Latest projects: Lord of the Beef audio editing

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Andy

I’m sort of sick right now, and I went to be semi-early last night, aiming to get around 10 hours of sleep, but my body decided it was done with that after 7 of them, so I am taking the opportunity to blog.

These next few posts are a continuation of my “What’s been going on” series, but I’m titling them differently because they’re also in a category of their own, my latest projects. As some of you may know, my life revolves around my personal projects, which usually involve researching things, writing, or creating things, usually computer programs or some other kind of tool.

Right now I am in a period of transition between projects. A couple of weeks ago, on Good Friday at 3:12 in the morning to be exact, I finished a project that I had dragged out over a year and a half, editing my friend Brandon’s Lord of the Rings parody. The first half of this project was editing the text, and then I recorded and edited his readings of it over Paltalk, plus his reading of The Tugger, which is his Hobbit parody, and a couple of other shorter readings.

If you want to listen to it, here’s the TheologyWeb thread where I posted the files. The thread contains links to the other threads that contain the text files, if you want to read it. At the end of that thread, Brandon posted some of the funny grammatical, logical, and other problems I caught while editing the text, along with the frustrated or sarcastic remarks I made about them while editing and his comments on my comments. I also posted a link to yet another thread for the audio bloopers. Unfortunately, the forum I posted it in is only accessible to TWeb members. I may repost those sometime in one of the public forums. The audio and textual errors were the best part of the whole project. 😉

Warning: This parody is very long. Together the Lord of the Beef and the Tugger make up about 14 hours of reading. For that reason it is not the kind of project I’m going to be volunteering for again anytime in the near future.

Another warning: The parody might not make much sense to you unless you understand TWeb culture. It’s really less of a parody and more a set of TWeb inside jokes that use the Lord of the Rings as a framework. But Brandon included a preface that explains the major characters and jokes and should give you an idea of what’s going on. The Hobbit is called the Tugger, for example, because the central feature of Brandon’s TWeb parodies is the teasing of a member named RumTumTugger, who plays a female version of Frodo in the Lord of the Beef.

Even though the LotB isn’t a typical parody, Brandon has a remarkable ability to make connections, and I was impressed by the sheer number of elements he was able to pack creatively into the story, not only from TheologyWeb, but also Star Wars, Monty Python, Pirates of the Caribbean, probably other movies I can’t remember, various Internet memes, and many random American cultural features. It’s worth reading just for that.

So now that project’s done, and my mind has been freed. I will post about my upcoming projects tonight or tomorrow.

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What I’ve been up to this time, part 2

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Andy

Okay, what next?

I’ve been a bit more social lately. In January I started going to Joel’s weekly prayer group at his house, made up of some of his friends from college. It’s been nice to get back into a group of my peers. Usually I socialize with one person at a time, which is good and which I prefer in some ways, but a group can be enlivening in a way that an individual can’t.

And while I like the older people I’ve spent time with while living here, it does leave me feeling like I don’t quite belong. It’s especially true when everyone else there has children. When you have children, you enter a whole other world full of school and doctor visits and other people’s children and children’s programs at church and so on, and it’s not a world I can really identify with. I’m only a somewhat interested outsider.

Now, Joel’s friends are mainly gamer geeks, and although I’ve always gotten along with the gaming crowd and I feel a certain affection for them, I’m not really a gamer, so I feel a little on the outside there too at times. But I don’t mind too much. I already know that I take a while to warm up to people, especially in groups. And gaming is an area I could potentially move into, if thought it would help. And of course their friendships are based on more than that. It is a prayer group, after all. And they are very welcoming.

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What I’ve been up to this time, part 1

Posted on February 21, 2008 by Andy

Well, time for another catch-up post, or series of them, more likely.

The biggest change in my life recently is that I started going to the gym with my friend Tim about three weeks ago. We go at 6 in the morning four days a week, and I have been trying to take up his practice of getting up at 4 to have devotions. I’ve had mixed success with getting up that early, but I’ve managed to fit in a devotion most days sometime before work. That is a dramatic improvement from the past several years!

That brings me to a point I’ve been meaning to make. Sometimes when people read my “Agnostic Christian” essay, they note that I wrote it in 2005 and ask me how I’m doing with all that now. I tell them that right now I’m more interested in being a Christian than in being a skeptic. Last year I decided that it would be a year for self-improvement in various ways, and some of that was in the area of character. And to me, Christianity offers a much richer set of resources for building one’s character than secularism does. Plus, when I think becoming a better person, that just means becoming more Christian. So my faith is what I turned to, and since that time I’ve been trying to reenter the Christian spiritual life I had been progressively ignoring for the last 7 or so years.

And it’s been good. I began an accountability partnership with a friend who is very intent on seeing me grow. The few times I managed to have devotions, I got more out of them than I had since probably high school, and that has continued since I started having them more regularly this month. I can see myself becoming more sensitized to spiritual issues, and I believe these times with God have a real potential to change me. I think he is welcoming and blessing my effort to get back in touch with him.

And as one example, last year for the first time in my entire life, communion and baptism acquired real meaning for me. They were always just bare symbols for me before, and though I tried over and over to see them, mostly communion, from new angles and to get some kind of significance from the experience, I always failed, or at least nothing stuck. But last year finally something clicked. I’ll write more about that some other time.

So while those doubts are still there in the back of my mind and I still think it’s important to evaluate the Christian worldview as a whole, I’ve put all that on hold and I don’t really think about it these days. I’ll get to it later.

That’s all for now. I will try to get to the rest of my update in the next couple of days.

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A thought on leaky abstractions and theology

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Andy

I wonder if the “simple” truths of Scripture are really just abstractions and they sometimes leak (see this), which is why we need people who study and sometimes explain the complexities of theology, for the times when people’s lives don’t fit neatly into the abstractions.

Posted in Programming, Theology, Thought, Transferrable concepts | 1 Comment

Balkiiiiiiiii!

Posted on February 9, 2008 by Andy

I am now watching my favorite sitcom of all time, which is *finally* on DVD … Perfect Strangers! 😀 The first two seasons anyway. Hopefully they will release the rest. It came out on Feb 5, and I got them from Netflix as fast as humanly possible. I just watched the second episode. The first episode was a little disappointing, not as funny as I remembered, and I thought maybe I was remembering the series through child-colored glasses, but in the second episode they got more into their familiar roles, and I liked it much better.

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Happy 2008!

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Andy

Happy New Year! Yeah, I’m late for everything.

So I bet you’ve been wondering what’s been going on. Well, just pretend. I’ve been busily procrastinating on blogging, emailing, and doing writing of any kind, as usual. But also as usual, I have been working on my projects and thinking about others. I will get back to that in a later entry.

I went home to Texas for Christmas. My brother and sister also came, as usual, and my sister’s high school friend Kimberly, whom my family kind of adopted after graduation. It’s like an annual tradition. We all gather once a year. It was good. Each year I try to get a little better at balancing the time that I spend with my family and the time I spend doing my own stuff, and I think this year’s trip was a success (I consider it this year, even though it was last year). We watched movies, went shopping, decorated, and just hung around the house and talked. It was all pretty laid back.

Now I am back, and it is cold. We had a few warm days a while back, but now it is hovering around bitterly cold. My threshhold for bonechillingness is -8 degrees Celsius, which is between 18 and 17 Fahrenheit. On Saturday it was 7. I stayed indoors. Unfortunately our boilers decided to freeze on Sunday, so my apartment building has no heat. But with my space heater and extra clothes and blankets, I’ve managed to stay decently warm. They hope to have it fixed by the middle of the week.

I had a dream last night that I accidentally took our cat with me on a plane trip, and I had to figure out some way to get her back home. When I woke up I did some research, and it turns out you actually can ship cats.

Posted in General | 1 Comment

New list–Recommended Preachers Online

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Andy

Until I come up with a good way to post my site updates automatically on the front page, I’ll write a brief entry to let the blog subscribers know what’s new. I’ve just posted the start of a new, ongoing list (and accompanying Google map!) of preachers online that I think are worth listening to. Take a look!

Posted in Audio sermons, Christianity, Site updates | 3 Comments

Recommended Preachers Online: The List

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Andy

This post has moved here.

Posted in Audio sermons, Christianity, In progress, Lists | Leave a comment

Recommended Preachers Online

Posted on October 1, 2007 by Andy

This post has moved here.

Posted in Audio sermons, Christianity, In progress, Lists | Leave a comment

Akelos and OpenLaszlo–a first attempt

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Andy

Along with my updated site I am updating my self-limiting policies on what I post. In the past I have refrained from posting on things like programming that would bore most of my audience (of 5 people), but no longer! I am going to post about whatever I feel like. My readers will just have to suffer.

This job I’m in is the most educational I’ve ever had. I never thought I would learn about networking or do any web programming, but now both are in my job description. When I decided my employer needed a web application, I didn’t know a thing about writing one, so I decided to use the web application framework Ruby on Rails because it allegedly made web development easy, or at least easier than it had been.

Well, once I got into it, it did seem like a pretty easy way to develop, but there was one problem. It’s hard to deploy, at least if you’re using a Windows server. So I looked for a PHP alternative, because I knew I could deploy that with virtually no effort. And I found CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and Akelos. I’m trying out Akelos because it’s pretty much a straight port of Rails to PHP (so all that Rails learning won’t be wasted), and even though it’s very new, people are already impressed with it.

But then there’s the problem of the user interface. It’s very easy to create boring and cumbersome UIs in regular HTML. It’s hard to create nice-looking and easy-to-use ones that work right in every browser. Hence there are rich Internet application platforms like Adobe Flex. I somewhat randomly settled on OpenLaszlo for this.

Laszlo interacts with the server by passing XML back and forth within a single application, I presume using a single URL. Akelos executes actions based on the URL the browser requests and then generates a view, usually in HTML, that gets sent to the browser as the content for that URL. Invoking a different action means pointing to a different URL. How can I get the two to work together?

The answers are probably obvious to anyone who’s familiar with the tools or with web programming in general, but I am just learning this stuff, so I was pleasantly surprised when I made fairly easy progress tonight with only a couple of general hints I picked up online. I’m used to guessing wrong about how things work and spending hours slogging through documentation and experimentation.

Tonight I successfully embedded a Laszlo Flash application in an Akelos view and had the application grab some XML data from a static view in Akelos. The next step is to get Akelos to generate the XML dynamically from the database, and after that I’ll have the Laszlo application give Akelos data to put into the database. Then I’ll have to learn more about OpenLaszlo to define the next tasks.

I think the basic idea behind getting the two to interact is to treat the Laszlo application as a web browser so that it is the one making the requests for the various Akelos URLs, while the browser simply points to the Laszlo application. So to deliver the data to the application, I created a view that contained the data (and a corresponding action in the controller), and then in the application I used the relevant URL in the src attribute of the dataset tag.

I would post the code for all this, but this entry is already long enough. When I get far enough along, I’ll post a demo or tutorial or something, either here or on the Akelos wiki.

Posted in Akelos, OpenLaszlo, Programming | 3 Comments