Some time ago my mom typed up a year’s worth of journal entries from 1981. She had this book bound and printed, and gave a copy to me and each of my siblings. I consider it a great treasure. ... Read more

The cover story of this month’s “Wired” magazine is about cars that are essentially driven by robots and the fact that they are moving ever closer to your garage. In fact, Wired says, “Your next car will drive itself.” ... Read more

The wife of a good friend of mine is a very accomplished song writer, which, as anyone who knows me well can confirm, is a talent I greatly admire. I can play the piano pretty well and can also create something resembling music on the guitar, but writing songs is a completely different matter altogether. My uncle once wrote a song you have never heard called “Natalie” that I thought was pretty awesome. So if it is awesome to write a good song that nobody has heard, how much more admirable to write good songs that lots of people hear and like. ... Read more

I’ve been thinking a bit more about my last post and trying to reconcile all of this in my own mind. There’s two conflicting trains of thought here. ... Read more

Some time ago at work, breakroom talk with a friend led to a discussion about Auto-Tune, a technology I oddly had never heard of before but had suspected for some time. Auto-Tune is a pitch-correcting technology used to analyze and correct the pitch of a tone that would otherwise be considered off-key. From what I’ve read, it can be used in recordings to add an obvious digitized effect to vocals (think Cher’s “Believe” as an example), but can also be applied more subtly such that it might not really be noticed (minor pitch correction in a live performance, for example). ... Read more