Here's a preview of what I've been working on for the past 1.5-2.0 years:

preview.mp3

Just a quick compilation of some bits and pieces. There are 12 instrumentals total that I have lined up, and no lyrics yet. In fact I'm not planning on doing much else with these tunes until the studio is built. Plus I'm thinking that I'd like to record vocals directly to the studio computer rather than the digital recorder, so I might as well wait for the new computer too.

So in the meantime, nod your head briefly to this stuff :)

My cartographic file parser is working the way I want it to now. There are four total files that describe states and counties for all 50 states, and two files for each state that describe cities and two files for each state that describe zip codes. I've parsed all of the state and county data, and have parsed 13 states worth of cities and zip codes. Those 14 states include Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Nebraska.

Some interesting stats so far:

• 21,018 unique boundaries have been imported (a state, city, county, or zip code)
• 2,737,277 individual latitude and longitude points have been imported
• Alaska has the greatest number of total points (13,756)
• Washington County in Oregon has the second greatest number of total points (10,436)
• The city with the geratest number of points is Columbus, OH (2,393)

Greatest number of points by state:

1. Alaska (13,756)
2. Texas (6913)
3. Michigan (5254)
4. Minnesota (5192)
5. West Virginia (4929)

Fewest number of points by state:

1. Wyoming (522)
2. Utah (570)
3. Delaware (589)
4. Colorado (601)
5. Rhode Island (688)

Greatest number of points by city:

1. Columbus, OH(2393)
2. Joliet, IL (1326)
3. Springfield, IL (1261)
4. Dayton, OH (1168)
5. Decatur, IL (1052)

I guess either the data collector who did Illinois and Ohio was very detail oriented, or cities in those states just have complex boundaries :)

Fewest number of points by city:

1. Lithium, MO (5)
2. McGrath, MN (6)
3. Urbank, MN (6)
4. Cordova, NE (6)
5. 19 others tied at 6

Other notables:

• Madison, WI (986)
• Rochester, MN (554)
• Minneapolis, MN (235)
• Duluth, MN (264)
• Hennepin County (473)

You may or may not know that the state of Minnesota is building a new Highway 212 through Eden Prairie, Chanhassen, and Chaska. Part of the project was completed a few years ago and the new highway terminated in Eden Prairie. A few months ago they broke ground again and construction started for the remainder of the highway.

Since the 2nd phase began, I've been watching a ridiculous amount of construction traffic make rounds on Pioneer Trail while heading in to work. In the morning when it's still dark just west of Highway 101 on Pioneer Trail you can see the lights from an enormous line of dump trucks waiting to load up excavated earth. They've been working out in a farm field, so you can see off in the distance where they've been excavating. But this morning I actually saw the giant parts of a new concrete overpass in the field. It was kind of surreal in a way. I've been driving on that road for three years and suddenly there's this big object out in a cornfield. Kinda weird.

I'm glad the project is under way though. It won't be done for a few years, but the area needs the new traffic capacity with all the new housing going up.

The demographics project has been revived. In between attending to Eva and working on the basement, I've been digging in to code. I haven't actually gotten in to any WPF stuff yet - I've been focusing on parsing the cartographic files from the US census bureau. In my earlier experimentation with 3D in Avalon, I gave the cartographic data just barely enough attention to make things work. This time around, I want the data to be complete, which means parsing many, many files and having a faster parsing process.

The files break down like this:

• Two files that describe US state boundaries (about 8 MB total)
• Two files that describe US counties (about 52 MB total)
• Two files for each state that describe cities (for Minnesota, this is about 2.5 MB; ~ 125 MB for the entire US)
• Two files for each state that describe zip codes (for Minnesota, this is about 10 MB; ~ 500 MB for the entire US)

I had a first attempt at a parsing process that ran extremely slow. It parsed the entire state files and a fraction of the county files in about a half hour. Way too slow. I improved the design and now it flies and will parse states and counties in a few minutes. Cities and zip codes are buggy at the moment.

Once I get all the data parsed, I'm estimating there might be around 1,000,000 individual latitude and longitude points. What's interesting is that states with a lot of coastline have the most data points. Alaska has about 7400. I haven't counted/observed any other states, but at a glance it looks like Florida, Maine, Hawaii, and California complete the top 5.

Once the data is in SQL, I'll write some more...

I want to be a state electrical inspector. I called him this morning to schedule the 2nd rough-in inspection for this afternoon, but he said they only do inspections from 9:00 to 11:00 AM. I couldn't do that today because of meetings. Damn, those are some nice hours :) Guess I'll wait until Monday.

Last night I was experimenting with a tune that I'd recorded a while back, trying to make it sound good. I discovered something that absolutely changed the sound of the entire song and I wish I'd figured it out before. It's just a subtle change, but the impact was huge.

I mic both the top and bottom of my snare drum and record each mic to its own track. The top has a lot more tone and a lot of low frequencies. The bottom pretty much just gets the bright snare sound. The snares tend to buzz a little bit after hitting the drum - like maybe 0.5 seconds after the hit. Plus the snares buzz from the drum picking up vibrations from other drums like the bass drum and toms. The bottom mic picks up all of this extra buzzing, and in the entire mix with all of the instruments it just makes the drums sound like they're playing in a bright room with a bit of reverb. It's a lot of extra mid-high frequency sound that muddles the entire mix.

Enter the gate. For those of you not too familiar with audio processing, a gate is a dynamics tool you can use to limit the sound that is allowed to pass through to the output channel. You can set a gate threshold level, and only sound that reaches above that level is allowed to pass through. So, I put a gate on the bottom snare mic. I prevented the quiter buzzing from passing through, but allowed the louder hits from the main snare notes to pass.

I couldn't believe the sound difference. The bottom was buzzing so much and I didn't even realize it. So now the drums sound super, super clean and the snare is crisp without any after-buzz.

So why didn't I think of this earlier? I don't know. In general I've stayed away from gates because I've had difficulty with them in the past. I've used them while trying to control cymbal bleed-in on the bass drum and top snare mic, but the audio ends up being kinda choppy if the gate isn't set just right, and the cymbals still bleed when the gate is open as you hit the drum. Ick. But the bottom-snare mic doesn't pick up much cymbal bleed naturally, so it worked really well to use a gate.

I downloaded some hands-on labs for WinFX yesterday and stumbled across some code to put video on rotating 3D surfaces:

Click for a larger image

Oh, what fun we'll have...

Late last night I fixed up my 3D tutorial for the new CTP release of WinFX. There really wasn't a lot to change, luckily. I also removed the tutorial from the confines of my blog engine (.Text) so that it can breathe more easily. The new tutorial is strictly content without navigation, eye candy, or constraints on content width. As a result I don't have to worry about the code snippets scrolling. Plus now it looks more "technical" :)

Anyway, here it is: http://www.kindohm.com/technical/WPF3DTutorial.htm.

This was the first time I've been back in WPF/Avalon in a while. It's nice because WinFX and WPF perform so much better now, and VS 2005 has obviously been released too, so it's faster than before. When I originally wrote the tutorial, I was using a Beta of VS 2005 and a very early build of WinFX - before Avalon was named Windows Presentation Foundation. Anyway, it flies now, and it's cool.

I was at the Wild game on Tuesday night and saw this hit on Andrei Zyuzin (see video link below). It was really tough to watch. After he got hit he crumpled to the ice and was kicking his legs vigorously in pain. When he lifted his head off the ice a moment later there was a pool of blood, and he crumpled back down. I've seen guys bleed in hockey before, but not kick and writhe in pain like that. It was tough to watch.

I heard he ended up needing 50 stitches to close a laceration on his forehead and he has some nerve damage.

The first half of the video focuses on the fight between Mitchell and Doan, but about halfway through it shows a slow motion replay of the hit at a different angle.

View the video

Maybe if there were 48 hours in an earth day I'd have more time:

1. Write my own blog engine. I've been using .Text for about a year and a half to power this site. It's fast and reliable, and I love the skinning capabilities. But it's not perfect, and it's not valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. There are some quirks about the posting options that I dislike, it doesn't support tagging, and there are some limitations to skinning.
2. Explore the world of WPF. I'd just like to become more knowledgable about this technology in general.
3. Revive my demographics project. It'll be a little easier to work on now that VS 2005 is out and there are new WinFX bits out. I think this project could be really cool... there's opportunimty for performing a ton of lightweight visual analysis on local and national demographic data. Something like this might already be able to be accomplished with something like Google Maps or Google Earth, but what fun would that be?
4. Construct and launch www.AreYouTwins.com. This is something that Neil suggested doing during lunch yesterday after I talked about a hypothetical scenario that I won't get into just yet. The problem with this project is that it would involve a lot of time filming and compiling video. The domain name is registered though. Thanks for the idea Neil.
5. Get virtualpuck.com off of its face. I'm not even sure I'm going to keep this site alive, but the problem is that it's a dog. It's slow. In short, the way that the site obtains statistical data about players (e.g. shot percentage, goals against per game, etc) is not optimal. I already know what the better architecture would be, but I just need time to work on it.

I've been looking for this video for about three years. Believe it or not, I saw this on my wedding night. I'd never seen a band this heavy play on national network television. I think it's somewhat impressive that Corey (vocalist) left out all of the f-bombs in the lyrics without accidentally slipping one in. Anyway, this is an excellent modern metal performance. Even if you don't like Slipknot or heavy music you should watch this.

Ah, this makes me miss going to shows :)

"Toy".

I picked up Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm this weekend. The book covers ways to deal with multiple browser types and evolving web sites by using CSS and XHTML. While skimming through it in the store I already learned a few new things, and was instantly hooked. Web design, page layouts, and CSS have always been an area of interest to me. I'm no graphic designer, but I've always enjoyed tackling an interesting web design regardless of the complexity or number of its images. Personally I'm not as interested in designing for multiple browsers - I think that different browsers will display web content more consistently as per w3c specs over time. I'm more interested to read about the book's approach to separating content from design with CSS.

I received one of these as a gift this weekend:

It's a Samsung YP-U1X mp3 player. I've been wanting a cheap little mp3 player for a while so that I can listen to music while mowing the lawn and stuff like that. But this one is really cool because it also has a built-in microphone for voice recording. My old cassettte tape portable recorder was always a hassle to use because it wasn't digital. For those of you who know me pretty well, you know that I really liked that recorder and got all kinds of interesting sound bites on it. Now you can expect me to try and catch you saying something stupid again :)

Nikki got me something that I've been wanting for a long time for my birthday:

This will fit perfectly in our Wild-themed basement once we get it built and decorated. Woo haa!

Got them via FedEx on Friday:

Woo haa!

I took a few artsy-fartsies of one of my AT3035's recently with our new Canon:

Click here to view all of them. I'm addicted to our new camera and interested in getting better at taking interesting pictures.

My Halo2Basics.com site gets about 2000 hits a month, so I figured with all of these damn web sites that I've been launching I might as well take advantage of the traffic and make some coin.

So, I subscribed to Google AdSense a few weeks ago and put some advertising on the H2 Basics site. So far I'm not to impressed. I've had one click for $0.06. But what's interesting is that the advertisements are kinda-sorta-relevant in a certain way. While I write this, these are the current ads on the site:

• Sniper Rifles - Wide array of Airsoft Sniper Rifles Shop for Airsoft Online Today!
• The Airsoft Gun Warehouse - Free Shipping! Great deals Guns, Rifles, Gear, Apparel
• Paintball Sniper Guns - One Shot-One Kill Destroys Enemy. Long Boy Paintball Sniper Guns!
• Tuffpak Guncase - The Adventure Begins When You Pak! The ultimate in gun and bow cases.

Hrm. Ok, I can see how ads for weapons would show up on the site since the content of the site talks about weapons and combat. What I was hoping for was ads related to the XBox and Halo game paraphernalia.

So I guess the general idea that you can't get something for nothing still applies. If I want to make money off of this, I'll have to put in some effort and work on the content of the site a bit.

Halo2NameGen.com has been upgraded:

We're going to New York City! Nikki and I booked the flights and hotel last night. We're staying at The Hotel Metro, which is extremely close to the Empire State Building, a few blocks from Madison Square Garden, and about 10 blocks from Times Square. The trip isn't for a couple of months yet, but we're really looking forward to it. We already bought tickets to a New York Rangers game too. Everything at face value was sold out on Ticketmaster, so we went through a ticket broker website and paid a little more. We didn't really mind the extra price - the important thing is getting into Madison Square Garden! :)

If I had a lot more time on my hands, and decided to buy a really big shovel, I could end up in the Indian Ocean:

Assuming you didn't die of heat exhaustion from the earth's core first, you'd probably drown if you dug to the other side of the earth from Chaska.

You can dig to the other side of the earth using the Dig to the Other Side of the Earth Google Maps mashup. I got to this mashup from googlemapsmania.blogspot.com after hearing about it on MPR the other day.

Found this this morning on YouTube.com. The "acoustic" guitar solo is pretty funny:

Video permalink.

In the words of the electrical inspector: "It was all looking great until we got here (the bathroom)".

Basically, the entire basement looked good to him except the bathroom needs to be on its own circuit. It shouldn't be too bad to do because I don't have to really disconnect much - I just need to run a new cable from the service box and hook it up to the existing entry box in the bathroom. The main downside is it'll take a little more time and I need to call him back to have him inspect the work again. It could have been a lot worse though :) I'm just happy that this milestone has been reached and that I know where I stand for the electrical work.

So, this weekend I hope to get those changes made and have him come back on Monday or Tuesday.

Why, why, why?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/01/13/iran.nuclear/index.html

Yes, I know that nuclear power is a "benchmark" that some nations use to indicate that they are self-sufficient and cool and hip. But nuclear power is so 90's. Hell, it's so Cold War. I guess it just wouldn't be the same to see a headline like "UN demands Iran to back down from Solar-power technology; Isreal threatens with hydro-electric strike".

Anyone have a recommended hotel to stay at in Manhattan?  If so, let me know. 

Spread the word. Halo2NameGen.com, a Halo2 Gamertag generator, has been launched. Fear this:

Mike's Halo 2 Gamertag is:

DrunkenFreak

You blaze through the game in a zen-like stupor and your battlefield skills are so crazy that your teammates don't recognize you.

Permalink: http://www.halo2namegen.com/Default.aspx?name=Mike

I'm still looking for more gamertag data, so if you have ideas or suggestions please let me know.

In the past week I've put in about five hours worth of work in the basement. That's more than what I've put in the past five months. I thought on Sunday I'd get everything done I wanted to, but I spent some time working last night too. Basically I'm getting everything in order for the rough-in electrical inspection. The major items were getting the new circuits I was working with un-hooked from the main electrical panel and taking down old temporary circuits. The electrical panel was a rat's nest of tangled cables from the previous work that I'd been doing, so it's nice to have that all neat and tidy now.

I'm still not ready. All of the electrical stuff is done, but I want to have the space looking decent for the inspector. I'd like to leave a good impression on him so that he thinks I have my act together and am not messy and careless. So tonight I need to vacuum the entire space and throw away a ton of garbage. I also need to print out the circuit diagram that details what I've done on paper. Unfortunately, I've deviated from the plan, so I'll need to figure out if iI want to update the plan to fit what I've done or just add some notes on the changes. I created the diagram in Visio so it's not like I need to re-write it all by hand. But if there are minimal changes then I might just leave it as-is and make some notes to explain the changes.

I'm preparing myself for the worst. In reality I think the "worst" would be that I'd have to re-run a few cables. The inspector might also have some concerns that I've had everything hooked up already, even though I've stripped it all down. Can't do anything about that though... We'll see what he says. I'm pretty curious. The inspector will only come out on the same day that you call, so assuming I finish up tonight I'll him first thing tomorrow morning and schedule the inspection. This'll be a huge milestone in the project once it's done.

I always thought that the reason the NHL and Minnesota Wild got such poor media coverage was because hockey isn't a very popular sport - especially when it's competing with other professional leagues in the area like the NFL, MLB, and NBA. But I was wrong - the reason the media coverage is poor is because the media itself is just stupid.

Nikki and I were at the Wild game on 1/9/2006 and were listening to the post-game press conference on the radio on the way home. If you've never listened to coach Jacques Lemaire speak during the post-game press conference then you're missing a good listen. His French-Canadian accent is extremely thick and it's entertaining to listen to him speak. He's always very blunt in his remarks too and has interesting things to say.

Anyway, one of the reporters attempted to ask a "question" about how Kurtis Foster (a Wild defenseman) took some bad penalties and as a result he was benched for a lot of the game. The reporter said something like this (this isn't an exact quote and I'm just going from memory):

So in the 2nd and 3rd period, Foster wasn't playing much. He took some pretty bad penalties in the 2nd period and you had to bench him. A guy can't take penalties like that and expect to play.

So what exactly was the question for Jacques to answer? Jacques didn't really know either, so his response was something like this (again, not an exact quote):

Well I guess you have my answer already. He didn't play because he took bad penalties. Do you have any other questions with the answers already for me?

A second reporter then did the exact same thing asking about why defenseman Filip Kuba wasn't dressed for the game, saying that his play has been sub-par lately and that he needed to be scratched from the roster. Jacques responded similarly saying how great it was that they were doing the press conference for him by giving all the answers.

Other than that, the reporters just commented about some of the bad puck bounces and talked about how much of a bummer it was to lose the game.

Why aren't these reporters asking questions and digging for information? Why aren't they interested in other important aspects of the game? The first two reporters could have had a lot more to write about if they would have asked "Why was Kurtis Foster benched" and "Why was Filip Kuba scratched". Jacques probably would have elaborated a lot more instead of making fun of the journalists. Why didn't they ask about other important parts of the game instead of commenting about trivial stuff like puck bounces? Why not ask about why Tjarnqvist keeps making bad passes and creates turnovers? Why not ask about how well he thought Gaborik played? Why not ask about how it looks like the Wild are starting to favor Fernandez over Roloson in goal? Who does he think played well and played poorly?

Maybe if the local media knew how to gather information then the NHL and the Wild would get better coverage. I always thought it was the low popularity of the sport.

I dug up a few old demos again from the Basic album:

• Complicated Maze Demo (listen to the real version) - I actually recorded this tune about five times before the final version. The main reason for that is because it was the first tune I really worked on after I got my Yamaha digital workstation. There are a few other demo versions of this song floating around my house on CDs somewhere, but here's the first one I've ever posted. This is one of my poorer vocal performances. I sound bored. I'm not singing in tune very well, but that's no suprise :)
• Making Future Go Demo (listen to the real version) - Again, I was learning how to use my new Yamaha recorder with this one. This sounds way different than the final version on the CD. It sounds thin and not very powerful, and obviously doesn't have any vocals yet. The snare has a nice crack to it though.

Thanks to Jake's post about YouTube.com, I've uploaded a few videos. YouTube is pretty cool, but so far I can't find a way to get widescreen videos to display correctly. They get squished to a standard screen size. Bah. Here they are:

Get On Your Knees and Bark Like a Dog

7-21-2005 Sidetracked Project (widescreen squished)

I was thinking this weekend about what 10 albums I'd want with me on a deserted island, assuming that I can't ever go home and get a different album, go somewhere and buy a new album, and that I'd have some method of playing music (e.g. boombox or iPod or whatever). If you know me, then I suppose you probably won't be too suprised by this list. Be sure to list your top albums (doesn't have to be 10. maybe 3 or 5...) in the feedback.

1. Betty, by Helmet
2. Hostile Ambient Takeover, by The Melvins
3. The Blue Album, by 311
4. Transistor, by 311
5. Lateralus, by Tool
6. The Complete Concert: 1964, by Miles Davis
7. At Basin Streeth, by Clifford Brown & Max Roach
8. The Rise of Brutality, by Hatebreed
9. The Maggot, by The Melvins
10. Everyone is Beautiful to Someone, by Edgey

Man oh man, there are a lot of CDs that were close to squeezing in to this list. Phish, Led Zeppelin, Soul Coughing, Aphex Twin....

The regular season at VirtualPuck.com is starting to wind down. January is the last full month of games, and a few games will be played in February. Who will make the playoffs? Will the Alpacas pull off a string of wins and rise back into league dominance? Will Jake Good continue his scoring run and be named league MVP? Will Sean Connery continue his mindblowing goaltending performance?

I'm close to officially launching a new website.  It's up and running, but I'm not going to officially publicize yet.  I need more data.  Specifically, I'm in need of ideas for XBox Live gamertags.  If you want you can help join the effort and list some of the best, coolest, funniest, or weirdest gamertags you've ever seen here.  Or just make some up.  Just leave a comment. 

Second chord sounds in a 639-year concert:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1972430,00.html

I love John Cage.  I had the opportunity to play his Living Room Music about ten years ago.  I'm not as familiar with his work as I'd like to be, but there was no composer like him.

Images from Friday's LAN party are available for viewing:

http://www.kindohm.com/ngallery/albums/57.aspx

Chapter Two:

Mike Hodnick says:
fog

Encarta® Instant Answers says:
Here is the definition for fog: thick mist.

Mike Hodnick says:
mist

Encarta® Instant Answers says:
Here is the definition for mist: thin fog.

MSN Messenger has encountered a circular reference and needs to close. Would you like to send an error report?

Perhaps if I had special knowledge of Fixed Point Theory I'd understand Encarta's answers better.

I'm learning that childrens' DVDs have very, very, very catchy songs on them.  Eva received a few DVDs for christmas that we've been playing for her.  She's a little young to really be super interested in them, but she watches them a little while she plays on the floor and stuff.  She got a Sesame Street All-Star Alphabet DVD [1] and I can't get the “J” song out of my head. 

Jump jump jump jump jumpin' J.  Who's going to jump with the jumpin' J?  J-J-Jaguar jumps with jumpin' J.

[1] Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report actually stars on the DVD as the letter Z.  Weird.