I had prematurely uploaded a bunch of changes which were still in development. As a result, I had to scramble to get them all fixed. I think now Austin Stories should be back to its usual ease of use.

So what was causing all the problems, you may (not) be asking?

The revised scripts now use a bunch of reusable functions which I can plug into other sites as is. Well, there's still some work involved, but I've restructured things in such a way that redesigning the site -- should the fancy strike -- isn't so much grunt work.

Should you notice any difference? If it works, you should notice no difference. But, the new backend should allow a bit more flexibility in case some new features crop up on the site later.

(By the way, these news items are now powered by Movable Type. Not sure what else I'll be doing with this app, but like my own journal, it's used mostly as a management tool -- not as a site builder.)

If you still experience any problems with the site, please e-mail straight away. Be as descriptive as possible when you report problems.

Thank you for your patience!

For the past two weeks or so, I've been working on corralling various REST APIs from Musicbrainz, Discogs.com, Last.fm and iLike to create a discography.

It doesn't aim to be thorough like other discography efforts, but it does try to bring together data from various sites into one. If I can get this effort to work, I might revisit the Musicwhore.org Archive, which could definitely use some fleshing out.

Even the Last.fm integration looks promising at this point.

I have the structure in place, but like the Tour History Map, it won't mean much till I can start populating it with meaningful data.

I'll be traveling in November for three weeks, so I hope to get something rolled out before then. If not, this site will probably still be a bit barren till the holidays.

Well, now it's back, and it's pretty much a laboratory.

When I first registered this domain in 1999, all you needed to build a remotely decent web site was an FTP program and text editor. Today, it's all about the frameworks and AJAX and social media and ...

I found myself in a position where I needed to update my training. But what was I going to build? Another content management system for a blog?

Nah. Why not combine two interests -- Duran Duran and web development -- into one? Luckily, I have this domain.

So Duran Duran Networks has returned, this time as a means to experiment and to create.

What better way to start than with a Google Maps mash-up? I've entered a few dozen old tour dates from the Duran Duran Timeline into a database, which I then cross-referenced with some cached geocode coordinates from Google Maps. The result? The Duran Duran Tour History Map.

Some of the mixes online right now are incomplete, and of course, I'll be tweaking them endlessly from now until time eternal.

At first, I thought I would be remodeling these tracks in the similar fashion I redid Restraint, but I found myself backtracking, even attempting to preserve a lot of elements in the original mixes.

The material calls for it -- the style of music on Imprint requires a more solid sense of rhythm than I can provide, so parts that I could conceivably play live, I've left to the machines. Except for the acoustic guitar parts. At some point, I'm going to have to face those.

But not on "Choices". This track was one of the last I wrote for Imprint. I vowed at first to stop writing when I reached 10 tracks, but the album felt as if it were missing something. I thought about the bass line to Sade's "Paradise", and I wanted to get that kind of feel. It ended up being "Choices".

I pretty much changed the drums and the guitar sample on this track. Nothing else was really touched from the original mix.

Listen to "Choices"

At various points in the past, I've posted audio files of a cassette tape that survived a burglary in 1998, in which I lost all my early 4-track demos. The transfer to digital was never satisfactory, mostly because I lacked the equipment and know-how to do it right.

As a result, I've always considered that lone surviving tape as something of a bastard child, and I would always wince when friends would say they listened to it. The demos are crude in the way that dated technology makes it thus, and it doesn't help matters when the sound quality is crap.

But two weeks ago, I gave the tapes another go, this time applying copious amounts of multi-band compression to clarify some parts and to mitigate others.

It definitely helped.

In fact, it's making me reconsider tracks I relegated to the dustbin. One such track is something I've given the working title of "Acid Vogue". I was trying to co-opt the drum beat of Madonna's "Vogue" into something I thought qualified for acid house. Not that I knew what acid house was -- I just knew Duran Duran was influenced by it during the Big Thing sessions.

It's more Depeche Mode than anything else. I still don't know what to do with this track. Maybe nothing at all.

Listen to "Untitled (Acid Vogue)"

It's now the holiday season of 2011, and that "Christmas card" has undergone some major revisions. Where there were samplers pretending to be guitars, there are now guitars (and basses as well.) Samplers are still posing as drummers, but the samples sound slightly more human. I've also replaced a two tracks, replacing a Japanese-language cover with an English-language cover and a piano piece with the semi-title track from 「風の歌を聴け」.

I gave this compilation the title Original Confidence as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, naming it after the Japanese version of the Billboard charts.

Have a listen, won't you? Here's a track called "Go".

Listen to "Go"

Which is strange since I seem to write so much music that requires a lot of guitar.

NUMBER GIRL was a Japanese punk band that actually inspired me to take a smattering of lessons back in 2001. I wanted to learn how to play the band's music, but I just didn't want to follow tablature blindly. And learning a few NUMBER GIRL songs made me braver in terms of writing with guitar.

「DESTRUCTION BABY」 is my favorite NUMBER GIRL song. It has only four chords, but the off-kilter drum fills and enigmatic bass line turn it into something far more complex. My version of it, though, is a mess. The playing is choppy, the rhythm a disaster -- not at all the precision work of the original.

Let's just say a lot of work went into post-production.

Listen to 「DESTRUCTION BABY」

So while I have been working on Eponymous 4 stuff, it's more on the web side than the music side. (Eponymous 4 is as much a web project as a music project.)

I did, however, go to a photo shoot for the cover of Restraint. I've also been looking at mastering options, and I've been going through more rounds of mixing. It's getting really close now. I'm not committing to a particular release date, but sometime in (early) 2012 is not an unreasonable goal.

The tracks you pretty much hear will be the ones on the final album. As such, I've also requested CD Baby take down the Work Release Program titles from all their digital partners. The Work Release Program titles will still be available through CD Baby, but I'm not going to feature them here, nor on the Observant Records web shop.

Honestly? It's kind of painful to hear those versions. I disclaimed the hell out of them when I released them back in 2009, but I didn't realize just how green they would sound to me just 1 1/2 years later. That's not to say what I have now is all that masterful, but I like the idea that I'm moving forward.

This weekend, however, I launched the scaffolding of the Observant Records web site. Not much content on there yet, but I hope to get a web shop running there in the future.

That's not to say I've totally been neglectful of musical matters. I went back to some cassette tape demos that I transferred to digital and took another shot at mastering them. The first time I tried, I did a brute force job and ended up with some terrible files. This time, I think I have something that sound decent.

As a result, some tracks I've written off as trash just might be candidates for a second look. Maybe I'll even post something here later.

For way too long, this site has given the impression that I haven't been productive. I have -- it's just a lot of the stuff in the pipeline never got around to being released and now probably never will.

At the same time, I needed a way to corral all the random items I post willy-nilly everywhere, so I opted to show the whole roadmap. I've redesigned the Music section to show all the releases forthcoming. About three of them are on the verge of getting out the door, and the rest -- well, there's a lot of proverbial ground to cover.

And when I get tired of being in the studio all weekend, I'll come here and post more about all the songs you haven't yet heard.

Somehow through it all, I managed to lay tracks on what could be considered my first new song since 2007. I'm not sure if I'm afflicted with writer's block or if I've just been distracted by real life to have done any writing in nearly five years. Maybe it's a combination of both.

I don't think this new song is something I'd put on an album. In fact, it feels very much like a b-side, and it bears too much of a resemblance to Kumuiuta-era Cocco. But I'm glad it's something new, and perhaps it might nudge me into focusing on creating instead of this endless whirlpool of mixing and remixing in which I find myself.

I'm sure this song will join that whirlpool, since I have this nagging feeling it's not completely fleshed out.

Oh, and the lyrics are mostly in Japanese. I can't guarantee that they won't sound to Japanese ears how Engrish sounds to ours. The title is transliterated as "Threnody".

Listen to 「スレノディー」

I'm not sure what the next Eponymous 4 album will be, but I have a sense a future album will be instrumental and attempt to corral all these libraries.

Just to test out all these new libraries, I threw together an untitled track. Yes, that's what it says in Japanese: "Mudai Heisei 23 Rokugatsu Itsuka", or "Untitled 06/05/2011".

The gamelan samples are put through some Western tuning to mix harmonically with the strings. I've also thrown in a brushed gong, tabla and taiko.

I don't know if this particular sound will expand into a full work, but it's a start.

Listen to 「無題平成23六月五日」

I finished the challenge, then put the resulting work off to the side while I worked on other projects.

One piece from that album -- imaginatively titled NaSoPiAlMo 2006 -- struck me as something that could be arranged for string quartet, which I did. I've had a lot of time to listen to it, and I think I prefer the quartet arrangement more than its source piano piece. In fact, I'm probably going to extract portions of that piano album to become a set of string quartet pieces. (But not an actual string quartet itself. Not in the traditional sense, at least.)

While that's going on, here's the piece that's taking me down this particular path. Yes, the title is in Japanese. Maybe I'll explain this fascination of using Japanese titles later, but translated, it means "String Quartet Pieces, Vol. 1, No. 5", and it's pronounced, "Gengaku Shijuusou Kyoku Sono Ichi No. 5"

Listen to 「弦楽四重奏曲其の一 No. 5」

One of the goals of the "Ex Machina Series" was to replace all the faked guitar parts with actual guitar parts where possible (read: if I can adequately play it), and nowhere is that more important than with acoustic guitar parts. Fake electric guitar parts can be obfuscated with mountains of effects, but faking acoustic guitar parts is harder. Reason has some excellent acoustic guitar samples, but coercing the digital audio workstation to sound human is where the true sorcery lies.

Or I could just play the damn part.

I covered The System's "Don't Disturb This Groove" back in 2008 after listening to Sam Amidon's All Is Well album and thinking that song would sound good using that kind of chamber orchestra arrangement. The acoustic guitar part I fashioned also served as a bass, with a single note on the downbeats marking the time.

Over the weekend, I re-recorded the acoustic guitar, this time just strumming in rhythm. I lost the bass note and had to add an upright bass part to compensate. The feel of the cover has changed dramatically because of those alterations. Still trying to decide if I like them, but I may stick with them just because I'm not inclined to go back to the fake guitar.

Listen to "Don't Disturb This Groove"

Propellerhead Software, the makers of Reason, announced it would let users who own Reason 5 and Record 1.5 to upgrade to Reason 6 for any price they name. It's Radiohead's In Rainbows all over again.

Reason 6 incorporates Record, so now there won't be two separate products. When the new version was first announced a few weeks back, I decided to skip it and wait for Reason 7. Since I already had Record, I didn't feel this upgrade was essential, and honestly, I don't actually use Record -- I tacked it onto my Reason 5 upgrade for an extra $20 out of curiosity.

But now the Pay What You Want option makes me inclined to upgrade. I don't know how much I'd pay, but it's not going to be for the usual upgrade price of approximately $130. Nor will I be a cheapskate and pay the minimum $1. Most of the value in the upgrade is for Reason owners who don't have Record, but for those users who do, Reason 6 seems more like a point release.

Really, the only thing I'd like to see -- which most likely won't happen -- is the addition of a solo viola instrument in the Orkester library. Short of dropping $500 on the Solo Strings library from Vienna Instruments, the solo strings in the Orkester library do the most convincing job of emulating solo strings I've encountered.

As part of an effort to study some of my favorite string quartet scores, I've programmed a few works into SONAR using the Orkester library as an instrument. Samuel Barber's lone string quartet is the source work for his famous Adagio for Strings. I can't say I was impressed by the movements that frame the Adagio, but after entering each note of those movements, it's eased up my criticism of them. At least now I can spot the sonata form.

Listen to "Samuel Barber - String Quartet: I. Allegro"

"enigmatics V" was one of those tracks that was complete enough but never really finished the way I would have liked. When I first wrote it, I didn't even have a fraction of the tools available to me now -- just the sequencer and an RCA cord to my computer. So the clavier part was really intended to be a guitar part, and that drum beat could have very well sampled Soul II Soul, if I actually had a sampler. I had also wanted that solo synth in the middle section to sound like something off of a Wayne Horvitz/The President album.

So 13 years later, I did what I set out to do. I replaced the drums with an emulated Roland 909 (thank you Battery!), replaced the clavier with guitar samples in Reason fed through Guitar Rig and passed the solo synth through a Guitar Rig distortion plug-in.

Now the track sounds closer to what I had imagined, which is different from the one that was actually released.

George Lucas has been getting a lot of flack for revising the Star Wars movies every time they get remastered for a new format. I can almost get his urge to tinker. He revised the original trilogy because the technology wasn't around to let him do what he wanted. I'm revising my tracks because I now have the right technology to do what I intended to do -- or at least closer to what I intended.

Of course, the big difference between Lucas and me is that way, way more people notice his tinkering. I can pull back the original enigmatics -- which I may do at some point -- and replace it with the revised version, and few people would notice.

Listen to "enigmatics V"

It started with Battery. I tried out a demo and liked how much better it sounded than the kits in my old KORG N364 or Reason, for that matter. When Guitar Center had a sale on Battery, I bought a full version. Cakewalk SONAR also bundled a limited version of Guitar Rig, so I experimented with that as well. By Christmas, I upgraded Guitar Rig to a full version and impulsively tacked on KONTAKT with my purchase.

Guitar Rig and Battery are at the heart of what I call the "Ex Machina Series". I'm going back and redoing all the drums on my tracks to use Battery (if it seems appropriate -- the N364 stil has some useful drum samples), and I've even tried my hand at recording guitar parts, even though I'm not much of a guitar player. Despite that lack of skill, Guitar Rig has quickly become an essential tool in my arsenal. So much so that it's eclipsed Reason, which I use now to fabricate guitar parts I know I can't play (usually arpeggios, definitely solos.)

One track that's definitely benefited from a remix is "Untold Demons", an adaptation of the first song I ever wrote. It always had the spirit of a guitar song, even though it was written on the piano. I posted an early version on Metafilter Music, but I much prefer the remix.

Listen to "Untold Demons"

It's allergy season right now in Austin, so I don't anticipate doing anything else in the studio till May. (I rue the peak of oak season on April 1.) At some point, I will make some of those vocal performances available. After two years, I may have more substantial content to offer on this site!

I did take an initial stab with a limited Christmas release called Original Confidence, a compilation of what I consider the best of Eponymous 4. I sent it as my Christmas card to a select number of people, but bits and pieces of it can be found on Myspace and Facebook. I've also added that release to the projects section.

You may also want to check out my contributions to Metafilter Music. I've been reckless and posting some of these rough vocal takes there as well.

I've added a new single in the projects section. It's a solo performance of Terry Riley's In C, which actually requires many more than one player. And yes, I'm being clever by calling a 26-minute, one-track project a "single".

This new EP is titled 「学生」 (Gakusei), which means "student" in Japanese.

A few weeks back, I carved out some time to write some lyrics, which I promised to do before I wrote the music for the next Eponymous 4 project. I have about 16 or so lyrics, and I've already written music for six 11 12 of them. I don't have the new work listed in the projects section yet, so I'll list them here. My gimmick: use Japanese titles instead of English. Oddly enough, the music itself is leaning toward country. They're now part of the project titled 「健忘症」.

I also took down the lyrics. They're attracting search engine traffic unrelated to the content of this site. Why be misleading?

I'm working on a solo piano album, and I've added the tracks I've done so far in the projects section.

I have nine more minutes of music to write, and I've got two more weeks to do it. This is not the time to hit a block.

[UPDATE 11/20/2006, 8:40 a.m.] I've written those remaining nine minutes, and now I'm done!

You may also be interested to know "The One to Make You Whole" is being used as the theme song for Austin Technology Matters, a public access TV show produced by my good friend chip. The debut show will air sometime in early November.

Also available on MySpace, as well as Metafilter Music, is a string quartet I attempted to write during that nether period after high school and before college.

Why put them there and not here? It boils down to "I don't feel like it right now". But if I were to come up with a reason, I'd want to be able to post all the vocal demos here than just a few. It would just seem jarring to hear vocals on one track, then a temp melody on another. So I'm going to wait for the time being.

If you want to put my contributions to MetaFilter Music in your news feed reader, there's an RSS feed available. The MySpace blog also has an RSS feed, but I only post to that when I change something in the MySpace profile.

I've also gone back and remixed "Offertorium (from Dead Man's Mass)", "No Exit" and "Beat of the Heart".

"Offertorium" now includes some guitar parts that I had always wanted to include in the first place. I adjust some panning for "No Exit", and for "Beat of the Heart", I found this great Reason patch called "OldPiano" which I thought went better with the ambient street noise. Also, that bass drum was mixed way too loudly, so I turned it down.

I might do some remix work on "Five (Ambiguous Friendships)", but I haven't decided.

Namely, the two class songs written for Sacred Hearts Academy in Honolulu were taken off the track listing because they didn't really fit the new feel of the album. I'm moving those two songs to their own single, titled "Orare et Labore".

"Orare et Labore" (Latin for "work and pray") is the motto for the school, and since both of these songs were commissioned by graduating students, they ought to have their own spot.

Because thematically, the optimism of a class song doesn't mesh with my art fag navel-gazing.

A while back, I had a vague notion of augmenting A Ghost in My Shadow with songs I wrote back in high school. That vague notion took off when I sat down and revised the very first song I ever wrote. Now I've gone back and heavily edited a number of old pieces.

The working titles are their original titles, but since I've changed the melodies on a number of these songs, they've become obsolete. (Never mind the fact the old lyrics were just really juvenile.)

I also posted new mixes of "Faith in Religion" and "No Exit" -- they got a bit of the Reason treatment.

To listen to these new songs, check out the project page for A Ghost in My Shadow.

I've been busy with night classes these past two semesters, so I didn't make much progress with anything in the last 10 months. But during the semester break in December 2005, I did remix a number of tracks on Restraint, and back in May 2006, I remixed some tracks on Imprint.

My original plan was to upload these remixes after I start laying down vocals, but after hearing how much work my vocals need, I decided to upload the remixed tracks now. After I've had all summer to improve my singing (bleah!), I might, just might upload demos with actual lyrics.

These remixed tracks sound much closer to what I have in mind, so if you have earlier versions of these songs, do me a favor and overwrite them with the new versions. (Thanks!)

Speaking of music set to text, I'm fishing out the Requiem I wrote in high school and revising it. There was some interesting and ambitious stuff I didn't know what I was doing, and I want to see if I can polish those ideas up now that I do know what I'm doing. I've already rewritten the Introit.

I'm not taking classes this summer, so I can focus on Eponymous 4.

• Epiphany, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #1)"
• Contrition, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #8)"
• Disengaged, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #3)"
• Relent, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #6)"
• Dismissal, formerly "Untitled (Stylish Number Girl #4)"
• Faith In Religion, rewritten from previously unpublished lyrics

The story follows three friends, Jonathan (Jui-Chia Chang), Shane (Joseph Chang) and Kate (Hui-Chia). Jonathan and Shane meet as children when their teacher pairs them together in class. Shane has behavior problems, so Jonathan is tasked with making sure he doesn't fall behind. The contrived pairing eventually turns into a true life-long friendship.

In high school, Jonathan meets up with Kate, another seeming misfit. A failed attempt at seduction makes Jonathan realize he's not into women. Jonathan is dealt another blow when he fails to get into a good college.

A woman in a gay love triangle usually pines after the unattainable gay man, as Jennifer Aniston's Nina Borowski does with Paul Rudd's Geroge Hanson in The Object of My Affection. Kate, however, confounds that type.

She cozies up to Shane as a way to remain close to Jonathan, but when she realizes her intrusion is pushing both men away, she steps up to keep them all together.

The relationship between Jonathan and Shane evolves organically as well. It's obvious to the audience the bond between the two runs deeper than either of them realize, and it's heartening to see both stumble to a realization.

Eternal Summer unfolds at a gradual pace -- yes, that's another way of saying "slow" -- but never once does it lose its momentum. The beautifully-shot rural scenes are wonderful eye candy, and despite a language barrier, the actors are all compelling.

(How do I know? I watched the Japanese film Boy's Love right afterward, and even in Japanese, I could tell the acting was terrible.)

Eternal Summer won numerous awards in Taiwan, and it was a staple in the gay film festival circuit in 2006 and 2007. Its accolades are well deserved.

No, I'm not really spoiling the film's story by describing that much because The Bubble, for the most part, is uplifting.

The story is set in Tel Aviv, the gay-friendly Israeli city with a thriving bohemian scene. While performing his required Israeli military service, Noam (Ohad Knoller) encounters Ashraf (Yusef Sweid) at border checkpoint. A pregnant Arab woman goes into labor, and Noam treats the woman while Ashraf serves as translator. Ashraf later tracks Noam down in Tel Aviv to give him back his lost ID card, and one magical night later, Ashraf decides to stay with Noam.

Noam and Ashraf spend a number of weeks taking in the liberal atmosphere of Tel Aviv, organizing a rave to promote peace. Ashraf's sister, however, is getting married, and he returns to his hometown to participate in the ceremonies. A car bomb detonated in Tel Aviv, however, thrusts Noam's friends and Ashraf's family into the strife, and the bubble of Tel Aviv's care-free life bursts under the weight of a bigger struggle.

Fox paints Tel Aviv as an exuberantly forward oasis, free from centuries of mistrust and hatred. The "real world" eventually intrudes, but until then, the Bubble, as the city is known, is resiliently optimistic.

The Bubble, however, is not a feel-good movie in the Hollywood sense. Ashraf must still conceal he's an Arab, and the threat of being exposed looms over his relationship with Noam. The final scene when Ashraf and Noam reunite is beautifully heartbreaking and in its own strange way, terribly romantic.

As sad as the ending may be, it's the one that makes most sense, and Fox does a tremendous job making sure the unraveling of events doesn't feel so sudden. It's a telling situation when the gay aspect of an Arab-Israeli romance is less problematic.

The film's secondary stories -- Noam's friends each trying to navigate their own relationships -- establish the character of Tel Aviv. Lulu (Daniela Wircer) attempts to attract the attention of hunky alternative newspaper journalist Shaul (Zion Baruch), while Yelli (Alon Freidmann) wonders whether his soldier boyfriend Golan (Zohar Liba) shares his more leftist views.

As with Yossi and Jagger, Fox deftly juggles the multiple layers of conflict in this film -- Arab vs. Jew, out of the closet vs. in -- to deliver a story that revels in joy, despite a toxic environment.

Its follow-up, The Bourne Supremacy, sank under the weight of a convoluted plot and exaggerated action scenes. It was difficult to fathom Jason Bourne's super agent resilience while piecing together what the hell was going on.

Thankfully, the third installment of the Bourne series, The Bourne Ultimatum, brings the story back to Bourne's quest to uncover his past identity. That's a far juicier story to follow than his getting payback.

Paul Greengrass returns to the director's chair, and this time, he keys into the success of previous director Doug Liman with the The Bourne Identity. Matt Damon also returns as Jason Bourne, playing him with the cool urgency that fueled the previous movies.

The story picks up almost immediately after the last movie left off, with a train station chase in Moscow. Bourne escapes but not without experiencing a hint of a flashback to his first day on the job.

When a London reporter named Simon Ross (Paddy Considine) writes a series of articles uncovering Bourne's deeds from the first movie, Bourne traces his past back through Ross' source. Of course, the CIA wants him terminated, and with each clue Bourne attempts to uncover, someone dies.

It's only through the cryptic help of CIA associate director Pamela Landry (Joan Allen) that Bourne can confront the people who turned him into a black operative.

It's the dual layers of this kind of story -- the suspense of the myriad chases happening across the globe woven into the mystery of Bourne's original identity -- that makes The Bourne Ultimatum engaging. In fact, this movie does a better job than the first in keeping the action unrelenting.

Greengrass does a better job this time in exercising restraint. There's only one car chase, which happens at the end, and it's abbreviated compared to previous chases. Instead, the cat-and-mouse game gets a lot of attention, with Bourne skillfully manipulating the Company's resources (and "assets") against itself. The chase through crowded Algerian apartments is the pinnacle of the movie.

Yes, driving a car off the side of the Port Authority does require a high degree of belief suspension, but it's not as extreme as a prolonged car and foot chase with a wounded leg that doesn't seem to be bleeding.

Julia Stiles' Nikki Parsons played small but not insignificant roles in the first two Bourne movies, but even then, there's a sense of history between Parsons and Bourne that's subtly played by the actors. In The Bourne Ultimatum, their history is revealed. It's a predictable plot device, but it comes off understated on screen.

The Bourne Ultimatum makes a terrific conclusion to the Bourne series. Of course, the ambiguous ending leaves open the possibility of more installments. I'd say leave well enough alone. This movie is great entertainment all on its own.

I can't say I really liked it. Gaiman's fairytale style didn't possess the nuance or depth of The Sandman, and the storyline felt really predictable. A maligned child grows to be someone really important? Where have we heard that before?

When I learned Stardust would be turned into a movie, I actually thought it would be a great fit. The story wasn't really that impressive, and Hollywood effects magic could go a long way into giving the plot some flesh. I didn't expect the film to gut the source material and actually make it better.

In the prelude, Dunstan Thorn (Ben Barnes as the young Dustan/Nathaniel Parker as the older) defies his town's rules and crosses the stone wall after which the town is named. He has a tryst with a woman in the market (Kate Macgowan), and nine months later, a baby son, Tristan, is left at his door.

Tristan (Charlie Cox) grows up not knowing about his enchanted ancestry, and in wanting to woo the unattainable Victoria (Sienna Miller), he promises to fetch a star that has fallen beyond the wall. The star itself was hit by a jewel shot from the castle of a dying king (Peter O'Toole), who sends his remaining living sons to fetch it. Whoever can retrieve it inherits the kingdom. At the same time, a trio of witch sisters witness the star's descent. Wanting to reacquire their youth, one of the sisters, Lamia (Michelle Pfiffer) sets out to capture the star for themselves.

Tristan gets there first and discovers the star is actually Yvaine (Claire Danes), who sprains her ankle in the fall. He must now make his way back to his town with the injured Yvaine, and of course, he encounters the princes and the witches and all manner of faerie folk along the way. In the end, he turns out to be a more significant person than people assumed.

I didn't realize how long ago I read the book because I didn't even notice some of the big changes made to the story.

Captain Shakespeare, for instance, is an entirely new character. I had a vague sense that he wasn't part of the original story, and I wish he were. The Advocate mentioned Shakespeare's portrayal was handled with remarkable sensitivity. Shakespeare, played with great fun by Robert De Niro, leads what he believes to be a double life. To his crew, he puts on a front as a fearless, formidable leader, but in private, he dresses in women's clothes and can style hair. Implication: teh ghey!

The crew, however, know about their captain's true nature, and they really don't care. But they play along with the ruse out of respect for the captain's efforts. How 2007 of them.

The plot development on the ship -- an entire section not in the book -- is less Gaiman, more Miyazaki Hayao. I couldn't help but think of Laputa: Castle in the Sky or even Howl's Moving Castle.

The film also moves the story along much faster than the book. As multi-threaded as the book was, it tended to drag. Hollywood pragmatism whetted the story down to an adventure suitable for summertime consumption. As a result, the characters are painted more starkly in the movie. I don't remember Yvaine being so snotty and Tristan being so much of a wuss at the start of the story. I prefer it that way, though.

I really didn't like the ghosts of the princes in the book. They added little to the story. In the movie, they turned into terrific comic relief, making them the best part.

Stardust is an enjoyable diversion, but it won't erase anyone's memory of The Lord of the Rings trilogy -- not that it aims to, nor should it. For me, it's a very unique kind of adaptation. I didn't like the original book, but the story told in the movie is the one I like better.

Other people have told me the movie reminded them of how the show was right around the time I stopped watching, which confirmed my perception that the movie seemed in keeping with what I remembered.

The Simpsons has always managed to be heart-warming in the face of ridiculousness. For the movie, that heart-tugging was magnified. Heck, I even managed to say "Awwww" toward the end.

So it's up to a reluctant Homer to set things right. Along the way, he loses the faith of both Marge and Bart, but of course, he re-establishes his connection to his son with a motorcycle and to his wife by saving the day.

The Simpsons is renowned for making quick satire out of the US zeitgeist, while balancing the dysfunctional but loving dynamic of the Simpsons family. For an 87-minute movie, those quick satirical punches stepped aside for the family drama, some of it a bit predictable. Marge recording her goodbye over her wedding tape? How bittersweet. For Bart, the pull of the Flanders' stable home seemed a bit at odds with the character well established in the show.

But when everything comes to its inevitable denouement, it's still incredibly tough not to be swept in the moment. Homer somehow manages to save the day, but on the big screen, that moment is played up as big as a Hollywood production can muster.

Anyone looking for the edginess of The Simpsons ca. the mid-'90s might be disappointed. The movie watered down the sharp comic gags emblematic of the show.

That's not to say I wouldn't watch a sequel, if one were made.

It was nice revisiting characters I haven't really watched in a decade, but the movie didn't really convince me to give The Simpsons a Season Pass on my TiVo.

That's my paragraph-long disclaimer to say I don't care about his politics, nor the politics of said fans and detractors.

That said, Moore's reputation does precede him. After the film, one of my friends commented he wasn't a documentairan -- he was polemicist. Another doesn't really like how Moore inserts himself in the story. If I didn't consider Moore's work to be partly entertainment, I'd be more bothered by that as well.

Moore doesn't hide his agenda, and as such, I've turned a skeptical eye to the two films of his I have watched, despite being part of the choir to which he's probably preaching. Still, watching Sicko was chilling and not surprising.

I've so far had the fortune of being covered by medical insurance, even during economically tough times. The closest I've come to a health care nightmare was shelling a few hundred bucks for an emergency visit, one which revealed I had to get my gall bladder removed. That procedure, thankfully, was covered 100 percent.

I hate to imagine what would have happened if it weren't.

But when Moore starts comparing health care in the US with other countries, his points get muddled. He mentions that the French health care system requires lots of taxes, and he introduces a well-to-do French family who don't seem to have much problem with those taxes. But Moore provides no numbers. He doesn't reveal that family's income, nor does he itemize the taxes levied on that income. Omission?

The round-table discussion with Americans living in France wasn't convincing either, but that's because I work with French people who live in the US. In the same way the France-residing Americans extol the virtues of their host country, my French co-workers raze their homeland for its inefficiencies and express relief from being distant to it all.

Moore shows the French government is afraid of its citizenry, because the people makes their displeasure known. He doesn't show the French people frustrated by their government's inability to act because of that fear.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Sicko was Moore's restraint in punking the object of his disdain. It's not until the very end of the film that he pulls his dramatic stunt -- taking ill American citizens to Guantanamo Bay for examinations by doctors at the infamous US detention center. It almost seemed Moore would actually make it through an entire film without pulling a stunt.

It was still disheartening to see a Cuban doctor reverse the regimen of an American doctor treating one of the film's subjects. The nebulous system against which the film rails feels concrete through the eyes of people subject to its whims.

As smug as Moore can seem at times, he does value the use of humor. Making an anonymous donation to the stricken wife of a vocal critic is just ... dick. But that's killing with kindness, I guess.

Sicko still didn't make me budge from my non-partisan stance on Michael Moore. It didn't turn me into a fan, and it didn't make me hate him either. It confirmed some cynical suspicions about how health care works in the US, but it didn't galvanize me into action.

The film does piece together an compelling picture of the US health care system, and Moore can spin a good story. But the holes in his talking points were enough to keep me skeptical.

It's not an inaccurate description, but it doesn't paint the entire picture either. Once reminded me more of the early Duran Duran videos directed by Russell Mulcahy, where the songs became miniature movies themselves. As far as my 13-year-old self was concerned, who needed Raiders of the Lost Ark when I had "Hungry Like the Wolf"?

Music video hasn't really tapped into that kind of cinematic sense since, not after Michael Jackson turned the form into some kind of Cecil B. DeMille canvas. Once manages to integrate that early-era music video storytelling into a larger form. Like an opera or a musical, the film's scenes build to a point where music comes in, but instead of an aria, it's a music video.

There are a few twists in the storyline that get revealed along the way, but it's nothing too earth-shattering. In fact, the plot is pretty basic and takes a backseat to the music.

It takes a slight bit of effort to adjust to the storytelling. Less patient viewers may want the songs to hurry up so that the film can get going. Music fans, though, will most likely enjoy how the music is treated as its own character. I feel a comparison to Amadeus and Immortal Beloved coming on.

The music itself is incredible, and I like the fact Once could be considered the first indie rock movie musical. I'd heard of the Frames for years but didn't explore their music. Hansard has an incredibly expressive voice, especially on the opening "Leave". He's a good actor to boot -- if you didn't know he really is the lead singer for a band, you'd think Once was his big break.

Irglova's accent is a bit thick, so it's tougher to evaluate her delivery. But she's just as watchable as Hansard, and they really sell the relationship between the characters. (The two stars have since become a couple.) Musically, she's a perfect complement to Hansard's husky voice. "Falling Slowly" is enough reason to get the soundtrack album.

Once has slowly been gaining traction since its theatrical release, with a bigger marketing campaign and a push for an Oscar, according to USA Today. My hope is for makers of both music videos and films to learn from Once. Music video can still be cinematic, and film can incorporate video into its storytelling.

No, I don't have HBO, so no, I've never seen Da Ali G Show. The most exposure I've had to Sacha Baron Cohen was his appearance in Madonna's video for "Music", and my reaction back then was, "Who the fuck is that clown?"

So, no, I don't know what I was expecting when I went to see Borat. It's the first non-horror movie I watched where I was ready to cover my eyes at a moment's notice.

Borat is without a doubt the most uncomfortably funny movie I've encountered. More impressive than a CGI wankfest, more awe-inspiring than a serious Oscar-baiting drama, certainly just as absurd as a Christopher Guest mockumentary (although the only one I've seen is This Is Spinal Tap) -- Borat begs the question: How did the filmmakers get away with all the shit that went down?

Salon is helpful in sussing out the real from the staged, and certainly a lot of footage must be lying on the cutting room floor.

But puzzling over how Cohen and his producers coaxed unwitting participants to look foolish while being, well, themselves is just as enjoyable as watching the results unfold.

Borat blurs the line between fact and fiction in a way reality television never strives for. The homophobic civic center assistant is just the kind of person I picture who kept the Republicans in power for the last six years.

The Academy would never consider Cohen for a best actor nod, but could, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman inhabit his character the way Cohen does Borat Sagdiyev?

Slight derail: Jette mentioned her brother considers Kung Fu Hustle the best movie of 2005, and I have to say, I empathize with that statement. Kung Fu Hustle was the last movie that made my jaw drop to floor before Borat, and I will go out on a limb and say whoever eventually gets the Oscar nod will have stolen it from Cohen's hands.

That said, I'm glad I saw Borat, but I don't think I'd see it again.

There are no additional subtleties to uncover with repeated viewings, and the kind of shock and awe experienced while witnessing bad situations turning humorously terrible is really just a one-time deal. I don't think it would be as funny another time around.

I don't watch enough movies to rank Borat for a year-end favorite list, but it is by the far the most memorable one I've seen all year.

The word "satchell" will never be the same again.

It's not a movie you can like right away, and a first viewing may not actually entertain you at all. But if you think about Lost in Translation after you watch it, then it's charms start peeking through.

Little Miss Sunshine is rather like Lost in Translation that way.

That's not really the case.

There's a lot of drama woven into the absurd situations of the plot, and the humor of the movie isn't the kind that necessarily makes you laugh. If anything, it's the kind of absurdity that makes you think, "What the hell?"

On some level, Little Miss Sunshine and Lost In Translation are the same story. The characters of both films start out unhappy. They then get into funny situations and form bonds. By the end of the story, they've all gone through transformations and understand each other and themselves better.

Little Miss Sunshine isn't ambiguous about its denounment the way Lost in Translation was, and at times, the character development is splashed with obvious signposts.

Greg Kinnear's detestable Richard is clearly bound to get his comeuppance. Paul Dano's sulky Dwayne gets his own wake-up call, and Alan Arkin's cranky grandpa comes through for the family in unexpected ways.

The foul language and the numerous ways the family pushes its each other's buttons produce most of the flinchingly comedic moments of the film. But it's not nearly as enjoyable as watching these characters develop, then come through for each other in the end.

A slight derail for the obligatory Steve Carrell mention -- the sexuality of his character, Frank, is treated as a matter of course, and Carrell doesn't go overboard with the fey. In 2006, a sympathetic portrayal of a gay character shouldn't be news, but it is.

The funny in Little Miss Sunshine isn't necessarily so, but the drama and the character development are incredibly satisfying.

Some of the moments are heartbreaking -- when Olive (Abagail Breslin) comforts Dwayne without a single word -- and some triumphant -- the way the family defends Olive's "talent" routine in the end.

Don't go to Little Miss Sunshine expecting to laugh at everything, but do go to see a story where seemingly indulgent characters face their limitations and draw strength from them.

There really isn't any excuse for Superman Returns to last 154 minutes. It would have been a far better movie if it was kept at or under 2 hours.

As stunning as Superman's powers are, a lot of the mayhem and destruction happening in Metropolis could have picked up the pace quite a bit.

I like big falling objects in my summer action films as the next guy, but there were times I wanted the big bangs to hurry up.

When Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) causes a massive blackout that kills all electronic devices, the first thing I thought of was the big lavendar explosion that concluded the second season of Lost. I kept thinking Penelope Widmore's agents ought to have detected that disruption.

The casting of James Marsden as Richard White, the husband of Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), made me think Cyclops ought to give Superman a hand at some point.

(I was also distracted by the fact Marsden had an on-screen kiss with Jesse Bradford in Heights, so it made me think of Lois as a beard.)

And it's rather telling that Superman/Clark Kent has very few lines throughout all 2 1/2 hours of the movie. Is it because Brandon Routh was cast only for his likeness to Christopher Reeve? Should it be construed as a vote of no confidence in the star?

Meryl Streep didn't have very much dialogue in The Devil Wears Prada, and she managed to give a fairly flat character incredible dimension.

In the story of Superman Returns -- where Kal-el returns to Earth after a five-year exploratory mission to find remnants of his homeworld Krypton -- the audience is expected to believe Superman is having some trouble adjusting to a world that moved on without him.

Little of that conflict comes through, and it's a combination of a slim script and Routh's flat performance that leaves a gaping hole where a connection should have been made.

Wow. I'm comparing Superman Returns to The Devil Wears Prada. There has got to be something wrong.

But Superman wouldn't be super without demonstrating his physical prowess, and he's given carte blanche to show it off in a myriad of unlikely disasters that happen throughout the movie. That's what summer audiences pay to see, and in that regard, Superman Returns delivers nicely. To a point.

There were moments where Superman saving the city bogged down the pace of the plot. Maybe if Singer did a 24-style split screen, we could get a better sense of the action.

As a summer blockbuster, Superman Returns has a lot of action and a great dose of unplausible entertainment. But the story and the storytelling could have been handled more imaginatively.

So how did I end up spending a July 4 holiday watching The Devil Wears Prada? Blame Meryl Streep.

I'm no Meryl Streep devotee by any leap of the imagination, but the idea of her playing an intimidating, icy power figure seemed too tempting to pass up.

Under less accomplished hands, the character of Miranada Priestly could come off as a flat bogeywoman. But Streep can make even Miranada's brand of sociopathic leadership feel human. Which she does beautifully.

The rest of the story is pretty predictable to write.

Anne Hathaway plays Andy, an assistant to Streep's demanding fashion magazine editor Miranda. She's moves to New York to become a journalist. Instead, she's subjected to Miranada's sweeping demands. Eventually, she proves her mettle and becomes Miranada's top assistant.

But to get there, Andy changes herself bit by bit to fit her environment, and that eventually gets in the way of her life. When she learns of some backhand maneuvering to ouster Miranada from her position, Andy is confronted with the direction her life has taken.

The Devil Wears Prada is the kind of movie where the story in the foreground -- Andy's voyage of self-discovery -- isn't as fascinating as the story in the background -- life in high fashion where egos swell.

Although Miranda is constantly in the background, it's the snatches of her own life which give the movie its most interesting moments.

When personal crises hit Miranda, just enough humanity seeps through to make her professional demeanor all that more frightening. And she achieves it by barely raising her voice.

Streep really is the only reason to see The Devil Wears Prada. Hathaway does a decent turn where chick-flick material is concerned, but it's not exactly the kind of story that let's her show off the kind of performance as with Lurleen in Brokeback Mountain.

Stanley Tucci does a wonderful job as the gay fashion director Nigel, but, um, how many times have we seen a Carson Kressley type on screen before? Well, just as long as the gay character gets all the best lines.

As a summer confection, The Devil Wears Prada isn't a bad way to spend an afternoon at the theater. But in terms of getting a bang for your admission price, wait for the DVD instead.

McKean created the bizzare, imaginative covers of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman for its entire 75-issue run. He's done CD covers, posters and more recently, film.

Mirrormask is McKean's first feature-length work, and of course, his good friend Gaiman wrote the script.

Although Gaiman scored a homerun with The Sandman, his other works seems to be hit and miss. I wasn't fond of Stardust, and the novelization of Neverwhere didn't make me curious about how it turned out as a television series.

And crossover is such tricky terrain. Just because McKean and Gaiman created some incredible comics -- go read Violent Cases and Signal to Noise right now -- it doesn't necessarily mean that vision translates in other media.

My fears were pretty much unfounded.

Mirrormask begins with a mother-daughter spat. Helena doesn't want to live the circus life anymore, and she resists getting into costume for a show. "You'll be the death of me," her mother sighs. "I wish I were," Helena retorts.

Of course, Helena's mother collapses moments later before she was to head into the tent in a gorilla suite.

Feeling the weight of her guilt and not getting the chance to apologize properly, Helena goes to sleep and dreams. She wakes up in the middle of the night and wanders outside to investigate someone playing the violin. She encounters a pair of jugglers, but before she can find out more about them, shadows engulf the street, hastening her escape into strange world.

The balance of this world has been disrupted -- the Queen of Light is asleep, and only a charm can wake her. Thing is, nobody knows what the charm is. Helena and her sidekick, Valentine, venture to find the charm, all the while dodging the shadows from the Land of Dark.

It's no coincidence Helena's artwork, which adorns her bedroom walls, looks remarkably like McKean's, and it's no surprise the world in which Helena finds herself looks a lot like her drawings.

I've never seen a Terry Gilliam film, but I'm sure that's the appropriate name to drop to describe the film's visual style. It's a mix of past and future, with bizarre masks and strange creatures. Books literally fly off the shelves of a library, and monkeybirds propel themselves off bars to get airborne.

The visual effects are incredibly imaginative and have McKean's imprint all over them.

Gaiman's story is engaging. He's fond of fairy tales, and his prose attempts to capture that minimalism. That quality drives Mirrormask to great effect. He's also good at telling bildingsroman, and Mirrormask is a tale about a girl attempting to deal with an adult world.

As a first feature film by either author -- save for Gaiman's turn adapting Miyazaki Hayao's Princess Mononoke in English -- it's an impressive start. The stunning storytelling the pair have done in comics survives the leap to the big screen.

I was warned. I read pretty bad reviews about this movie, but I dove in and soldiered through all of it. Curiosity didn't just kill the cat -- it ran it over with a steamroller.

Casshern is the debut feature film from director Kiriya Kazuaki, or Mr. Utada Hikaru. Kiriya directed a number of his pop star wife's videos, even before they two got married.

Those videos featured incredibly lush, detailed visual effects, and their cinematic appeal is a definite draw. While Kiriya has a terrific eye, his storytelling needs a lot of work.

After 50 years of war, pollution and disease threaten humanity. In an attempt to save his sick wife from her own illness, Prof. Azuma Kotaru (Terao Akira) pitches for funds to research organ harvesting. A shady defense contractor bankrolls Azuma's research.

At the same time, Azuma's son, Tetsuya (Iseya Yusuke), heads out to fight in the war. Azuma disapproves, but Tetsuya goes anyway. A year later, he's killed.

On the day Tetsuya's body arrives back from the front line, an accident in Azuma's lab results in the rebirth of numerous cadavers. The military hunts down the reborn lab experiments, but a handful survive. They call themselves "Neo-sapiens", and they wage war on humans.

Azuma takes Testuya's body and submerges him in the same pool from which the Neo-sapiens emerged, bringing him back to life.

And that's just the exposition.

The rest of the movie plays out the conflict between Neo-sapiens and humanity, with Tetsuya, taking on the identity of a guardian angel named Casshern, trying to stop both from anihilating each other.

There's a lot of story, and Casshern doles it slowly -- painfully and troddingly so.

The entire plot of the film could have been condensed into 90 minutes. But Kiriya is fond of the long build-up. Every pause is exaggerated to three times its needed length.

Even for Japanese filmmaking, it's excessive. Yes, we know two of the characters are about to engage in a sword fight. Do they need to stop and stare each other down for a full 15 seconds before one of them charges?

Perhaps the biggest fault of the movie is the fact there actually is a good story in there somewhere. Issues of family and selfishness, love and sacrifice, even oppression -- terrific themes from which to fashion a plot, but it's lost under the weight of melodrama.

To its credit, Casshern is a visually stunning work, and the dizzying action scenes don't induce illness the way the first two episodes of Star Wars do.

Unfortunately, it fails where V for Vendetta succeeded -- an epic story set in a frightening future with engaging characters. By contrast, Casshern is an epic story drowned in dense settings with unsympathetic characters.

The next time Kiriya makes a movie, his producers should make sure he doesn't write it. At the very least, a really good editor needs to be involved.

So I felt a sense of deja vu catching up on Sorkin's previous work.

You can tell he was hashing out ideas which would eventually make it into the series. The presidents of both the film and the TV show at one point pose the question, "What's the value of a proportional response?"

In essence, The American President is The West Wing as a romantic comedy.

He walks in on a meeting with an environmental group, and he's smitten by lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Benning). She threatens him, he patronizes her, as Sydney would later describe their first meeting.

As the two develop a relationship, Shepherd underestimates the political ramifications and the obvious conflict of interest comes to the fore.

The political technical talk which made The West Wing sound smart also separates The American President from the rest of the rom-com genre. Sure, the awkward fumblings of a single widower forging a relationship with a new woman is reliable comedy fodder, and yes, it's compounded when the widower in question is the leader of the free world.

But as Sorkin would later demonstrate with The West Wing, separating the man from the office is a precious balance, which The American President also handles well. If only Dave would have done something similar.

Of course, The American President is a Hollywood film, and the nuance of Sorkin's characters have their rough edges smoothed out.

Richard Dreyfuss' conservative antagonist Sen. Bob Rumson is pretty much a "family values" straw man. He doesn't wield the power hungry ruthlessness of Steven Culp's Rep. Haffley in The West Wing.

Shepherd's Chief of Staff A.J. McInerney -- played by President Bartlett himself, Martin Sheen -- seems to share with Bartlett's Chief of Staff Leo McGarry the heavyweight-as-second-fiddle role. In a pivotal scene, Shepherd confronts A.J. about why A.J. was always a step behind him. "Because if I weren't, you'd be the most popular history professor at the University of Wisconsin," A.J. retorts. In the two-hour span of The American President, that relationship doesn't get the room to play out.

The American President also falls back on rom-com conventions. Benning is pretty much reduced to the role of giggling girl throughout most of the movie. In only a few instances do we see her come through as a reputed power broker.

Douglas, on the other hand, plays against reputation. He's actually pretty hot as the suave, collected President Shepherd.

Despite its rom-com conventions, The American President lets its intelligence show. Fans of the snappy, walk-and-talk dialogue of The West Wing will find The American President enjoyable, and it's refreshing to see Sorkin's more comedic side get center stage.

I liked Howl's Moving Castle, but it was not Spirited Away. Never mind the fact Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit was the box office darling of October 2005.

I wanted to see Wallace and Gromit eventually, but I wanted to wait till it became a five-day rental at the video store. My curiosity wasn't strong enough to view it as a new release.

Blame Chicken Run for that.

Chicken Run captured the essence of chicken behavior so well, I ended up empathizing with Mrs. Tweedy. Aarden Animation made Chicken Run, and the studio also made Wallace and Gromit.

Thankfully, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a story far removed from chickens. (Although, I never lived with rabbits. How do the rabbits in the film compare with the ones in real life?)

This time around, the ever-inventive Wallace runs a vegetable security firm (Anti-Pesto) in a town about to celebrate its annual vegetable festival. Lady Campanula Tottington (voiced by Helena Bonham-Carter) calls on the pair to deal with her burgeoning rabbit problem humanely. She wants to rebuff the hunting obssession of her would-be suitor Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Finnes).

Lady Tottington inspires Wallace to recondition the urges of the rabbits. By combining two of his inventions, he wants to brainwash the rabbits into disliking vegetables. Of course, something goes wrong, and a were-rabbit is unleashed on the town.

Wallace and Gromit hunt the were-rabbit down, but just when they think they've confined him, Gromit discovers the chase isn't so easily resolved.

Gromit is the scene-stealer of the movie. He has no dialogue, but he has all the best expressions. His furrowed eyebrows say all that needs to be said.

Subtlety isn't much of a virtue in most (U.S.) children's entertainment, so the understated humor in Curse of the Were-Rabbit is welcome. When Gromit and his villanous counterpart, Phillip, engage in a climactic aerial fight, they steal their planes from a carnival ride called "Dogfight". During said dogfight, the plane prompts its riders for more coins. The battling dogs oblige before resuming their fight.

The action scenes are also rich and incredibly cinematic. Part of the wonder of Curse of the Were-Rabbit is how the filmmakers managed to make something so kinetic with stop-motion animation. The underground car chase is particularly dynamic.

Perhaps the best part of Curse of the Were-Rabbit are the twists in the story. The film's writers don't dumb anything down for the children in the audience. When the identity of the were-rabbit is revealed, adults (such as myself) expecting one thing are just as surprised when it turns out differently.

Wallace and Gromit racked up Academy Awards before, so it's not surprising Curse of the Were-Rabbit grabbed the award for best animated film. It's an entertaining, beautifully shot film, and it deserved to win.

Is it dead? I'd like to think not, but for the time being, it won't be updated till I get through a pretty major event happening in my life right now -- I'm moving to Seattle.

In my mind, I've been done with Austin for the last half decade, but I wasn't in quite the financial or professional shape to justify a move. Now it seems those proverbial stars have lined up. I landed a job with the University of Washington, which I'll start in mid-January.

So now my life will be occupied with finishing up work projects, packing, organizing a move, finding a place to live -- not much time to update a blog neglected for nearly half a year.

And even after I've settled in, I question whether this site will continue in its present form.

Those logistics haven't been planned, and it's probably going to be a while till I figure it out.

Till then, here's a list of what I could have been writing about in the last five months if I had mustered the gumption:

• My new favorite label is New Amsterdam Records. It's the gateway label between Temporary Residence and New World or Tzadik.
• I would not profess this love for New Amsterdam had it not been for another growing influence in my listening habits: Spotify. The streaming service spurred me to get Fugazi's 13 Songs or The Smiths Complete.
• I'm curious why Kate Bush didn't bother to master Director's Cut. I had to put it through my own mastering to make it bearable to listen to.
• I sure have been listening to a lot of catalog and deluxe reissues.
• I had excellent seats to both Emmylou Harris and Sade.

But it looks like labels are now lining up their fall releases.

So this group with SUPERCAR's Nakako and Furukawa Miki and bloodthirsty butchers' Tabuchi Hisako? Judging by the 30-second samples on the Sony Music, it's either a New Order tribute band or another inscrutable iLL album.

And how's this for an embarrassing admission? I didn't realize STRAIGHTENER's STOUT was entirely a self-cover album. I was wondering why the band was releasing another album within months of the last.

Cocco, The Best Ban, Aug. 15
lostage, CONTEXT

My first reaction to a second Cocco best album was, "Again?" Then it was pointed out that 10 years have passed since Best + Ura Best + Mihappyokyokushuu. It's debatable whether two-thirds of Cocco's last three albums have any of her best material, but like last time, there are a few rarities that a Cocco fan may want to grab with this release. I have my eye on "ShimaTori no Uta", a track that appeared on the special edition of the documentary Daijoubu Aru you ni.

The upcoming lostage release is an EP. If it shows up on eMusic, I may check it out.

Steve Reich, WTC 9/11 (Kronos Quartet), Sept. 6

Using the technique he pioneered with Different Trains, Reich takes excerpts of 911 recordings to fashion WTC 9/11, a work for triple string quartet. Nonesuch offered a preview of the work, and that excerpt sounds pretty compelling.

It's also the first Nonesuch release by Kronos Quartet since 2009's Floodplain. The last two releases have been on independent labels.

Spangle call Lilli line, New Season, Sept. 7

Will you look at that? Another version of "roam in octave"!

Tokyo Jihen, CS Channel, Sept. 21

This release is actually a DVD compilation, rounding up video clips from Daihakken and Sports. It also includes a new song, "Handsome Sugiru".

Björk, Biophilia, Sept. 26

Hey! Tracks from the new Björk album are available as apps for your iPhone and iPad! Well, your iPhone and iPad, at least -- I've got an Android phone. And so reveals the big elephant in the room of Biophilia's much-hyped crossmedia release -- it excludes fans who aren't on a particular platform, let alone fans who aren't even wired. (And I imagine there are a few.)

Other albums in the works:

• Santigold, TBD I find the Billboard story about this upcoming release a bit disturbing. Her label should just stay out of her way.
• Matt Alber, TBD Matt Alber conducted a pre-order campaign for this new album, which he hopes to have out by November.

Where other writers love to pack their prose with florid language, I go for economy. Less is more.

I signed up for Twitter back in Nov. 2006, and I knew right away I would love the challenge of summarizing moments of time within the strict limit of 140 characters. Twitter turns five years old soon, which means I've been expressing myself 140 characters (or fewer) at a time for half a decade.

Note that the previous entry in this blog is dated May 1, 2011. I haven't posted anything here in a month and a half, and I think that Twitter ceiling has affected how I perceiving the medium of blogging. This here entry? Too many words.

It feels too expansive. It takes too much energy. In short, I've gotten out of the habit of writing in longer forms. It was that or blame the job for the lack of entries here.

You would think all that time away would allow me to dig up some awesome listening. I think maybe the quality releases were mostly stacked in Q1. Q2 seems a bit more elusive in finding the gems.

Probably a more interesting list would be to pit 2010 against catalog. I think 2010 would lose that fight.

I'm fairly sure the first five slots of this list -- although shifted from earlier drafts -- are solid. The remaining five are malleable. In fact, I'm not sure how LCD Soundsystem made it on there. (Well, merit, of course, but I think I gave more spins to The Shape of Jazz to Come and Zenyatta Mondatta.) Comments provided for only the newest entries from previous drafts ...

It's a saga I detail over at VexVox, but I pretty much flew out to Hawaiʻi at a moment's notice, bringing only my most recent purchases. I wasn't really in the frame of mind to shop for music -- not that it stopped me from heading to Book-Off at Shirokiya in Ala Moana -- so growth of the backlog was somewhat mitigated.

In fact, only two of these titles are actual physical purchases.

Observant Records releases are also available elsewhere, most notably CD Baby, which still offers the Work Release Program titles.

As you can tell, there's not much here at the moment, just the scaffolding of things to come. One such thing is building the Observant Records web shop, but for now you can find links to online vendors where Eponymous 4 albums are sold.

That doesn't stop me from buy the occasional DVD from time to time. It doesn't mean I actually get to watch them.

So I figure I may as well make a list of DVDs I own but have yet to open. I'm including movies as well. At some point, perhaps I'll crack them open and revisit what made me like that particular story in the first place.

With the other two series, you essentially had fat Americans frying shit to holy hell. It really got boring after a while. But Feasting on Waves actually features foods that are new and unknown -- indigenous fruits, local cocktails, exotic locales and colorful people. (Or people of color, for that matter.)

I find that far more interesting. If anything, Feasting on Waves is much like Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, minus the hard-boiled tone, plus AB's self-deprecating humor.

If AB never travels across the US for the next installment of this series, it will be too soon. (Although Feasting on Waves II ought to focus on Hawaiʻi.) I'm wondering, though, if a trip through Mexico or Canada is the next order of business.

(I don't believe it's proper Twitter etiquette to follow anyone who follows you. I do believe it's proper Twitter usage to follow people you genuinely want to follow.)

Today, I said I didn't want to return the Season 2 DVD set of Eureka I bought impulsively last week. I need the cash though, and maybe when I'm a little more flush, I'll reinvest.

Then a Twitter user named _S_A_R_A_H started following me. I was about ready to block _S_A_R_A_H when I noticed the Twitter slut ratio was roughly 1 to 1. Then I read _S_A_R_A_H's "About Me" info and realized it's the Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat from Eureka. In other words, it's Sheriff Carter's house! _S_A_R_A_H is following me on Twitter!

OK, this kind of thing would be considered Pepsi Blue on Metafilter, but still -- the folks who market Eureka are incredibly clever. For the first season, they spoofed infomercials with products designed in Eureka. Now, an intelligent house is using Twitter to keep in touch with viewers.

I already like the show, but this kind of fan outreach is just cool.

Of course, now I'd feel bad if I returned that Season 2 DVD set.

I have to say the break made me re-evaluate my viewing habits. With nothing to watch during the strike, it was easy for me to focus my attention on other endeavors. TiVo also has made it easier to wean myself from anything that isn't absolutely essential, which these days means Battlestar Galactica.

I just spent today catching up on the last four episodes of Brothers & Sisters. The shows have been waiting on my TiVo for a good month now.

Being a TV whore was a lot easier when I didn't have a TiVo to unshackle me from the futon, nor a lengthy hiatus that made me not miss anything at all.

The summer premieres of shows I like don't happen till the middle of July, and I'm now caught up on the fall shows. So it's a good time to review and preview in bullet points.

The only show to which I was truly addicted was Bleach, a Japanese anime shown on [adult swim], but it ran out of dubbed episodes many months back. I had to resort to finding fan subs from the Evil Sharing Networks to get my fix. (I finished the Soul Society Arc, but I figure I'll wait to start a new storyline when [adult swim] catches up.)

So between a lackluster season and disruptive labor disputes, I've had no incentive to blog about TV. That's not to say I'm shutting down this site. No, I think instead I'll wait to see what happens next season. For now, I'm sitting the rest of this television cycle out.

What little I had to say about this season can be expressed in various bullet points.

• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Get rid of Adam Beach and bring back Mike Doyle, please.
• Desperate Housewives Still can't fucking stand Gaby and Susan. I kind of liked how they were softening Edie last season, but oh well -- it was nice when it lasted. I think the Season Pass is going to get removed at some point.
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent This show is still CSIzed, but at least it's not as heavy-handed as last season.
• Bleach Goddamn, I hate the Don Kanonji episodes.
• Dirty Sexy Money I should care about a bunch of bored rich white people, why?
• Pushing Daisies Could have sworn I programmed the pilot to be recorded.
• Chuck So far my favorite new show, even if Matthew Bomer is shown only in passing.

But now I learn that Tobey Maguire is attached to a big-screen adaptation of Robotech, so says Hollywood Reporter. FTW?

I think now I can empathize.

I've been meaning to write this entry for a long time, but I've been sidetracked all summer by work in my recording studio. As I've mentioned before, TiVo has actually been responsible for my watching more shows but fewer hours of television. How is that possible? Maybe it's all just perception.

Here's what I've been watching:

So now I have to play catch up. And I still haven't even weighed in on the season finales.

It would be funny if I were watching so much TV that I don't have time to update, but as I mentioned before, TiVo actually lets me do other things during the week, leaving my weekends free to be chained to the television set.

I have only so much blogging energy in me, and I've been expending it on a New Year's resolution to turn my music site into an MP3 blog. I've been running this feature called "365 Days, 365 Files", where I post a song from my CD collection everyday, and it's been monopolizing my time.

I just want to say, yes, television is still my drug of choice -- certainly far and above movies -- and I'm getting my regular fix. Writing about it, though, is a separate challenge entirely.

It took two years to line up the pieces to make it happen, but it's done. I live in Seattle now, close enough to Hawai´i to make traveling less arduous but far enough to keep me away from the orbit of familial crazy.

I live in a bona fide gay neighborhood now. I can walk or take public transportation, which actually is preferable since city planning in Seattle seems to be an oxymoron. (Take one wrong turn, and you'll find yourself on the other side of town.)

Seafood and Asian cuisine options are abundant, but of course, that means surrendering Papalote and Azul Tequila. But hey -- I can find plate lunches here. They won't give Grace's Inn any sleepless nights, but if I crave something from the islands, I don't have to make it myself.

Cedar season had to kick me in the nuts before I left Austin -- compounded by the fact the allergies really masked a stress-induced cold -- but I like the fact I'm spending my January free from the death grip of allergies.

My apartment has a balcony with the Space Needle squarely in view. I keep the vertical blinds open as much as possible because I love the view. I can see the Sound, the mountains, the downtown skyline. Back in Austin, I kept my vertical blinds closed because all I had look at was a swimming pool.

The cold weather is still a wild card. I may have forever stayed in my Austin rut if the summers hadn't gotten extremely hot. Ninety days of triple-digit heat? Fuck that shit. I tell people here in Seattle that I'm done with sun. Had too much of it. Give me overcast skies. Too much blue sky means drought, and droughts suck ass.

We'll see how I feel about a season of freezing temperatures. At the same time, a winter should feel like winter, not spring. (Unless you're in Hawai´i.)

The cold weather has already had an effect on my wardrobe. I bought some waterproof boots to deal with an unusually strong winter storm. My athletic shoes were no match for the ice and snow, not to mention the hills of my neighborhood. I also bought a cap. One thing I remember from my year in New York City -- most body heat escapes from the head and hands. I could feel the heat sapped out of my hair as I walked in the chill.

So yes, lots of adjustments to come. It's been a long time since I've moved. I know there's a psychological impact to relocation, stages a person goes through getting used to a new environment. It's been a long time since I've gone through them, and I hope I'm at an age where I can weather them.

We'll just have to see now, won't we?

• A bottle of pinot grigio
• A gift card to Azul Tequila

Both gifts encourage the consumption of alcohol. These are things my friends wish for me to prioritize.

The real toy I "got" for Christmas were two pieces of Native Instruments software -- the previously mentioned Guitar Rig 4 Pro and Kontakt 4.

Kontakt 4 comes with samples from the Vienna Symphonic Library, perhaps the most thorough orchestral sample library out there. I haven't used Kontakt much on this remix project, but I did use a string ensemble on one song. Oh, my. It sounded good, but the articulations were limited. I guess it's time to start saving my pennies for something either slightly or extremely more extensive.

Guitar Rig 4 Pro and Battery 3, which I bought back in September, have been my workhorses on this remix project. As much as I love how Reason allowed me to fake guitar parts, Guitar Rig allows me to have the real deal (or as much as a real deal with my limitations.)

For my patronage, Native Instruments offered me some vouchers to take a few bucks off of other instruments in their catalog. One of them was set to expire at the end of December, so I also got a gamelan sample library. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it yet, but I've got visions of the Akira soundtrack dancing in my head.

Wow. All this talk of these new toys makes me want to play with them.

Excuse me.

Back at around tax season, I went LCD and bought myself a new computer monitor and television. The monitor gave me enough desk space to move my mixer front and center, while the television made me realize just how behind the times I was in terms of entertainment options. The fact I can hook my old computer up to the television with a VGA cable blew my mind -- and VGA is so 2005.

I'm not quite ready to jump on the Bluray bandwagon just yet, especially since I have a collection that includes DVDs from multiple regions. I don't want to end up with something that can't play my Cocco music videos. But it's nearly a year, and I still need to upgrade my TiVo.

In July, I got myself a new job, and with it, a few new skills. No longer am I dependent on phpMyAdmin -- the MySQL command line is no longer daunting to me. I also get the XKCD joke about "sudo make me a sandwich".

The job also put me in a position where I had to work within a codebase not designed by myself. I still don't have a mental picture of all the moving parts in this application, but I do get a sense the design complexity. The code itself is a mess, but the application runs pretty well in spite of it.

The new job allowed me to get a new computer, which in turn let me upgrade a whole bunch of software and to invest in others. As a result, my demos sound closer to final drafts than they ever have, despite the fact I suck at playing guitar. Perhaps in the future I'll be able to record a concept album akin to 「加爾基 精液 栗ノ花」 by 椎名林檎 or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. Or maybe a symphonic work. I've got the sample library to do it.

All these "new" things makes me think 2010 was the start of some sort of transformation. Into what? I'm not sure.

I guess that's what 2011 is for.

There are always things to tweak, but for the most part, the album is at a point where I'm mostly satisfied with the results.

I've been recording and remixing and remixing and recording these songs since 2005, and they've come a long, long way. In the beginning, they were all computer-driven, with parts faked to sound approximately human. That uncanny valley can sometimes be bridged, but most times it can't.

Now I've got a real human playing on these songs, even if that human can't really play. (That human would be me.) The songs at least now sound like a band is playing them and not a machine.

I've left the computer to handle a few things -- the trickier guitar parts, the drums, and keyboard parts that obviously need a CPU's intervention.

But for the limited budget and space under which I'm operating, the album actually sounds decent enough for me to put it out for real.

That leaves the question of what to do with the version that's already out there. I'll figure that out later. Right now, I need to take a break from this project.

I'll start on the next one.

Tickets to Hawai"i are expensive on any day, but when you have to get one at a moment's notice, it costs a huge chunk of change. So I kept this account above $1K for as much as possible.

Well, it came in handy this past month, and now the emergency has passed.

I find myself thinking about getting things I've been putting off because I never knew when I had to tap that fund. I've got a 10-year-old copy of Microsoft Office that needs upgrading. I would mind getting a TiVo compatible with my LCD TV. I've been meaning to learn Flex, and I could probably think about getting a smart phone.

It feels weird.

My dad has traditionally served as a symbolic obstacle between me and things I want out of my life, mainly because he was less symbolic about it when I was younger. I put off a lot of little things because I was waiting for my dad to die. Now that he's gone, I can start thinking about those things again.

And still I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Aside from the drums and the drones in the background, it's the only one where every instrument is performed live. I actually had to practice the guitar melody in the chorus. Thankfully, it was slow enough for my limited abilities.

I remixed this track a long while back, actually, but it did inspire me to tackle the whole notion of remixing everything I've done so far. ("All the Times I Remember" was also done prior to this weekend.)

At some point, I need to learn how to make those drones myself since Guitar Rig 4 could probably do a bit more convincing job than Reason, but that's another experiment for another time. Or I could just leave well enough alone.

Here's the remixed track:

(Listen)

And here's the original demo:

(Listen)

There. Now I'm caught up for Holidailies. Till I fall behind again tonight.

I recorded it back in 2005 and didn't really edit it since then. The vocals are the first take. Back then, I didn't really know much about effects, panning or any of the tricks in my growing arsenal.

So this past weekend, I finally separated all the tracks -- only three instruments -- and gave them proper panning and reverb. It makes for better listening on headphones, at least.

Here's the remixed track:

(Listen)

And here's the original demo:

(Listen)

While I was updating iTunes, I figured I may as well install Safari for Windows, just to take a cursory look at my websites.

So all those problems with Japanese text and sans-serif fonts I've been laying down at Google Chrome's feet? Well, it's not Chrome's fault entirely -- it's Webkit's fault.

Chrome runs on the Webkit engine, which also powers Safari. Viewing this site in Safari produces the same result -- no font substitution when a sans-serif Japanese font is required. A visit to Bounce.com on Safari confirms it -- the site looks borked on Safari as well.

Just to be thorough, I checked Opera as well. It can handle sans-serif Japanese font substitution fine, although it looks a bit ugly.

UPDATE, 02/27/2011, 08:13: Well, I finally joined the 21st Century and upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. Aside from all the User Access Control prompts and annoyances with running programs as an administrator, I have to say I rather like some of the subtle touches of Windows 7, but that's not the point of this update.

Windows 7 and Webkit are rendering Japanese text styled with a sans-serif font. Rather, it falls back on a default font (even if it's a serif font) than showing nothing at all. This issue hasn't been fixed in Windows XP, which is inconvenient for anyone holding out on upgrading.

Nothing strange so far, right?

Here's the same sentence in a <span/> tag with a style attribute specifying Helvetica, Verdana and Arial fonts: このセンテンスは日本語で書いた。

If you're using Google Chrome, you may not even see the sentence at all. It will, however, render when you view the source code.

Curious to know why some parts of my sites render Japanese text and others do not, I started inspecting elements with Japanese text in Chrome, enabling and disabling rules. When I disabled font-family rules specifying sans-serif fonts, the Japanese text re-appeared. Enabling the sans-serif rule made them disappear again.

It looks like Chrome is pretty literal about how it renders fonts -- if it encounters a character the font doesn't support, it's not going to render it. In fact, it won't even bother trying to render an analogous sans-serif Japanese font.

Here's our same example sentence with a style attribute specifying a sans-serif font-family: このセンテンスを書いた。

Firefox and Internet Explorer look like they substitute fonts to render sans-serif Japanese text, probably falling back on MS PGothic.

If you want a mix of English and Japanese text to render with a sans-serif font in Google Chrome, it looks like you have to specify those sans-serif fonts in your CSS.

Example: This sentence mixes 日本語 and 英語 with Arial MS Unicode and MS PGothic specified in the font-family.

Of course, this means your English text is also rendered in Arial Unicode MS or MS PGothic, which pales next Helvetica. And Mac users? Well, that's an entire cross-platform can of worms I haven't even tested.

UPDATE, 06/01/2010, 0917: Of course, this site uses UTF-8 for character encoding. If a site uses Shift-JIS or EUC-JP, these problems may not be an issue.

Also, the examples may not adequately demonstrate the sans-serif issue, so here are more examples using <h1/>.

Sans-serif specified in font-family:

日本語

Helvetica and sans-serif specified in font-family:

日本語

MS PGothic specified in font-family:

日本語

Arial Unicode MS specified in font-family:

日本語

Firefox falls back on MS PGothic in the Helvetica example. Internet Explorer falls back on a serif Japanese font. Chrome does not render it.

FOLLOW-UP: It's actually WebKit's fault.

I signed up with Twitter a good six months before it took off at SXSW in 2007, and one of the first things I did was tweet in Japanese. Success! I signed up with Grooveshark around the same time and tried to share some upload some music tagged in Japanese. I saw question marks where there should have been text. Failure.

Google Chrome is gaining market share, and even I have to admit I like its speed. But one thing prevents me from adopting it -- it can't handle the Japanese characters on my site.

That's not to say it can't handle Japanese -- I can visit HMV with no problems, but Bounce looks totally messed up.

If you're viewing this site on Google Chrome, you already see a number of these inconsistencies. First, the header of my site, which is named 「作譜」, is completely missing, although the <h1/> space for it is allocated. But "About this blog" renders the blog name just fine.

The side bar ought to have links to this site and my "creative scrapbook", 「名作記」, but they are gone. Trying to reproduce the errors is proving elusive. Here's how the side bar is supposed to look like under the "Links" section labeled "personal":

作譜
名作記
austin stories

It renders fine in this entry, doesn't it?

I've coded this site on the back end to do a bit of string processing to account for paragraph and line breaks, so while it's a syntactic replica of the problem text, it's not rendered the same way. But I suspect even if I do replicate the markup, encoding and response headers, I won't get the same results.

I've already sent bug reports through Chrome about this issue, and it's been a persistent problem since the browser launched.

It would probably help if I didn't make such weird demands on browsers with all this mixed language content. Why must I be so difficult?

Part of me would like to visualize Hula's Bar and Lei Stand as the scene of that moment, but Hula's has been around for 35 years, according to its web site. That would put it around 1975. The American Psychiatric Association revised the entry in 1973, then removed it entirely in 1987. Maybe it's plausible?

A semantic argument ensued, which usually happens when definitions of adjectives are up for debate, but in this case, both authors are correct. Passion, professionalism -- they're not mutually exclusive in the realm of programming. But both writers managed to talk around the one point on which they agreed.

The Carnegie Hall web site makes a coy reference to that age-old joke, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The reply: practice.

If you want to improve a skill -- be it C# or C-Sharp -- you need to practice. To become a master at that particular skill, you need to practice for 10,000 hours.

Malcolm Gladwell seems to get all the press regarding this figure, but Daniel J. Levitan mentioned it first in his book, This Is Your Brain on Music. Levitan says it's a well-researched figure, and I haven't scoured the footnotes of the book to verify. Intuitively, it makes sense.

So, yes, there's a reason employers seek at least five years of experience for their positions -- consciously or not, they're looking for masters.

The quality of the practice matters. I had a piano teacher in college who advocated a method of "perfect practice" -- he taught that if you played a passage of music perfectly during rehearsal, your performance will be likewise perfect. (Classical music is all about fidelity to the score.) If you spent five years doing something incorrectly, you'll be a master of doing it incorrectly.

So here's where passion and professionalism affect the picture. Passion is needed to make those 10,000 hours feel engaging. If you're an accountant who hates being an accountant, five years is going to feel like a lifetime. Professionalism, as defined by Mark, is actually the same thing Soon describes without the hyperbolic language. Whatever it's called, you're going to need it to reach that mastery.

And really ... if you spend that much time being engaged (and not getting burned out), then yes, it may seem like passion/professionalism should take all the credit. It doesn't.

I've been building web sites from the ground up since 2000. Numerically, I ought to be a master at it, and by some accounts, I am. I like what I do, and on the days I don't, I take solace knowing it doesn't annoy me as much as, say, working at a newspaper would. (I've done that.) But I have interests beyond programming, some dating back further than when I became a programmer.

Do I lack passion, then? Probably not. But I've got something that has kept me going for the last 10 years, and even if I never set out to master my programming skills, it doesn't mean I may not end up doing so.

Note: I had intended to write a series of tutorials while I dealt with some menial task for a video project, but those tasks turned out to be easier than expected. So I'm not sure how many more of these entries I'll write.

There are a lot of places on the Interwebs where you can find out about video resolutions and the first two links provided by Google are good places to start.

Assuming you can get through all the jargon that gets thrown around.

Here's the thing you should come away with in learning about video resolution: there are many ways to describe the same thing.

Let's begin with aspect ratio, the width of an image divided by its height. Long ago and far away when televisions started inching their way into American homes, film studios combated the perceived threat of the medium by expanding the size of the theater screen. As a result, films have an aspect ratio of 16:9, while TV has an aspect ratio of 4:3. That's the simple history of aspect ratios.

Now comes the hard part.

It has to do, in part, with scan lines.

The About.com article describes it best:

A television or recorded video image is basically made up of scan lines. Unlike film, in which the whole image is projected on a screen at once, a video image is composed of rapidly scanning lines across a screen starting at the top of the screen and moving to bottom.

Even though the image you see on the screen may be 4:3, the video resolution expresses the degree of granularity within that 4:3 aspect ratio. A 640x480 resolution has a 4:3 aspect ratio. 640 / 480 = 1.333. A 720x480 resolution also has a 4:3 aspect ratio. 720 / 480 = 1.5.

What? 1.333 is not the same as 1.5.

All right, let's talk about standards. Different regions of the world have set specifications by which video makers and manufactures must abide. In North America, there's NTSC. In Europe and Asia, there's PAL. And there's also SECAM, wherever that's used. Each specification states how many scan lines can be used in video equipment.

That explains why the 480 doesn't change between 640 and 720 -- the specification deems it so.

What's the deal with the 640 and 720, then?

Scan lines deal with vertical resolution, but each line contains a number of dots -- that is, pixels -- that get fired up anytime that scanning beam of light hits it. The more lines and the more dots you have, the sharper the picture becomes.

Throwing all these numbers around won't mean a thing without seeing just how messing with them affects your picture. Ever hear of letterboxing? It's those black bars that show up on the top and bottom of your screen if you try to watch a 16:9 film image on a 4:3 TV set. If you tried to watch a 4:3 image on a 16:9 screen, the black bars would show up on sides.

Try to fill the entire space with the image, and it gets distorted. The narrow picture on a widescreen gets stretched, while a wide image on a narrow screen gets squished. Take out the distortion, and the image gets clipped.

In the audio world, it's best to cut than to boost, and that still applies to video as well. Analog images look terrible on high definition screens because of the differences in scan lines -- the 480 vertical lines of an analog signal can't possible fill all 720 lines of a hi-def screen. It's like transcoding a 128kbps MP3 to 192kbps -- it's still going to sound like a 128kbps MP3.

So if you want to watch a video shot at 320x480 on a DVD player, you cannot help but have a fuzzy picture. And if you transcode a high definition video to standard definition -- no, I'm not even going to get into what those terms mean -- then try to upload to a site that supports high definition, you get a letterboxing double whammy.

Combine these concepts with the lesson about codecs, and ... well crap, my brain just shut down trying to keep all of it together.

And there's still much more to learn.

"Rock star developer" used to mean one thing but now is meaning something else. I sometimes look at those job postings and wonder if these employers would prefer a "classical developer" instead.

I am a classically-trained musician, although you wouldn't know it if you heard me try to bang through the Tocatta by Aram Khachaturian. When I was learning the first movement of Ludwig Van Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, I wasn't concentrating on the individual notes so much as I was listening for the overall harmonic rhythm. I could sense when one diminished seventh would fake out a resolution to another diminished seventh, till it finally reached the tonic, which was not necessarily in the root key established at the start of the piece.

But some musicians don't need to speak that language. In fact, most musicians never speak that language. They just develop an instinct for what sounds "right". U2 prided themselves on the fact their earliest songs were nothing more than music exercises jumbled up to become songs. (On some level, though, that's how it's supposed to work.)

U2 are rock stars. They probably still don't read music. And honestly, they're wealthy enough not to need to.

By that token, I could probably be a "rock star developer". I don't necessarily know what design patterns are. I may not be able to tell you what "cardinality" and "polymorphism" are off the top of my head. I write database queries with joins and outer joins all the time, but if you asked me to explain how they work, I'd probably mumble and stammer.

Makes you wonder how I make a living as a web developer.

I've been building web applications since 2000, so at this point, you'd think I'd pick something up. And I have. I'm just not necessarily cognizant of what. I know I have holes in my knowledge, but I don't know exactly where they are. My coding style could probably best be described as "instinctive".

Very much like a rock star. Or at my level, a rock musician. (I don't have the ego or the blow to be a "star".) Knowing the difference between an augmented fourth and a diminished fifth won't effect whether you can shred through a guitar solo, but even a little music theory could go a long way in enriching your harmonic language.

What I should really be doing -- and what I aim to do in the next several months -- is become a "classical developer", someone who can map those nebulous concepts with an actual vocabulary, someone who knows why best practices became the "best", someone who can actually explain what "cardinality" and "polymorphism" mean.

Of course, the hazard of having classical training is being shackled by it, and no world is more inflexible than classical music. What's on the page is what should be coming out of your instrument. That is the rule of law, and audiences will let you know when you break it.

The trick, then, is to lean on that training without being beholden to it. When I work on my own material, I'll keep in mind what the common chord progressions are -- then try to find ways around them.

I'm at a point professionally as a developer where I want to do something and know what I'm doing. And, uh, it's kind of long overdue.

Have you heard the story of how Paul McCartney "composed" his classical piece, Liverpool Oratorio? He had someone with music training transcribe what he was humming.

I don't want to be like Paul McCartney.

Any explanation of digital video begins with an understanding coders and decoders. The proper parlance for this concept is codec. This word is important to learn. Take it to heart.

Digital video takes up a lot of space, much, much more than audio. An uncompressed audio file can be dozens of megabytes. An uncompressed video file can be dozens, even hundreds, of gigabytes. Back in the late '90s, when I made my first tip-toe into the depths of digital audio, 6GB hard drives felt voluminous, but they were no match for the demands of space-hogging WAV files.

Today's late-aught hard drives make those 6GB drives look puny, so a 100MB WAV file doesn't seem so greedy. But even a 1.5-terabyte drive is no match for hours of uncompressed video files. Till such a day comes when drive space approaches infinity, codecs are a fact of life.

And damn are there a lot of them.

Lossy codecs discard information during encoding, similar to how a WAV file loses part of its frequency range when being converted to MP3. Lossless codecs do not discard information during encoding, similar to how a FLAC file compresses a WAV file without loss of sound quality.

Between the rock of hard drive space and the hard place of video file size, lossy codecs are pretty much de rigeur when working with digital video. To the home studio enthusiast, that's like recording a song with nothing but MP3s and MP4s. Oh, it could be done, but the basic tenet of any media editing is that you want to cut more than boost.

Actually, keep that idea in mind throughout your exploration of any creative endeavor: cut before boost.

So in terms of digital video, you'll be working with source that's pretty much cut to begin with. I did not realize this fact during my first steps in dealing with video, so I ended up transcoding a lot of video. But similar to how coding and re-encoding a sound file will eventually screw up the sound quality, the effects on digital video are compounded moreso.

Transcoding is a necessity when working with video, but smart transcoding saves time and space.

Let's make this personal.

My first music video was shot on a Canon Powershot S500 point-and-shoot camera from 2003. It could record 30 seconds of video at 640x480 or 3 minutes at 320x240. Translation: It could record 30 seconds of video viewable on an old television set or 3 minutes viewable on 2005 state-of-the-art YouTube.

I opted to go for the smaller file size.

I eventually wanted to view this video on a DVD, despite its resolution. The concept of resolution requires another tutorial entirely, but for now let's map some of these numbers being thrown around with real-life environments:

• A 320x240 video can be viewed, as mentioned before, on YouTube at its lowest settings. It won't look any good bigger than that.
• A 640x480 video can be viewed in iTunes or other desktop computer media players such as Windows Media Player and Winamp. You might even watch it on a television, but it won't have the same picture quality as ...
• A 720x480 video, which is DVD quality and no better. It is certainly not hi-def, which is ...
• A 1920x1280 video, right now the best picture quality around, with 1280x1040 still being pretty damned decent.

My video, being capped at 320x240, has no chance of looking good at a DVD level, but in order to be burned on a DVD, it has to be transcoded to that resolution regardless.

Fine. I figured I may as well transcode the source material to the destination resolution, edit it and export at that resolution. So I transcoded those files without paying attention to which codec I was using and ended up with 10 files each nearly 1GB. The original files combined took up 230MB of space. But I have a big drive, so what's the deal?

First, the codec mattered. I could have saved a lot of hard drive space by choosing the right codec for the job, and I didn't. I don't even know how I chose what I chose -- probably some default setting -- but if I used one designed specifically for DVDs, I could have shaved a few hundred megabytes from those encoded files.

But in reality, I didn't need to transcode those file at all. In fact, I could have just worked with the files on hand and let the settings in Sony Vegas Movie Studio take care of the transcoding during export. The picture quality looked the same both ways, but one method saved hard drive space.

So what codec do you use? That's a question that comes up numerous times, but for beginners, read the manual for your camera. My Canon Powershot S500 stored video in AVI files with the MJPEG codec. My newer camera, a Canon Powershot SD780IS bought to replace the now-dead S500, stores video in MOV files with the H.264 codec.

Your camera will be different.

If you use a paid software video editor such as Vegas Movie Studio (the one I use) or iMovie, it should come with its own set of codecs to create whatever video you want to produce -- DVD, Blu Ray, YouTube. If you use freeware such as VirtualDub, you'll have to hunt for your own codecs.

I'm at the point where my workflow is pretty solid -- get the MIDI parts down, record those MIDI parts to audio, lay some vocals over those tracks, apply effects processing to all that audio, mix it down, do some quick mastering and pow -- ready to hear.

It took a few years before I really got how effects, particularly equialization, work, and I had to redo a lot of stuff multiple times just to get the sound I have today.

That shot of confidence in my achievements made me think video would be just as surmountable.

What an idiot.

And boy am I never going to get any of those hours back.

Right now, I'm going through a tedious process of accommodating my lack of processing power to edit some hi-def video. It will take me a few days to reach a point where I can start editing, which will take another few days. And once the editing is done, another few hours will be spent rendering the finished product to various formats.

It takes only a few seconds, maybe a minute, to turn a WAV file into an MP3. No such luxuries await with video.

So I'm hoping to spend the next few days jotting down -- mostly for myself -- things I've learned in working with video. I'm still light years away from attaining a beginner's fraction of knowledge, but I hope what I know prevents me from going down any more wrong-headed paths.

Hyperlinks, punditry and meta were pretty essential to the success of early blogs. Not so much online journals -- meta, yes, punditry, perhaps, links, optional. Blog topics could cover any number of subjects. Journal topics focus primarily on the events of the writer's life.

I come from the journal tradition. I'm not much of a blogger because I'm not combing the web for things on which to comment. Well, I do for Musicwhore.org, but for this site? This site which was intended to be my dumping ground for commentary? This site which was supposed to deal with subjects other than myself? Not so much.

I'm just not suited to write a blog -- which hasn't stopped me from launching about seven of them -- because I'm just not a link collector.

Or so I thought.

For months, I've felt self-conscious for letting this site -- and others -- go neglected. Where can I find that cool content which would make me gaze intently at my navel?

That's when I looked at the links I post to Facebook and realized all of them were fodder for blog posts. If I had the inclination to ponder and to elucidate, I could have contributed my two yen about, say, Patrick Stewart's mom, Nathan Gunn's workout or the correlation between secular societies and prosperity.

Or would I?

Actually, I probably would have just made a link and wrote little more than "Hey, this is cool" -- a format at which Facebook excels.

Paste a URL in a box, type some text, press a button -- viola! Instant link log.

Sure, I could do something like that with Tumblr, but Facebook has an advantage this site does not -- I know my audience.

The Facebook audience are people I have met at some point in my life, a few virtually. I know exactly who is reading what I have to say about some link I posted. I can find out IP addresses of visitors for this site.

This site isn't indexed by search engines because, well, I have family members on the Internet. So whatever potential audience I have is seriously curtailed by a robot.txt file. In short, the people who would read this blog are people with whom I'm already networked.

(My personal sites are really for them, anyway.)

So yes, Facebook killed this blog. Or rather, injured it significantly. Things I could have posted here, ended up there.

I don't really intend to shut this site down, but I can't picture an avalanche of content coming soon either.

I could see where Dzuiba is coming from, although I wouldn't word it as strongly. I've seen a lot of posts pop up on DZone extolling the virtues of being a "passionate programmer", someone who always strives to learn, devotes free time to improving, living and breathing code ... all the usual self-back-patting by overachievers.

I used to code in my free time. But that's because I was learning from scratch. I spent my college years learning such esoteric topics as orchestration, music theory, Associated Press style, defamation of character, points and picas. Control structures, variable types and design patterns were not part of that curriculum.

I can tell you when I started coding at home less -- early 2005. That's when my interest started being diverted to home studio recording. I wanted to figure out how compressors, limiters and equalization worked. I wanted to create a Red Book-standard compact disc that I could eventually send to a pressing plant. I wanted to learn how I could create a make-shift isolation booth in my walk-in closet to record vocals.

It's possible I could have learned home recording and continued my exploration of code, but honestly? How many times do I want to relearn how to use an if statement? When you know the basic grammar of programming languages, all that's left is to learn vocabulary and syntax. I would like to learn Ruby and Python at some point, but I prefer to learn how to use effects processors instead.

I still code in my free time, but it's not all I do. In fact, coding is my escape from recording. When my ears are fatigued, I'll fire up Netbeans and scrub a few more bugs I've been putting off.

All that to say, I chose balance. I've benefited from coding in my free time. I wouldn't be nowhere near qualified if I didn't. But I've benefited just as much -- my instinct tells me even more so -- from leaving code in the office. When I'm done with models, views and controllers, I can go home and think about chord progressions and melodies. Or nothing at all.

Dzuiba is right to question a mindset that blurs boundaries between the personal and the professional. I don't find it healthy. The rebuttals are also correct. Extra-curricular coding is necessary to improve, let alone keep up.

So code in your free time, if you want. And if hiring managers find fault that you don't, their lack of balance is not your responsibility. In fact, just nod and walk slowly away.

After considerable uproar from users, the forced compression was removed. So I begrudgingly uploaded my videos again.

This past summer, I put new audio tracks on my videos, and I wanted to update them on all the sites to which I uploaded. The difference in user experience between then and now was drastic, and it forced me to update the 2008 shootout. High definition is now the norm, and each site handles it differently, some better than others.

This time around, I stuck with uploading MPEG-2 files, forgoing the comparison with MP4.

Here's how each site performed.

YouTube has really stepped up. I was expecting my videos to look like total ass -- and yes, the upload process does create low-quality versions for users with low bandwidth -- but I was nicely surprised to see very little to no loss in picture quality. The audio also remained in stereo.

Back in 2008, the multiple video upload interface was marred by JavaScript errors. Google now forces users to install Google Gears to upload multiple videos, which I guess gets around the JavaScript issues.

The best part of the user experience was not having to hack my videos to accommodate YouTube's processes. My opinion has pretty much changed 180 degrees.

Myspace

Myspace, on the other hand, is worse for wear. Myspace Video also supports HD, but the post-upload process is too dumb to figure out whether something is really in HD. My 4:3 videos were stretched to fit the 16:9 view port, making the videos look odd.

The audio quality remained high, but the fact YouTube and Facebook can get aspect ratios correct pretty much reveals how far Myspace needs to go to catch up.

Facebook

In 2008, Facebook scored high on picture quality but low on audio quality. Now the audio quality has caught up with the video quality. Before, the audio was converted to mono, but now it's kept in stereo, with little or no degradation.

Last.fm

Bandwidth issues pretty much took Last.fm out of the running. My video uploads timed out after a few minutes, and with an upload transfer rate easily a fraction of the other sites, Last.fm cannot be considered a serious contender in online video. So the old videos from 2008 are just going to have to suffice.

Conclusion

As much as I was surprised to praise Myspace last year, I'm just as surprised to turn around my opinion about YouTube.

YouTube effectively addressed the issues that hampered my user experience a year ago, and I don't hate the site any more. (That's not to say I love it, either.) Myspace, however, lost out, and I'm not confident in its ability to catch up. Facebook also gave some impressive results, so I'm more inclined to post on Facebook than to Myspace. Last.fm? It has bigger issues with its artists services on the whole, something the site has never really managed to address satisfactorily.

At some point, I may try other video sharing sites, but for my current needs, YouTube and Facebook suffice.

When I tried out the early incarnation of the site, my mixes were pretty novice. (Now, they're safely amateur.) I think the results I got were softballs, and my second go at the site confirmed it.

In fact, I even dropped cash to get full access to the site's services. I uploaded a beta mix of Imprint, and the results were brutal. Of the 12 tracks on the album, only "Choices", "Take It Apart" and "Late Thaw" were considered having hit potential. Most tracks got an "Honorable Mention", and a few earned the rank of "Keep Trying". At least I didn't score so low as to be told to keep my day job.

It was night and day. "Your Gaze" first scored a 5.2 (Keep Trying), but the new mix scored an 8.9 (Platinum). "Silver Sting" first scored a 6.4 (Honorable Mention), but then scored 8.0 (Platinum) on the second try.

The final mix of the album earned five Platinum, two Gold and one Silver -- that is, eight of the 12 tracks have hit potential. (Not bad, eh?)

I uploaded most of Restraint, and it bears out my perception that the album is a sophomore slump -- three Platinum, two Gold and one Silver, a little less than half of the album.

The first time I used this site, all my songs seemed to hover around a score of six. I'm not sure what happened since the launch of uPlaya, but the analysis varied widely. My lowest scoring song is 4.0, while the highest scoring song is 8.9. I bet it's a combination of the mix and pitch correction. The 2007 mixes were really, really bad.

Of course, why should I put so much credence into a machine analysis of something as ephemeral as music? Isn't it about the song?

Well, I've got a solid analytical streak running through my creativity, and curiosity, more than anything, is reason enough for me to use uPlaya. (What a terrible name for a web site.) I wanted to see whether the machine could match my instinct.

As with most machines, garbage in, garbage out. In 2007, it told me the hit potential of my music, as it was back then. I got indignant when a song I felt would be a hit got a low score. Now that I've cleaned the mixes up, uPlaya got a better handle of my songs.

For the most part, it seems to pick out songs I had that "good feeling" about. It also surprises me a few times -- "All the Times I Remember" is really that good?

Of course, now I have to figure out how to leverage that information. High scores are nice ego boost, but they won't have much impact if I don't do more to get the songs out there.

Given my whole move to frameworks, I decided to try out a CSS framework, namely Blueprint. It was a paradigm shift for which I wasn't quite ready. I made the mistake of trying to use Blueprint to recreate an existing design. The final product looked ... odd. Rather, my eyes were so accustomed to how it has looked that I didn't see how else it could look.

I abandoned the idea and moved onto other projects.

When my sister asked me to build a web site for the daycare her son attends, I decided to use Blueprint rather than figure out all the minute details of the design myself. I whipped up something fairly decent in a couple of hours, and I was impressed -- Blueprint, like any good framework, sped up development time.

So I gave Blueprint another shot, this time in creating entirely new looks for my sites. I've spent the past two weeks moving everything to Blueprint. A few sites -- including this one -- did not undergo any redesign, but Blueprint does a nice job of cleaning up the layout. I did, however, make some very major changes to the Musicwhore.org family of sites.

(Speaking of color palettes, the Color Schemer desktop application rocks my world. When I'm less broke, I'm buying a license. In a pinch, I can always the Color Schemer Online.)

I've even gone so far as to incorporate white backgrounds into the sites. I dislike white backgrounds. They hurt my eyes. The majority of my sites -- including this one -- use dark backgrounds, but I think I use white backgrounds in the new designs sparingly enough to mitigate any discomfort.

I have to say, working with the grid layout has always been the one thing I missed about print page design. Back in my student newspaper editor days, I would be calculating points and picas, worrying about gutters and white space and text flow. The grid offered by Blueprint lets me space elements in a way that's consistent. I don't think I achieved that with my non-grid layouts.

Now I just have to use more semantic HTML, and I think my skill set will finally be up to date.

• I know you.
• I know of you.

Beyond that, I can't say I'm terribly interested. Yes, that flies in the face of the idea of "social media", but anyone who knows me can attest that my sociability has its limits.

I also have some very draconian criteria of whom I allow to follow me. I actually tend to block a lot of people, most of whom seem to gamble on the idea that if they follow me, I will follow them back. Here's what determines when I block Twitter followers:

• A following-to-follower ratio more than 2:1. Just now, I blocked a guy who was following more than 900 people but had only 169 followers himself. That rose a flag to me that he was trolling for another follower. I may let you slide if you have a manageable following count of fewer than 100.
• Following or follower counts in the thousands. I don't care if you think you can pay attention that many people. You can't. I'm doing you a favor by blocking you. I cannot in good conscience contribute to your attention deficit disorder. Also, I'm egoistical enough not to want to be lost in a stream of thousands of posts.
• SPAM. I do have to say Twitter has been very good at targeting mass followers.

Right now, I'm following 40 people, and I've got 50 people following me. I didn't block a few people because their profiles indicated some common interests, and maybe something I say will have some relevance to them. Only they could tell you.

But my stringent following and follower policies pretty much spares me from all the annoyances other Twitter users may experience. In the end, I use Twitter in a way it was probably intended -- as a means to communicate with a tight social circle. I like some of the ideas that have bootstrapped on to that premise, but I'm not a true believer.

Now that I'm done with the Japanese cover album, I'm going ahead with the English language cover album. Here's the track list (this information was previously posted, crossed-out tracks are done):

1. Duran Duran's "Planet Earth" straight-forward with lyrics in Japanese
2. Bruce Robison's "Wrapped" in the style of U2's "Stories for Boys"
3. Gabby Pahinui's "Moonlight Lady" in the style of a shoegazer band
4. Yvonne Elliman's "Hello Stranger" as played on a toy keyboard.
5. Linda Ronstadt's "Hurts So Bad" in the style of Garbage.
6. Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much" in the style of Alice in Chains
7. The System's "Don't Disturb This Groove" in the style of Sam Amidon and Nico Muhly.
8. Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" performed with a string quartet
9. Neutral Milk Hotel's "The Fool" as an a capella piece.
10. Roberta Flack's "The Closer I Get to You" in the style of Explosions in the Sky and mono.
11. Robin Holcomb's "So Straight and Slow", straight-forward

For the "Wrapped" cover, I changed the chord progressions to sound more U2 than Bruce Robison. I'm also experimenting more with the drums. I usually use my KORG N364 as a rhythm section, but for a few tracks, I used Reason's Redrum processed with some effects. On the Linda Ronstadt cover, I finally ventured into using hip-hop loops with the Dr.Rex loop constructor.

I wasn't sure what I'd get out of recording covers, but it has been instructive. Following the instrumentation of the original on the Japanese cover album gave me a bit more insight on how to make my drum parts sound slightly less mechanical, while the English-language album allowed me to branch out and to use sounds and effects I hadn't yet employed.

I think maybe this experience is what I needed to get me more inspired to make new Eponymous 4 material.

So I did what any self-respecting analytical person would do and prioritized the songs by range of difficulty. I thought I would be tackling the easiest songs first, but on a whim, I went straight for the hardest. When I managed to get through them, I got a boost of encouragement.

Over the course of the year, I managed to whittle down the number of unfinished tracks to two, both of them covers. That's when the inertia hit. I had laid down initial tracks for my own material (many of the performances requiring more takes later), and I didn't have much onus to work my way through someone else's work.

So for the longest time, the Spreadsheet was 98 percent finished.

Today, I can report that it is 100% finished.

Oddly enough, finishing those two covers got me thinking I could perhaps flesh out the Japanese cover album a bit more. I originally planned to record 12 tracks for the album but whittled them down to seven when I couldn't scrounge up the band scores for five of those songs.

YouTube helped fill in the gaps. Some resourceful fans would upload themselves playing along with their favorite Japanese rock songs, and watching them was pretty instructional. It also saved me the time to figure those songs out by ear.

As a result, I now have an 11-track Japanese cover album.

But I'm also recording an English-language cover album. And I might even record a four-track EP of Robin Holcomb covers.

Yup. I've gone cover crazy.

All thanks to the Spreadsheet, which I can now retire. It has served its purpose.

I finished a second novel.

I'm as surprised as your are. I considered myself done with fiction writing after I set up The Courtship of Gary Huang on Lulu. There's still a lot work to be done with Eponymous 4, and I didn't want to be torn between two creative urges.

But then I showed a dormant revision I started back in 2004 to a couple of friends, and they were eager to know how the story turned out. So I decided just to chip away at it slowly, not to consider it some kind of contest. The further the story got, the more encouragement I received, so I found myself practically sprinting to the finish in the last few weeks (last few days in particular.)

Of course, what's done is a first draft. Now I have to go back and rewrite the thing. (This revision is the fourth attempt at tackling this story. The previous versions didn't capture the tone I wanted.)

Perhaps most important is the how the novel turned out to be a refuge from Eponymous 4. I haven't been writing anything new for Eponymous 4 because I have so much unfinished, and at this point, it's become more about refinement and editing than creation. I also have to confess I'm kind of blocked music-wise, and I want the next album to be incredibly ambitious. I don't think I'll really be ready to start writing anything for Eponymous 4 till 2010.

At the same time, I didn't want to disengage. I wanted to be working on something, and the feedback I got from the novel seemed like a good channel to which to direct that energy.

I've also been sitting on this particular story for more than decade, and at some point, it had to be set. The main character, Crux, has been stirring around in my head since the early '90s, so it's kind of nice finally to have a complete story of his down on magnetic bits. (And soon, paper.)

I even tried to start a second Crux novel before the first one was finished as a way to participate in NaNoWriMo. I got about seven chapters done before I realized that story also could not be squeezed into a 30-day time-frame. I've started revising that story as well.

I have vacation time coming up in July, which I've intended to devote to recording. I think I'll focus on fiction for the time being so that I don't prematurely burn myself out before the next marathon of sessions.

Besides, I have to justify my use of QuarkXpress.

By the way, I'm calling the book Starting to Remember, and I confess it's a bit of a reference to the Madonna song "Something to Remember". I've been trying to find a title for this thing for a long time, and once Starting to Remember grabbed me, it made the work all that much easier.

She recounts an anecdote Tom Waits told her during an interview. He felt the ideas of a song coming to him, but he was in the middle of traffic. So he said out loud to nothing in particular, "Do you mind? Can't you see I'm driving?"

I left a comment on Sivers' site, but I feel the need to repost my thoughts here. (Looks like the comment got deleted. Not sure why. Guess I was too pompous for Sivers' taste.)

Back in high school, I read the autobiography Music by Philip Glass, and in it, Glass says he only composes in the morning. He never composes after lunch, instead tending to business affairs in the afternoon. Glass says an idea never comes to him outside the time he's composing.

I pretty much adopted that working method the moment I read it. One time, I was trying to get an idea down on paper, and my dad interrupted me, insisting that I watch some thing or other on the TV. After I watched whatever the hell it was he wanted, I tried to go back to work, but the idea was lost. So I flung my notebook in the air, which startled him. In my teenage brattiness, I pretty much blamed him for making me lose an idea.

I had that memory in mind when I read about Glass' working method.

These days, I have ideas running through my head all the time, but they're always nebulous. Nothing ever really comes to me so compelling, I need to stop what I'm doing and make note of it. I can name only two instances in recent memories where I used an idea that sprung up outside a time I set aside for writing.

The opening drum beat of "Your Gaze" was something I hummed in the office, and it was simple enough that I committed it to memory. Another time, I was so bored at work, I considered doing some songwriting in the office. I got as far as one line of lyric, but I saved it in a text file: "This is not the time for me to write my feelings down." I was pretty much rebuking myself for trying to schedule creative time when I'm not supposed to, but it was compelling enough line that I wanted to keep it. I used it as the first line of 「今」.

When I am writing, I do something dangerous -- I let ideas come to me, and then I try to forget them. I don't write them down, I don't record them. I let the imperfection of memory filter through the idea till I get to its essence. If the idea comes back to me in tact later, then it's one strong enough to stand on its own. If parts of it come back to me, those were the parts that spoke to me in the first place.

As much as I try to control when ideas come to me, the ideas themselves can be pretty insistent. I've been feeling a bug to start work on a new album, despite the fact I've not really gotten the other four finished. 「健忘症」 really set a bar for me personally, and I want to make sure it was no flash in the pan. But I'm kind of intimidated by where the ideas want me to go next, and I've been putting them off, using the unfinished work as justification for the delay.

But I think they're getting cranky. Allergy season isn't helping much either.

• Bruce Robison's "Wrapped" in the style of U2's "Stories for Boys"
• Duran Duran's "Planet Earth" straight-forward with lyrics in Japanese
• Janet Jackson's "Miss You Much" in the style of Alice in Chains
• Linda Ronstadt's "Hurts So Bad" in the style of Garbage.
• Marilyn Manson's "Tourniquet" in the style of Enya. (Actually, I ended up covering Neutral Milk Hotel's "The Fool" as an a capella piece.)
• Roberta Flack's "Closer I Get to You" in the style of Explosions in the Sky and mono.
• The System's "Don't Disturb This Groove"in the style of Sam Amidon and Nico Muhly

As much as I'd like to think these interpretations are beginnings of a cover album, I don't get much of a thematic thread from them. The source material is all over the place, and their planned interpretations are incongruous. It wouldn't feel like an album to me.

Now there's another wrinkle.

Thing is, these songs which were hits in the day are pretty obscure now, and they would actually make interesting source material for a covers album. I mean, really -- do any of these titles really ring a bell?

• "A Lovers Holiday" by Change
• "Let Me Talk" by Earth, Wind and Fire
• "Never Knew Love Like This Before" by Stephanie Mills
• "Stomp!" by the Brothers Johnson
• "Special Lady" by Ray, Goodman and Brown
• "Twilight" by Electric Light Orchestra (which is from 1981)

A lot of these songs marked the end of the disco era and coincide with the emergence of post-punk, the music that really informs my identity. And yet, I like these songs too. Some of them anyway.

And the time factor makes a far better thread than just a bunch of random -- if not somewhat interesting -- interpretations.

So on what should I work? A cover album of songs from ca. 1980? Or a cover album of songs with unlikely interpretive pairings?

Music videos are a long way from a feature-length film, but two videos I made in the last couple of weeks have gotten me wanting to experiment with the medium further.

Hell, I'm already thinking of making a DVD album out of Original Confidence.

I've spent the last weeks experimenting with 2-D animation software, even though I haven't drawn anything on paper since high school. And I also looked up what it takes to make greenscreen effects. I even caught myself looking up prices for camcorders. Yeah, that bad.

So I'm just going to jot down some of the ideas I have for future videos, since I seem to be heading down this path already.

So to justify the expense of having bought the software, I created scores for NaSoPiAlMo 2006. I originally recorded the MIDI playback of those pieces for the album, but now I'd like to record them live. I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be neat if I could work off of a score book, like my Beethoven and Bach pieces?"

Sibelius doesn't do book formatting, but QuarkXpress does. So I exported my piano scores to EPS and fashioned a book out of it. Then I went to Lulu to see about printing it up. After poring over the help section of the site, I added a cover, title page and copyright page to the book. Then I loaded it up.

Huh. That was easy. What else can I get printed up?

So I fired up QuarkXpress again and formatted that story as well. Instead of going with a canned cover, I wanted to create my own. The story begins with a chase scene across a number of rooftops, so I pictured some blurry photos of downtown buildings at night, with streaks of light running vertically on the cover.

Rather than browse for someone else's photo, I went to downtown Austin one Saturday night with my digital camera and just wandered around taking random shots. The very last one was what I picked for the cover.

I decided to load all those photos to my Flickr account, and as I watched the Uploadr read the files on the hard drive, the thumbnails formed a kind of animation. That gave me another idea. What if I could craft a music video using nothing but a series of pictures? Moving images, of course, are nothing but a series of pictures shown in rapid succession (24 frames per second, in fact.)

At the same time, I realized I would never really shop around the one and only novel I've so far written to publishers or agents, so I fired up QuarkXpress once more and started laying out that book to print at Lulu. In laying it out, I went back and rewrote a few scenes, changed a few details. It got me thinking about these characters again and wondering what's happened in the years that I haven't really been thinking about them.

While I waited for the books to be printed, I started shooting some footage for the video around downtown Austin. I would take some high-speed pictures, import them into a video editor, set each image to three frames and export an MPEG. After seeing all the jerky, hand-held footage, I decided to get a tripod.

The tripod lets me take some fairly adventurous self-portraits, and I thought, can I make a music video with the video function on my camera? So during the July 4 weekend, I mugged in front of the camera and spent a day in a marathon of editing. Before I could finish the idea of my first music video, I had another one already done.

Now I'm coming up with ideas for new videos or new stories. New music, I'm somewhat and oddly relieved to report, has been squeezed out.

What started out as a justification to use some software has ended up turning into many separate projects -- writing, publishing, photography, video.

Sometimes I think I work too much.

I haven't worked on it since, and now that I've launched a label and a publishing company, I don't think I'll get back to it any time soon.

So I'm extending the shinkyoku moratorium from September 2007, or at least, I'm not considering it broken. Launching the label forces me to look seriously at the current state of my catalog, and adding to it just doesn't seem appealing. Now that I have a means through which this music can be (somewhat) properly distributed, I need to make sure it's the best it can possibly be.

That means recording and editing vocals, finalizing arrangements and closing outstanding bugs issues.

I've already shipped off a majority of my songs for Copyright registration, and I'm still considering whether to register them with ASCAP.

After three years of attempting to curb my productivity, I finally have something to put me in check. In essence, I'm moving out of the prototyping phase and am transitioning to a production phase. That opens up a whole slew of tasks -- perhaps requiring outside involvement -- which makes pure creation a dubious endeavor.

In other words, I won't have time to add to the workload.

Is it hazardous to have a title before an actual idea?

From Acadia to Zenith, another title I've vowed to turn into an Eponymous 4 project, sounds great, but now I have to contemplate what kind of work would be suitable for it. Perhaps I'm putting the cart before the proverbial horse.

Existential Eureka Moments in the Seismic Context Shift almost sounds like a greatest hits collection, though.

• A collaboration with my friend Double-A, code named Eponymous 4 × Sharazad, where she writes lyrics and I write music to them. Three lyrics have been done so far. Gotta follow-up to see any more are in the works.
• A second string quartet, perhaps even a third. I want to gauge how far I've gotten as a writer in the 20-some odd years since my first quartet.
• From Acadia to Zenith, most likely the follow-up to 「健忘症」, making it the second album of entirely newly-written material.
• Existential Eureka Moments in the Seismic Context Shift is a project of an undetermined nature, although the more I think about it, the more it feels archival.

At some point I'm going to have to stop fantasizing and get to work.

[UPDATE, 3/5/2008, 2:45 pm] I've always wanted to write a piece for the instrumentation of the Bang on a Can All-Stars (clarinet, cello, keyboard, electric guitar, bass, drums), and I've always thought Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand had the vague feel of a long-form classical piece. Since Existential Eureka Moments in the Seismic Context Shift strikes me as a fake Guided By Voices album title, I figure that's my starting point for such a piece.

Now the question is whether I can pull something like this off.

For all the times a new idea made no sense
For all the moments when a dream would fade
For every hour spent in vain
And every ounce of wasted pain
The slightest hint of hope is just another ruse

For all the times a memory held one more truth
Then history would never be so wrong
If every minute passing by
Takes one more piece of every lie
The story left remaining is another ruse

How does the time go by so fast?
What are the phases of the moon?
Who knew it wasn't meant to last?
Who knew it wouldn't end so soon?

For every hour passed into another day
And every second ticking one by one
I leave another clue behind
To let you seek what I can't find
And maybe you can see right through this final ruse

How does the time go by so fast?
What are the phases of the moon?
Who knew it wasn't meant to last?
Who knew it wouldn't end so soon?

What's one more minute in the greater scheme?
What's one more minute in an endless dream?

I know the time, it moves so fast
I know the phases of the moon
I knew it wasn't meant to last
I knew it wouldn't end so soon

What's one more minute in the race for time?
This moment here with you was never mine

A number of weeks back, someone on Metafilter posted a link to an old Harpers article by Dorothy Thompson, titled "Who goes Nazi?" A single phrase jumped out at me -- "from Acadia to Zenith" -- and I feel compelled to work that into an Eponymous 4 project. I'm thinking it's going to be the title of the next album, but I'm not sure what that album is going to sound like.

So we'll see how From Acadia to Zenith inspires me.

I've also been listening to a lot 20th century string quartet repertoire. Before I announced the annual shinkyoku moratorium, I considered recording an album of string quartet music for NaSoAlMo 2007, an idea I've had for quite a while. I've been wanting to do my homework first, studying scores of other string quartets. But I haven't really gotten around to acquiring many scores.

For now, I'm just absorbing all the different ways composers have approached the medium. I listened to all of Dmitri Shostakovich's quartets in 2006, and I delved into Béla Bartók's quartets last year. I'm revisiting Terry Riley's Salome Dances for Peace, and I even sought out the Samuel Barber quartet from whence the Adagio for Strings came.

My first string quartet, which I wrote when I was a teenager, wears its Shostakovich and Barber influences on its sleeve. (I had just discovered Kronos Quartet around that time.) I would like this next string quartet (or two) to sound more like, well, myself. Whatever that means.

In short, I don't need a New Year's resolution to spur me to work -- I've got more than enough. Yes, I could make a resolution to get through that work, but last year, I made one which was immediately sidelined by a pinched nerve. I know the work needs to be done, and no amount of resolving is going to change the fact it's going to get done.

Rather, I prefer New Year's resolutions that challenge me to try something new, like when I took singing lessons for a month or learned how to play bass guitar. If I were to make a New Year's resolution, I would probably start with forming a band.

If the exercise of laying down vocal tracks is any indication, I am not a singer. Even my sister said I need singing lessons. I think these songs need more than my meager voice to do them justice.

And even though I've recorded everything with keyboards, most of the songs I've written are really geared for live musicians. I just don't need a singer -- I need guitarists and a rhythm section as well.

But I'm not resolving to do form a band in 2008. I have this perception of a band as being a life-turning commitment -- once it's formed, I have to spend a number of years making it work. And like any kind of relationship, it requires time and money. The former, I probably have too much of it. The latter, not so much.

Of course, just because I don't make a New Year's resolution to do something doesn't mean I won't end up doing it.

An alternative ideas for a New Year's resolution is to release an actual CD on CD Baby. enigmatics has been in the can for years. All I really need to do is pay the various fees, slap a barcode on the cover art and send CD Baby five copies.

Hmm. Doable.

But I'm not committing to that one either.

This past summer, I managed to record vocals for 10 songs, and I was actually pleased with the results. It took helping someone else to record a song to teach me how to do it for myself, and I'm much more comfortable knowing that most of the limitations of my voice -- and there are many -- can be "fixed" in production.

Thus inspired, I went through all Eponymous 4 songs requiring vocals and noted the highest and lowest notes of each. My most comfortable range is from low C to D near middle C. Every song was categorized in relation to that range. If the lowest note was a B, it was considered too low. If the highest note was an E-flat, it was considered too high. In reality, I can hit those notes but not as easily as anything within range.

Songs that hit the furthest acceptable ranges -- low F for bass, G near middle C for tenor -- were flagged to be transposed in such a way where the extreme note would be near the comfortable range. Songs with an extremely wide range -- the folly of a writer who isn't a singer -- posed the most problems. Two songs in particular were more difficult rhythmically than melodically.

And after all that analysis, the Spreadsheet was born! It really should be called the Eponymous 4 Vocal Schedule, but I'm calling it the Spreadsheet.

I've used the Spreadsheet in the last few days to figure out which songs I'm going to tackle first. My first inclination, like all lazy people, was to do the easiest stuff first and save the harder stuff for later. Then I dove straight into the most complex song to record -- "Hear the Wind Sing". I wanted to get a benchmark of just how much work would be required to do the more challenging stuff.

When I realized it wouldn't be that bad, I decided to go against inclination and tackle all the difficult stuff first. If I get it out of the way now, they won't be around for wild procrastination later.

See that section of green? Those are songs that have some vocals done (not necessarily final draft vocals). The goal is to make that green section as large as possible. Not pictured is a blue section, which signifies the songs that fall in the comfortable range. The yellow sections, of course, are the more difficult songs, with the darker shades being more difficult than others.

All this organization isn't very rock 'n' roll, but I've been putting off recording vocals for a long, long time now. I needed a picture of the work I'm facing, and the Spreadsheet illustrates it nicely.

Most shinkyoku moratorium are attempts to curb my overproductivity, but this time, I'm calling one to take care of something not related at all to music. I need to get my weight under control, so I've started to walk the treadmill every night. It's sufficiently time-consuming to cause potential conflict with any future creative spurts.

So I'm not going to work on music from now till after the start of the year. At that point, I'll see how much progress I've made on the health front to determine whether shinkyoku moratorium needs to continue.

I'm also making the decision not to participate in NaSoAlMo this year. If I were to participate, I would want to spend every spare moment writing and recording. Right now, the weight issue is more pressing. I'm also dodging a bullet with this decision -- I was seriously going to write a string quartet album, but I haven't really studied any scores yet to prepare.

During those hours I'm not working out -- or researching about losing weight -- I'll be concentrating on works currently in progress. I have far too many vocals to record, and now I have the environment to finish them.

So we'll see how this shinkyoku moratorium turns out.

It is for me.

I'm not a singer, so I fall into the trap of comparing my untrained vox with people who can sing. Regardless, I've spent the last few weeks recording vocals for a number of songs. If it weren't for extensive editing I couldn't sit through hearing myself.

First off, I have a hard time staying in tune. I never seem to hit a note right on, and in some cases, I can be slightly more than a half-step off. I don't stay steady on long notes, and the nasal timbre of my voice could be considered an acquired taste.

But it depends on the material. I think my voice is well-suited for singer-songwriter-y kind of stuff, not so much on commercial pop. It's not strong enough for heavy rock, unless it's processed to hell, but it seems to work for introspective stuff.

And while there are some questionable ethics issues with editing vocals, I need it. I need to hear what my songs sound like when I'm singing them in tune, and all that post-processing has actually instructed me to handle my voice differently.

That said, here's what I sound like. Or rather, here's what I would ideally sound like:

• Untold Demons
• Revulsion
• DESTRUCTION BABY
• 聞いてはいけない、言ってはいけない
• Go
• The One to Make Me Whole
• Imprint
• Silver Sting
• What I Deserve
• 波動
• Speechless

My name is Greg, and this is my online journal.

I live in Austin, Texas, and I work as a web developer. At least, that's what it should say on my business card. I'm good enough at what I do, although I'm probably better at other things.

I've worked at a newspaper, a child support collection agency, a record store and (currently) a technology company. My degree is in music and journalism, so I guess two of the four jobs I've had were relevant to my education.

I'm homosexual in the clinical sense, but in terms of living up to all the stereotypical imagery of the term "gay", well, I'm a miserable failure at that. The number of times I have sex would make people weep. I'd weep, too, but my brand of self-pity has a lot more dignity than that.

I don't have a boyfriend. I probably ought to get one, but if Tim Gunn can go two decades without one ...

I have a reputation of being a music nut. I listen to it a lot. I write about it a lot. I even make it, not a lot but getting there.

For a long time, Duran Duran was my absolute favorite band. But then they recorded Pop Trash right around the time I ran across Number Girl and Shiina Ringo. I still like Duran Duran, but I think I'm the only Duranie in the world who wants the band to break up.

I've spoken at great length about Japanese music, and it's something of a trademark. I know enough Japanese to slog my way through a Japanese web site, but I wouldn't want to try to conduct a conversation.

I'm not Latino, I'm Filipino. I'm first generation and all the socio-economical issues that entails. Even though I can understand Japanese (to a point), my parents language is absolutely unknown to me.

I don't talk about my family much because I see no need to involve them.

I grew up in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. No, I don't want to move back there. Hawaiʻi could never really offer what I need from the world. I miss the food and the few friends I have back there, but that's about it.

I spent most of the '90s devoid of television. At the turn of the century, I developed an unhealthy addiction to Law & Order, and now I can't shut the thing off.

I just got a TiVo.

I won't draw a Johari window, but I think you and I would both agree I'm pretty smart, perhaps even funny.

Some of you may not know how much of an angry asshole I am, or that I'm quite misanthropic.

Some of you may think I'm sweet and generous, perhaps even sexy, but I would have no knowledge of that.

Neither of us would know I'm contagious.

This is my online journal, and you may find reference to all the things I've just mentioned therein. Some of them may be new discoveries for both of us.

This entry is my final one.

And it happens on the 10th anniversary of the journal's inception.

I set out to write everyday for the past 365 days as a way to mark the event. It ended up killing any enthusiasm I had about this site, which had been waning for years.

So I'm retiring it. But I'm leaving it up.

I've got some pretty deep archives, and I want to show some of us have been doing this thing way before it became "blogging".

I'll still write on my other sites, so it's not like I'm totally walking away from writing about the personal.

And who's not to say I won't come out of retirement?

Right now, on the 10th anniversary of this journal, it just seems like a nice stopping point.

Here's where I thank my readers.

Thank you, readers. Ten years is a long time to bore people, so I hope you come out of this all right.

And if this visit is your first, well, you've got some catching up to do.

I spent most of the day transferring shows from my DVR to my computer, then burning the MPEGs to DVD-R to author later as full-fledged DVDs.

When I started to cut the commercials out of an episode of Psych with TMPGEnc, the program kept putting the audio and video of the resulting file out of synch.

I spent all night fiddling with the markers and rebuilding the files, which takes a long time since video is a time hog. I never got around to writing an entry last night.

I didn't go out at all yesterday. By contrast, I was in and out of my apartment all day.

I bought more DVD-Rs and stumbled across a new colleciton of short stories by Murakami Haruki. Then I headed to Fry's to get some packaged video editing software. TMPGEnc wasn't going to do what I wanted it to do, and I'm tired of all these freeware and shareware user interfaces. They're the kind of interfaces only programmers would love.

I ended up with Pinnacle Studio 10, and while I had the minimum amount of RAM needed, my computer was slooooooooow. So I impulsive bought more RAM. Something or other was going to force me to upgrade at some point, and this excuse was as good as any.

So I now have 1GB of RAM, and I saw a noticeable (but not vast) improvement in the speed of Pinnacle Studio 10. When it came to do build an MPEG, it took more than an hour, and I wasn't terribly pleased with the resulting encoding.

(I just checked the return policy on software, so it looks like I'll have to live with it. I like the interface well enough, though.)

And here I was thinking I'd get more writing done.

2006 is just about 3/4 done, and as busy as it was, there isn't much to say about it.

I learned the hard way that classes three times a night, in addition to a full-time job, is not a lifestyle to pursue.

I never mentioned I got my first "B" in my academic career at ACC. It was the marketing class I thought I aced. I'm not sure what brought my score down, because I thought I did reasonably well on the exams. Perhaps my papers were too esoteric.

I hauled ass with my C++ class though. My reimbursement was riding on it. I thought I needed to get an "A" for a full reimbursement, but then I discovered a "B" was also acceptable.

I'm rather ticked that I didn't take the marketing class more seriously. ACC was the first place I've ever had a 4.0 GPA, which isn't exactly a stunning accomplishment.

I better not screw up this semester's synthesis class.

Of course, the big event of the year so far was the surgery.

Although it was a minor procedure, it still resulted in some ambitious arrangements. It was the first time I've ever been hospitalized in Austin. I've gone through surgery before back in Honolulu, and the little things like arranging transportation and post-surgery care were easily taken care of by family.

This time, my parents came to town, and I had my concerns about how they would get around town if the need arose.

Looking back, I'm glad they came because I really was pretty useless for the first few days immediately afterward. I was useless for that entire week, but I could fend for myself as the days passed.

I'm feeling fine now.

I finally got a TiVo, but you can just read the entries of the last two months to get a full perspective on that.

I'm not sure what the rest of 2006 will bring. I'm taking a synthesis class. I'm still working for the same company. I've experimented with digital audio. And I'm still recording demos like a possessed man.

You don't get to find out what happens in the last 1/4 of 2006. Not at this particular Uniform Resource Identifier. That doesn't mean I won't drop an update on the other sites I maintain. I mean, hell, I essentially have about eight webblogs.

I set out to celebrate this journal's birthday by updating everyday for a year. I ran out of things to say years ago, and this exercise was just overkill.

I like talking about myself, but man -- even I'm sick of digging out my own navel lint. (Yeah, TMI.)

So I'm going to shut up after tomorrow.

And it'll feel good.

The soundtrack of my 2006 would so far include:

• Dylan Rice, Wandering Eyes
• Sloth Love Chunks, Shikakui Vision
• Utada Hikaru, Ultra Blue
• Eluvium, An Accidental Memory in Case of Death
• Anthony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now

And yes, you have only two days before the free CD-R offer ends.

Tired of waiting to earn the kind of income that allowed me to start building a home studio back in 2000, I decided just to sink myself much deeper into the red and start buying up music equipment.

I fished out Cakewalk Pro Audio 9, which I bought in 2000, and started laying down tracks. Then my web server died, and I had to buy a new computer.

That purchase opened the floodgates.

I upgraded Pro Audio 9 to Sonar 4. I bought a new MIDI interface, an external soundcard, a dynamic microphone, a condensor microphone, Reason 3.0 and an old Kawai K-4 (my first synthesizer) off of eBay. Plus any needed accessories (mic stand, keyboard stand, cables, headphones.)

Each purchase of new equipment went hand-in-hand with the momentum of my writing.

First, I recorded Imprint, what I consider my "adult contemporary pop album". I took of my favorites songs I wrote in high school and expanded the sound of those songs to eight others. I fleshed out two songs I sketched around 2003 and 2004. Everything else was entirely new. That was February-March 2005.

In the summer, I re-recorded my original demos and started divying them up. 「風の歌を聴け」 and an early version of A Ghost in My Shadow were done by August.

I also managed to flesh out songs dating as far back as 1999, what I would consider my post-college work. By December, I had produced Restraint, an album of singer-songwriter stuff, and Revulsion, a punk EP.

I started 2005 with a whole lot of sketches and a single old demo tape. I had only 20-some odd finished songs. By the end of 2005, that number would grow to approximately 45.

In 2006, I've managed to bring it to 50.

The resurrection of Eponymous 4 has implications that are only starting to play themselves out. I've done all this writing -- what am I going to do with it?

Good question.

I had a car accident in August 2005.

The first thing I thought when I felt the impact was, "Shit! I haven't even had this car for a year yet!"

It was a four-car pile-up caused by some white trash driving some beaten-up Oldsmobile. He was uninsured, so my insurance policy went after him to cover half of my deductible. (I doubt he coughed it up.)

I felt most frustrated two days afterward, when the back pain flared up. I couldn't sleep very well, and it felt like something was clenching my spine.

I got a referral for physical therapy, and after the first visit, I unknotted some tightened muscles and got a good night's sleep. The exercises I was taught rehabilitated some tenderness developed by my walking days at Waterloo.

After a month of sessions, I felt much better. But it sucked having to drive a rental for three weeks.

I was so glad to have my own car back.

Another big event of the year was my first traveling vacation to somewhere other than where my family lives, namely Hawaiʻi and Chicago.

It was my New York City homecoming after 13 years. Before that trip, I was starting to dismiss the idea of returning to New York City to live. I felt the adventurousness that spurred me to go there in the first place was starting to wane, and my older self would probably be put off by the pace of the city.

But it didn't take more than few hours to reacquaint myself with everything. I booked a hotel near the Flatiron Building, which was approximately my old neighborhood. I traveled on the 23rd Street bus and recognized a number of places that were there when I was around.

I visited Lincoln Center, shopped the classical section of Tower Records, found Book Off! and Kinokuniya, ate at Benny's Burritos.

I refamiliarized myself with the subway system to the point where I was giving people directions. I even got swept up in the subway tunnel pace -- that occassional glance down the tunnel to see if a train is on its way.

I reached the conclusion that perhaps I could live in New York City again, even if it's just for a handful of years. And honestly, I'm working toward that goal.

The soundtrack of my 2005 would include:

• Gang of Four, Entertainment!
• Sigur Rós, Takk ...
• ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Worlds Apart
• Duran Duran, Beautiful Colors
• Kate Bush, Never For Ever

And have you requested your free CD-R yet?

I went to Waterloo last night to pick up a Sleater-Kinney album I discovered I had sold for cash, which I guess was a desperate measure since I was dumb enough to part with it in the first place. There were two guys there in tank tops who struck me as being way too cleaned up. If anything, I got a couples vibe from them.

The first one I saw face on had a decent face and an incredibly slim figure. So did his friend, whose back was turned to me. I went around the aisle as I did my browsing, and when I saw the other man, I was immediately smitten.

He reminded me of DAS, the guy who served as my incentive to come out of the closet. The same physique, a similar face and glasses. Of course, glasses do me in everytime.

I will be crass and admit I wanted to bed him.

The guy at the party wore glasses as well, but took them off not long after he arrived.

I've been shutting myself in for a number of weekends, and it's made me forget there's a lot more eye candy out in the world than the stuff I see at the office day in and day out.

The closer the retrospective tour reaches to the present day, the less enthusiastic I'll be about the events of the year.

Around the time I started the journal, I was going through a lot of personal drama, and I experienced things that shaped me as a person.

These past few years have been relatively uneventful, which is a good sign that things have settled down. I could improve on some things, and on others, I'm willing to accept what's there.

So now the tour stops at 2004, and there isn't much to say about it.

Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy moved away at the start of the year.

I forgot to mention the one reunion we had back in July 2003, where each of us was ready to leave the past behind. But his partner questioned my presence in his life, and that put a kibbosh on things.

Then Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy got a lucrative job offer which meant relocation. I didn't see him off, and I wish I could have.

Que sera so what. That's an album title, isn't it? (Actually, no it's not.)

I received an e-mail from him recently. He applied for a job and interviewed with a friend of mine from the Dow Jones program. I don't know if he ever got the job.

My Nissan continued to break down, and I sank more money in keeping that piece of shit afloat.

October rolled around, and I got a notice from a credit union in Hawaiʻi telling me a certificate of desposit would mature. My mom opened one up in case of a proverbial rainy day, and nothing says shitstorm like an old car breaking down all the damn time.

So I consulted with my mom about cashing in the CD. Combined with a 1 1/2 years of weekend work at Waterloo -- in addition to my full-time job at the company -- I had enough for a downpayment.

I went to my credit union in Austin to ask about a car loan. I was pre-approved, and I had a month to find one. I settled with a 2003 Toyota Corolla, and I've been happy with it ever since.

After the drama of the previous car, I've bent over backward to make sure this car runs fine. I check the fluids every time I gas up, and I endeavor to get the fluids changed every 3,000 miles.

I've had something of an antagonistic relationship with my Nissan from the start. I have no such relationship with my Toyota. If anything, I'm its bitch. If I sense the slightest thing wrong, I get automotively hypochrondriatic.

But it's a healthy car, and my fears are usually allayed.

I was officially hired by my company in February 2004, even though I had been working for them as a contractor since June 2003.

The economy was still pretty wobbly, and all hiring was frozen in 2003.

When the anniversary of my official hire rolls around, I point that disparity out by calling it the "x.66666667-year anniversary".

Bitter, me? What makes you think?

The soundtrack of my 2004 would include:

• Sasagawa Miwa, Jijitsu
• Art-School, Love/Hate
• Mindy Smith, One Moment More
• Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose
• Kicell, Mado ni Chikyuu

Just a reminder to say get your request for a free CD-R to me before Sept. 6, 2006.

I had attempted to throw one together a year ago, but I wasn't fond of the final product. Today, I nipped and tucked a few tracks and came up with a track listing with which I can live.

Here's the program:

1. Sloth Love Chunks, "Loveless ideals"
2. eX-Girl, "Pop Muzik"
3. Molotov, "Puto,"
4. Number Girl, "Destruction Baby"
5. Shiina Ringo, "Koko de KISU Shite"
6. Cocco, "Count Down"
7. Death Cab for Cutie, "Title and Registration"
8. Duran Duran, "Beautiful Colours"
9. Madonna, "Ray of Light"
10. Everything But the Girl, "Wrong"
11. ACO, "Spleen"
12. Des'ree, "Kissing You"
13. Mindy Smith, "Come to Jesus"
14. Hem, "Half Acre"
15. Enya, "Book of Days"

This disc is, essentially, a soundtrack to this online journal. Each of these songs mark a year (some more than once) this journal has been in existence.

Contact me through e-mail or post a comment if you want a disc.

Offer ends SEPT. 6, 2006

If one person is to thank for keeping me in Austin, it's Jette.

At the start of the year, I announced I was moving to Chicago if I didn't find an office job by October. That's when my lease would end. I mentioned it to my sister, and she was willing to let me crash.

And I would have done it, too. I needed to do it because the savings account was dwindling, and a Waterloo paycheck was not enough to support the level of lifestyle I wanted to live. In short, I wanted to keep my cable and my high-speed Internet connection. Those things don't come cheap.

I don't know if Jette really dropped a hint to one of the managers to scoop me up before I head to Chicago, but I like to think she did.

I actually interviewed with her company and for Waterloo Records at the same time. I wasn't hired there, and I was set on working at Waterloo anyway. The manager who would eventually hire me liked me, and from what I hear, some "other factors" prevented her from doing so at the time.

Then a position opened up, and I was asked to come back for another quick interview. I was offered a job as a contractor, and I accepted.

The move to Chicago was called off.

I've been with the company ever since, and for all the grumbling I do about my salary, it's not an evil place to work. The culture of the office is oversold a bit, and they can clamp on their pennies pretty damn hard. But my co-workers are nice folks, and I like what do well enough.

If I had moved to Chicago in 2003, I probably would have missed JournalCon.

As much fun as JournalCon Austin was, I didn't take advantage of the networking opportunities nearly as much other people who attended did.

Hell, I missed out on all the Saturday night shennanigans because I fell asleep on my futon after dinner.

I just wanted to show Ryan my town. He got me to go the first JournalCon in Pittsburgh in 2000, and I insisted he attend the 2003 convention in Austin.

I wish I could have taken him to Maria's Taco-Xpress -- however much he loved the Las Manitas breakfast tacos, I wanted to see what he thought about Maria's.

I'm also glad I got to take him to the Alamo Drafthouse. We saw Kill Bill, Vol. 1 after a big dinner at the County Line, and now he wants a franchise to open in Hawaiʻi.

Dreama came down to Austin as well, but she got caught up with the whole JournalCon 2000 reunion crowd. I think I spent that entire weekend around Stephen Deken and his groupies. Stephen's pretty hot himself, but I could have done without a lot of the hurry-up-and-wait.

Ryan pointed out that Brian of Open Brain Surgery reminded him of JFK. Then Brian, who is straight, started to flirt with me while we were all eating dinner at Marekesh. Haaah?

It was odd seeing all my worlds colliding that weekend. A friend from Hawaiʻi meeting friends from Austin. Co-workers past and present rubbing elbows with non-offices co-horts. My life is pretty compartmentalized, and it was nice to see Jette, chip, davidnunez, Ryan, Dreama, Kramer, Double-A, OmarG ... people from these different circles converging.

I wish the weekend had lasted just a bit longer.

The latter part of the year also marked the slow death of my Nissan. I had been driving it for seven years, and it was turning 10 years old. I didn't take very good care of it, and I tried to make it do things -- like go up hills and gun past slow drivers -- it didn't want to do.

And I paid for it with a ballooning credit card debt.

I came to despise my car, and I made up my mind to buy a new one in 2004.

My sister got married that Christmas as well. I went back home to Hawaiʻi for the holidays for the first time since 1997. I learned my lesson about flying on the day after Christmas, and since then, I insist on visits that don't happen during the holidays.

That year, I chose to leave on Christmas Day, and it wasn't a bad flight.

While at home, I visited with old high school friends, the Ozawa clan and even JFK. Of course, I shopped for a lot Japanese CDs.

I haven't been back home since.

The soundtrack to my 2003 would include:

• Shiina Ringo, Karuki Zaamen Kuri no Hana

I think I'll just stop right there. I had that album on repeat for an entire year. This album is one every serious musician should listen to. I can't begin to list the superlatives this album represents. I'm just sorry it had to be limited by local market.

I had lost my job in August 2001, and I blew the 6-month allowance for unemployment. I filed for a 3-month extension, and I had until May to find work.

Right around the holidays of 2001, I dropped off a résumé at Waterloo Records, hoping to get some temporary work. Alas, I was late, and no positions were available.

Then in February 2002, I received an e-mail from the human resources manager at Waterloo. She asked if I wanted to interview. I didn't care if they would pay me $6/hour -- I was so there.

So fished out a tasteful but somewhat formal shirt -- in my book, that's anything with a collar -- tamed my hair and went in for an interview. Later that week, I was hired to help out with SXSW.

I was so out of shape.

After two hours of being on my feet, I was wondering when my half day would end. I didn't anticipate how much worse my feet would feel as the week went on.

After SXSW was done, there weren't any positions open just yet. So I had to wait till June before I was brought on part-time.

My schedule was 24 hours a week, Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Two of those shifts were night shifts, but unlike the graveyard shift of Austin360, these shifts lasted from 2:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. I could get a reasonable amount of sleep and still wake up relatively early.

At the end of the summer, Sundays were tacked on to my schedule, bringing me up 32 hours a week, which was considered full-time. At the end of the year, I qualified for health insurance coverage, and I stopped paying COBRA insurance with SupportKids.

The unemployment officially ran out in August, but by then, I could scrape by with my Waterloo paycheck and some savings. Unfortunately, my rent was too expensive, and I had to move to a smaller apartment.

I went from earning $46K/year to $6.75/hour. And I didn't mind.

My joke from when I got laid off wasn't a joke after all.

There were some downsides to working at a record store.

For most of the day, I was subjected to music I wouldn't normally listen to myself, and I ended up discovering a lot of stuff I didn't like.

All garage rock sucks. That is my conclusion. One customer asked me for a good garage rock band. I told him (with a half-joking disguise) there was no such thing.

Noise bands from the downtown New York scene are just wankers. All my classical training makes me demand an intuitive sense of order amidst the chaos of dissonance.

I can't fucking stand Modest Mouse. The idea of a "good" Modest Mouse album makes as much sense as a "good" garage band.

I developed a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss first, accept later. When you're surrounded by that much music, it's the only way to keep sane.

Sore feet and fatigue are also downsides, but they're mitigated by a loss of 10 pounds. I didn't notice the weight loss till I discovered I was pulling up my jeans every few minutes when I was stocking CDs.

Working at Waterloo was exhausting but fulfilling. It was an environment totally different from the insanity of the dot-com boom and just the thing I needed to feel grounded.

At 30 years old, I was working my very first retail job.

I felt proud of myself for having swallowed my pride and applied to retail jobs as well as office jobs. And I felt really priveleged to have my bizzare music expertise recognized as something valuable.

I can type 10-key now, and I'm much faster with calculating math in my head. Uh -- make that slightly faster.

The funniest part was the fact I could set myself apart from the rest of the staff by not being cantankerous. In my office jobs before Waterloo, I managed to turn into the grouch of the office, the crank who made snide remarks about everything work-related. The tables were turned at the store. Everyone there was some level of cantakerous, and there was no way I was going to compete with that.

Record employee humor -- there's nothing darker and wittier.

A lot of my co-workers who were around when I was a full-time employee are still there, and when I go in to shop, I still feel like part of the gang.

The time I spent working there made me realize I'm fully equipped to handle retail work, should the situation arise, and I like a career in computer programming well enough to do it for the rest of my life, if I had to -- but I don't have to.

The soundtrack of my 2002 would include:

• ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Source Code & Tags
• Hem, Rabbit Songs
• Hatakeyama Miyuki, Diving into your mind
• Hajime Chitose, Hainumikaze
• Zoobombs, Love is Funky

I actually knew I was getting laid off earlier in the month, but they couldn't exactly get rid of me right away -- I was the only remaining web developer on the staff, and I was still in the middle of a few tasks.

So I didn't get axed till the end of the month.

On Sept. 8, I went to Emo's to see eX-Girl. Then on Sept. 11, I knew the economic downturn which cost me my job was going to last for quite a while.

It's something of a boring question to ask where you were on Sept. 11, 2001, and some answers are more interesting than others.

My first reaction when I turned on the news was "not again!" I was living in New York when a car bomb was detonated in the World Trade Center parking garage in Feb. 1993.

The building was up and running again in a matter of months, in time at least for me to visit the observatory deck before I moved back to Hawaiʻi. Knowing only the towers were attacked again that morning in September, I assumed the fires would be put out and the World Trade Center reopened.

But then I heard planes had been flown into the towers, and it was a different story after that.

I didn't have a job to go to, so I kept the TV on. I don't know what else I did that day. I did go to Waterloo Records to get a new Ozomatli album -- some excuse to get out of my apartment and not get bogged down by the news coverage.

I probably turned to the cable stations at some point. As immediate as broadcast news can be, I didn't need it to be constant.

Read the entries from after August, and you'll see one self-pitying diatribe after another.

Losing a job is a crushing thing to face, and however crappy I felt at the time, I still consider getting burglarized far more traumatic. The work-weary part of me kind of looks back fondly on those days.

To distract myself, I set out to write a novel, and I finished it. I haven't shopped it around to publishers because I want to prove to myself I can write another, and I haven't. So I guess that one novel was the fluke. But at least I know what it's like to write one.

I did manage to line up interviews for some web development positions, mostly with state or city offices. I went to them pretty half-heartedly. I was burned out by the whole web thing, and I wanted a change.

I fooled myself into thinking working for a public office instead of a private business would be that change, but in reality, I needed something far removed from development work at all.

I joked with my then-ex-coworkers that I'd just apply to Waterloo Records and work for minimum wage, given how all the web jobs were going bust. But part of me knew I wasn't joking (and part of me was hoping I was being clairvoyant.)

By contrast, the first half of the year still felt propserous for me.

I had more money in my bank accounts than I ever did, and I managed to splurge quite a bit on music equipment. I bought a bass guitar, a bass amp and electric guitar. I also invested in a small mixer, a MIDI interface for my computer and Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.

Yeah, I was building my studio back then as well, and the economic downturn pretty much halted me until 2005.

I even took guitar lessons.

My sister who lives in Chicago got married in Honolulu, and I brought Double-A and Angeles with me to split a hotel. I so didn't want to be home with that kind of stress. And I wanted to show my friends around Hawaiʻi.

I agreed to be an usher, not realizing I would be forced to wear a tuxedo in 80-degree heat. After that experience, I made a lot of noise of never volunteering for that kind of duty ever again.

Another highlight of the year was visiting Patrick in Boston. I started to flirt with him over AIM, and I offered to take a trip to Boston to meet him.

It was a nice trip. I'll be a gentleman and leave it at that.

2001 was a year with a split personality.

Before August, I was happy with my job, learning a new instrument, building a bedroom studio and living a life I wanted.

After August, I was unemployed and depressed, but all the time on my hands allowed me to finish a novel.

The soundtrack to my 2001 would include:

• Shiina Ringo, Shouso Strip
• AJICO, Fukamidori
• fra-foa, Chuu no Fuchi
• Wayne Horvitz/4+1 Ensemble, From a Window
• Shea Seger, The May Street Project

Monday was my first day of synthesis class, and my instructor was demonstrating Ableton Live. He was urging the class to download a demo copy and try it out.

I vaguely remember two pieces of software bundled with the external sound card I bought a year ago. One of them was Reason. The other, I was pretty sure, was Ableton Live.

So this morning, I poked around my software discs and found the special verison of Ableton Live. Then I remembered it came with a registration number on a brightly-colored card. I felt uneasy. Did I throw those cards away? I don't remember where I put them.

I looked for them after I got home from work, and I didn't find them. I searched the designated places where I keep computer-related items and came up empty.

Surely I wouldn't be so careful as to throw away registration numbers. I learned my lesson the hard way when I attempted to reinstall Cakewalk and had no record of a registration number.

I stopped and gave it a good think. I didn't find it on the bookshelf, where they ought to be. What if I stashed them somewhere? I flipped through the various user manuals to see if the cards were tucked in them, and sure enough, I found the registration numbers in the manual for the sound card with which they were bundled.

This kind of phenomenom would never happen at home. When something got lost, it was lost. As a result, I structure my life in such a way that something isn't "lost" -- I just don't immediately recall where I put it.

Is that sad?

2000 was an interesting year.

I went home in February for something of a family reunion. It was my parents wedding anniversary, and my sister flew in from Chicago while I flew in from Austin.

While I was there, I asked my brother for recommendations of Japanese pop music. However much I loved Cocco, I wanted to listen to other artists similar to her.

On that trip, I ended up with albums from L'Arc~en~Ciel, the brilliant green, Utada Hikaru and Shiina Ringo.

That trip pretty much turned the course of my listening habits. I was so enamoured of the albums I bought, I looked forward to covering Japan Nite for SXSW again.

I picked up more discs by Number Girl and Mummy the Peepshow at the festival. Although I warmed up to Number Girl slightly more than last year, I didn't experience my awakening till I was listening to School Girl Distortional Addict in my car.

After that, I went on a total tear learning as much as I could about the music scene in Japan. My music 'zine -- which would not become Musicwhore.org till September 2000 -- began covering Japanese music extensively.

I was on a mission.

2000 was also the year I finally moved on from Austin360. It was also the only year I managed to change jobs twice.

I was so desperate to leave Austin360, I jumped on the first opportunity that gave me the time of day. I ended spending two very unhappy months trying to get my head around DHTML. It was the first time I encountered the true suckitude of cross-browser development.

I hated it, and I resigned before I even had another job lined up.

It all worked out well, though -- an Austin360 alumna who jumped ship herself mere weeks before me talked up her company. I expressed interest, she buttered up her supervisors and I went in for an interview with Supportkids.

When I was hired, nobody had really big expectations of me. They knew I was comfortable with scripting, but it wasn't till I got involved with an actual development task did I show the true depth of my skill.

My boss didn't waste time changing my title and giving me more programming tasks. For that, I'm eternally grateful. I was able to learn on the job, and before long, I got so comfortable with making web sites communicate with databases, I ventured to host my own sites out of my living room.

The bump in salary also allowed me to subscribe to cable. It was the final season of Star Trek Voyager, and I needed my Garrett Wang fix. It wasn't till it was up and running did I discover the local UPN affiliate closed shop.

Not to worry, I discovered something even more addictive -- Law & Order.

When I felt particularly cheap -- which was often -- I would drive home for lunch, since my office was only three minutes away. I'd watch Law & Order on A&E (before TNT bought all syndication rights), then head back to the office.

It was a nice arrangement.

The burn-out with Austin360 and the other job (which I will not name) made the first half of the year difficult, but the second half of the year brought me a prosperity I hadn't known. I really started to enjoy life at that point.

2000 was also the year I met Dreama and Patrick in person. That was the year of the very first JournalCon. Ryan managed to con me into attending.

Patrick thought I was icy, which I was because I felt uncomfortable meeting an admitted fan of mine who also happens to be pretty hot. I'm also socially inept at the whole flirting thing.

I probably enjoyed myself more than I would admit, but I didn't go out of my way to bond with every attendee as most everyone there seemed to. I still had a chip on my shoulder about my writing.

The soundtrack to my 2000 would include:

• Cocco, Rapunzel
• Number Girl, School Girl Distortional Addict
• L'Arc~en~Ciel, ray
• Utada Hikaru, First Love
• Do As Infinity, Break of Dawn

The year started out with one final piece of drama. It wasn't really drama, but it sure felt like another jolt in my confidence. Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy found a better-paying job.

It bummed me out, because it felt as the dot-com gravy train was leaving me behind -- which it was -- and I reacted pretty immaturely. I made a concentrated effort to lose contact with him. I didn't e-mail him. I didn't call him. I went so far as to trash talk him on this journal a few times. I avoided the places where he might show up, which meant anywhere gay.

Yes, I'll come clean -- I retreated from anything and everything gay because I didn't want to run the risk of running into him. I stopped going to bars. I stayed away from popular gay hang-outs. I disconnected myself from the community.

It's a pretty lousy excuse to deny a big part of my identity on the count of one person, but if it weren't Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy, something else probably would have caused me to disconnect. Alternately, I could have stayed connected to the gay scene and realized I had cut myself off from something else.

And that something else was live music.

With Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy departing his daytime slot, I was offered the position, of which I couldn't really take ownership until someone filled my early morning position. Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy left in January. My replacement didn't start till April.

Compound that with my first SXSW, and I was exhausted beyond belief. More on that later.

Once I was working a normal shift, I started going to concerts by myself on the weekends. I traded in Saturday nights at Oilcan Harry's for Saturday nights at Liberty Lunch and Emo's.

I felt so much more comfortable standing in front of a stage, hanging around fashionably unkempt hipsters, enjoying the crush of a loud band. The more shows I went to, the more the idea of spending any time a gay bar seemed like a waste of time.

I drove down to San Antonio to see some arena shows. I drove up to Dallas to listen to Café Tacvba and Molotov. I attended two Duran Duran concerts, two more than I would have in Honolulu. And I squeezed in the Kronos Quartet in there as well.

I finally got to hear why Austin was called the Live Music Capital of the World.

I did manage to squeeze a date here and there, but when I mentioned the local music scene to my dates, they'd give me blank stares in return. Another reason to get disenchanted by the local gay scene.

So in 1999, I took a break from the local gay community, and it turned into a seven-year exile. The music scene is pretty ambivalent about its gay audiences, and the gay scene is oblivious to live music. It felt like a situation in which I had to choose.

And I made my choice.

1999 was the first year I attended Japan Nite. I forgot to bring earplugs, and I ended up hurting because of it. As a result, I didn't really look too fondly on my first Japan Nite. I would eventually appreciate Missile Girl Scoot and Number Girl. (Nicotine remain unimpressive to me.)

But like everyone else in the audience that night, I fell in love with eX-Girl.

The moment they took the stage, the audience was eating out of their hands. And ever since, eX-Girl has been an Austin favorite.

I haven't managed to go to all of their shows -- subsequent SXSW appearances have always clashed with other engagements -- but I've gone to as many as I can. I even drove up to Dallas in 2000 to see them.

I also remembered Number Girl. At the time, I thought I could like them if only my feet didn't hurt and my ears didn't ring. When I watch footage of the band's SXSW performance of that year, I kick myself for being so cranky during it. Because they really kicked ass. I even remember Tabuchi Hisako snapping that photo in the middle of "Iggy Pop Fan Club". Sometimes I think I can spot myself way in the back when the shot appears in the footage.

I covered the daytime panels of the music and interactive festivals as well.

Panels during the day, bands at night -- it was tiring but exhilirating. I understood the lure of SXSW now, and I'm forever hooked.

Realizing I would never make it in management, I took my career into my own hands and signed up for a PERL programming class in 1999.

When I finally peeked behind the curtain of a dynamic web site, I knew a lateral move would suite me best. My ticket out of my job would not be to follow in Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy's footsteps. I couldn't remain in content production if I wanted to stay sane.

I needed to get into development and make my mark that way.

So I started to code like a fiend. I was proud of my first efforts, even though I realize how flawed they were. But they were impressive enough to people who didn't know any better. Best of all, I got my company to pay for my education.

1999 was also the year I applied to Austin Community College. I knew I was limiting my social circle by excluding the gay community, so I figured I may as well use continuing education to make further contacts.

My first class was a survey of the music industry.

I also took classes on audio engineering and MIDI. I was getting the education I wish I had when I majored in music at the University of Hawaiʻi.

No such program exists in Honolulu.

In 1999, I started to take control of my life. Some things fell by the wayside that shouldn't have, but other things paved the way to where I am today.

The soundtrack of my 1999 would include:

• Molotov, ¿Donde jugaran las niñas?
• Shakira, ¿Donde estan los ladrones?
• Jordan Knight, Jordan Knight
• Nina Hynes, Creation
• The Kiss-Offs, Goodbye Private Life

Man, what a mindfuck.

In January 1998, I was really deep into my thing for Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy. I couldn't stop thinking about him, which was hard because I saw him more than I saw other people.

That month, I attended a statewide convention for the Texas chapter of the Asian-American Journalists Association. My homesickness was in really full force by then, because I clung to that day like my life depending on it.

In Hawaiʻi, I was part of the majority. But moving to Texas was the first time I was ever made to feel my "minority-ness", as it were. And it really opened my eyes.

While still crushing on Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy, I started seeing Bobby in February 1998. He ran across my web page, and being a total Internet neophyte at the time, he didn't understand my splash page. So he ended up e-mailing me directly instead.

We e-mailed each other for a few weeks, then went on a date. He spent the night.

We saw each other for a few months, but he had to slow the momentum of our dating when I started thinking he was a boyfriend. In November, he met someone he wanted to get serious with, but we had stopped having sex by then.

He would be the last person I dated.

(I've gone on dates and hook-ups since then, but they're so sporadic, you could count the number of times in the last seven years on one hand. And maybe a few fingers.)

Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy recruited a friend of his from college to be part of our night news team. With him around, I stopped hanging around Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy and let his friend take over for the after-work hang-out.

I really started to flame out professionally by then.

I went for a promotion to move to a daytime shift and got passed over for Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy. Then I went for a content manager position and got passed over for his college friend.

My hours shifted from a night shift to an early-morning shift. Instead of coming in at 5 p.m., I came in at 5 a.m. It wasn't any better. And I had to work with a real bitch.

Yeah, I hated my job.

To top it all off, my apartment was burglarized.

I came home one night after work to find some erroneous notice on my door from the apartment office about some missed payment. But that didn't shock me as much as the bottle of juice sitting by my front door. I didn't drink juice, and I didn't leave a bottle there.

That's when I saw my sliding doors had been pried open, and when I turned the knob of my door, it was unlocked.

I walked in to see my VCR and stereo gone. I dashed to my bedroom and saw empty spaces where my MIDI workstation had been.

A neighbor three doors down had been hit a week or so before.

I took out renter's insurance when that happened.

Just typing out this story again is hard. I wanted to go home, right then and there.

I got to a level of frustration that I trashed my apartment when my insurance company canceled my policy after paying out the claim.

The lowest blow was discovering my original demos had been stolen. The burglars took my cassette cases without checking to see they consisted entirely of mixed tapes. They probably ended up in a dumpster somewhere. I didn't notice they were gone till I tried to look for them two weeks after the burglary itself.

1998, for me, will always be the Year of the Burglary.

After my policy got canceled, I did what I should have done all along and get both auto and renter's insurance from one company, and it paid off with a discount.

Most significantly, I bought new equipment from the insurance claim, and it made me realize just how limited my original MIDI workstation was.

All the music of Eponymous 4 was recorded in part with that equipment, and I've been able to do more with my writing because of it.

As painful as the burglary was to live through, it did result in some good.

My best friend from high school -- the first guy I ever for whom I ever felt sexual attraction -- got married that year, too. So I flew to Portland to attend the ceremony, and I was so proud of him. I reached a level of comfort with my sexuality where I could joke and flirt with him, and it wasn't awkward.

I also got to visit my sister in Chicago that spring as well. In fact, a week before my place was broken into.

So the year wasn't totally bad.

The soundtrack of my 1998 would include:

• Cocco, Bougainvillia
• Madonna, Ray of Light
• Asylum Street Spankers, Spanks for the Memories
• 8 1/2 Souvenirs, Happy Feet (BMG version)
• Craig Armstrong, The Space Between Us

Ryan called it "an unforgettable year, but that doesn't stop me from trying."

Every year that puts more distance between me and 1997 is a welcome thing. Oddly enough, 1997 was a pretty good year for music releases.

1997 was the year I had a relationship of any length or signficance. JFK had come out to me after a conference we attended in Orlando, Florida. Since I was only out of the closet myself for about a year and a half, I did a stupid thing and helped him out of the closet further by ... introducing him to sex.

And so we started seeing each other, even though he really didn't find me attractive. JFK, in contrast, is a very, very pretty guy.

But sex kept us together, far beyond what a relationship of that ilk should have lasted. And after I moved to Austin, I still hadn't quite separated myself from him emotionally. When I found out he started to see someone else not mere weeks after I moved, I got ... pissed.

Now that I'm writing about it, I have to say being in a relationship with a guy who wasn't into me may contribute significantly to my ambivalence about dating today. I'll have to bring this up with my shrink.

Over the years, I've developed something of a condescending perception of that relationship. "Oh, it was just about sex!" I've told myself numerous times. I'm sure JFK has had better since me, and I assumed he probably doesn't look back fondly on it either.

I was kind of surprised, then, when I met him for lunch back in 2003, when I went back home for my sister's wedding. I called him out of the blue, and he sounded genuinely happy to hear from me. It made me wonder how being his first experience has effected his own perceptions on relationships.

I have to say, I haven't given much thought about how it's affected mine.

The spring semester of 1997 was my final at the newspaper. The competition for the next editor-in-chief was getting toxic. Very vocal factions started to emerge, and some political shenanigans ensued. It's been mercifully long enough now that I can't dredge up the details clearly. I just remember something about "harrassment".

Ryan had some drama of his own going on, which he recounts somewhere on his site. He started getting distracted, and I got distracted alongside with him for my own reasons (JFK.)

There was a point when it got really, really dark. And so I distracted myself by creating a print zine called The Soloist's Notebook. The seed for Musicwhore.org was thus planted.

May 31, 1997 -- the day I arrived in Austin.

I remember heading into my room at the Austin Motel, and some black women were catcalling me. I ignored them -- I didn't want to break the news that I didn't swing their way.

I remember writing a lot of entries about all the grown-up things I had to deal with -- finding a place to stay, paying my own bills, arranging a move.

I was exiled to a crappy night shift, and I had to work weekends as well.

As a result, the only person with whom I had any social contact was Gay Friend-Drinking Buddy. It didn't help that I was incredibly attracted to him. And at the risk of raising the ire of his husband, I still do. He was my type physically, and he has a great personality.

(I need to find an aging hispter to date. I usually go for guys who are ultimately out of my league, so I need to hit closer to my array of interests. Guys like Triggerman, Chainsaw, D-Rock or the Head Hackle -- I don't mention them all that much here. Unlike, say, the guy in marketing.)

But the attraction was (is?) one-sided, which I couldn't really handle on top of the first signs of homesickness and job burn-out.

The people I would meet that year who I would continue to know today:

• OmarG -- practically the first person I met.
• Double-A -- not till much later in the year. She would be my cigarette supplier.
• Grote -- another Dow Jones alumnus. We met in Missouri, and he's stopped by Austin a few times.

The soundtrack to my 1997 would include ...

• Duran Duran, Medazzaland
• Shawn Colvin, A Few Small Repairs
• Pizzicato Five, Happy End of the World
• Björk, Homogenic
• Kim Richey, Bitter Sweet

Yeah. Didn't think so.

There are roughly 10 or so entries left before the end of my endeavor to update this site everyday for a year. For the folks randomly stumbling at this late stage in the game, I'm commemorating 10 years of keeping an online journal with daily updates.

I said I would retire this site on its 10th birthday, which is Sept. 5, 2006. At first, I was non-commital about ending what's been a constant presence in my life for a good decade. But after pulling entries out of my ass for a year, I so need to step away.

So for the next few entries, I'm going to look back on the years, one entry per year. That should take us to 2006 by the beginning of September.

And what better time to start than with the beginning -- 1996.

I was still in college back then. It was my last semester, and I was one core requirement away from graduating. Technically, it was also my last semester at the student newspaper, but I agreed to stay on for a semester more as an non-degree student. I took a chorus class.

That final semester was pretty much a rush to find a summer internship, and my friends and I were all sending out résumés and clips. We applied for the Dow Jones Copy Editing internship and took the copy editing exam.

Everyone was scraping just to work at some small-town newspaper on the Mainland. I managed to get the interest of the Washington Post and Dow Jones.

I didn't hear back from the Washington Post after I submitted my exam to them. I was, however, offered a Dow Jones internship. That was when I learned I was heading to ... Austin, Texas.

Texas? That's the last place anyone born and raised in Hawaiʻi would willingly go. West coast? Yeah. Chicago or New York or -- if you're Filipino -- Virginia Beach? Yeah. But Texas?

A friend of mine who graduated from the University of Texas two years before assured me Austin was not like the rest of Texas, and I would eventually grow to love the place. I was skeptical.

But I wanted out of Hawaiʻi. I've wanted out of Hawaiʻi since before college. I wasn't going to be choosy -- if Austin could get me off the rock, then moving around the Mainland would be reasonably easier.

I always thought I'd be the first of my siblings to move out of the house, but I wasn't.

My oldest sister started dating a guy who lives in Chicago, and in November 1996, she packed up and followed him there. My internship wouldn't start till May 1997.

I'm sure my parents were hoping I'd do the internship, then come back home to find a job. But I think we all pretty much knew I was leaving the nest.

I started writing my online journal at the start of the fall semester. I didn't find out about the internship till the semester was ending. And I graduated from college in December 1996.

I would spend 10 months working as managing editor for the fourth largest daily newspaper in Hawaiʻi. It made me realize how badly I sucked at management.

I remember 1996 as being mostly stressful. I was finally reaching the end of a long college career, and I was really anxious to stop going to class.

Hawaii's job market was in the crapper, not like media jobs were easy to get in the first place. Everyone in my senior class felt the anxiety of getting an "in" with the Advertiser or the Star-Bulletin or one of the stations.

Ryan and I were running the paper without a copy chief, and we were getting run down.

Compound all that stress with learning how to date, and it just didn't feel all that great.

I think that was the semester when I met Dick, a one-night stand I can't forget.

I started my journal complaining about how tired I was, and when I try to remember everything from that era, fatigue is all I can recall.

The soundtrack to my 1996 would include:

• Everything But the Girl, Walking Wounded
• Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet
• Värttinä, Kokko
• Emmylou Harris, Portraits
• LeAnn Rimes, Blue

So I opened up the computer and tried air-blasting the dust off. Maybe eight years of dust was gumming up the works. That only made the fan sicker. Or perhaps, it gave its old age more clarity.

I'm not a total dummy when it comes to computers, and with effort, I can fix my own software problems. But hardware? I get skittish. The stakes are higher with hardware. Screw something in wrong, and it may cause a fire. Okay. Maybe nothing that dire, but having a processor melt and losing hundreds of gigabytes of hard drive would really, really suck.

So when blowing off the dust from the fan didn't quell its sickly-sounding behavior, I immediately went to the dark place. Am I going to have to buy a second external hard drive to back up the drive on the computer? Should I just tie that financial noose around my neck and get a laptop? Will I have to search Google high and low on instructions of how to replace a heatsink? How much does a new heat sink cost? Couldn't I just replace the fan?

A few searches on AskMetafilter later, I decided just to replace the fan to see if that would make a difference.

Straight after work, I went to CompUSA to buy a new fan. I thought about stopping by my apartment first to remove the old fan and to bring it on my search. But I figured I could recognize what I need if I saw it. Plus, I wanted to pick up dinner from Firebowl Café before the dinner rush.

All the fans in stock were obviously too large for my heatsink. I ended up buying the only thing that looked remotely small enough to fit.

I brought it home, opened up my computer and discovered it was too small. So I ate dinner while Without a Trace was on and waited for the sun to etch closer to the horizon. Have I mentioned how much I dislike August heat?

This time, I removed the fan from my computer and brought it with me. As it turned out CompUSA did not carry the kind of fan I needed, so I asked where I could get it. I was told Fry's. Someone had suggested Fry's to me earlier in the day. Huh.

I got my refund and headed up to Fry's, which is located so close to the office, I felt cheated by the fact I wasted an entire commute's worth of gas on the trip.

I found fans of the same size, but the pins were different. Being the hardware dullard I was, I asked for help. The guy told me I could use the ones with the different-sized pins in such detail that it totally went over my head. In essence, I could plug the fan into the power source of one of my drives -- preferably not the hard drive -- and plug the drive to the second pin provided.

I took his word for it and spent $6.48 on the new fan.

I installed it as instructed, and now I don't hear my computer struggling any more.

Replacing a fan on a motherboard is, in fact, no big deal, but I feel a sense of accomplishment. I always do when I perform some sort of hardware fix without managing to do strange damage to the computer.

Of course, all those trips took all night, so I don't have much of the evening left to work in the studio. But at least I got an adventure out of it to recount on this site.

Number of entries before the end: 11.

It was hard not to notice.

Perhaps the most original reaction was one of my co-workers, who's from Japan. He asked me whether I was going to buy a watch. I didn't get the reference, so he explained -- it was "The Gift of the Maggi".

Since I cut my hair, he was asking me whether I was going to buy a watch chain, just like the wife in the story who cuts off her hair and sells it to a wigmaker to get her husband a chain. The husband in turn sells his watch to buy a brush for his wife's hair.

No, I told him, I wasn't going to get watch chain.

Everyone's reaction so far has been positive.

The guy in marketing shaved off his goatee. I didn't get a clear look at his face, but oh dear -- I'm already lusting after him hard enough ...

Number of entries before the end: 13.