After some time and quite some expectation, a new version has been released that includes the single most awaited feature in the history of the game: Multiplayer!

At this point the multiplayer feature is reduced to the bare bones, but it works. We are hoping on the community to help us test it

Heather Dale is a fantastic canadian singer and producer, able to take us to places long ago forgotten while she tells us stories with her wonderful voice.

J:Thanks for your time, Heather… Give us a global vision of your musical trajectory.

I am always looking for new stories to tell… I enjoy studying legends and stories from around the world. I think that every story, no matter how old it is, or how strange it seems, can tell us something about ourselves — it can help us understand each other better.

J:We could say that your music is angelical, magic, ethereal, intimate sometimes, sweet and very well produced. What feelings do you look forward to conveying in the listener?

Thank you! No matter what I say in my lyrics, I try to be as honest as I can. If I feel sadness or happiness, I hope to encourage my audience to feel the same thing as they listen… I often have people who cry or laugh out loud at my concerts. It’s a great feeling to share each moment with my fans, when I’m on stage.

J:Your influences are the Celtic folk, pop music, rock…. but the lyrical component and the voices are very important in your works. Other styles like the jazz can also be observed… Is the mixture between the antique and the modern thing a way to open new musical sensations?

I never like to do things the easy way, or to simply mimic what another musician is doing. Sometimes that’s hard — for example, I’m very influenced by Loreena McKennitt and Sarah McLachlan, but I want to make sure that I always sound like myself. I would rather be known as “the first Heather Dale”, rather than “the new Loreena”, even though I love her music!

Also, I combine different musical styles to try to tell my stories better — I think it helps my audience feel connected to each culture. For “The Road to Santiago” (the title track from my new CD), I wanted to explore some Spanish melodies and percussion; and for “Sedna”, I wanted to capture the sound of Canada’s native Inuit people, and so I used a sample of real Inuit singers, as well as their special frame drum. With my King Arthur songs, I want to transport people back into that time, while still showing them how much life today is the same as life in the Middle Ages… so I play with different styles: Celtic, jazz, folk, rock… everything working together.

J:The thematic of your work is between the tradition and old legends. Is this your biggest inspiration? For example, all your Cds and especially “May Queen” are directly inspired in the King Arthur. Has perhaps your music some of the magic of Merlin The Magician?

I love the King Arthur stories… they are so complex and full of wisdom. The stories wouldn’t have survived 1500 years unless they had something important to say: they talk about hope, betrayal, honest love, crazy families, courage, hard work, and all the things we still experience in the 21st Century. Life is not so different after 1500 years!

Funny you should mention Merlin… I have a friend, Barbara Miller, who teaches about the Spanish Merlin legends at a college in the USA. She has shown me that in Spain, Merlin is seen as very passionate and sometimes frightening; he’s a bit of a devil, even though he’s beautiful and powerful. I like this idea — that Merlin was not always old and tired. Because of that, I don’t look at elderly people the same way anymore; I realize that I will never know what an amazing life they had. That’s the wisdom I learned from Merlin!

J:You are the manager and founder of the Independent Records Label Amphisbaena Music. Is it a traditional Records Label? What does Amphisbaena offer us?

When I started recording, I knew I had two options: 1) wait for a record label to discover me, or 2) start working immediately. I am not very patient, so I started working immediately! As I learned more about the music industry, I realized that a record label simply loans you enough money to hire experts, and these experts help you make your CDs. So I took out a loan at my bank, and researched everything I could about making recordings… if I couldn’t learn to do it myself, I would hire an expert with my own money.

I called my new company Amphisbaena Music, because an amphisbaena is a two-headed dragon — one head looks forward (like my musical styles), and one head looks backward (like my interest in history). My company now helps 25 other independent artists, as well as myself; we all fund and produce our own recordings, but together at www.AmphisMusic.com we help to publicize each other’s recordings.

J:In fact you help to the production of new musical talents… Does Amphisbaena try to fill some musical “hole” not covered by the commercial industry?

As I was learning to make recordings, I “practiced” by producing CDs for other new artists. This was excellent experience for me, and I got to work with some wonderful musicians and storytellers, who couldn’t have made a CD otherwise. Now that I’m so busy with my own performing career, I don’t do much production work anymore, but I’m still in contact with those artists and we sometimes perform together. Amphisbaena focuses in particular on “historically-inspired recordings” — by this I mean that all the artists are trying to create something new which has been inspired by history. We have a Norwegian storyteller (Morgana bro Morganwg), a Canadian singer/poet who writes about the Medieval era (Hector of the Black Height), and an American instrumental group (Musica Subterranea) which plays music from the Renaissance but also teaches Renaissance dances to anyone that wants to learn! I love that all these artists are inspiring new generations to study history in new ways.

About your live performances… Your last tour has been through Canada (your country), United States and even sometimes you have toured in the United Kingdom. Do you plan to come play in Europe? In Spain? Is Heather Dale well-known in the Old Continent? How are your concerts?

Since late 2004, I have been doing a lot of touring… in fact, this year alone I have travelled 38,000km to bring my music to new areas. I’ve played all across Canada (which is wider than all of Europe), and play occasional shows in the USA as well. But I’m most excited about my current tour in Sept/Oct 2005… I will be touring the UK, as well as visiting Budapest, Hungary and (best of all) Santiago de Compostela in Galicia! I have wanted to visit Santiago for many years, even though I don’t speak much Spanish; I will be there from October 11-15. I don’t have any formal concerts planned, but I plan to sit in the town square and play music for the pilgrims. I hope they enjoy it!

I sing and play lots of different instruments in my shows: piano, bodhran (an Irish hand-drum), tin whistle, dulcimer. I usually tour with Ben Deschamps, and he plays guitar, double bass, and flute… so our shows have a lot of variety. We will be doing a lot more touring from now on — I spend 4-5 months away from home every year, but I just love travelling and seeing the world.

J:Your last work “May Queen” (your fouth CD) was published in 2003. Do we need to wait a lot to listen to new projects?

I just released my fifth CD in 2005… it’s called “The Road to Santiago”, and it has 12 songs inspired by different cultures: Canadian, British, Irish, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Caribbean, and even Canada’s native Inuit peoples. It often takes a long time for me to make an album, because I wait for inspiration — I know some songwriters just write every day, but I prefer to travel and explore the world, and then let the songs develop slowly.

J:Is good music an antidote against bad moments in life?

Absolutely! I think that music can be a very healing and strengthening force — it also brings us together, even when we can’t talk to each other in the same language. I’m so happy when I hear from my fans; they listen to my music in the brightest and darkest times of their lives. They play my music at weddings, births, funerals, celebrations, memorials… I really makes me feel like I make a positive difference in the world with my music. I can’t think of anything better than that!

J:Thank you, Heather. We will continue enjoying your beautiful music.

Thanks Jorge!

A passionate synthesist and music connoisseur, Jorge is a reference in the field of “independent new musics” -quite broad term!-, and he regularly writes articles on new releases and interviews musicians from every corner of the world. Jorge is currently managing the site Articmist.

Look forward to Jorge´s articles, starting with his interview to canadian artist Heather Dale.

There´s people renowned as great creators only because no one has ever refuted their weak arguments.

(…) a collapsible eyeglass and self-encasing system

Foldable Glasses= Opti-gami! Actually all glasses I know are foldable, but these “concept glasses” do something better: they fold in the middle in a way so that the arms encase the lenses, thus protecting them from scratches. One could perhaps argue that as a result the arms themselves are perhaps too big, but the solution is clever and convenient. The whole RKS site worths a visit: they design all sorts of cool products for others, they make some of the best-looking guitars I have ever seen, plus they have coined the term “psycho-aestetics“, in their own words

(…)a proprietary design methodology in which a product’s design creates a promise of physical and emotional benefits to the user as well as guides us to address the product’s key attributes and consumer desires.

… a design that makes you feel better, powerful… that path can only lead to making rock guitars, obviously! XD

The wikipedia defines recursion as “(…)a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition (…) a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way”. Point a mirror towards another mirror and look inside: that´s recursion. The company Droste has used this method in the graphic design of their packaging with a success so as to give name to the “Droste Effect”, i.e. a picture of a board showing a picture of that board showing that picture of a board showing…

This said, I would like to point you to two sites where I have seen great Drosterisms:
First, take a look at www.josleys.com, which contains many examples and shows transformations of ordinary pictures into Drosterites. Within said page is an explanation of how Escher used this method together with a mathematical transformation to create the enigmatic painting “Print Gallery”, and you can read that “Prof. Hendrik Lenstra succeeded in unraveling the mathematical structure of the image”…

The second site I want to show you, http://escherdroste.math.leidenuniv.nl/ , devotes itself to explaining Prof. Lenstra´s work on the “Print Gallery”. The site is full of pictures and videos that not only unveil the secrets of the drawing, but also show how Drosterism works.

Warning! Watching the videos in the sites above could keep you entangled in an infinite loop of self-repeating paradoxes, ditto.

Update 26.09.07
Escher´s Droste Print Gallery@Flickr;
Droste Effect Tutorial, same source.

The site above features a very nice collection of mini-aquariums, along with code for you to include them in your own website or blog, may you want to. I tested a miniaqua in nan´s sidebar for a few days, and after “installing” it my browser updated (automatically) the Shockwave player. Then the aquarium ran perfectly, though a friend told me today that he had been unable to open the site, so be careful if you decide to use it. By the way, there´s another version of the aquarium available from the same site, though it´s not as mini

Now, for some real-ly small fishtanks, you may like to take a look at this selection.

Related Article: The megatank!

Ok. Let’s start again. I am not going to talk about the ridiculous script, the non-existent sense of measure, the extremely confuse action scenes, or the inappropriate performances. I think that something better could have been done with the idea of putting together in a plane all the meanest delinquents. …or snakes-jose

…Vs Sideshow Bob and other semi-frustrated villains

Imagine that John Malkovich’s role in “Con Air” was replaced by his performance of Mitch Leary in Petersen’s “In the line of fire”. Maybe he would not lead the band of villains, but he would pose be a much more serious threat to Nicholas Cage.

And what if Ving Rhames’ role was substituted by Samuel L. Jackson’s mega-villain Elijah Price? Too fragile for turbulences, but quite an effective choice nevertheless!

Now, imagine that Steve Buscemi’s role as a kind-of-Hannibal Lecter was replaced by Lecter himself. He would make some witty mentions to Cage’s haircut and t-shirt, besides the very poor security in the plane. Lecter would probably be the criminal genius able to cope with the situation. However, it takes time for Lecter to make his plans, and I think he would be too focused on teaching Cage a lesson (Lecter is a very individualistic guy).

All in all, I don’t know anyone who would fit better the characteristics of the convicts´ leader than Sideshow Bob. The only objection is his poor criminal record (“homicide attempt? Is there a Nobel Prize for Physics attempt?”, he said in one of his memorable appearances). In fact he is no more than a frustrated villain, but there would be still a chance: Nicholas Cage is not Bart Simpson either.

The forces of Nature show themselves by making a feeble stream flow no less than by displaying huge forces able to change all beings; that precisely is the greatness of Heaven and Earth.

modelling the structure by means of up-to-date 3 dimensional molding method offers an effective teaching aid.

(Freely “rearranged” from the babelfish translation of the page above.)

I highly recommend that you take a look at this article even if you don´t know japanese, since its pictures (scroll down a bit) beautifully illustrate several techniques currently used to make real objects from 3D models. In this case the subjects are molecular structures: these techniques not only bring them to a human scale but also to the human world, thus helping scientists twice. Furthermore, some of the machines used, like the Roland mdx scanner and milling machine, are getting cheap and easy to use enough that in a near future they may become as common as photocopiers!

http://www.eurekster.com

A search engine that learns from your community’s search behavior.

In a nutshell, a Swicki is a search engine which gets gradually biased by the community that uses it -which explains the wiki wicki side of the word. I´ve spent a few days now using it, so what comes next is a report on my own experience on how to set up and manage a swicki.

I guess you might be thinking, how can any search engine be better than google? Let me give you a practical example. This is the search result page in google for the word “prophet”:

http://www.google.com/search?q=prophet

Now, this is the search result page for the same word in my Synthesizers Swicki:

http://synthesizers-swicki.eurekster.com/prophet/

The results are quite different: while google shows results for every meaning of the word “prophet”, the swicki has been trained to show results relevant to someone who wants information related to synthesizers. That is exactly my case: whenever I hear of a synthesizer I don´t know about, I search for more information on it; unfortunately, relevant information is sometimes literally buried around page 12! If you are interested in a particular field, with a proper swicki you can find what you are searching for very close to the surface. In that sense, a swicki might be better than google…

… a proper swicki, I said… yes, there´s something important to have on account: a swicki is as useful as big the number of people using it. If you are the only person using the swicki it won´t be much better than bookmarking the pages you find, but if a community uses it, every member will automatically benefit from what every other member discovers. That´s the real power of a swicki, and perhaps its worst disadvantage too: as in forums, or blogs, or anything involving communities, the first (and second, and third) steps can be very hard. Anyways, good news is that setting up a swicki is free, so why not try?

Quick steps to setting up a Swicki:

1.Go to eurekster and sign up.

2.After you have dealt with the sign up bureaucracy, login and head for “Swickibuilder”. Here you´ll make the most important decision of them all: you´ll choose the swicki´s topic! Notice that you can´t make a swicki on a topic that has been already used in another swicki, alas! -some creative naming can help: instead of synthesizers, you might name your swicki “best synthesizers”-

3.The rest of this first page is quite easy to understand. I recommend leaving the “keywords” box blank for now. If you want to put something, think on a couple words you would search for (thinking on synthesizers, I´d put moog, roland, prophet and the like). As for the layouts, if you choose multimedia you will get pictures and text results. I chosed not to show images to make the search engine be as fast as possible, but that´s entirely personal.

4.The second page is where you give the swicki its “personality”. If you have a site relevant to the topic, you can make the swicki give priority to result on your site; if you know of sites that have lots of information on the topic, you can point the swicki there too. You may ban sites that you want to exclude from the search results; finally, you´ll give a short description on the swicki, then choose from a (short, I believe) array of preset categories. Warning! The eurekster team adds the swickis by hand to their directory, so if you don´t see yours listed after some time, write them. I did so and found that they are friendly and helpful.

5.That´s it for the basics! Next page is all about publishing. If you have some experience with websites you won´t find much trouble in adapting the swicki to your site/blog; I did so with wordpress here through a widget and I got it working in minutes. Anyways, you don´t need to embed the swicki anywhere to use it: see where it says Now take your swicki for a spin!? Click on “spin” and you´ll get to your new swicki. Congratulations!

That´s all there is to know about swickis?

Well, actually there´s more, much more (evil laugh). Now you have a swicki, yes, but it will work as an inespecific search engine unless you train it. After I made the synthesizers swicki, some friends asked me if it would search only for words related to synthesizers; that´s not the case, you can search for anything you want with it. The thing is, you want it to show results relevant to your topic, so how is this done? Fairly easy: After a search is made, a regular use may vote for those results that he or she finds the most interesting. Sites with the most votes rise in the results´pages.

I find the approach above straightforward and easy enough that anyone can use it. There´s a problem, though: first users using the swicki will find results as relevant as googles´ (not bad, anyways, but I bet they won´t use the swicki if they get the same in google). Here is where a moderator comes in handy. When you use your own swicki, as a moderator you can do things regular users can´t: you can take a site straight to the top (promote result), you can add a site to the list of relevant places for the swicki to direct its searches to (promote site), and you can delete sites too. On the top of the page you´ll find convenient duplicates of some of of the tools you find when you login at the eurekster´s site: customize, train, promote/demote and buzz cloud. The buzz cloud is a powerful tool: as a moderator it allows you to see the words people are searching for, and you can add some or all those words to the “cloud” that displays at the right sidebar as “hot searches”. This lets visitors get a sense of the sort of searches others are doing, and also gives clues on topics that have been already pruned by others.

Ah, yes, pruning: now you have a swicki, you know how it works, let´s call the friends, right? HALT!!

Let me insist: the swicki doesn´t find the right results alone: it may already yield better results than the average search engine (since you gave it a topic and a list of sites where to favour search), but I´m pretty sure it won´t still be convincing enough. My advice is that you use the swicki on a regular basis for some time before showing it to other people: not only will you learn how it works, but when others see it you´ll have already some relevant words in the “hot searches” cloud, and there will be some chances that they search for things you´ve already done, thus benefiting from your work. As a moderator it is also helpful to prune some obvious searches first: It will be hard to convince anyone that the swicki is helpful if they can´t find interesting results on well known things (like moog, roland and so in the synthesizers swicki).

(Drumroll) You made it this far! Thanks for the interest As a reward, I´ll share with you a secret, take note:

http://www.envelooponline.com/nan/synthesizers-search-engine.xml

Get the file above, open it with notepad, study it carefully: it is the plugin to add the synthesizers swicki as a firefox search engine. To install it, place it in program files/mozilla firefox/searchplgins and restart the browser.

If you are using firefox (you should!), I guess you´ll see the power of that little file. I use firefox, and of course I make every search from the search bar, which is more convenient than going first to the search engine´s site. Right after I created the swicki I realized that I would hardly use it in the long term unless I found a way to add it to the search engines´ list, and so I did some research, since eurekster´s site doesn´t directly provide a solution -however, their customer support was very helpful and pointed me to the right place-. Basically, if you want to add your swicki´s engine to firefox´s list, just open with the notepad the xml above, change the data so that it points to your swicki´s address, save it and copy it in the searchplugins folder. It´s that easy (well, it´s easy if someone tells you. I´m no programmer and I couldn´t find a template until the people at eurekster helped me).

Now that you have the swicki up and running, and with a nice firefox plugin ready, I think you can start telling people about your swicki.

So, is that everything?

Nope! I haven´t written an article for months, I can´t stop now!!

Actually I´ve saved something interesting for the end: you can add ads to the swicki. As a moderator you can “manage advertising”. If you have an account with adsense, chitika, contextweb and/or adultfriendfinder (they accept suggestions for more advertising programs), eurekster lets you add adds in relevant positions on your site. I have tried adsense so far, and getting the codes they need to make everything work is very easy with the online tutorial. So far they don´t give you options to customize the color schemes, but I´m sure they´ll improve on this. Anyways, and even though I´ve added adsense to the synthesizers swicki, I don´t recommend you to start a swicki for the money: start it because it may be useful to you, see if you can get others to help make it useful for all, and then you can say that whatever you earn goes towards moderating expenses.

Done?

I think so, or at least I don´t think I´m forgetting anything… you may ask why, if I´m so interested on swickis, I haven´t made a “nan swicki”. I was thinking that too so I just made one, hold on:

Here´s the link http://nan-swicki.eurekster.com/

Here´s the xml to add to the search engines´list in firefox:http://www.envelooponline.com/nan/nan-search-engine.xml

Now I have to find a proper place for it within the site. I think I´ll keep it hidden here for now; it goes against what I said before, but I´ll take it as a long-term experiment. Of course you can try my other cool swicki on synthesizers…

As always, any comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

So, is there any app out there that could allow one to keep several different desktops within the same computer? As far as I know, the answer is “yes and no”, but at least the “Yes” side of the story could be enough for many users:

http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/

VirtuaWin is designed to be simple and elegant to use yet still be highly configurable and extensible.

VirtuaWin, as most of the “desktop managers” I have found so far, doesn´t provide you with fully independent desktops, but with a set of different taskbars. In this way, you can distribute the programs you use on the different taskbars, and switch from one another very quickly. For instance, you could have your browser windows opened in taskbar #1, your mail app in taskbar #2, msn in taskbar #3… Installing and using VirtuaWin is very easy, and it works very well: I have been using it in my computer for quite some time now, and switching from taskbar to taskbar has become second nature(1). The only problem I have encountered so far is that I can´t open different browser windows in different taskbars, since they are automatically moved to the taskbar where I first opened it, but that´s not much of a problem.

Therefore, does Virtuawin worth trying? definitely yes. It is completely free, and if the “by default” aspect doesn´t convince you, there´s a whole bunch of icon sets and user-developed mods that add different looks and functionalities to the program. I use it along with the “cool desktop switcher”, which really lives to it´s name, since it makes switching desktops even easier

Well, VirtuaWin is a very nice program, yes, but while it unclutters my taskbar it doesn´t offer more space in my desktop. Now, if you´re wondering if there´s a program out there that would do that, again I answer “Yes and no”, only that this time the “no” side may be a big drawback for those interested on it. You´ll see why:

http://www.shelltoys.com/virtual_desktop/

Own desktop icons for each Virtual Desktop

The statement above is the main difference between Cool Desk and the other virtual desktop managers I know- Cool Desk provides you with completely independent desktops, not just different taskbars, so that you can have different workspaces with the files and folders you want instead of keeping everything in ye ol´main desktop. However, as good as it may look, Cool Desk is not free ($24.95), and at least in my computer (PIV1.8, radeon X800GT), it didn´t go very well: moving files and folders was slow, laggy and unreliable a task. Furthermore, Cool Desk keeps the virtual desktops and their content within the program´s main folder, which I don´t think is a good policy. However, if you don´t mind this issue and your computer is fast enough, Cool Desk could be an interesting option.

All in all, even though I still don´t have completely different desktops in windows, VirtuaWin has proved itself very helpful with handling many different tasks. For a more complete list of available programs, you may want to visit the wikipedia article on the subject; by the way, since I have an ATI card I tried Hydravision, but I found that Virtuawin works better in my computer.

(1)Pun intended for spanish readers and/or automated translators: no traduzcáis maliciosamente por “cambiar de una tasca/bar a otra tasca/bar se ha convertido en una segunda naturaleza”.

Imagine there are rumours of a vacancy in the executive bureau of the company where you work. You want to make your boss understand that you are the most capable person for the post. Your boss has his/her car in the repair shop, and you offer to lift him/her (because it’s on your way home). How can you tell her her/him about your aptitudes without saying anything, but only playing five songs?

Any suggestions? leave us a comment

The Master said: I have no secret science. When an ignorant man asks me about something, no matter how shallow the question is I try to inform him the best I can, exhausting the topic in all its aspects.

“Right! In your dreams! I’m not a nerd!” Joe jibed his brother good-naturedly.

Had Joe said “I´m a Nan”, he wouldn´t have received the answer he received. What was that answer? Ah, I´ll guess you´ll have to read the story, just as much as Joe should have read NAN!

ps. in the same story…

“Bye, Nan!” Callie chimed and her slightly high-pitched voice was sounding a little shrill to Nancy’s ears.

“You know something, Drew? You’re like an open book right now.”

heh, it seems that actually Joe was reading NAN XD