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"Merry Go Round"
Wild Man Fischer

Possibly the earliest Larry Fischer recording, this is from a student project by someone at UCLA from May of 1968. There are three Fischer songs on the EP, and this is the classic Fischer song that everyone knows and loves and can't get out of their head, ever.

If you want to hear the rest, do a search for "Laminas UCLA" and follow the links. But really, what more Fischer do you need other than "Merry Go Round"?

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Should you learn coding? Yes, says Michael Bloomberg! No, says Jeff Atwood! Yes, says Sacha Grief! Fuck it, don't learn ANYTHING! Wait, it could help you out at work! Especially if you're a judge! Well, you could always learn MORSE code...

I'm divided whether or not everybody should learn to code. Ideally you shouldn't HAVE to, but you need to learn SOMETHING about the tools you work with on a daily basis, and computers are no exception. If you think it might be fun, then go ahead and try it. Otherwise, you probably know someone else who is a programmer and who can help you.

Maybe that's what it should be. Instead of everybody learning to code, everybody should make friends with a programmer. Just not me, okay? I have plenty of other stuff on my plate these days....

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So, this past week the makers of Portal 2 released the new level editor, and people just went wild creating levels for the game. I took a test spin of the editor this weekend, and found it much easier to create basic games than Hammer, the standard level editor for the Portal games. You don't have as much control over the items you can put into your levels (you're limited to the most recent technologies, the lasers, the gels, the buttons & boxes, etc., and you don't get the retro tech look of the early-era Aperture Science levels), and the programming isn't as sophisticated as you can get within Hammer. But the new app is definitely much faster to create a level, which you can apparently then load up in Hammer for fine-tuning. So I'm very interested in working on that.

Nothing much else of note for the weekend. We've made some travel plans for the summer & fall, so that's pretty exciting. Margaret the cat kept pretty much to herself this weekend, preferring to hide behind the futon in the dining room, rather than socializing. I think that's just going to be how she is, so we'll have to work around that.

Less than 2 weeks till the Festival of Aloha! There's a Website up that has some further details. If you're in the Chicago area, please check out the concerts; lots of great performers are coming here for the event.

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