories
1.
I get a lot of other people’s mail. Yes, it’s all addressed to my house, but I have no idea who the names above the addresses belong to. It’s like I have a history of all the people who have ever lived in this house. Only, the pages are out of order. I have no clue whether the chapter on “Mark’s Playboy Re-Subscription Notices” comes before or after...
I get so distracted.
I am prone to distraction. I feel like I can never get anything done because I can never concentrate on one thing for more than 5 unbroken minutes. I blame the culture that I live in for me being this way. Every day I come home from work with a new ambition; some new creative dream. I want to be a great programmer. I want to make lots of money programming. I want to have written a great novel. I...
April 2011
2 posts
Stuck on a hard programming problem? →
3 tags
Lisp My Number
So, I bought a fun little book.
Land of Lisp by Conrad Barsky M.D
Below is my first Lisp program. It’s a guess the number game.
(defparameter *small* 1) (defparameter *big* 100) (defun guess-my-number () (ash (+ *small* *big*) -1)) (defun smaller () (setf *big* (1- (guess-my-number))) (guess-my-number)) (defun bigger () (setf *small* (1+ (guess-my-number))) ...
January 2011
1 post
2 tags
Artificial Composer
Today I’ve been thinking about what it would take to make an artificially intelligent music composer.
I’d like it to come up with songs based on some “seeds” that I would feed to it initially. These “seeds” would be the most basic elements of a song, such as:
sound types (frequency, dynamics)
length
speed
harmonies (or lack of)
chords
chord progressions
...
November 2010
1 post
JRPad: A Javascript library for drawing on... →
August 2009
4 posts
2 tags
Weekly Update
This is not an update on the progress on Kokomo because, simply, I haven’t worked on it this week. I’m working two jobs, going to school and working on my church’s website (which suffered a setback when I realized it is much more economical to pay for hosting than to do it yourself, after i’d already worked pretty hard on getting a server up and running).
I just...
What Kokomo is and a problem.
What I’ve been working on is a drum beat creation application. Basically my own version of Fruity Loops.
It is to be programmed in C++ using the wxWidgets framework for the GUI. I’m using wxWidgets because I want Kokomo to be easily portable to different systems.
I worked on Kokomo on Thursday. Basically I learned how to add a menu bar and menu items with wxWidgets. I had a...
1 tag
Simultaneous cross platform development.
I have a new programming setup. Two laptops, one (a Dell Latitude D830) running XP, and the other (a Toshiba Satellite) running Ubuntu.
Take special note of the Slinky.
The point of this setup is to do simultaneous developement with wxWidgets on Windows and Linux. Here’s another view.
July 2009
1 post
1 tag
Five beautiful things about Shaina.
I want to take some time to list 5 things (in no particular order) that I find beautiful about a special woman; my wife Shaina.
1. She takes care of me.
She always knows what kind of dinner I want after a long day at work.
2. She gave me the “world’s cutest daughter”.
No really… she did. Dont believe me?
3. She loves me.
And I can’t see why.
4. She lets me be a...
April 2009
2 posts
2 tags
To Do...
Learn to code in Python or Ruby and find out what these things have to do with something called Rails.
Do a bunch of XNA tutorials to learn how to make a clone of Castle Wars for the Xbox 360. :)
Finish my secret project.
Michael Moser
Just heard a presentation from the VP of Engineering for DataSync. He gave some really good information on getting into the industry. I’m going to start posting more code on this tumblog.
March 2009
7 posts
1 tag
Been playing Minerva: Metastasis →
Warning: Half-Life 2 EP2 needed.
1 tag
Happy Birthday!
SELECT sysdate AS “Mom’s Birthday” FROM dual;
1 tag
Been studying Daniel. →
2 tags
Querying glass.
SELECT * FROM music WHERE artist_name LIKE ‘%edison%’;
1 tag
Asterisk - Failblog
Studies have shown that adding the word “FAIL” to a ridiculous picture does not actually make it any funnier.
*studies conducted by Gage Herrmann.
Garfield Minus Garfield →
Funniest thing since 5 minutes ago.
1 tag
I made a song.
It’s called You’ve...