Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Playing SparkBall
If you own an iPad / an iPhone 4 or 5 / or an iPod Touch running iOS 7.0 or later, you are in luck to download the latest game craze before everyone you know is already playing it! That is because SparkBall was just released yesterday by Orbosphere Development Studio and is now available for free as an Apple iTunes App Store download.
Our son, Julian, is at it again, and this time he has created a downloadable game. SparkBall is so simple that anyone can play it immediately. It is a fantastic exercise in eye-hand coordination and reaction time on a touch screen that becomes fiendishly hard to quit. If you have addictive tendencies, watch out for this one!
All you have to do is tap the bouncing balls to remove them from the screen. The trick is in figuring out how far ahead of the ball you should tap to avoid missing it as it goes by. That is not simple to do because the speed of the balls is changing as a result of impacts with other balls. It creates an eternal urge to try again. If at first you don’t succeed…
I was lucky enough to secure a brief interview with the developer yesterday evening by email. I figured I better be quick to contact him before he gets buffered by agents and lawyers managing his affairs. I found the man who works under the moniker of “Orbosphere” to be refreshingly candid…
Was there anything in particular that inspired you to create SparkBall? And/or are there any arcade style games you are especially fond of? (This may seem a bit technical, but) I believe the inspiration began when Apple released the SpriteKit framework within iOS7– since I was already familiar with iOS development, the release of SpriteKit brought me the closest opportunity to get into game development that I’ve had yet, at least from a programming perspective. There were already several 3rd party frameworks for making games on iOS, but something about one being “baked in” with Apple made it seem more quickly attainable for me.
Initially, SparkBall was meant to be a different type of game, with a different set of rules. The tap-to-remove element was originally just me getting comfortable writing some code with SpriteKit, just a test really. But it was quickly apparent that it was kinda fun to try to tap the ball as it bounced across the screen. So I set out to make that a type of “game mode” for SparkBall, which became version 1. Perhaps I will still add different game modes in the future.
Did you create the music and the game sounds?
No, Jaywalker did. (So, yes.) Still not sure where to make the distinctions between which elements belong to which “brand name”… because I could also say yes, orbosphere did it. But then where do I draw the line? Genre doesn’t exclude something from the Jaywalker brand. It is the same in the end.
I was working on the song prior to SparkBall, or at least independently of it, originally. Eventually I didn’t really know what to do with the song (or how to finish writing it) and it just kind of clicked– put it in the game. Let it just loop. It will make it matter less that I didn’t know how to finish writing it. Video game audio composition would certainly be an interesting area to explore further for that very reason.
How long of a song is it before it loops? It does loop, doesn’t it?
03:16. It should restart at the end… I can’t guarantee that it loops perfectly in time, but it may be close.
Since you have a job as an iOS developer, was it like working two jobs while you were creating SparkBall?
No, not really. I certainly worked on it at my leisure– sometimes a couple nights in a row when my brain was hooked on certain problems, sometimes I’d let a week or maybe two go by. And I enjoyed the development– I’ll explain it to non-developers that in the right setting* development can be like playing with Legos, only, the bricks are inside your head, as well as the computer’s.
*Right Setting might indicate lack of a project manager hovering over your shoulder, looming critical deadlines and such.
Did you get addicted to playing it when it was far enough along to do so?
Pretty quickly, as I said earlier the tap-to-remove element wasn’t the initial plan. Once it was noticed how fun that was, I was hooked.
Do you like to pop bubble wrap?
Of course. You know there’s an app for that? (And I don’t mean SparkBall.)
Yes, I know there is an app for that, but it isn’t nearly as fun as the increasing intensity of more and more balls to be dispatched on each successive level that SparkBall offers.
Thanks, Julian, and congratulations on a wonderful accomplishment and treat of a game that you have created for everyone to enjoy. I hope it goes viral!
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In Mind
Lately I’ve had Chastity Brown‘s music in my mind, particularly, her song “Lift Us.” It suits me. You know how I feel about love, that it certainly does lift us. I think she’s got it right with these lyrics, and every other nuance of this recording, as well. She wins me over right away at the opening guitar up-strums, but then the way the bass slides to enter with the drums; the background “ooo ooos;” the light balance, yet fuzzy substance of the electric guitar; the emotion with which she distorts the pronunciations –getting “lift” to sound like “leeeeft;” the rhythmic bounce that carries the whole thing all the way to the end.
I highly recommend you take the time to pay extra attention to the details as you listen, but be forewarned, when you listen to all the detail, songs have a way of burying themselves in your mind.
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I was heading down a road
Going nowhere
But I didn’t even know
Ya know I didn’t even care
But along the way
Came a word I was needing to hearChorus:
Love can lift us
Oh love real love
Love can lift us
Talkin ‘bout love real loveSo you say you’re all alone
Drowning in a sea of people
I will throw you a rope
Pull you to shore
So you can feel thisChorus
Talkin bout love
If you’ve ever been on the floor
Aint go no where to go
Just lookin up keep lookin upChorus
credits: from Back-Road Highways, released 24 March 2012
© all rights reserved Chastity Brown
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Notice Things
Last night, I wasn’t feeling my best, and decided to lay low for the evening. It was a beautiful night and I didn’t want to miss out on all the action, so I plopped myself on the deck to be near Cyndie and Delilah while they were playing together in the back yard.
It was gorgeous out there. It helped me to realize the importance of stopping to enjoy the thrill of just being here in this fabulous paradise. It is too easy to talk about how nice it is here, like we did a lot with friends who visited last weekend, as they marveled over the place. It is easy to know how great a place this really is, intellectually, as I plod from one end to the other, toiling away on chore after chore. It is another thing to pause and enjoy it to the fullest.
Knowing and talking about it is NOT the same as stopping to actually experience it. I had a wonderful opportunity to do that last night.
It occurred to me that this was an extension of a theme that started earlier in my day yesterday. In a discussion with a mom of a 6-month-old girl, we marveled over the thrill of watching an infant discover themselves and the world around them. Baby’s new revelations bring shrieks of joy and laughter, from both baby and mom!
“Oh, I have arms!” baby must be thinking, “And look! They move back and forth like wings!”
We could all use an occasional reminder to revisit that child-like wonder about the miraculous number of things our bodies are able to do, and for amazing things in the world around us.
As I was preparing to crawl into bed last night, I happened to notice a “fix” I had hastily conjured up weeks ago, to keep our headboard from knocking the wall every time we turned over. When I put it in place, I didn’t honestly expect it to last, but intended to try it out to see if it would prove the concept. It has worked so well, I’d completely forgotten all about it.
Notice something today that time has led you to take for granted, and give it a renewed sense of child-like wonder in your mind. The world is no less awesome now than it was the first time we became aware of ourselves and our place in it.
Important Message
This week the U.S. celebrates our Independence Day, and in the nick of time, warm and sunny weather is settling into the region. That means a lot of people will be heading to their favorite lake places and vacation spots, and probably spending some time splashing in lakes and pools. On Monday, I was shocked to see a rather morbid graphic with an article in a local paper on the subject of drowning, and what drowning actually looks like.
Even though the subject can be disturbing and unpleasant, I’m glad it caught my attention. I learned something very important about drowning, and it is something that I believe should be more universally known, especially by parents of young children.
Revisiting the online version of the article that I had read in the paper version of the StarTribune, I don’t find the same haunting graphic, but the drama of the gripping opening paragraphs is there:
The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach.
“I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine; what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but the captain kept swimming hard.
“Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned boat owners. Directly behind them, not 10 feet away, their 9-year-old daughter was drowning. Once she was safe above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”
I did not realize that a drowning person does not present the classic signals of distress that I expected would be present, and that have been used for years by the television and film industry to convey the situation: yelling for help, splashing in the water, and flailing about. It doesn’t work that way in real life, and that is very important to know.
Before I learned to swim, which was long after most children do, I jumped off a raft for the umpteenth time one day, and shockingly discovered it had floated far enough away from shore that I was now out over my head. I thought I would drown. I swallowed water, hit the bottom and came back up. I didn’t make a sound. There wasn’t much time to think, but I recall not wanting to make a fuss or draw attention. What a silly, and potentially deadly, reaction that is. I didn’t make a sound.
Luckily, that bounce off the bottom I made, moved me forward enough that I sensed I was close, and I bounced down and back up a couple of times until the water was no longer over my head. Coughing, I made my way back to shore and sat on land for a long time. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know how to swim.
Now, I think about all the times in my life that I have been charged with supervising swimming children, to assure their safety, and I shudder over the fact that I never actually knew the most important sign I should really have been on the lookout for.
Watch out for that kid who goes quiet!
I found a better graphic in an online search, at the site of The Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project, Inc. I encourage you to visit their page to read about the real signs of drowning.
Relative View
It came to my attention recently, by way of a public radio program, that the image of my face that I look at in my mirror everyday, is not the version of me that everyone else sees. I heard a rebroadcast of the program, RadioLab, specifically, a story about symmetry, which included a segment called, “Mirror, Mirror.”
It isn’t really a surprise, …at least, it shouldn’t be, yet, it seemed really profound to me at the time. After having let the idea simmer in my mind for over a week, it continues to spark a feeling of significance. I’ve yet to gain any clarity as to what that significance might be for me, so I believe writing about it might be a worthy exploration. Maybe the significance is not for me, but for someone who is reading here.
I am well aware that a mirror reverses images. We all know that text in a mirror will appear backwards. I’m guessing people will recognize the phenomena of giving directions, say, when carrying a couch, and needing to specify, “my left.” The reversal of image does appear to be an obvious fact, but it is one that is easy to lose sight of with the occurrence of daily viewing our own face.
If you click on the link above to the RadioLab site for, “Mirror, Mirror,” you can find a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, with the ability to click to then see his mirror image. It is an interesting exercise to see the view he would have looked upon in the mirror, as compared to the man the rest of the world saw.
I decided to look at two opposite images of myself, side by side, and see if I could recognize a difference. It won’t mean much to people who don’t know me, I suspect, but I’d be interested if those of you who do know me, recognize one of these images as being the view of me you see in real life, face to face encounters.
It seems to me that I would have noticed that the face I see in photographs of me would look different than how I see myself in the mirror, but I don’t have any recollection of ever having had that thought. (Of course, I don’t have an obvious left or right hair-part that would make the visual difference more dramatic, which, by the way, is the point that is featured in the RadioLab episode.) I do know some people who complain that they never like how they look in photographs, and a few who flat out refuse to have their pictures taken.
Maybe that is akin to the phenomenon of not liking the sound of our own recorded voice, because it doesn’t sound like us. Since we usually only hear ourselves with the internal resonances of our own heads, our recorded voices sound foreign.
It could be that our being accustomed to the view of our faces in a mirror, is why images of us in photographs can look foreign to some people.
Interesting topic of perspectives, don’t you think? If nothing else, it is a darn good topic for a blog called Relative Something! I still don’t sense what it is that I might want to take from this new insight of perspectives, but it has me freshly aware that the guy I see in my mirror is, indeed, opposite from the one everyone else sees.
Now you have an excuse to spend a few extra minutes in front of a mirror, next chance you get, pondering what it is you are actually seeing!
For reference, if you are interested, it is possible to get a mirror that double-reverses the reflection, so you can see yourself as the rest of the world sees you. Check out the True Mirror (featured in the RadioLab program) for one such version.
Not Me
I was reading an article in National Geographic last night, and came to the conclusion that I am not a man. Not compared to the men who lived in years gone by. I am a lawn ornament, maybe. Or, a flower. Admittedly, the modern conveniences that we have come to accept as normal, make me feel like a softie, when comparing to anyone who lived in centuries before us, but stories of the explorers of the time boggle my mind.
The story was written by David Roberts, describing the experience of thirty year old Australian, Douglas Mawson, exploring Antarctica in 1912.
I’ll just highlight a few examples from the description, each one sounding like it would be my demise, that have me measuring life today with a fresh perspective.
- Living through winter for years in a place with wind gusts of 200 mph.
- Getting 300 miles away from the base after 35 days, with a 3-man team, and then losing a man and the team’s most valuable gear, including their three-man tent, the six best huskies, all the food for the dogs, and nearly all the men’s food, to a crevasse.
- Trying to dash back 300 miles with remaining dogs, having them all die, one by one, in the first two weeks, and needing to eat them to survive.
- Forced to pull the sledge themselves, and having it repeatedly capsize, exhausting them, and forcing the dumping of remaining gear.
- Teammate gets sick, risking both their survival, but not being able to leave him.
- Burying dead teammate, and choosing to go on, even though the food was almost gone, and his own physical state was deplorable, with open sores on his nose, lips, and scrotum; his hair coming out in clumps; and skin peeling off his legs. And he still had a hundred miles to go. “I am afraid it has cooked my chances altogether,” Mawson wrote in his diary.
- Discovering, three days later, that the soles of his feet had completely detached from the skin beneath them, which spurted pus and blood. He taped the dead soles to his feet, and put on six pairs of wool socks. Every step thereafter was an agony.
Okay, that right there is enough for me. I’m done. Bury me back by my teammate. As if I would have made it that far. But the story goes on to describe that he eventually falls in a crevasse, hanging from the sledge above by rope, expecting the sledge to come down on top of him any moment. When it doesn’t, he climbs, hand over hand, back up the rope. That is something that would be hard to do when healthy. Douglas was far from healthy.
When he gets to the top, trying to climb over the edge of the crevasse, it gives away and he falls back down to the end of that rope. I would have lost the mental battle there, for sure.
It does describe that he considered cutting the rope and falling to his death, but then recalled a verse from his favorite poet, and somehow rallied to climb that rope again. He passed out at the top, then woke later to find his body covered with a dusting of new fallen snow. It says he was now convinced he had no chance to survive, but wanted to get to a place where someone would find their diaries to learn the story of their experience.
I think the most mentally grueling aspect of his feat was a window of time that he had been up against. He needed to get back to base camp before the expedition’s relief ship was scheduled to leave for Australia. Even though he somehow makes it back, after coming upon a food cache left by expedition members searching for his team, he can see the ship out at sea. He missed it by a mere five hours. He has to spend another 10 months there, with 6 men deputized to stay and search for his party, waiting for the next ship.
It is too much for me to fully grasp. Douglas Mawson was a man. All I know is, I do not compare.
Sports Spectating
There was a big sports championship waged yesterday in the U.S., ending the National Football League season for another year. Congratulations to the fans of the Baltimore Ravens.
American football is a team sport, 11 vs. 11. Each play is a battle of eleven different 1-on-1 competitions. I think that is what provides much of the intrigue of our game.
When it comes to players on offense trying to execute a block, all they need to do is occupy the person to whom they are assigned, for the brief moment of play. Sometimes, it can be as simple as getting positioned between the defender and the ball carrier. The offensive team knows where the play is intended to go, so it would seem they have the advantage.
The defensive players are tasked with needing to quickly deduce what is happening, fight off or avoid the block, and then make a play for the ball.
Many of the individual match-ups on any given play, could probably be judged a draw. Then it comes down to a player who can be either a hero, or a goat, which may produce a gain, or loss, of particular significance.
For as slow as the actual 60-minutes of play-clock takes to run (games take around 3 hours), there is a lot of action that happens in each short burst. It is a pleasant distraction from the real world, while it lasts.
Now that we have arrived at the NFL off-season, I can return my discretionary attention to things that actually matter.
As if. I do still have the sport of hockey for frivolous entertainment, you realize. Yes, the truth is, I’m rather hopeless when it comes to the distractions of spectator sports.
Big Accomplishment
This past week, we received an email from our son, Julian, with the subject: “My album has been RELEASED!”
Even though some of my son’s taste in music is different than mine, I can’t stop myself from listening to the whole thing, over and over. What a parental rush!
You can read his descriptions of the What, Why, and How, and listen for yourself at the web site he created to share his music: jaywalkerbroadcasts.com.
I recommend you sample enough songs to discover the wide variety of voice and instrument he has put together.
Talk about highly capable, he wrote songs, played all the instruments, sang, recorded, found and financed a professional studio to do mixing and mastering, and then built the web site to distribute his product. And, he did this as a side project to his current full-time day-job. To say we are proud of him, and all he accomplished with this, is an understatement.
When I was young, and heavily interested in recording artists of the time, one thing that boggled my mind was, when individuals would play all the instruments at such an accomplished level, so as to be able to produce a marketable product on their own. Now my own son has done just that!
I remember showing Julian a few things on my guitar when he was little. Then, he took up percussion in the school band, and off he went, playing guitar in rock bands, becoming an accomplished drummer, developing his singing, and developing skills on keyboards and bass guitar. Julian has performed live, in a variety of bands, in a wide range of venues. It’s the stuff that some folks dream of doing, and others actually make a living doing, but he has done it as just one of his many life interests.
Cyndie and I are always thrilled with the music our children make. I’m pretty sure we were annoyingly proud of watching our kids as marching band percussionists for many years. We drove Julian to ‘battle of the bands’ gigs back when he and his school friends didn’t have driver’s licenses. We were also fixated for quite some time on a video that Julian and friend, Dave Marshall, produced while Julian was living, and going to school, in Stockholm, Sweden, and Dave was back in Chicago. I’m including it here again, with Julian’s permission, because we still love it so much.
Julian has now gathered years of his music in a present day recording. He has included guest artists from high school and college days, and put together a legitimate album that he is distributing free on the internet. We think this is a really big accomplishment. I hope you will give it a listen, and then share it with all those who you know that have an appreciation for what he has produced.
If you agree with me, that his efforts are worthy, I invite you to post a comment at his site, or on any of the music sites he links, so he doesn’t just hear it from Mom and Dad. We all know, our support can appear to be a little biased.
Double Disdain
Maybe I’m just a bit old-fashioned, but there are two technological advancements that I disdain, and I just realized they have a certain commonality. Automatic transmissions in cars, and the electric cooktop. They share an aspect of vagueness that I don’t like. I want to be able to feel the control of gears and I want to see the flame providing heat for cooking. Neither of the two technologies do that for me.
I needed to drive Cyndie’s car on the commute yesterday, and in comparison to my manual 5-speed, her car left me feeling dramatically less in control. A lot like placing the pan on the stove and not having any idea of the status of the heat source below.
Cyndie and I are both gas cooktop people and now using an electric style that is in the kitchen of the home we just bought. We are trying to adjust to it, for now, but can’t help feeling it is a totally inferior option. With a gas flame, you know when it is on and when it is off. It doesn’t ramp up and down in intensity while you are cooking. Want more heat? Adjust to a bigger flame.
With the manual transmission car, when I let out the clutch and give it gas, it responds directly, without hesitation. When I want to slow down, simply removing my foot from the pedal allows the gears to slow the car. I just don’t get that kind of control with an automatic transmission. Her car just keeps gliding along, even after removing my foot from the pedal. I’m forced to tap the brakes. Yuck.
I have enough lack of control over other areas of life. Like software. Just when I learn how to control an application, a new version is released that sets me back to struggling to accomplish tasks. Isn’t it frustrating when devices that are supposed to make things easier for us, end up doing just the opposite?
There is a silver lining, though, in my suffering through the driving of Cyndie’s car. She brought mine back all clean and shiny from the car wash.
Sometimes, letting go of that need to control, can bring rewards.
Relative Something 