Best of 2013

Well, here it is. I'm starting to make CDs now. Enjoy!

Best of 2013: Bonus Tracks

I'm finalizing the track order for this (last) years Best Of playlist. Meanwhile, here are some songs that didn't quite make the cut, although I really like them alot.

Best of 2012: Bonus Tracks

Every year there are always a handful of songs I hate to leave out of the "Best of" mix. Usually, they are too similar to a song that made it on the playlist. Or I have two songs that I really like by the same artist, and one gets selected for the annual playlist almost at random. So I decided to put all these extra songs on their own playlist.

Best of 2012

It's about time, isn't it? Moving twice in the last six months doesn't help. But here it is, your Best of 2012 playlist...



2012 was a strong year for music. So strong that there were too many good songs to choose from. If I made this playlist next month, it might be very different, depending on my mood. But I think this is a well balanced mix.

By the way, in case you're wondering, the Best Album of 2012 is The Carpenter by The Avett Brothers, followed closely by Good Kid: m.A.A.d. City by Kendrick Lamar. The Best Song of 2012 is "Maybe You" by Say Lou Lou (who I know by their original name, Saint Lou Lou). I could listen to that track on repeat for days!

Transit of Venus

I managed to take some photos of Venus passing in front of the sun yesterday evening. I took the filter out of a pair of solar viewing glasses, taped it to the lens of my wife's high-end point and shoot camera (Canon G12), and zoomed in as far as I could go.

Best of 2011

This is probably the longest it has taken me to get out a "Best of" playlist, but it has been a busy year. I hope it is worth the wait. I'm making CDs now and will send them out soon.

Songs missing from the Rdio playlist are:
Geotic - Find Your Peace
Sun Glitters - Wind Caresses Her Hair
The New Division - Walk in the Dark

The Amanda Palmer Australia album can be found here.

Top Albums of 2011

These are, in no particular order, my favorite albums of the last year. I could listen to each of these on repeat for days.

The Antlers - Burst Apart

The last Antlers release was a concept album about battling cancer (No thanks!). This one is still pretty depressing, especially the song that uses the concept of putting down an injured dog as a metaphor for a doomed relationship. However, these depressing topics are married to near sublime music.

Apparat - The Devil's Walk

This guy is great! Over the years he has been moving from hardcore glitchy electronica to more mainstream indie electronica, and he hit the perfect balance with this album. It properly stimulates my nerves for repetitive music that progressively builds in intensity, but also includes some songs with more typical verse-chorus-verse song structures. It's a great album for listening while driving or working.

Cults - Cults

This could be filed under generic indie pop, but I find the songs incredibly catchy. Part of it may be their use of song structures and components for Doo-wop and Motown music.

Geotic - Mend

I can't stress enough how amazing this album is. It's an ambient album made from over-processed guitar loops by the guy who normally records as Baths, but it is extremely listenable. I could have a horrible day and I would feel totally at peace after hearing only three songs. Oh, and did I mention it is available for free? Go download it today.

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins

The beloved British folk artist and a highly-respected electronica artist team up to produce one of the best albums either of them ever produced. Seriously, folks, this strikes just the right balance between ambient music and twee folk.

Little Dragon - Ritual Union

Normally I'm not that much of a fan of Little Dragon's electropop, but they changed it up for this album. There aren't really any standout tracks, but the beats and melodies employed are very ear-catching. I find that every time I listen to it I hear some new transition or progression that I enjoy.

M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

I'm a sucker for anything M83 does, but a double concept album where each track on one disk is mirrored by another track on the second disk? Sign me up! There is more live instrumentation on this release than on previous albums, and I think it works out well. Plus, there's a children's song about psychedelic frogs!


As you can tell, most of these lie on the ambient and chill-out sides of the music spectrum. There's not a lot of upbeat, dance-y music on this list this year. Don't worry, Disc 2 of the Best of 2011 playlist will have plenty of bangers this year!

Best of 2011 is in the works

The latest "Best of" playlist is proceeding slowly this year. However, I wanted to give a quick update. I've just passed from the collection phase (where I listen to everything I'm considering for the playlist and gather together all the 2011 songs in a huge 275+ track list) into the first culling phase (where I prune the master list down to about 75 tracks). This should take me a few weeks.

Pixel Art

Lately I've been obsessed with this image.

It was generated using an iPhone app called pxl. When I saw this particular image, I was inspired to take one of our photos and create a large poster we can put on the wall. However, after some investigation, we discovered that the output of the app is limited, and a high resolution image that would be appropriate for large scale printing was not available.

I still wanted to create some wall art in this style. I tested with upscaling with Photoshop, and after applying several noise-reduction and sharpening filters, I came up with a reasonable output quality, but it wasn't very satisfactory. Another option was to create a file from scratch using Adobe Illustrator, but that quickly turned out to be much more time consuming than it was worth. What to do...?

Then I thought about using some sort of coding/scripting language. The version of Photoshop that I have doesn't support scripting, so that was out. Perhaps this was a motivation to learn python? But that would take a while, and I don't have that much free time. Then I remembered a scientific imaging program that many researchers already use with powerful built-in scripting: ImageJ. I quickly looked up the documentation for scripting and I was off. In a few hours I created something that did what I wanted. Once I set the bar width, bar height, and spacing between bars, the script calculated the mean RGB values for pixels in a regularly spaced array, and then painted an angled rectangle in a new blank image with that RGB value. After the new image was constructed, a "smooth" filter was applied twice.

Here are a couple examples. The first is a photo of ducklings that hatched last year near my building:

The second is a photo of Archie on Galveston Beach:

Archie's Food Log

Many of you might know that Kirsten and I have been keeping track of how much Archie eats. This is something the hospital makes you do after the birth, and we just decided to keep on doing it. I designed a couple of feeding logs that we used to keep track of different categories, like the amount of breastmilk, the amount of formula, and the amount of solid food. We kept this up for his entire first year.
What you may immediately notice is the apparent noisiness of the data. This is not due to precision errors. His total daily intake really did fluctuate this much from day to day, but it's really not noticeable at the time until you plot out the data like this. There are a couple spikes from growth spurts (most noticeably at Day 9) and dips from airplane travel. There's also a missing week of data because I can't seem to find that log sheet. Near the end of the year, you can see that formula intake drops as he starts eating more solid food. Although all of this data is presented in mL, it would probably be more informative if it was presented in calories. However, it would have taken too much effort to convert all the different solid foods into calorie measurements, so we decided not to pursue that line of data collection. Maybe next time!

We can also break down the data by hour to see how much Archie eats on average over the course of a day.
For the first three months, he is eating roughly every two hours, so the data is distributed around the clock. But for the rest of the year, his eating is concentrated around mealtimes, and we eventually stop feeding him at night altogether.

The color values in this plot are in mL, by the way. Now we can quickly see his constant mealtimes. Breakfast at 8 AM. Lunch at noon, but for a period of time fluctuating around 1 PM. We used to have dinner at 6 PM, but then we moved it up to 5:30 in order to get Archie to bed earlier. We also have a brief formula "top-off" right before bedtime, which has decreased in volume over time. The chaos of the first three months is washed out by the large feeding volumes in the rest of the year, so I made a plot focusing on that early time.
Archie quickly developed feeding cycles, but they changed often, sometimes for only a week, and we sometimes tweaked them as well (i.e. "reset" feeding at 10 PM). Around Week 13 we simply decided to stop feeding him at night, which definitely helped us get some sleep.

A word about film scanning

Last month I brought in some film to one of the last professional film labs in Houston. The people at Aker Imaging were very friendly and helpful, but unfortunately they got part of my order wrong (they didn't cross-process my slide film, but that's OK because the pictures turned out great anyway). There were also problems with some of the image scans. Most of the scans were alright, but the scans of the black and white film were way too contrasty, and I couldn't tell how good the photos were at all. Both the highlights (e.g. bright sky) and shadows were saturated, but in the actual film negatives I could see details of clouds and trees, so I knew the scans were bad. I actually went back to the lab and asked them to scan them again. They were very accommodating and didn't charge me for the rescans, which is why I will go back to them.

The rescans from Aker Imaging were good, but there were still contrast problems in some of the images. Plus they were 60 cents a frame, which is more than it cost to develop each frame. I knew that Costco had film lab services, so I thought I'd bring in the same black and white film for them to scan. The Costco scans ended up being about 30 cents a frame, with is much cheaper, and even though I only asked them to do raw scans with no additional post processing, all the contrast issues were gone. Here's an example of a wild pony at Chincoteague:

You can see that in the original scans, you can barely see the details of the horse and trees. You can also see that the left and right sides of the scan are darker than the center. The rescan pretty much solves the contrast issues, but there is still the brightness gradient towards the center. In the Costco scan, you can see all the details of the horse and trees (although the details in the sky are lost) and the brightness gradient is completely gone (all parts of the image are illuminated evenly). Here's another example of the Capitol Building:

The same problems exist in the original scan. Parts of the sky are saturated, the trees are black, and in the center of the image it is difficult to tell when the building ends and the sky begins. The rescan is a little better, but the Costco scan is clearly the best, showing all the relevant information in the photo.

Bottom line, while the Costco scans may not always look the best, they show all the image details I need without any artifacts so that I can tell which photos are good and which are not.

The Most Unusual Piece of Mail I Have Ever Recieved

The other day at work this showed up in my mailbox:


I've blurred the addressee, a Mr. Samuel S., but you can probably tell that it was mailed from Ghana. Although the envelope is clearly not addressed to me, there was a new address label affixed to the front with my work address on it. The JSC mail security had already opened the envelope to screen the contents.


Inside the envelope we have a nice birthday card lacking any personalized note or signature from the sender (although the name of the recipient is printed inside), a couple CDs of recent Ghanian hiplife music, and a couple of photocopies of documents implying that Mr. Samuel has recently paid off his student loan for his education at the University of Cape Coast. There is also a (Ghanian?) phone number written on one of the CDs.

This whole package is confusing the hell out of me. I can't come up with a rational explanation for how my address got attached to this letter. It was clearly affixed to the front covering the original address, so it couldn't have gotten there by accident. And why is there no note in the birthday card? Why would somebody send a card without signing it? Is this some sort of "test" for an international spy organization or the Illuminati? Is the phone number a direct line to headquarters or a safe house or an answering machine for the future? If I figure out the secret pattern in the song titles or filenames (using the word GHANA to decrypt them first, of course), will that lead me to an international assassins guild or an NSA recruitment facility? Or is this all just a big, impossible coincidence?


By the way, here are some examples of the music on the CDs: 1 2 3 4

The Daily Commute (With Graphs!) Part II

Here I have broken down my commute data by day of the week. In the morning, it doesn't matter which day I drive, it will still take me around 40 minutes to get to work. However, on my drive home, there is a clear relationship between the day of the week and my drive time. In particular, my commute home becomes longer as the week progresses. I always could tell that my Monday commute was usually not that bad and that it sucked to drive home on Fridays, but I didn't realize that it was progressively worse in the days in between. And again, you can see that taking US 59 home adds about 5 minutes to my commute.

The Daily Commute (with Graphs!)

Since moving to Houston, people keep asking me how long my commute was. In January, I started recording how long it took for me to drive to and from work, and this is the result:
This represents about 5 months worth of data collection. The short answer is that, in the morning, my commute is usually 35-40 minutes, but my commute home averages about 45 minutes, although it often creeps up to around an hour, depending on traffic. The fastest I can possibly get to and from work seems to be 34 minutes. But there are some interesting aspects of the data. First of all, let's look at the morning drive time in detail:
It appears that heading off to work as close as possible to the hour is optimal, and my drive time tends to increase as the hour goes on. Next, take a look at my drive home:

There are two possible routes I can take to drive home. Taking US 59 is actually shorter by distance, but it almost always adds about 5 minutes to my commute compared with taking Allen Parkway. This is most likely due to longer travel on surface streets from US 59, which move slower than Allen Parkway during rush hour. No averages here because I don't really have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions, but the apparent trends appear to peak right around 5:00 PM (although there may be a "sweet spot" if I leave work exactly at 5:00).

New TV, why won't you work!?!

I just need to rant for a minute about TV reception. For Mother's Day this year I bought a small TV to put in the kitchen so the wife can watch NewsHour and reruns of Roseanne. Those shows are on channels 8.1 and 11.2, which are broadcast on the VHF band. Well, I first bought a cheapo "rabbit ears" antenna and was able to get all the UHF channels (14-64) with no problem, but no 8 or 11. Then I tried upstairs near the window, but no luck. So then I tried the nice antenna we have hooked up to our regular TV, but the only place I could pick up those two essential channels was by the sliding glass door out back (the absolute closest direct line of sight to the towers). This was of course unacceptable. So I bought a nice antenna with an amplifier from a reputable brand. Guess what? no channels 8.1 and 11.2 or any VHF channels! Under any conditions! I know the amplifier works because when I hook up that antenna to our regular TV I can pick up some channels that always come in spotty with no problems. So what gives?

The thing that bugs me the most is that I have no problem picking up 8 and 11 on our regular TV, so why can't this new TV? I guess it has to be something to do with the built-in tuner in the TV, but I don't understand how it can be so drastically different when picking up VHF channels when UHF channels come in relatively fine!

Lord of the Rings Subway Map

Sometimes I need to work on something creative other than my usual work. And sometimes something like this falls out of my brain. The idea was inspired by this and this, and I swear I had the idea before I found out about the Threadless t-shirt!

Best of ... 2009?!?

April Fools! The Best of 2010 playlist is coming soon. But for now, I made a playlist on Rdio for last years mix.



Missing songs:
Tilly and the Wall - Heartbeats
A Camp - Stronger than Jesus
Beirut - La Llorona
Balmorhea - Settler
Notorious B.I.G. vs. Miley Cyrus - Party and Bullshit (In the USA)
Miike Snow - Animal (Treasure Fingers remix)
Joe Goddard - Lemon and Lime (Home Time)
Beirut - Venice (Tom Croose City of Water edit)
Aphex Twin - Rhubarb (Addled edit)

Top Albums of 2010

I'm finalizing my annual "Best of" playlist, but I thought I'd post a couple albums from 2010 that I thought were stellar.


If I'm in the mood for something mellow and introspective, I pull out See You on the Moon by Tift Merritt. I've been following her for a few years now, but this album is a cut above her previous albums. It is more alt-country than straight up country, and gives it a more approachable, hipster-friendly feel. When I listen to it, it makes me want to take a road trip.


On the other hand, if I'm in the mood for upbeat pop/hip-hop, then I turn on the latest effort from Gorillaz, Plastic Beach. I had this playing on repeat for about a week this Spring. While there are no real standout singles, all of the songs are good and span a variety of modern electronic sub-genres (no doubt due to the wide variety of guest artists).

Honorable Mentions


I shouldn't like this album. It sounds way to much like 1970's post-hippie music, but it mesmerizes me. All the songs pretty much sound the same, which makes it difficult to pick out a track to put on the Best of mix, but it is definitely worth a listen.


And here is another quality album from Plants and Animals. Again, there are no standout singles, but the album as a whole is full of fun, jangly, indie rock. It probably would be great to listen to while cleaning the house.

Best of 2010!

It's that time of year again! I've put together a mix of some of my favorite songs from 2010. Instead of typing out the entire playlist like in previous years, this time I've made a playlist on Rdio, the new streaming music service I have been using for the past couple of months.

As always, send me an email if you want a hard copy of the mix.



You can listen to it on Rdio here.

Songs missing from the playlist (because they aren't available on Rdio):
The Radio Dept. - Domestic Scene
Ernest Gonzales - Dancing in the Snow
Yellow Ostrich - WHALE
Fences - From Roses
Ruth Moody - Cold Outside
Emeralds - Candy Shoppe
Pacific! - Narcissus (Alan Braxe remix)
Noddy - By Hook or By Crook
HEALTH - In Heat (Javelin remix)
Mount Kimbie - Before I Move Off
Gonjasufi - Candylane (Bibio remix)

Junior's First Mix by EVF

Even though it contains a Bon Iver song, I really, really like this naptime mixtape a friend made for Archie. I would listen to it on my own if I needed some good mellow background music. So I thought I'd post the tracklisting (or at least what songs were available on my streaming service).



If you are an Rdio subscriber you can listen to it here.