Comments (0) It has been a long time since I have put an update on my portfolio on here. I have not been as active trading because I lost my job and have not had any money to put into my account. I am happy to say my portfolio is still going strong and growing.
I went to see the Cirque Polynesia while I was in Maui and the drummer astounded me. I must have watched him for the first twenty minutes at least. He totally made the show. He reminded me of a cross between Kiss and Michael Jackson, leaning heavily towards the Joker. Check it out and see how much you like him too!
I started using jQuery last week and I am finding it to be a great library so far. It is very easy to interact with elements on the page in fun and creative ways.
As a sample, I have been working with the Northwest Nazarene University web team and they wanted to develop a simple wizard they can put on any page that will help prospective students find the degree they are interested in. I decided to tackle that task. At first I was looking at slide show sample, then one of the other developers showed me the beauty of .load(), which allows me to load into any arbitrary element the contents of any file or web address. After playing with .load() and the event handlers for an hour I figured out a way to implement what they wanted. It took me maybe 4 hours going from ground zero of no knowledge on the subject to implementing a working system complete with calls to a backend PHP file that gets the contents for the wizard from the database. jQuery is really neat, I highly encourage other web developers to check it out. A working sample may be found here or on NNU's website.
Here is the jQuery code I used. Try not to be too critical, I am positive there has to be a better way of doing this. I still am learning the vast amount of options available to me in jQuery.
<script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $('#programs').load('programs.php', {}, function() { // Load the degree options $('.choice').bind('click', function() { // Load the school in that degree $('.choice').bind('click', function() { // Load the list of degrees $('#programs').load($(this).attr('href'), {}, function () { $('.choice').bind('click', function() { $('#programs').load($(this).attr('href'), {}, function () { // Load a degree }); }); }); }); }); }); }); </script>
I was practicing piano today and I suddenly had a possible idea for a song. I started messing around a bit and I did not want to forget, so I fired up Reason 4 and recorded some of my ideas. This is a loop that has a bunch of instruments thrown together all at once. Obviously it is highly unfinished. Hopefully I will have some time to flesh it out a bunch more and turn it into a real song. Take a listen
Comments Off Chocolate Chip and Peanut [butter] Cookies
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 6 ounce package (1 cup) semisweet chocolate pieces
1 cup peanut [butter]
Preheat oven to 375 Degrees F
Cream butter or margarine and sugars; add egg, vanilla and beat until light and fluffy. Sift together flour, salt, and baking soda; stir into creamed mixture; blend well. Add chocolate pieces and peanut [butter] and stir by hand.
Drop from teaspoon about 2 inches apart on a greased (I don't grease because I use peanut butter not peanuts) cookie sheet. Bake in 375 F oven 12-14 minutes. Remove from sheet immediately.
Yield: 3 dozen Cookies.
Comments Off Slice 4-5 potatoes in greased casserole. Salt and pepper to taste. Slice 1 onion over potatoes. Fry 1 pound hamburger and spread over potato mixture. Mix:
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 can milk (soup can)
Pour over mixture. stir once. Bake 45-60 minutes or until potatoes are done. Sometime during the last 10 minutes of baking spread grated cheese on the top.
Comments Off 8x13 pan
Layer bottom with chicken chunks. (3 cups?) (cooked)
Mix:
1 can Cream of Chicken Soup
8 oz. Sour Cream
Pour over chicken
Roughly crumble 2 pkg's ritz crackers, then pour 1 stick butter over. Mix up. Put on top of mixture in pan.
Bake 350 degrees approx. 30 min
I had a great summer, but unfortunately it is once again time to get back to Nampa for school :(. Road tripped it back with Jordan in my 1965 VW Bus. It was a good trip over all. We started around 3.30 PM and the air was hot! We sweated along for a few hundred miles before we gained enough elevation and evening approached to cool us off. The bus complained about the heat as well. Had to pull off a couple times to let the old lady cool down. Jordan snapped a fabulous photo after a short break.
As proof, I snapped this. We were going up hill at the time as well. Not really steep, but it was a long drag.
I figured the VWers will still be skeptical, so I shot a video cruising past a semi right after that picture.
Spent an amazingly hot next day pulling all my stuff out of storage and setting it up. I was sweating so much that my clothes were completely soaked! And the worst part was my shower drain was busted so I did not get to shower until about 11 that evening. Here is a video tour of my apartment. I really like how it turned out.
For many years now I have watched reactions people have towards Christians and been completely dissatisfied. Christianity has given itself a bad name. It saddens me this has happened because it immediately turns people off when the idea people have about what a Christian is is nowhere near the reputation Christianity holds today. I recently read the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller and I would like to share a passage he wrote of an actual experience:
***
In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn't do it, and moreover, that I didn't want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. "Then why don't you want to defend Christianity?" he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won't do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn't like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.
***
Jesus came to die for us because he LOVES us. Jesus did it for love. Unfortunately there are many people out there who call themselves Christians who do not love as Jesus loved.
If you think you are a Christian take a good look at your life. Are you exemplifying the characteristics of love, joy, peace, patients, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self control that the Bible exhorts you to, or are you acting with malice. If so you need to take a step back and reevaluate how to live your life. Stop pretending to be a Christian and giving them a bad name, or embrace the love of Jesus and let it shine through your life onto others around you.
I recently picked up a copy of Propellerhead Reason 4. Reason is a software synth program, and it rocks my world. I am going to be away from my Korg Triton Extreme and my rack of sound modules for a while, but I still wanted to be able to make some sweet sounds. It took hours of playing with to find sounds that I like, and then I had to figure out how to mix them together like I do on my rack. With my rack, hitting a note on my keyboard triggers MIDI on all the sound modules. The audio output from the sound modules then goes into a mixer and I mix the sounds at whatever level I think sounds good. Reason has a cool 14 channel virtual mixer that I was able to run everything in to and mix perfectly, but it was not very friendly when it came to playing live and remixing sound per song, and sometimes in a single song. I began hunting around for a MIDI mixer and eventually ran across the Korg nanoKontrol.
The Korg nanoKontrol is a sweet little unit. Designed to be used with a laptop, it is slim and sleek looking. 9 sliders, 18 buttons, 9 knobs, and a transport section along with 4 programmable scenes. If you have not yet done so, hop on Google and check out some reviews. Stunning little unit. And super cheap too. I eagerly ordered mine, and impatiently checked for updates on the UPS website several times a day. When it finally arrived it joyously plugged it in and Reason 4 recognized it right off. Thinking I was going to be able to run with it I started messing around a bit. I could not get Reason to recognize any signal coming out of it. I scoured Google and could not find any info on getting it setup. I saw many people using it, but no tutorial on setting it up. I finally tried something I saw on a blog post's comments about the nanoPad. Turns out that even though Reason 4 correctly recognizes the nanoKontrol, it cannot use the built in driver. Here is what I did after erasing it out of my list.
While in the Keyboards and Control Surfaces preferences:
Now Reason 4 should properly recognize your nanoKontrol MIDI device.
The fun part is assigning functions on the nanoKontrol to elements in Reason 4 to control. This turns out to actually be quite simple. As a demonstration, create a new Reason project and only add a 14:2 mixer. Hover your mouse cursor over the slider on channel 1. Right click the slider and select Remote Override. Check the Learn checkbox and wiggle slider 1 on the nanoKontrol. Save that and now you should have a happily moving slider in Reason whenever you move the slider on the nanoKontrol.
If you are like me and also want the buttons mapped to mute and solo you will need to download the Korg Kontrol Editor from Korg's website. The Kontrol Editor allows you to change any parameters on the nanoKontrol that you would like. Change all the buttons to Toggle instead of Momentary and not only will they start working like real buttons, but they will also remain lit.
Have fun! If you have an questions feel free to leave a comment and I will try to answer it.
P.S. I assume above that you have the universal Korg MIDI driver installed already.
Edit Added on 01-13-2010:
Blinded Mice has made available a zip file containing everything you need to get rolling for Microsoft Windows. Blinded Mice Reason File
Blinded Mice also has an excellent video tutorial on assigning the nanoKontrol to your Reason elements. Blinded Mice Tutorial
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