2014 Year in Review

Well, 2014 is coming to a close.  Was it any better than 2013?  It's hard to say.

By many accounts, 2014 was shaped by events that were more unfortunate than could ever been realized.  Domestically, in the US, we had multiple police brutality cases come to light.  None of those seemed to come to the conclusion the public hoped for.  We were swept by fear over the concerns of Ebola, which hit Africa to devastating effect but never made a particular impact here.

Overseas, by all accounts, was much worse however.  From ISIL to plane disasters, 3 of them now that another plane has gone missing on the 28th of December, the world has not been a particularly safe place.  It all seems so far away when we hear about atrocities like the December 16th school massacre in Peshawar by the Pakistani Taliban or the thousands of deaths in West Africa due to Ebola.

At home, this disconnect became increasingly obvious.  The fear frenzy sparked by Ebola, which to date only has 4 cases and 1 death in the US, was almost comical in how overblown it was.  The level of misinformation supplied was clearly crafted to feed the fear as all credible sources have said that outbreaks in developed countries would be incredibly unlikely.  Now don't get me wrong, the crisis in west Africa over the spread and fatality of this current Ebola strain is very well founded, it just isn't particularly dangerous to the US where the media went crazy.

As bad as the year's been in the world, outside the Earth we perhaps had one of the most exciting events in recent space history.  Rosetta and Philae, spacecraft from the European Space Agency (ESA) landed on a moving asteroid, no doubt a great feat.  From a set of cute animated renditions of their mission to an xkcd comic chronicling their landing, the scientific community celebrated the success, though brief, of one of the longest and most difficult space missions to date.

In daily life I'm sure everyone has had somewhat of an up and down year.  Every time you think something good happens, you get punched in the gut with something terrible.  That's how the world is though, between all the good and bad, there's a lull where nothing seems to happen.  Sometimes, I feel like that's what we should really be celebrating.  Not praising the good, nor vilifying the bad, but celebrating those everyday events, the mediocrity is what keeps us going.

With that, I hope everyone has a good new year's.  Hopefully, this upcoming year will have more to celebrate, both good and neutral, and less to cry over.  As always, until next time.

--CsMiREK

Headphones Jargon

Short post this time.  I just put up a new page on headphones jargon/lingo/whatever you want to call it.  If you wanted to know what I mean by the different kinds of headphones and what various metrics I look for, hopefully it'll be helpful.  I'll have more term to definition type explanations than I gave in these posts.  The idea is that if you don't want to spend the effort to look stuff up, it'll be a place where you can quickly pick up what the terms mean individually.  You can find it on the side below the link to the headphones spreadsheet.  The posts I mentioned here will also be linked to on the page.  Until next time.

* No Audio for this post *

--CsMiREK

Gear Days: Headphone Spreadsheet

Recently I've been going back through all of my headphones and re rating them.  The results of which I'm glad to share with you here on this link.  When I obtained a pair of Beyerdynamic DT880 headphones all of my rankings needed to change.  Simply put, at the current moment they are the best headphones I own and everything needed to get re rated in order to compensate.  In the sub tabs of the spreadsheet I'll be breaking down the sub sections of headphones I currently own with the best in each category taking the 10/10 slot and everything else adjusted to the headphones that hold the 10/10 slot for the category.  The last sub tab is a list of songs I like to listen to for various reasons that I try to elucidate.  If you are ever in the position of looking for headphones I hope you can refer to that spreadsheet for some advice at any time.  I'll also be leaving the link on the side for reference at all time.  And with that, until next time.

*Note: No audio for this post*

--CsMiREK

Musical Discovery - Alstroemeria Records

So the new year has begun.  For my first non-update post of the year, we're going back to Music Discovery.  The topic of this post is the group Alstroemeria Records.  With this post, I will retroactively also be adding genre tags to all my previous Musical Discovery and Top Tracks posts.

Alstroemeria Records is a Japanese group headed by Masayoshi Minoshima.  Genre wise, it falls into the trance category with more recent tracks starting to feel more on the dubstep side of the electronica spectrum.  Historically, Alstroemeria Records has only released during Comiket which occurs twice a year, once in August and once in December, and Reiteisai (博麗神社例大祭) which occurs in October.  The reason for this is because as a group Alstroemeria Records does covers of tracks from a game called The Touhou Project.  These are largely unimportant things, besides the fact that a lot of the music I listen to is related to these events.

Back to Alstroemeria Records though.  The sound of Alstroemeria Records has changed from when they started releasing back in 2003.  At the beginning the sound was more instrumental and less electronic.  Throughout the years, more vocal tracks have been added and the sound has become decidedly more electronic mainly in the veins of trance and dubstep.

In the category of Japanese Touhou cover groups, Alstroemeria Records is likely the most famous due to a viral video released in 2009 that has since seen many copies in various form like this.  I'm personally a fan of the video I linked because it uses carved apples instead of just shadow art.  They're known because they're responsible for the song that goes with the accompanying video.

While far from mainstream, I do think that Alstroemeria Records has a sound that is appealing to many different kinds of people.  While some of the newer material can be jarring for those not into dubstep or harder hitting electronic music, compositionally the material is still very good.  In my opinion, I feel that by expanding and experimenting in different genres, Masayoshi Minoshima has gotten better at composing and arranging and allowing new material into what began as rather general covers.

At this point, I'm just going to end with a mix of some of the tracks Alstroemeria Records has released in the past.  I hope you enjoy and until next time.

**Sorry for all the pops on the p's and b's I really need to get a pop screen.  If/when I do, I'll redo all the recordings.

**Also, if I ever get any notices saying I should take down any cross fades or mixes, I will.



--CsMiREK

Moving forward

Regardless if you're new here or have read a thing or two here before, welcome.  I hope everyone had a great new years and because it is a new year I would like to review my year here.  I started this blog a little over a year ago on January 1st of last year.  Honestly I find this blog to be an extension of myself.  My interests, my flaws, my regrets, my triumphs.  During the course of writing this blog, I have become more aware of myself and what I really enjoy.

Besides starting this blog, this past year I graduated from college.  I moved halfway across the country for work.  I started to work.  I spent WAY too much money on audio gear for the amount I make.  I hung out with friends.  Most importantly though, I spent this last year reflecting on who I am as a person.  While I'm still unsure where I will go in future years, I know this for sure, I am very lucky and thankful for my past.  Sure I have many regrets, but honestly life has been good to me so far.  And while I am still young, I know to appreciate what I've been given.

A few days ago I was thinking about disabilities.  Most notably I was thinking about being blind or deaf and how being either would affect my life.  Given a choice between the two I think I might rather be dead.  I know this sounds disrespectful to those who are either blind or deaf but given how I've lived and my interests, I don't think I could survive being either.  With how much I listen and enjoy music, I could not survive being deaf.  To be so for me, would be equivalent to cutting out one of the most important facets of my life.  To be blind would be equally devastating.  I'm not sure if I could survive as a programmer without my eyes.  I spend almost my entire day looking at a computer screen, and while my eyes aren't great, to the point where I might as well be blind without my glasses, I spend my entire day looking at things.  I'm sure that there are ways to do my job without being able to see, but I can't imagine that they'd be efficient in any manner.

In thinking about all this I came to a realization that the internet is not for the blind.  A system of pages interlinked largely visually is just inherently unusable to those unable to see.  I'm aware that it is possible to enjoy the web as a blind person using screen readers that verbalize the words on a screen.  There are entire sites however devoted to the visual arts, which is fine just completely inaccessible.  For more on this you can read this article written by Gizmodo a couple years ago.

While W3C standards include things about accessibility like use <strong> instead of <b> if you want to have strong emphasis on something semantically.  Eg you want something bold to actually "sound" bold or have a strong emphasis.  To blind people, it can be hard to tell that you mean something to be strongly accented unless you mean to have <strong> tags around things.  More importantly, this isn't even standard.  For example, I tried to set something bold in the blogspot editor and they use <b> tags.  Assuming I meant whatever I had bolded to be strongly emphasized, anyone using a screen reader wouldn't hear it.  Knowing that, I can tell that the web isn't quite there yet for those with really bad vision impairment.

I would love to make changes to the entire internet to make the internet more accessible.  However, I know that that isn't possible by myself.  Instead, I would like to make this blog at the least more accessible.  For those who can't see or those who would rather listen, I am going to start recording myself speaking my blog posts.  Kind of like a podcast but more of a vocal transcription of each post.  This makes this more of an audioblog now, and I'm completely ok with that.  That said, each post will likely take longer as I'll have to both write and record myself for each post.  This will all begin with the next post.  I hope you enjoy it and I hope you keep reading/listening.

--CsMiREK

Gear Days: The month ahead

For this month, I'm going to be giving a bunch of headphones reviews for the new pairs that I've gotten.  The focus of this set is: cheap headphones.  The most expensive of the pairs I'm going to review I got for just over $20.  On that note, if you are looking for new headphones, this past week, the week leading up to and immediately after Thanksgiving, is generally a good time to get them for quite a bit cheaper than usual.  Anyways, I hope you enjoy the reviews and I'll be getting started with them tomorrow.  I hope you stay tuned as I crown my personal 'Best under $30' headphones.

--CsMiREK

Apologies and going forward

I'm truly quite sorry for November.  It simply got away from me.  Instead of trying to make up the posts that would've taken it up I think I'm going to abandon it.  I still have a couple of posts from May that I should really get done and the end of the year is coming up.  I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving if you're in the US.  This coming month will be a bit on the sparser side with relatively small updates.  After this month I'm going to shoot for 2 updates a month with more if I can commit to it.  As has been shown I've not been the best at holding myself to my word, although I often do try.  That said I hope you enjoy the upcoming posts and keep reading.

--CsMiREK

Gear Days: An Introduction

It's October now and I've been at this writing random stuffs thing for 10 months now, let's disregard the 3 month break during the summer.  But really, let's talk about some of the stuff I'm interested in.

To my friends, it's no surprise that I enjoy music. To that end, it's also not surprising that I like the gear to record and listen to music. Over the course of this summer alone, I've picked up a microphone, a pair of studio monitors, an audio interface and 3 pairs of headphones. Since I've started, collecting, see hoarding, audio equipment, I felt like I should talk about audio equipment. Note, I'm not so bad that I would classify this as a mental illness, but also far from a passing interest. Let's call it a hobby.

In the posts labeled 'Gear Days' or GD for short, I'll be talking either talking through how a piece of audio equipment functions or I will be going over and reviewing a particular piece of gear that I own. I hope you find these posts as interesting as I find the gear themselves. Until next time.

--CsMiREK

So behind

So I'm sure you've noticed I'm horribly behind.  Between working somewhat odd hours and procrastinating on anything and everything I have neglected this blog.  Fear not!  I am working to back fill all the entries I have skipped.  Unfortunately, I will have to let go of August's updates as there were much too many planned and I'm still behind from May.  It's been a crazy few months but I think I'm almost ready to get back into this updating thing.  Expect lots of new stuff coming up as I have learned much from my job in terms of programming and have had time to work on some interesting side projects of a musical nature.

--CsMiREK

Step One: Resources

Step one in learning anything new is getting resources.  While some people like their books and swear by what books can teach them, I find that learning by book is really poor.  Don't get me wrong, books have their strengths, namely in organizing and structuring facts and knowledge.  However, they do a poor job of interacting and providing impetus to continue learning.  As such, I feel that any resource that does not give a strong level of interaction and satisfaction probably won't be good.

As for coding resources, I'm sure all of you can Google for 'coding tutorials' or 'html tutorials' or whatever the else you feel like typing.  But, I'll save you some trouble and give my own ideas about what these things do well and what they don't.  You'll notice that this month will have a lot of updates and that not all of them will be coding related.  I'll try to cover as much as possible and review as much as possible, but I'll put in some other stuff to break it up I promise.

If you want to get a heads up on what some other people think about the resources available and what it takes to be a coder, check out these links.  Ok, so the last one kinda sucks as it seems totally corporate, but I hope this month will be informative for you and I know I'll learn a lot.  I just hope you come along for the ride.  Also, fun fact, this is post number 42, woo!

--CsMiREK

Into the Void

Well, I hope you enjoyed poetry month.  I missed a couple of updates but they're all up now.  Other than that, I think I'll spend this month going over some HTML/CSS/JS resources.  Partially because I want to do it to help myself and partially because I think it'll be fun for you guys as well.  So without further ado, let's begin our journey into the void of the internet.

--CsMiREK

Next Month - Poetry Month?

So next month is National Poetry Month across the US and Canada.  As a result, I thought to myself, "Well...this is a random blog full of random things...why not?"  And so, I will be partaking in a month of poetry themed posts, some of them personally written, others just pieces of poetry I find really good, others might perhaps be guest pieces.  Who knows what'll happen?  It's a good 30 days and there are a lot of updates in the coming month so look forward to it.

--CsMiREK

More Site Stuff

So this is gonna be a short post.  Mainly I wanna point out that the title of this site is really long.  It kinda sucks if you wanna type it out. So instead you can send this around if you don't wanna type. http://bit.ly/V9fqmd.  Still sucks, but it's shorter.  That'll end up redirecting to the main page of this site.  Fun fact, you can also make your friends type "aural abstractionist" in quotes like that into Google's search engine.  As of me writing this, the only results will be links to this site.  If you're on a mobile phone I just got a QR code from bitly as well so you can copy this places and have people scan it.

Look forward to more site stuff including style changes and all sorts of awesome in upcoming posts.

--CsMiREK

Musical Discovery - Intro

If you talk to any of my friends, you would learn that I have an avid interest for few things.  Among those are music and video games.  To better understand just how avid my interest in music is, the current number of pieces of music I have is just under 17000.  That much music takes up over 110 GB of space and takes over a month and a half to play end to end.  Now while I don't legally own most of it, I do try to get as much as I can legally within my means.  (Currently up to a little over 2000 legally owned tracks)

The point of these posts labeled Musical Discovery is to give all my readers a sense of what I like to listen to.  It also makes for a good way to get people interested in music that they would never normally hear otherwise.  The plan currently is to have at least one or two of these a month, highlighting a different artist in each post.  In addition, if you come across any sweet music, leave a comment and I'll look into it.  Stay tuned for the first real post in the series coming up soon!

--CsMiREK

The little details

By this point, you might have noticed that I am posting everyday.  What you might not know is that I indeed have a planned schedule of updates for this particular blog.  Here's a hint, it's not gonna be everyday.

If you look at all, you'll find a bunch of references to all manner of things.  Most of these will likely be from TV shows or music but not all of them.  If you look even closer you'll discover my update schedule, at least for January.  Well good luck in your search in the upcoming months and I hope you enjoy the site and stick with me for some of my upcoming posts.

--CsMiREK