Wow, I am busy as ever. I'm in the middle of getting hammered by final projects for all of my classes. You see, this quarter I have no final examinations (the good news), but instead I have final projects (the bad news). Ech. So I've been working for like the last week solid on coding this perceptual audio compressor. It works in a similar fashion to MP3 but isn't quite as good. Of course the plus side is that it's not patented either. =) Write me if you'd like a peek at the source, I'm going to put it up soon.

As a method of procrastination, I looked into the Flash file format and poked around, trying to see if I could write my own little version of Generator by simply replacing text strings like #DATE# and #ARTICLE# with information in realtime. Unfortunately, while Macromedia has made the .SWF format open, they were purposefully very loose on the simple detail of how text labels (tagDefineText) are stored...Grr... It would be really fun to have the whole site available dynamically in Flash.

I wrote a cute little piece for plug.com titled "The MP3 Artist" that basically encourages musicians to give audio on the Net a go. Separately, just for kicks, I threw in a little piece about why I think that leadership in corporate America is changing, and for the better.

Work on the book is an 100% go-ahead, but it looks like I'm going to need actually write the darn thing now. [grin] Too bad I can't write a Perl script for that.

I had a series of interesting encounters on some investor bulletin boards where people didn't actually believe that I was me! It was funny and infuriating all at once: imagine trying to prove to someone that you were not just an imposter of you! The situation ended up resolving itself, but I don't have time (especially not right now!) to dink around on boards. There are a lot of semi-mature people out there, but a well-written as positive email can work wonders on almost any soul. My word of the day:

"Nothing is quite so powerful or as cutting as a kind response to a cruel word."

I'm still waiting on EPAC -- I'd love a chance to test it, but the negociations are going pretty slowly. The second round of tests will be database-backed and dynamically driven, allowing you to pit two formats against each other on the fly. (This feature will also make it easy for me to add new samples, comments, and codecs, if I implement it properly.) If you have any ideas as to what should go into the Net's most comprehensive comparison, please send me ideas and/or samples!

Please wish me luck on my final projects, folks. It's going to be a rough week.

Peace.