Hello everyone! This is my first blog post on the newly-completed website. So before we get to the meat of the post, I figured I would do a brief introduction to the site. First off, this site is intended to serve three purposes:

The first purpose is to help track and record all of the projects that I tend to work on throughout the weeks, and be a kind of portfolio of my work, as well as a central hub for all information related to my work.

The second purpose is to allow others (such as yourself), to follow my work more effectively, and remove some ambiguity about what is and is not completed in relation to projects that people may be waiting on (CM4DX…hint hint….)

The last purpose is to provide a place for me to voice opinions, thoughts, and random ramblings! (fun, huh?)

More information about the site, as well as myself can be found on the About me page. Project information (separate from blog posts) will be logged in the Projects pages. I also have links to my Twitter and GitHub accounts, which are used heavily as well.

So I was debating on what to post about for my very first blog post EVAR on the new site! After much debate and mulling over, I decided to cover … you guessed it! DATA DISCOVERY AND MUSIC COMPOSITION! (wait…what?)

Yep! You heard right! Data discovery and music composition! Now, before you get upset, rest assured that there will be a post in the next day or so that covers CM4DX, but I want to just have some fun for this one, so bear with me!

So here's the story: About a week ago, I discovered some old external hard drives sitting on my desk (yes, I know, not exactly “discovering”, but I hadn't really paid attention to them since I moved in). So I look at them and it dawns on me…I had no freaking clue what the heck was on those disks! Hence it was time to start digging around. Sadly, it was not as easy as it would seem, as the AC adapters for those disks were buried in a box somewhere among other random cables (everyone needs a “random cables” box!).

Well, after some searching, I plugged in the hard drives and on one of them, I came across something I hadn't looked at in years. My old music compositions folder!

Now at this point some of you may be wondering what the hell I'm talking about. What you may not know, is that before I started working on CyanogenMOD and other such community projects, I used to actually compose music for fun (I kid you not). In particular, instrumental pieces that would have been good for fantasy-style video games I was working on at the time. Sadly, most of my work has been lost in the process of data transfer and whatnot, and a large amount of my work was typically left half-done.

HOWEVER! On this wonderful hard drive I found the one piece of work I am the most proud of, which is named “Untitled Melody”. I have uploaded it to SoundCloud, and you can get more information about it, listen to it, or download the sheet music on the Untitled Melody project page. The song itself is a three-movement piece for piano, violin, and flute, which covers three situational states typically found in some fantasy role-playing games. The first movement is called “Calm” and is similar to music you would find in a town or outpost, the second is “Wanderer” and is similar to what might be heard in an overworld or between-outpost travel sequence, and the final movement is “Conflict”, and is reminiscent of some good old battle music.

Although this is by far my favourite piece I have made to date, I was never able to find the instrumentalists to perform it and record it onto an actual nice track, so sadly people are stuck listening to the synthesized MIDI track for now, which lacks in the ability to blend the various sounds together effectively (e.g. all instruments are always the same volume, so sometimes the piano and violin drown out the flute, even though it has the melody) or to vary the tempo effectively (e.g. all parts of the song are the same speed, even though parts like the “Conflict” movement should be played a little faster). Essentially the MIDI synthesizer lacks in one of those fundamental aspects of music, and that's the ability to put any emotion or feeling or artistic variance into the piece. The music is available though, so if anyone out there can or knows someone who could arrange to have this piece performed, that would be fantastic! (this is the part where I start wishing!)

If you check the projects page you'll notice I was able to find another one of my compositions called To You, which also has the sheet music and audio available. This was a song I wrote as a gift and isn't really anything all-together exciting at face value, as it was intended to be somewhat simple so that you could easily ad-lib to spice things up a bit. This was also designed exclusively for the piano so that I could actually perform it for the person I was gifting it to.

So where to go from here? What to expect in the future? Well, the above text gives you a feel of what to expect from my writing style, and as for content, it will be varying based on what I'm working on during any given week. I already have decided on my next topic, which I will be posting sometime in the next few days: “CyanogenMOD and Motorola Devices”. In that post I'll go over the current state of CM on the original Droid, as well as discuss a roadmap for the CM4DX project which aims to get CM on to the Droid X.

Until next time!

This is the new site. It has a blog and project wiki and about page and links and stuff.

I found some old music that I composed awhile back. My favorite is here. Take a look.

Upcoming topic: CM and Droid and DX, OH MY!