The music of Video games, bicycling clothing, automake

Sounds

I stumbled on 380 YouTube videos which all have the title sequence: "From Bleeps to Beats/The Music of Video Games". The site which organizes these videos in a more aesthetic manner is called "Gar's VGM Site". These videos were compiled by a man named John, who is from Montreal. His handle is "garudoh".

I believe the music was extracted directly from the ROM, but it's never credited. The complete sequence of every tune from the games is represented. I've been working my way through from #1 and have to say that he's done an impressive job of including video game content as well as music.

I'd like to clarify why I think this is music. There are some incredible tricks that composers used to make the music not only listen-able but that is related to gameplay of specific games (side scrolling action games tend to be in 4/4 and have a lot of snare sounds...like Sousa?) and can be listened to over and over and over again.

I'm not a gamer, and haven't really been since Genesis was popular...so listening to a lot of these is a mixture between admiration for the composers and memories of my childhood.

Opinions

I got a pair of Cordaround's Bike to Work Pants in the mail yesterday. They are very comfortable, durable and close to being acceptable in a formal setting. They're fine for my workplace, but they wouldn't work with a button down and tie....at least I couldn't make it work.

But I'm no fashionista (fashionisto?)

It got me thinking about clothing for biking. When I sold my car for a bike last month, I thought about what I needed a bike for, and then shopped for that kind of bike. I don't want to have one bike. I love biking and have done it for many years. I want to have a utility bike first (for groceries, getting to work, etc), road bike second (for weekend trips to Marin) and a mountain bike third (for doing what I love most about biking...playing in the mud). The second two need to be top notch, so my goal was to make my first bike a fixer upper, so I could re-learn all about bike maintenance and repair. The bike I got was a 1970s Motobecane Grand Touring. It's yellow and silver. I'm going to change the wheels, rear cassette and cog (should come with wheel), bottom bracket and crank (need 175mm crank, and I might have to rethread the bottom bracket), possibly fork headset and handle bars...then brake levers and dérailleurs.

Anyway, I got to thinking about necessary accessories. There are lots of clothing that bikers tend to wear...you can see this in any bike shop. Shoes are essential, as this is part of the pedal/crank/chain system. But the pants and shirts are what concern me. Spandex is good if you're training or racing...but for fat slobs riding slowly with their girlfriends down abandon roads or wine tasting...please stop today.

There is a need for better "clothes" to wear while biking. Clothes that you could wear if you weren't biking either. They have these for camping, hiking, skiing, mountain biking, skating, and plenty of other sports (how many jerseys do you see at football stadiums...in the stands?) Why not utility biking and every day biking?

So I talked to a couple people and we concluded that the market probably hasn't had a demand for it yet. With rising gas prices, the new incentive ($20/month pre-tax from employer for riding your bike to work rather than driving) to ride your bike to work, the response in the Bay area surrounding increased commuters taking their bikes on public transportation, and many other factors are indicators that people don't want to drive anymore. They want to ride! And with that, let's make it more fashionable by providing fashion and clothing with is just as much utility as it is regular clothing. I'm waiting for this to improve.

Programming

The automake tool has been causing me headaches for the last week or so. I've been attempting to cross compile (to an ARM Cortex-A8...BeagleBoard) Pango because it's a dependency in a project I'm working on.

Learning Linux is satisfying. This is going to be more of an opinion post than anything, but diving into generating a Makefile from scratch which auto builds an entire list of dependencies in order to do this for other systems and compliers is a great thing. Tracking down bugs helps you learn the tools that are part of Linux (less, more, grep, etc), it helps you learn about log files, read through errors quicker, and figure out what all of these dependencies do. I'm learning more about how to start a project by learning how to make a project that's broken than I did programming with Windows for 4 years. In Windows, you don't have to mess with this stuff. There are some complicated things you can learn how to do in Windows...but their alternative in Linux is easy (e.g. DirectShow vs. GStreamer).

On the flip side, the "complicated" things in Linux really aren't that complicated, and are actually minimal for a reason. The alternative on Windows is obfuscated by their license. We can never know how some of these kernel level things happen in Windows because it's hidden on purpose.

Proof by induction: Linux is more user friendly, although more difficult to learn in the beginning.