So on January 1, 2002, Florida State will play Virginia Tech in the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville (thanks to Mark for the word on the street). Number 13 plays an unranked team just two years after going for the National Title in the Sugar Bowl. From my position, the inherent irony oozes out like filling from a trampled Ho-Ho. Actually, one of my friends back home noticed that Virginia Tech started losing after I graduated, and Florida State started losing after I moved here. I must be Tech's secret weapon. I'm in the process now of arranging ticket sales with my old Tech brethren, but as always these things move too fast. Tickets go on sale today at Tech and will probably be sold out by tonight.

Eight days until the next Masters' listening exam. I've studied forty-seven works to the point of at least tentative recognition and have eighty-two to go. Good thing they offer it more than once...

I was sorting through my MP3s yesterday and found a recording I'd forgotten about. It's the demo track of a friend from Virginia Tech named Jason Chrisley. He was a music ed major and trumpet player, although he wasn't so great at the latter. After placing in some statewide karaoke competition, he abandoned his music degree to sing country music in Nashville or somesuch. Although the backup singers they gave him on this tape sound like retarded Muppets, you can tell that he really does have a good country singing voice. Here's an MP3 excerpt, if you're into country music or local success stories (750K).

Gone fishin'.

Happy Thanksgiving!

List Day: Ten Things I Learned Over the Break

1. If you wait three years to buy the Indiana Jones boxed-set, the price drops from $90 to $30.


2. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom did not age very well. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is still top-notch.


3. Refactoring code is a fun pastime.


4. Metroid Prime 2 is still more annoying than fun. You don't make a game involving copious exploration and then put time limits on how long you can explore the dangerous bits before you die. Boss monsters should also not respawn after save your game.


5. Virgina Tech is still capable of shutting out UVA, 17-0.


6. Costco doesn't have their little seafood kiosk after Thanksgiving. From now on, I'm going to make bacon-wrapped bacon.


7. You can get a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese breakfast with an extra hash brown at McDonald's for $5.11. However, you can get a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese breakfast with TWO extra hash browns for $5.12 because of the Dollar Menu. This is why America is collectively fat.


8. Mashed potatoes made with a hint sour cream are tasty. Black olives are tasty too, but probably not mixed with the mashed potatoes.


9. If your house has a smart-heating system that shuts off after you go to work, but one day you decide not to go to work, it will be rather chilly when you finally wake up.


10. Wii merchandise may be sold out everywhere, but you can still find plenty of copies of HANNAH MONTANA for the Gameboy DS. Miley Stewart is living a double life as a teen pop sensation known to millions as Hannah Montana. Her best friend Lilly is the only one who knows the truth -- or so she thinks. Someone is threatening to reveal Hannah's secret! Miley and Lilly investigate their school, the boardwalk, stadium and the beach to uncover clues. Help solve the mystery and keep Hannah Montana's true identity secret so the show can go on!

Happy Birthday Susan Wollersheim!

Museday Tuesday

in which I have thirty minutes to write a thirty second song

Chirk: (v.) to make a shrill chirping sound; to cheer up My Composition (0:30 MP3)	Old Musedays: Sidelong Moodily Obnoxiously Obsessively Spikiest Leggier Carsick Dinkiest Reclusive Trifid Frowzy Trampled Surefooted Gamy Chichi
For this Museday word, I pictured a plethora of Disney wildlife creatures flying out of the forest to cheer up the scullery boy / princess / orphan / cancer patient.

Music Tuesday: Spectralism and Other Gimmicks

Mike (of Mike and Chompy) came out for a visit a couple weeks back and mentioned his interest in going back to school for a music composition Ph.D. When asked what sort of musical fads were getting all of the youngsters excited these days, he described spectralism, which is a compositional style based on sonographic representations and mathematical analysis of sound spectra, where timbre is the most important element.

In order to become an overnight expert in spectralism, I used Google to find a page with three or four songs embedded, including Lichtbogen by Saariaho, and listened to them multiple times without judgement. What I found was that I still probably wouldn't do very well in a doctoral composition program because I can't commit to taking music like this seriously.

My musical language is happily stuck in the early twentieth century with a little bit of jazz mixed in, and unlike my professor who listened to Schoenberg as dinner music, I will never set the mood with a fine bottle of wine and Ligeti's Continuum. My main issue is that most contemporary gimmicks of composition are self-serving and don't speak to the general populace. Music needs to be a dialog to be successful, and music like this is more of a one-way prepared speech in a foreign language (unless you mix it together with visual elements).

Composers will argue that the listener's experience needs to be broadened to increase the acceptable range of weirdness, which is true, but that's really just raising the barrier of entry. Yes, I might enjoy your song a little bit after hearing four others like it and understanding the structure of the piece, but life is short and I have no reason to do so when other composers can connect with me directly using my current limitations. Composers should be challenging the listener without leaving them behind.

Really, the only purpose that contemporary academic music should serve is to broaden the musical palette of composers. Young composers should be forced to write in all manner of weird styles to get the mechanics right and build the biggest compositional toolbox possible. Then, they should use the tools sparingly in their work, and only when it serves a purpose. An entire piece written with spectralism is just as bad as writing a TV drama with a plot twist every four minutes, or one where every scene starts with "Forty Eight Hours Ago..."

Unfortunately, you end up with a positive feedback loop where academics spend more time listening to weird music and build up a heroin-tolerance to weirdness. Then, their students feel like they have to write weird music to be successful academically, and you end up with a whole pile of music that becomes increasingly irrelevant to mainstream listeners. And let's be honest: most performers are not going to want to play this weird music either. All of these hopeful composers will fail at composing in the real world because their music doesn't connect with performers OR listeners, and they'll end up teaching composition at a university, perpetuating the cycle.

Stuff in My Drawers Day

Cartoon sketches from the notebook I took to Boy Scouts, circa 1994.

That T-Rex is super excited about fake butter.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Overwatch Highlights Day

I haven't done much video editing work since Microsoft killed Windows Movie Maker (and I don't have the PhD or patience necessary to learn Adobe Premiere). However, I recently discovered Shotcut for lightweight movie editing and finally put together a highlights reel of all of the Overwatch Plays of the Game I'd amassed over the past couple years. Enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We may have done these holidays in the wrong order.

The URI! Career Triangle

I give an annual presentation to a fresh cohort of my company's Technical Leadership Development Program, describing my unusual career path from software engineer to word wizard over the past 20 years. This article is an excerpt from that presentation, capturing the key questions I asked myself whenever I reached a point in my career where I could pivot or progress.

My career has zigged and zagged over the past twenty years, starting in an overly optimistic grad school berth as a music composer, through many joyful years as a software engineer, to my current role where I write more in English than in Python. Each time I took on new responsibilities or considered a lateral move, I had a framework in place to make career decisions. It's not something I consciously realized back then -- just something I reverse engineered after the fact. If you're early in your career, my framework might help you consider your way forward with more objectivity and consistency.

Each time I reached a point in my career where I could potentially do something different, I asked myself three questions, related to Competence, Satisfaction, and Salary.

Competence: Can I get good enough at this to stay marketable?

You need to have the potential to learn and excel at your job. Competence will give you peace of mind and the ability to look ahead instead of treading water fearfully. For example, you don't want to be a Machine Learning specialist if your linear algebra skills are super weak.

The demand for your role and the available talent pool will influence the answer to this question. If there's a very low demand for your job (in my case, academic professor of music composition) or a low barrier for entry (enterprise Java maintenance developer), you will spend more time fighting for your position than growing in it.

Satisfaction: Can I do this every day and not hate it?

Satisfaction affects your mental well-being. You really need to be able to come to work without dreading it. I've known people that squander the entire weekend dreading the approaching Monday rather than recognize that something about their job is unhealthy. Satisfaction can be intrinsic (Do I like what I'm doing?) or extrinsic (Am I changing the world by doing this?) and different people will need a different balance in each category.

I've found that a huge proportion of my job satisfaction comes from surrounding myself with good people. One of my key maxims would be to never join a company just for its reputation. A company is just the people that happen to be working there at the time and it's the luck of the draw if you end up working alongside the people that will make you excited to come in. Instead of fighting to get into the next Google or Facebook, seek out the best people wherever you are and latch onto them like a barnacle.

Salary: Will this support the lifestyle I want?

Clearly, this question is less important in tech compared to music, but the ground truth is that we all work for a wage that enables us to live the life we want. In spite of many motivational coffee mugs, "doing what you love" will only make you hate it. Monetizing passion is a lost cause for everyone but the exceptionally talented. My second maxim would be: Instead of doing what you love, do what you're good at and use the money to ENJOY what you love once you've gone home for the day.

When you consider salary, remember that there's always a minimum point under which you can't survive, due to our high cost of living. However (in government tech), there IS an upper limit where having more money is just nice to have -- this is the point whether you can objectively consider whether you'd rather be locked in a secure facility all day for plenty of cash, or you'd rather earn a little less and surf Reddit all day long. In my case, I found the perfect balance between hourly rate and hours worked so I can be present for my tiny kids and not burn out from overexposure to dry government proposals.

Interpreting the Results

So you've asked yourself these 3 questions and come up with answers. What's next?

In a perfect world, you would have 3 emphatic YES answers and you would definitely take the new role. You probably want to pass on the role if you have any hard NO answers (unless you have extenuating circumstances like unemployment) -- there will always be more opportunities in the future.

Realistically, you'll have a mix of YES and MAYBE answers. This is the point where you consider those responses and figure out if the strength of the YES answers outweighs the uncertainty of the MAYBE answers. Is it okay if the role is a little less fulfilling as long as the salary is high? Do you love the job so much that you're willing to earn less? Are you worried about how you compare to other candidates but expect your satisfaction and salary to be worth the stress? Figure out where you sit in the triangle and make your decision.

What if I choose poorly?

Regardless of what you decide, you will be okay! There is no such thing as a career mistake, which brings me to my final maxim: Career choices are just like dating. Just as every relationship helps you understand what you need and want in a partner, each new role you take will help you define your realistic, sustainable career. You may end up with the occasional job nightmare and that's okay. Each negative path will emphatically lock down a potential "what if" until you have arrived at a role you love and excel in.