A jacket on a pile of clean but unfolded laundry. It was all approximately clean anyways, not too much of a dirtiness gradient going on. Standing quietly, meekly, behind the burgeoning cotton hill, was a dusty monolith trying hopelessly to hide its ebony black bulk from sight. An old grand piano. In better days, she was a magnificent New York Steinway Model D with a black satin finish and a penchant for Debussy, whose glittering whole-tone runs and lush, yet restrained, 20th century vocabulary perfectly showcased her sparkling high end and responsive yet firm action.

But, like an old retired spinster, she fell into disuse and faded into obscurity. What was the point?

I wandered around the apartment restlessly, looking for something of interest, even though I knew I wouldn’t find it. Everything was so familiar, old, worn from overuse. What was the use in buying another useless trinket? I’d only bore of it over time, another lap in the infinite race to achieving something more than a passing interest in anything.

Shelves. Endless shelves. At least, they once seemed endless. Hard disks, CDs, LPs, cassette tapes, printed scores, even inane wind-up toys playing out-of-tune “Twinkle, Twinkle”s and “Frere Jacque”s. Slowly, carefully, I’d gathered them all. What started as a few of my favorite piano works grew to encompass the complete oeuvre of the Romantic piano masters. Why stop there though? Bach, Berlioz, Boulez, Count Basie, Beatles, The. 25 letters left to go, might as well try. Try to finish it, complete what I’d started. All the music in the world. And when someone created something new? It would be mine. I would wait.

All the music there would ever be.

The academics argued, the news outlets exaggerated. It happened, eventually. Frustrated composers wondered what other soundworlds existed, if theirs was the only one. Searching, hoping for some forgotten detail, in vain. Same old laundry. Same old shelves. Same old sounds. There would be no more music.

No celebration. No joy that my long task was finally done, that no more shelves were to be conscripted into eternal servitude in those dark corridors.

My muse was mortal, after all. And she was dead.

Somehow, today, I felt something new. Anger. What foolish endeavor had led me here? Broke and alone, left with only these obsolete, meaningless trifles from another age. This bereaved widower had mourned long enough in the shadows. Turning away from the suffocating mass of plastic and vinyl, I noticed something on my desk: a match. Taking it carefully, I struck it against the brick wall and watched a flame spring into life. I watched as my hand let the flickering light fall to the ground. I left.

And it burned. All the music in the world burned on a funeral pyre made of wood, and brick, and linoleum. My apartment burned. And while it burned, it crackled and roared. The timbers groaned and creaked, crashing down occasionally in a thunderous cacophony.

I thought to myself, with a smile, “Nobody has ever heard the burning of all the music in the world. Nobody has ever heard a phoenix sing so beautifully.”

This is going to be a quick post about a tiny detail that I feel makes for a big increase in happiness for a lot of people.

A lot of computer users, when using text editors or any other application that use monospaced (having the same width for every character, useful for programming and related tasks) fonts to render text (source code, plain text, e-mails, markup, etc.), stick with the default font. On some platforms, notably Mac OS X and most modern Linux distributions, this default font is a fairly reasonable and attractive typeface like Monaco or Monospace. On Windows XP and Vista, however, the default monospaced is Courier New.

Courier New, 10pt

Recently, Microsoft released several new fonts with its new operating system, Vista. One of these fonts is a monospaced font specifically designed for programming, called Consolas. This font, and a few other nice fonts, is available by default in Vista and Office 2007, and can also be downloaded as part of the Office Compatibility Pack for free.

Consolas, 10pt

Isn’t that better?

The only caveat is that Consolas is designed with ClearType font smoothing in mind, and if you do not have ClearType enabled, then things will look very ugly.

Ted: I’m a master of cryptography.

Ted: You actually can’t export me to Syria.

It seems like an impossibly long time ago, but once upon a time, it was actually summer.  It was warm and sunny, and life was considerably more carefree than it has been since school started up again.  I was working my internship, singing with my a cappella group, and more or less just having the time of my life.  One weekend, a friend of mine who’d recently graduated and was working for Microsoft Games (Hi Karena!) decided to get a bunch of people together for a night of good ‘ole fashioned karaoke.

You see, before there was Rock Band, before there was Karaoke Revolution, there was karaoke.  Straight up karaoke, complete with terrible MIDI instrumental tracks, questionable transcriptions of song lyrics, giant tomes full of song titles and six-digit codes, and more reverb than anyone could ever possibly need.

So I found myself with around 12 other people, most of whom I didn’t know, in a little Asian karaoke place somewhere in the middle of Seattle.  We didn’t have much in common other than we were all friends with Karena, but we sang anyways.  We sang the classics, we sang Backstreet Boys, we sang harmonies with each other, we sang in key, we sang off key.  Hell, we even sang the guitar parts to “Knights of Cydonia” by Muse, complete with requisite headbanging and hardcoreness.

It was good times.

A 6.046 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) problem set about NP-completeness and randomized algorithms looms over my head like a vicious giant palm tree, and so the only course of action is to blog.

We had a concert this past Sunday for our 21M.303 (Writing in Tonal Forms I) class, where the fantastic QX String Quartet performed our humble compositions for us. The project was to write a minuet & trio for string quartet in idiomatic 18th century style, a goal I think all of us in the class achieved quite well. My minuet & trio pushed a bit against a few rules, a few dissonances sounded more 19th century than 18th century, but overall I (and I hope my professor as well) was pleased with the final result. A classmate and I recorded the concert, and recordings will find themselves on the Internet sometime in the near future.

Thanksgiving is coming up. Does anyone else notice that it’s basically a week late this year? I thought it was always the third Thursday of the month. Apparently somebody decided that it would be the fourth Thursday of November for 2008. I had a friend who actually booked her flight home incorrectly because of that faulty assumption. Is there some committee somewhere that’s in charge of deciding these things? Are there some people somewhere who sit around and vote on when Thanksgiving will be? The National Committee on Holidays and Funtimes, I would call it. I wonder if they have lobbyists. Could I lobby for a new holiday? Do companies lobby for holidays? Coca-Cola Day? Christmas, brought to you by Samsung?

I was leaving the bathroom yesterday, and I noticed something that I usually take for granted.  Our bathroom here in my luxurious accomodations at Burton-Conner has not one, but two light switches.  Two light switches.  The curious thing is that regardless of the position of the other switch, flipping one switch will always cause a state transition in the light.  If you think about it, this is actually pretty non-trivial to implement.

I couldn’t think of a simple circuit that would implement the desired behavior.  Clearly, neither putting the switches in series nor putting them in parallel would work.

The strange thing is, after observing the behavior of the switches for a while (much to the bewilderment of my suitemates), I realized that the state of the light was a simple XOR of the positions of the switches.  My bathroom has an XOR gate built in to it.  I wonder what would happen if I somehow “wired” together enough bathrooms.  Could I make arbitrary combinational logic circuits?  I’d need one other type of gate…

In my composition class the other day, while doing a harmonic analysis of a minuet & trio:

Isn’t that just about the worst chord in the worst inversion (iii64) you could possibly use as a pivot ever?

Yeah, but when you get to real music and you’re Haydn, you can do these things.

Basically, what happens when you progress to the third class in the MIT Music department’s composition offerings, you start tearing apart the system of nice-to-haves and never-dos that you’ve spent the past two semesters building up.  Rules turn into guidelines, and eventually turn into recipes for writing boring, formulaic music.  As my professor told me: writing one parallel octave is a mistake, writing 23 in a row is exciting.

Why did you write that voice leading there?  It doesn’t quite resolve the 7th regularly.

I don’t know. It sounds beautiful to me.

Somewhere in between the 12 hours of dance per week I’m putting in, the composition class I’m taking, and the Romantic music analysis class I’m taking, I’ve found some time to discover something a little bit comforting about the nature of art.  And by art, I mean the larger sense of the word.  Music, dance, Python, whatever tickles your inner sense of pretension.

The struggle between form and freedom.

That is the only reason I have yet to write a Python script to automagically generate my composition assignments for me.  It honestly would not be terribly difficult, because there are enough rules in play for many of the assignments that one only makes a few decisions before the rest of the notes just inexorably fall into place.  Writing music is not about being correct though.  Writing music is about that moment when you accidentally play a sharp instead of a natural, and you notice that it sounds infinitely more exciting (after all, what could possibly be more exciting than a misplaced augmented chord?), or when you deliberately scatter unresolved melodic lines about a deceptively complete harmonic cadence to nag at the minds of your listeners.

Rules give these little transgressions a framework.

You can’t really break rules for fun and profit if there aren’t any rules to begin with.  Rules create expectations and tendencies, and only then can you manipulate those forces to add some pizazz to your plain ‘ole I-IV-V-I progression.  Breaking, as an improvised dance, would be incredibly difficult to pull off without a huge vocabulary of moves and sequences to draw from.  It would also be incredibly boring if that’s all anyone ever did.  There is a sense among bboys that whatever you decide to do, be it adding some Latin flair to your style, freezing completely when nobody expects it, or running around pretending to be an airplane, if you do it convincingly and with confidence, then it works.

In math, 1+1 will always equal 2.  In art, 1+1 could equal 2, but it might equal 22 if it’s more beautiful that way.

Having moved back to MIT for the academic year, I am now currently taking some classes.  This is a generally accepted side-effect of attending a rigorous college.  More specifically, I am taking the following five classes:

• 21F.304 - French IV
• 21M.250 - Schubert to Debussy
• 21M.303 - Writing in Tonal Forms I
• 6.004 - Computation Structures
• 6.046 - Design and Analysis of Algorithms

I have a decidedly not-too-computer-sciencey schedule, which is nice for keeping a healthy balance in life and also keeps the giant progamming marathons to a minimum.  In addition to my classes, I am also:

• VP of Imobilare, the MIT breaking crew
• Webmaster and dancer in MIT Dance Troupe
• Director of the Harmonic Series, a small a cappella group that a few friends and I started our freshman year
• Floor chair of Conner 2

The way it works in practice, I usually just wind up doing classwork and dancing all the time.  It’s not bad really, since I actually enjoy doing both.  I’m looking forward to starting Dance Troupe rehearsals tonight as well, since I was fortunate enough to be placed in the three dances this semester that I wanted to be in (auditions went well, yay!).

Sleeping, eating, all that stuff too.

I’m too scattered right now to put together coherent paragraphs, so I shall list some thoughts that I have had recently:

• In lieu of a laundry hamper, a towel wrapped around your clothes functions quite perfectly.
• Looking well-dressed is as easy as getting well-fitting, nice basics (good jeans, some t-shirts, some dress shirts) and recombining them endlessly.  This need not (and should not) be expensive.
• When dancing hip-hop, I find it helpful to focus on two things: where you go, and how you get there.
• Teaching someone to give good massages is the gift that keeps on giving.
• Backstreet Boys.
• Happy hour sushi is made of rainbows and unicorns.
• When at a loss for content, make a list.

The worst part about writing a random list post is that I’ve never really figured out a good way to end it.  Oh well.

My colleague, Laura Nicholson, and I were discussing various topics over Skype one night, and I at one point mentioned my primitive system of classifying the myriad types of procrastination. We fleshed out some details together, made some terminology more specific, and eventually developed a fairly descriptive and useful (in my opinion) taxonomy for describing procrastination.

So, without further ado, I present the Tang-Nicholson System for Procrastination Classification.

Types of procrastination are given two attributes: class and level. Procrastination class can take on one of the following three values:

Class 1

Procrastination from a productive task by either not doing anything at all, or doing something purely recreational, e.g. playing video games, reading a book, or spending time with friends.

Class 2

Procrastination from a productive task by performing other productive tasks that are lower in priority, e.g. doing the dishes, running errands, or doing assignments due at a later date.

Class 3

Procrastination from a productive task by focusing and obsessing over details related to the task, e.g. learning LaTeX in order to typeset an essay, copying problem sets to make them neater, or obsessively refactoring code instead of finishing features.

Procrastination level is a positive integer that, in relative terms, describes how far removed from the actual productive task an activity is. Since procrastination can be composed with itself, this metric measures the level of nesting. For example, if one’s original task was writing an essay, imagine the following procrastination composition: write essay, learn LaTeX to write essay, configure Emacs for editing LaTeX, submit patch for bug in Emacs. The final step, submitting a patch for a bug in Emacs, is a class 3, level 3 form of procrastination. In fact, all of these steps are class 3, with level ranging from level 1 for learning LaTeX to level 3 for the last step.

And there you have it: a simple, concise way to precisely define how you are wasting your time.

Quick, what level of procrastination was I at when I first thought of this system instead of doing my psets?

This past Thursday night was one of the most enjoyable nights in recent memory.

The a cappella group that I’m a part of this summer, The Funktors, recently got its first gig: opening for Jon McLaughlin at a company barbeque on Monday.  This is very, very exciting.  We’ve been rehearsing about three times a week for four hours at a time for a few weeks now, and working pretty hard at preparing ourselves.  This Thursday, we were missing a few members because of scheduling conflicts, so our rehearsal was short and not terribly productive.  On a whim, we decided that it might be fun to go sing outside and get some fresh air.

We wound up wandering around downtown Seattle from around 10pm until 11pm and singing songs at various street corners for all of the homeless people and drunken clubbers who would listen.  It was a real joy when some random passerby would compliment us, or even go so far as to stop and dance along.  We even made $1 from a woman who gave us a tip, despite the fact that we had no tip jar/hat/guitar case.  On top of all of that, we sounded amazing.  Maybe it was the adrenaline, or maybe it was the acoustics of singing outside, but we were in tune, on time, and really just loving every note we sang.

Also, some guy spit at us.  This is patently absurd, mostly because we are probably the most harmless group of college-age, mostly Asian, happy-go-lucky singers you could ever encounter at 10pm in downtown Seattle.  Seriously, we couldn’t even hurt someone if we tried.  What sort of thought process goes like, “Hey look, a bunch of Asian kids singing ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’ I think it would a rational decision to spit at them.”?

Jerk.