The Quixotic Engineer

Jazz is a fascinating genre of music. Born out of slavery in the Mississippi Delta along with its sister the blues and defined by complex melodies and improvisation, it became the framework for some of the greatest musical minds of the 20th century.

To those of us raised on three chord rock and 2:50 pop songs, however, jazz can seem a tad impenetrable. The songs often lack a traditional structure, and change rhythm and melody on the fly. Lacking a paradigm within which to understand the music, it can be difficult to pursue the active, focused listening required to properly grok it.

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I’ve done my best to resist celebrating arbitrary milestones in this blog. I silently hit my 100th post a while back, as well as various fractions of a year. However, you’ll have to excuse my pride now as The Quixotic Engineer is one year old today.

For the curious, here’s a chart of my RSS subscription growth over the last year. The first big peak was the day my Gmail spam post was linked by Lifehacker, and the count has been steadily growing ever since. The occasional sharp valleys are days when Google Reader didn’t publish a subscriber count.

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This is an entry in the June ’08 Round Table discussion. This month’s topic, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, asks you to explore a relationship within a game that you found compelling or memorable.

If there’s one stock character that I’m really sick of in video games, it’s the generic ally. This is a character who, early in the game, we are told has an existing relationship with the protagonist (lover / sibling / parent / child / lifelong friend / etc.) We spend the first chapter of the game following / escorting this person before they are kidnapped / killed / turned evil, and this serves as the main character’s motivation for the remainder of the game.

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I’d heard from friends and other video game enthusiasts that Video Games Live was a fantastic experience and well worth going out of your way to see. Unfortunately, life got in the way when they came to Montreal a few months ago, but yesterday I was given a second chance. They were putting on a free show at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto, no more than a hour or two away from my current residence in Waterloo. I thought I’d do a little recap of the evening’s events, and hopefully convince you to check them out if they’re playing near you.

The show was scheduled to start at 8:30, but we got there at 7 to ensure a good spot (it was a free show after all.) There were Wii and Xbox 360 stations set up for people to play, as well as a Guitar Hero competition that went on throughout the day. There were a few cosplayers, including a troupe of Jedis and a dude in a fantastic Phoenix Wright costume. There were also hordes of people playing DS while they waited, so it was a good opportunity for me to take advantage of The World Ends With You‘s mingle mode feature.

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I was originally introduced to Markov chains by Josh Millard’s Garkov, a project that applies this mathematical model to Garfield comics. I thought it was an amusingly random idea, but didn’t fully appreciate the concept until Jeff Atwood wrote a post detailing how Markov Chains work.

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