Planet Olin

Back in high school I discovered the music of Virt, a video game musician who back then was using Impulse Tracker to simulate the sound of the NES. Some of my favorites was his “Classical Favorites” tracks, available from his chiptunes page, albeit in tracker formats.

At the time, I was spending a lot of my own free time writing music with Impulse Tracker, so I dabbled a little bit in faking NES music, in my “LOFI” series, with some pleasing results. This was back around 2000 or so. I never quite got back into it, sadly.

Later on, I discovered 8bitpeoples, a musical collective of chiptune artists. I went to their Data Destruction Tour in Boston and got to talk to and admire the music of Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, and Covox. I wrote a little bit about their music in a post for alwaysBETA.

Anyway it’s been a couple years since then, and I’ve been excited to find out that Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, and crew are performing a showcase and debuting a documentary at this year’s SXSW festivals here in Austin. Needless to say, I got pretty stoked.

This revived my long-standing desire to get one of the handful of different Game Boy cartridges that people have made for writing chiptunes. The one I’d wanted for a long time is named Nanoloop, and I’m glad to say that I finally bit the builet and bought an original 1989 model Game Boy and the Nanoloop 1.3 cartridge!

For my first song, I took one of my old LOFI tracks and spent a short amount of time trying to mock it up on the actual Game Boy, to see how close I had come to simulating the real sound.

The results of this experiment are found in LOFI2. Compare with the original LOFI2, and please keep in mind that there are a lot more restrictions with using Nanoloop and a real Game Boy than I had in Impulse Tracker.

After a couple days, I put forth a little bit more effort and wrote my first completely new Game Boy track, Goof Step. For this track, I kept things simple by only writing one pattern for each of the four available channels. I merely turn them on and off at strategic times to create the structure of the track. I’m pretty pleased with the results, and soon enough I will pursue a more ambitious and complete track.

Enjoy!

Downloads:

• LOFI2 (new version) - mp3
• LOFI2 (original version) - mp3
• Goof Step - mp3

If I had one word to describe my year off to date, I’d say “Reflection.” If I had two, they’d be “Reflection” and “Design.” But, if I had a third word, it would be “Coffee” (the fourth phrase would be “really bad music” just in case you were wondering).

Coffee has become a strong passion for Chester, George and I. It started out from our work on designing products for the specialty coffee industry, but it has become so much more.

We have tried dozens of coffees from across the US brewed in many different methods. We’ve grown from buying coffee that costs $4/lb to tasting (but not really buying) coffee that is well over $100/lb (though we usually settle on coffee which is around $14/lb). We’ve met a ton of amazing people who share this passion. And we’ve learned a lot… enough to know that we know almost nothing about coffee.

There are a few things that I really like about coffee.

First and foremost, the mathematician and engineer in me like the fact that producing good coffee requires the optimization of dozens of coupled variables. As much as we try, there isn’t a closed form solution to this problem; there isn’t an equation which will produce the perfect cup of coffee. As a result, there is always room for experimenting and trying things out.

The entrepreneur in me likes the fact that the Specialty Coffee Industry is young and growing at a non-trivial rate. This means that there is lots of excitement in the industry and lots of change in the technologies. It also means that what is considered the best today will be laughed at 6 months from now. Things aren’t stationary.

The anthropologist and designer in me likes the fact that everyone is so passionate about their work. They love spending time working on coffee, and are such rich and complex individuals as a result of it. It’s pleasurable to design for them.

The humanist and socialist in me likes the fact that the community is so considerate. Everyone is driven by something higher than money- good coffee. People in rival companies help eachother out. There’s always someone out there willing to help you out, even if it doesn’t help them out any. It’s great.

It also helps that I really like coffee shops and the taste of coffee.

It’s super fantastic.

I don't think I've ever been this lonely on Valentines Day. Not because I don't have a significant other. (Although, I really wouldn't mind going on a date or two.) More because the people I care about most are so far away. All my closest friends are spread out across the country and I miss everyone.... :(

On the bright side, I am going to Olin for Candidate's Weekend I and I am really looking forward to it. Of course, I've signed up to interview, be in the alumni chat, and do an info session for TI, but I'm pretty sure I'll have time to party at Olin and in Bos-town! You have to make time for what's important right?

I recently started re-playing a game called Kingdom of Loathing that I played a bit in college. It's a text, turn-based, role-playing game that is way too fun to play. It's kind of ridiculous and appeals to people of a more nerdy nature, which is why I love it. It's surprisingly well thought-out and updated fairly often for a free online game. Luckily, you are limited to 40 turns per day, so people that tend to get addicted to turn-based games (like me) can only play for so long. Of course, I spend the rest of the day thinking about how I'm going to maximize my limited number of turns, but what can you do? So, if you need something to do to pass the time, make a character! It's fun. I'm a Disco Bandit. :)

my apartment has furniture (thanks in large part to ikea and my dad's help in assembling furniture) and doesn't look like a hurricane hit it anymore. i'm pleased! [on a side note, i have perhaps the nosiest landlady on the face of the planet. she's always around and asking questions...and is super strict about what i can do in the apartment.]

also, whole foods has green and black chocolate on sale :p

the world is good!