Kirkland Waterfront (from Anthony's Homeport)

 

I would like a "two pack" of these

 

Redmond Light Rail Transit Center Parking Structure under construction

 

From the other end.  The actual station is under the outside eve in the foreground / left.

Foggy Day

 

Falls Power Art

One of the electric generators at Snoqualmie Falls gets its water through these pipes (diverted from the river above).

I thought it had a cool paint job but my wife suggested it's really mold that has been shaped by the rain.  I think she's right!

Snoqualmie Falls after a couple of "atmospheric rivers"

 

Fun with AWS and the BTC Blockchain

I have a personal task of understanding Bitcoin. Oh my. It is so simple and so complicated at the same time.

I was curious about how fast I could download the blockchain using EC2.

A 1 TB SSD attached to an EC2 instance at AWS costs $80 / month! (That seems excessive to me. But oh well.) I started over with a 600 GB drive - only $48 a month. Anyway, a c6i.2xlarge with the SSD and the cache set to 15000 can download the whole blockchain in about 10 hours which I think is pretty fast.

Once downloaded, I also copied it to S3 - that takes about three hours using the CLI, and about 3 hours to restore. That much storage is $18 a month and could probably be a lot less if I glaciered it. Anyway, after a few days of experimenting, I destroyed the whole set up, so the cost was really quite small!

It's so great to have access to a wide variety of computers for short periods of time for hobby-level costs.

BTW, the early blockchain is a lot simpler than the later blocks in the chain.  I think later blocks reference way more of the previous transactions.

Here's a graph of the download times; the vertical axis is number of blocks downloaded in that minute, and then horizontal axis is time.

The graph begs loudly to use a logarithmic (or exponential) scale but that would be less dramatic.

Stephen writing computer code with sixteen monitors

Full prompt (this from "bing create"):

stephen clarke-willson writing computer code; he has gray hair and a gray beard. He has sixteen monitors. 

I don't recall saying that I should three hands, but what can you do?  Oh, tell it I only have two hands:

Somehow that changed the style, but okay.

As it is, I only have one monitor.  But I've seen people with 4-6 monitors on super cool monitor stands and I admit I am a bit jealous of that setup, sometimes.

Music - The Stars and Stripes Forever - Funky Doodle Version

My friend Tom who worked for Disney Imagineering used to call the version of Yankee Doodle in America Sings at Disneyland "Funky Doodle."

Below is a YouTube clip of The Stars and Stripes Forever in that same funky style.  I love it!

If you pay attention you'll hear a jazzy version of the piccolo part played Hamond Organ style.

I've started the clip approx where Stars and Stripes begins, but feel free to restart from the beginning! It's a sequence of great patriotic music arranged Disney-style. 

 

Music - The Stars and Stripes Forever - Piano Transcription

The famous Horowitz somehow transcribed The Stars and Stripes Forever for piano.

Including the piccolo part!

Even as I watch this modern performance by Emily Bear I'm stunned at all of the parts being played simultaneously. 

Here's Horowitz, sadly, without video:

He rides the pedal pretty heavily. I think his rendition of the piccolo part is better than Emily's performance. What I love about Emily's performance is that she doesn't ride the pedal, and with the video you can see what a workout it is to play The Stars and Stripes Forever.

Music - The Stars And Stripes Forever - and 94 Piccolos

I have a set of cassette tapes that are biographies of composers.

Souza is one of the composer in my tape set!

I learned from the Souza tape, many years ago, you know, when cassette tapes were playable, often in vehicles, that Souza woke up one morning with the Stars and Stripes Forever clearly composed in his mind.  He just had to write it down.

One of the more striking bits of Stars and Stripes is the piccolo part near the end.

In the YouTube video below, the orchestra plays it through normally, and then reprises the piccolo part with 94 people!

Music - Synthesizers - the K150 and the Maple Leaf Rag

Most of my pianos samples were played back on a Kurzweil K150.  At the time, this device was quite clever - it used additive sine waves to simulate a piano.  Pressing an individual note did in fact sound like a piano!  But it had a couple of bugs.

One was that, for me, for playing fast ragtime, the pedal programming had a bug where if you hit a note, then the pedal, then lifted the note quite quickly, it made a truly horrible squaking sound.  Of course this happens a lot when playing stride piano when hitting the bass notes.

The other problem was that it does not in fact have enough sine waves to sound like a real piano.  Each note had 16 sine waves available, with a total of 240 sine waves available (so 16 notes at a time, if you didn't really use all 16 sine waves?  What an odd number.).  And so it has a kind of bell tone to it because it is missing some of the higher harmonics.

I played the version of Maple Leaf Rag below in June 2003 on the K150.  I guess one noteworthy thing is it forced me to play (mostly) without the pedal!  But you can hear the bell-like sound because 16 sine waves is not quite enough.

Music - 8-bit 11K

A long time ago, before 16-bit audio cards were normal, and storage was tight - maybe 1996 - I experimented with making great sounding low-res 8-bit audio.

This one minute sample of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata is 8-bits wide and playing back at the incredibly low rate of 11025 samples / sec.  It is stereo which improves it.

(I wish I knew the source of this music.  I have to admit it sounds a bit synthesized but that might also be the low bit rate.)

Pretty nice, eh?

Tracking

One thing is for sure - you don't have to worry about getting tracked for visits to this blog!

I noticed a link on the 'Stats' page - More about this blog.  It took me to a page that tells me that:

1. Everyone visiting is using Android OS
2. Everyone visiting is (somehow) using Mobile Safari (an iOS based browser) on their Android OS  and
3. Everyone visiting is from Singapore.

So ... 

Music - Piano - Two Part Invention in D

It turns out it is hard to play the piano well!

I didn't know because I simply spent every waking hour during my junior and senior years of high school teaching myself to play.

I always loved Wendy Carlos' performance of Two Part Invention in D (by Bach) on Switched-On Bach.

This is by far the hardest thing I ever taught myself.

Technically I know how to read music - actually doing it is very slow and painful.  My only chance was to memorize this.

I can't play it anymore.

As I listen to this recording from c. 1986 I hear every hiccup.  But a couple of days ago I listened to it in the car where I was quite a bit less critical and well, it's an achievement of some kind.

Music - Composed - Goth Mar

(Repost from 2008 with some additional text.)

I've only composed, as in actually thinking it through and writing it down on paper (physical or electronic), two tunes, and the first one is lost to history (so far). Normally I just noodle around and overdub.

The second piece I actually thought through is this one. 

I composed it one note at a time using Cakewalk in sheet music mode. It's got some really thick chords in it. It's got a good tempo. It's got some really fancy finger work - in fact, it's probably not humanly possible to play, which is cool.  One of my goals was to have constant volume for every note and have the dynamics come from the number of notes.  The drums were added later from the SR-16 using MIDI sync.

I like it quite a bit. 

Music - MIDI - Downtown

Well, this is sure repetitive. Not sure what I was trying for here.

Music - MIDI - Seaside

I wish I could tell you where the name for this came from. Doesn't sound much like being by the sea to me. More like trapped in a cave near the sea with monks chanting in anticipation of your drowning.

But I digress.

I think the rhythm is from a drum machine, but then I went and remapped all the drum sounds to other sounds.

Music - MIDI - Walking

This piece is greatly enhanced by the drum machine.  It's one of my favorite toys.  It's an Alesis SR-16 and the great thing about it was that you could trigger different "breaks" depending on when you hit the break button (or pedal).

Music - MIDI - South Coast Plaza

South Coast Plaza is a shopping mall in Southern California.

Inside was (is still?) the Carousel Court.

The Carousel Court included a clock which would "ding dong" every hour or maybe every 15 minutes. I dunno.

Clock with bells:

For unknown reasons I decided to actually compose a song with that "ding dong" (first->lower fifth) chime as the theme.

When I say "compose" I mean that I actually thought about what I was doing, recording it in MIDI, making modifications, and tweaking it a lot, as opposed to my improv pieces where I mostly just sat down and screwed around for an hour or two.

The bird chirp sounds at the start and end are because of a tune I learned about in a music class in college where some famous dude had composed an orchestral piece of some kind based on birds chirping. I felt my simple "ding dong" theme was reminiscient of that so I added in some bird chirps at the start and end.

As you listen, you'll hear that the piece is quite a bit more complex than "ding dong" but that was the basis!