Halloween and Pumpkin Carving

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays of the year. The whole concept of people running around outside going trick or treating an so forth is just great. No other holiday is as communal.

This year as always I carved pumpkins and I did it with Meg. I posted the picture above. Can you guess which one was done by an art student? Yeah........

This is one of the first years that I did not have the opportunity to go to a Halloween party or get dressed up. I have just been too busy and unfortunately I have class on Tuesday from 6pm-9pm. The coming of Halloween signals two things in my life. First it means that the holiday season is beginning, and second it means that my birthday is coming up (November 2nd). This year I am a little apprehensive about my birthday, but I will save that information for another blog in a few days.

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Found Pictures From Political Trip to Wisconsin

Googling myself this evening I stumbled upon an old link to pictures that were taken from my Political Science 499 trip up to Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Trip

This class was one of the coolest I have ever taken in college. It was all about elections and it just so happened to be the presidential election of 2004 when I took the class. I had the opportunity to meet all sorts of people such as Jim Ryan, Judy Bar Topinka (umm, yeah), and many, many more.

Around the last week of October we all headed up to Wisconsin (yes the entire class) as part of a project to campaign for our candidate of choice. At the time Wisconsin was a battle ground state so our professor thought we should expirience the full swing of the election.

That was really a great time. I wish more college classes were as immersive as this one was.

P.S. I still have the John Kerry pin that I carry in the upper left pocket of my jean jacket. For whatever reason I just cannot get rid of it.

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Moving on to a New Job

I normally don't post about job related activities on this blog, but I am going to make a slight exception this time.

Today was my last day at my current job. I was an intern at a municipal government near Chicago. I am moving onto a new part-time job working for a non-profit organization starting this Tuesday, that with any luck will become full time once I graduate this December.

As with all new chapters in your life I of course have the sort of mixed feelings. On the one had I am glad to move on, but there are inevitably some moments where you like the consistency. Overall this whole transition period right now in my life is one from a college student to that of a professional. Three weeks ago I handed in my thesis paper. Tomorrow I have my comprehensive Exams for graduate school. They are basically pass or fail exams that rest on the whole two years that I have been here.

I am sort of nervous about them, but hopefully, if I have been awake for the past two years I have learned something and should be ok. I'll let you know tomorrow how they went.

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The Battle Over Electronics

I am a big gadget freak and in many respects, a hardcore computer nerd. I know quite a bit about computers and customize Windows pretty easily. Since my switch over to Mac this past summer I have become increasingly interested in different sorts of technology articles talking about stuff for the Mac. Essentially I am trying to become as geeky on it as I am on Windows. During this process I have noticed that there appears to be a very high level of divide over the PC vs. Mac world.

In almost every single discussion I have looked at online that discusses the merits of either system, there are inevitably users from the other camp who seem to feel the need to overzealously hype their system of choice. You get you obvious claims of "Man Windows sucks, M$ is just trying to take your money", and on the other side "Apple computers are over priced and no one uses them".

This sort of divide does not just exist in the computer world, but I think spreads to the electronics world in general. You see these same tensions in the Video Game market where people devotedly tout the PLAYSTATION 3 (yes, it is supposed to be all capital letters) over the Nintendo Wii or the Xbox 360, or the iPod over the Creative Zen and Microsoft Zune. If you think about it, you don''t see this problem on other markets of the economy. I have never seen a Nissan owner get onto a message board online yelling at people about how stupid their Ford is. I have never seen a guy at Burger King shout at a McDonaldÂ's customer that they are an idiot noob who has no sense in taste. Have you seen a person in Best Buy making fun of someone because they bought the Kenmore refrigerator instead of the Whirlpool? So what is the deal with these people and the need to claim superiority in the electronics market? What makes people so zealous over electronics and not other products?

Since my switch to Macintosh, I will honestly say I love it and I do think it is better then Windows. That all being said, I am not going to go out and bash Windows or claim it has no place or value in the market. I use Windows at work and the integration that it has with Microsoft Exchange servers, FTP, and other office platforms is very impressive. I previously used Windows for my music creation and there are a lot of independent developers that are making great software for the platform. Why can'?t then multiple competitors exist in electronics?

I suppose the point I am trying to get at here is that there does not need to be this battle between factions in the electronics world for products. The competition between people forces the market leader to try to improve them self. Could we say that the video game market would be better if Microsoft didn't enter the fray with the Xbox and Xbox Live, or if Nintendo suddenly disappeared? Would the computer world be suddenly better if Mac OSX didn'?t force Microsoft to improve upon Windows or of Linux didn't force competition in the business and server markets?

I suppose my point here is that McDonalds is McDonalds, and Burger King is Burger King, but in the end they are both still hamburgers. Let people use what they want to use because everything has its own merits.

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A Little Music on the Way

This past weekend I had the opportunity to start some music writing again. I honestly have to say that the endeavor was not very successful. I made some interesting sounds here and there, but nothing that really stood together.

I am also currently looking for some software ideas to begin a little work on my laptop. Since I am not commuting to and from class this year and will being commuting to and from work within the next two weeks I have a lot of small junks of free time. Almost no time will be spent at home at my gear.

I got to say I am not sure really where I want to go with this. I was at first going to explore .:Gleetchplug:., but unfortunately it is no longer freeware and version 2.0 is not out yet.

I am now looking at a few of the audio programming languages such as .:Impromptu:. and .:Chuck:., but I don't know if that is the direction or commitment I want to take.

Ideally I would like to get something like Nanoloop for my laptop. Maybe such a software doesn't exist?

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Massive Galactic War Started in Eve Online

This post is totally not related to music and any such way, but I have always been infactuated with online worlds and their increasing ability to mimic our real ones. (You have to read the series .:Otherland:.)

Reading the posts on the gamer blogs today it appears that two of the largest alliances in .:Eve Online:. have declared open war upon each other. For those who don't know, Eve Online is a massively multiplayer online game set in space. The size is pure mind boggling and the entire system plays on a single server farm.

Anyways, one of the alliances has secretly completed the first ever Titan ship in the game. Apparently you can't just buy one of these but you actually have to physically build one and it took them eight months and over 168 billion in game money.. How freaking cool is that?

.:Kotaku Link:.

9,000 players have been pulled into the conflict as simulated worlds begin to mimic real life in complexity and method. ASCN (one of the factions) tested a doomsday device as and mistakenly hit a lot of their own ships in the process. There is a video of the device going off in the link. Rumor has it the other alliance may have a doomsday device as well, but no one knows.

The whole concept of a simulated world being able to support the complexity of something like this is truly amazing. Politics, economics, markets, etc all supported in a game. I personally do not play the game, but the shear notion of this all happening without coercion and without falling apart into a mess is astounding.

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So where have I been?

So many of you have probably wondering where they heck have I been? Well the last semester of school started and it is a pretty cruel one with my thesis wrapping up and all sorts of other issues piling on top. One great news event however is that my Capstone Thesis, that I have been working on for the past six months, is finally finished. I am just waiting for final approval, but I should hopefully hand it in on Monday and be done with it.

I am starting to get onto the last leg of grad school which I am very much thankful for. Things are beginning to change and I probably have a job lined up for after graduation. I begin working with the new company in the middle of October part time and with any luck it will become full-time after graduation. I think the ball really rests in my corner for this.

I will hopefully have some more free-time now and I would love to get out and begin performing some live music once again. It has been over a year since I last performed and since the release of my new net-album .:Colored Faceless:. I have a lot of material that I would love to get playing again.

I will hopefully try to get post my thesis online for everyone in case you are bored enough to actually read through forty seven pages of material.

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Colored Faceless

Colored faceless is the new album from Dynamic Interplay created with the mindset of minimalism and simplicity at its core. The music has been stripped back to its core sound and was composed live “as is” with only three pieces of gear and minimal post processing.

Download

Tracklisting

  • The Light in Your Eyes
  • Be Still
  • Finder Fip Top
  • The Chinese Connection
  • Light Waves
  • Flutter By
  • Raging Bull
  • The Tranquility Alternative
  • Caught on a Rainbow

All Tracks (c) Matthew A. Supert 2006 unless otherwise noted. All work including music and artwork is released under Creative Commons sharealike license 2.5. For more information please visit the .:Creative Commons 2.5 Deed:. for this webpage.