Psst!

I'm over here now.

Within these halls...

I am absolutely pleased that DROD : Journey to Rooted Hold has made the list as one of GameTunnel's Top Ten Games of 2005, and also received the Player's Choice of 2005 award.

I started work on DROD's music a very long time ago, and I wrote a heck of a lot of music for it. In the end, only the main title theme of mine stayed, and that's a bit of a mix of three different main title themes I wrote. Still, when the game starts, you hear me singing Erik's lyrics in four-part harmony.

I think it's great that DROD's won the awards, because the community behind DROD has been behind it 100% of the way since the get-go. It is another project that I am very, very happy to have been a part of. Here's hoping that I get to write the music for a sequel, if it happens.

Merry Christmas

To my friends, family and loyal readers, a merry Christmas and happy holidays.

To the thug that smashed my Cadillac's driver-side windows at just after 7pm on Christmas evening, I would like to inform you that you have been put on notice.

Put your affairs in order. If I ever find your identity and justify to myself that you are guilty of this vandalism, they will never find your body.

Pajama Crisis Again

I have had an awesome weekend, but in order to clear my head, I decided to search around for some Scott Joplin MIDI files, because I love ragtime stuff. I came upon John Roache Music, and the best arrangement of the Maple Leaf Rag that I have ever heard.

I was so inspired by the arrangement that I brought some pieces together to try to make it a little more interesting to modern audiences. Therefore, here's some free music. It's strange arranging an arrangement, but I'm very happy with the final result.

I realize I haven't updated in a long time, but I figure if I show up with free music, there will be no complaining! You heard me, no complaining. Plant out.

The Sizzle of Branding

Ever since 1892, The Coca-Cola Corporation has been working hard to sell beverages to people. Their ad campaigns are the stuff of legend. From jingles like 'just for the taste of it' to Max Headroom castigating people for 'using the P-word,' Coca-Cola has left an indelible mark on the art and culture of marketing and advertising. Wherever you find industrialized capitalism in the world, you'll find Coke.

It turns out that the latest strategy for Coca-Cola is to change their branding in 2006, from the current campaign ('Real') to a new one. The slogan will be 'Welcome to the Coke side of life.'

The Coke side of life? How droll! They obviously didn't ask me. For a brief moment today, I pondered upon the question: If Coca-Cola had asked me to put together a new slogan for them, what would it be? I imagined myself in a pinstriped three-piece suit with a fedora, walking down the streets of Atlanta. Several advertising flacks surround me, taking down my words on white legal pads and personal digital assistants.

We walk by a brick storefront, and around the corner. I am backdropped by a large sign proclaiming that Coke Adds Life, obviously a remnant from the campaign that ran when I was born in 1976. I pull out my fountain pen and point the butt of it toward the impeccably-dressed crowd of hangers-on, waiting with bated breath.

I turn to the bald guy from Chicago. "Coke is love. Pepsi gives you AIDS."

I whip around to the mousy girl that just started last week. "Coca-Cola : Intelligently Designed."

I spin to the aging baby-boomer, hoping that the firm comes through with his pension. "Coca-Cola : It's really funny when you, like, shake up the can and, like, give it to some dude that doesn't know you shook it, oh my god man, hilarious."

I raise my arms over my head and yell to the sky. "Coca-Cola : The Nutrients You Need For Ample Man-Boobies."

My assistants write furiously. I wonder what they'll think of these at One Coca-Cola Plaza.

My reverie is broken by another little detail at the office.

Old Stuff Meets New Stuff

For a pretty good stretch of time, I was the CEO of the Xiph.Org Foundation. When I got there, there were only a few offerings from the organization. Ogg, the container format, Vorbis, the audio compression codec that beat the living pants out of most any other lossy compression codec at the time, and Icecast, the streaming audio server. This was all well and good, but I wanted to expand things a little bit so that open multimedia could have a unified front. I pulled Speex on board, which is another lossy compression format, but designed just for speech. Also, FLAC, the lossless audio encoder. I also negotiated the release of Theora, but that's a different kettle of fish altogether.

Recently, I've been busy working in television development (for Sonivius, my own company), music production, general creative services and things like that. I was also an executive producer for Sputnik7 in the meantime. How does all of this go together?

Starting on December 1st, I took over as Futurist for Audiofy. It's a great little tech company in Philadelphia, and I couldn't be happier. Audiofy is a platform that is entirely rolled out on a small secure digital chip. Using lossy speech compression, we're able to cram a whole lot of CDs worth of spoken audio onto a very small audiobook chip that weighs a little less than a quarter.

The technology is solid, we're working like crazy, we're selling product and things are going well. The nice part for me is that as the Futurist, I get to sit in on pretty much every part of the business to make suggestions and lead projects to fruition. It's a lot of fun for me.

Don't worry, I'm not leaving television development or other creative projects, but I am getting to scratch a lot of itches I have about the future of digital multimedia, including publishing, rights management and how everyone should be able to bring their content to the table, regardless of how small they are, and how big everyone else is. It's important to me as a producer to be part of this platform from the beginning, so that I can inject my own sensibilities into how things unfold in the future. After all, with a good platform and solid technological underpinnings, it makes the work I do as a creative person a lot easier to get paid for, as well as establishing solid creative freedom.

I know that last sentence sounds impossible, but I do impossible stuff all the time. It's all about scale.

Anyway, that's out of the way. I just wanted you to know the 411 in case I start ranting about audio content, publishing, compression technology or how damned tired I am.

The World Shifts Again

So, here I am with a brand-new journal, even though it seems as though my template isn't loading quite as cleanly as I would like. I'll fix that tonight, probably.

There's a lot of new things going on, and I figured the best way to keep track of it all for those who follow my illustrious (ha!) career would be to actually keep and maintain a journal, but to do something new and interesting, rather than to rehash a lot of stuff I've done in the past. So, here 'tis.

I will have more to say tomorrow, I'm trying not to just wordbarf on the universe with the first post other than to say, 'Hey, I'm here, if you want to read my ramblings, they're gonna be right here.'

Right now, I'm annoyed that Blogger still has no 'please post this at this time in the future' functionality, so I can't just come up with something brilliant and make it appear, say, 3:25am on Sunday. Alas.