Dan and I have just had a pun battle. Check it out!

Start with a seasoned hamburger patty. The one I used was from Whole Foods and was covered with crumbs of onion, bell pepper, garlic, and parsley.

Cook on a grill. I used one of the tabletop ones that grills both sides at once. Well-done works best so that it’s a bit crumbly.

Make a bed of spinach on your plate.

Toss some sliced pepperoncini peppers over the spinach.

Lightly cover the spinach with a garlicky Italian dressing, then spread some flaxseed over it so that it sticks to the dressing here and there.

Take the burger patty and cut it into chunks, and spread over the salad.

Crumble some white cheddar on top, leaving the chunks fairly big.

Serve with some crackers. One great choice is “Everything Flatbread” by Passport which adds even more garlic and seeds to the mix.

So a few months ago I lost my Olin College class ring.

Last night I was doing laundry, when I heard clinking in the washer. Thinking it might be the ring, I dug around inside for awhile, realizing that I’d need to use a wrench to take off a bolt so I could remove the piece blocking the clinking object.

When I went over to where my tools were, I found my ring sitting right next to them.

The clinking object was a quarter.

Tonight I put together a website to showcase some of the music I’ve written over the years. Until now, all of my music has been available only in disparate locations across the web.

My new page uses Yahoo!’s excellent and easy-to-use Javascript Media Player, so you can just click the little play button links next to each track.

Check it out at http://music.nertzy.com!

Back in high school I discovered the music of Virt, a video game musician who back then was using Impulse Tracker to simulate the sound of the NES. Some of my favorites was his “Classical Favorites” tracks, available from his chiptunes page, albeit in tracker formats.

At the time, I was spending a lot of my own free time writing music with Impulse Tracker, so I dabbled a little bit in faking NES music, in my “LOFI” series, with some pleasing results. This was back around 2000 or so. I never quite got back into it, sadly.

Later on, I discovered 8bitpeoples, a musical collective of chiptune artists. I went to their Data Destruction Tour in Boston and got to talk to and admire the music of Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, and Covox. I wrote a little bit about their music in a post for alwaysBETA.

Anyway it’s been a couple years since then, and I’ve been excited to find out that Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, and crew are performing a showcase and debuting a documentary at this year’s SXSW festivals here in Austin. Needless to say, I got pretty stoked.

This revived my long-standing desire to get one of the handful of different Game Boy cartridges that people have made for writing chiptunes. The one I’d wanted for a long time is named Nanoloop, and I’m glad to say that I finally bit the builet and bought an original 1989 model Game Boy and the Nanoloop 1.3 cartridge!

For my first song, I took one of my old LOFI tracks and spent a short amount of time trying to mock it up on the actual Game Boy, to see how close I had come to simulating the real sound.

The results of this experiment are found in LOFI2. Compare with the original LOFI2, and please keep in mind that there are a lot more restrictions with using Nanoloop and a real Game Boy than I had in Impulse Tracker.

After a couple days, I put forth a little bit more effort and wrote my first completely new Game Boy track, Goof Step. For this track, I kept things simple by only writing one pattern for each of the four available channels. I merely turn them on and off at strategic times to create the structure of the track. I’m pretty pleased with the results, and soon enough I will pursue a more ambitious and complete track.

Enjoy!

Downloads:

• LOFI2 (new version) - mp3
• LOFI2 (original version) - mp3
• Goof Step - mp3