UPDATE: I have added two more pictures of snakes eating humans. Please click here.
We all know that (some) humans have eaten snakes. Myself for one, have had plenty of snake’s soup in Hong Kong. It’s actually quite nice, and you should try it yourself. You won’t even know there’s snake in it.
What goes around, comes around. Human eat snake. Snake eat human.
Not for the squirmish.
A while back I came across the subject of holophony or holophonic sound, which is an audio recording technique that results in realistic and life-like 3D sounding audio recrodings. Holophonic sound recordings should be played when wearing headphones, and played at a reasonable volume. This improves the listening experience because you can hear the true effect of the recording.
Pink Floyd even used holophony in the album “The Final Cut”.
You will hear someone lighting two matches, first on your right and then your left. You then hear him/her shaking the box of matches all around your head. Listen to it with headphones!
The file above was actually featured on digg several months ago (where I orignally found the file back then), and became subjected to the Digg-effect - that’s how good it is! 
I currently have 12 7 5 4 Moola invitations available to anyone who wants it. Just leave a message with your email and I’ll send it to you (if I don’t hate you :P).
But first, let me tell you what Moola actually is…
Moola allows you to play with real money for free. Moola will pay you $0.1, which you can use to play against other players - via a ‘double or nothing’ strategy, you can win up to US$10 Million! And yes, you can actually cash out this money.
Games include:
Hi Lo - A quick and simple card game where the player who correctly reveals the most cards in the least amount of Lives is the winner!
Ro-Sham-Bo-Fu - Rock Paper Scissors. But with a Twist!
Gold Rush - A 2-player game of strategy, in which the most clever bidder goes home with the Gold!
Visit: Moola
01 December 2006: Due to the popularity of this post, it has become a large target for spam (1000+ spam comments daily, with my spam filter managing to hold 99% of them). For this reason, I will no longer allow comments. If I decide to give out more invites, there will be a new post on it.
I’ve been spending some time tweaking up this website and thinking of things to add. Some of you may have noticed the new “Most Popular Posts†section on the sidebar – posts are given points based on the number of views, comments, pingbacks, trackbacks etc., and posts with the highest total are listed there.
I’ve also just finished setting up the Systems area of the website – this is where I will be placing little coding projects or systems that you might be interested in. Check it out – so far I’ve added a Password Generator and a cool little UFO shooting game programmed in Flash.
This website has also been much more popular than expected. Although most visitors do not seem keen on posting comments (start posting!), this site has attracted some 760+ unique visitors and 30,000 hits since its launch 15 days ago. I never thought numbers would make me so happy!
Yesterday I installed some new statistics software and found that I had visitors from all around the world! Check out the screenshot from my statistics software below:
I think the legendary programming quote fits perfectly with this post: Hello World!
Anyway, that’s all for tonight, thanks for stopping by - see you soon!
The lock used below is a very common safety lock used in homes and hotels. How safe do you feel now, knowing tools like this are around?
Today I spent some time at ’studio timw’ with some friends who were pretty new to the music producing scene. Soon enough, the question of why I mixed with monitors as opposed to just headphones came up. This question has actually become somewhat a legend in the music scene, especially amongst those who are just starting out, as well as those who have a fair amount of experience.
Firstly, let me clarify that headphones are not useless and are valuable tools. They help critical listening for noises, pops and clicking, many of which are often not audible on monitors. They also bring to surface sonic flaws on individual tracks and/or mixes, as well as provide ‘monitoring’ when tracking, where true monitors would cause unnecessary leakage. And that pretty much sums it all up.
You may have noticed I left out the use of headphones in mixing. True, but that is because headphones are simply dreadful mixing tools. In fact, headphones are pretty much useless tools for any tonal or EQ change decisions. Reaching this stage, my friends explained how using headphones would remove any problems with room acoustics, and thus should make track mixes much more consistent. However, we know that audio-engineering is full of clear-cut theoretical techniques that often turn out to be the no-good way to handle things. Undoubtedly, headphones remove problems with room acoustics, but if you think about it, they actually place your ears in two separate, tiny rooms, which surfaces two main problems:
1: Distance and Isolation:
When you use headphones, your frequency response changes because your ears are so close to the drivers. Thus, bass and mid-range waves become distorted. Your stereo imaging also becomes distorted because each ear is separated from the other.
Seeing that my friends were slightly unsure of what I was trying to explain, I pulled out my Korg RADIAS, and tweaked up a patch through headphones, allowing my friends to decide what they considered sounded good. I played the patch again, but this time through my monitors, and we all agreed that the patch sounded awful. In fact, at least 90% of the time you will hear a distinct difference in sound. The example above was used with a simple patch; imagine you were working with an entire mix. Actually, try it yourself: make a mix with only monitors, and then again with only headphones. The headphone mix will definitely always sound completely off.
2: Different ears on the same headphones:
We’ve already established that imaging and response is distorted when using headphones, but it doesn’t stop here. Each set of ears hears differently. This is because one’s cilia (the ear part responsible for distinguishing frequency vibrations) is exclusive to that individual. This point is really important because it means that a single song, when listened to through the same headphones, will sound different to each person. If you felt understanding mixes using monitors was tough, imagine the complications with headphones.
Now you’re probably wondering if there is a difference using monitors, and there is. When you use headphones, you hear a ‘personalized-response’ effect, which is emphasized because of the closeness of headphone drivers with your ears. When using monitors, the room helps balance the sound’s frequency-response, allowing production of a more consistent sound to each person who listens. On the other hand, headphones are typically touching your ears, and so there isn’t a room to help balance frequency-responses.
It’s actually quite simple. Headphones complete their appropriate tasks effectively, but are restricted to these tasks. You wouldn’t use a hammer to unscrew a bolt right? So don’t use headphones when mixing, and get yourself a set of monitors!
Dave Chappelle is hilarious for his parodies. Here he is again; Chappelle’s version of MTV Cribs. Oh yeh, this episode hasn’t been aired yet!
IE6 users will have noticed a problem with the layout - all content was pushed down, leaving the website with a huge block of white space. In addition, running the site through W3’s HTML Validation Service showed over 30 HTML problems. After spending about two hours digging and correcting (with the help of some people on IRC), I’m proud to announce that timw.com is now “XHTML 1.0 Transitional”, and IE6 users should no longer see any frustrating white spaces!
You guys are going to love this.Â
I recently came across a website that was about me. On it had a profile of me, with a bunch of hilarious stuff like I had 6 toes, and that I was a “chinaman”, along with a bunch of Chinese writing calling me a “big mouth” and “fat”. My phone number along with area code and email address was posted on it. The first thing I thought was: “Damn! Fans already?!”.
Then I found that this person had been going around Internet forums posting images of me and trying to make me out to look like a complete dork. Some of it was pretty funny - someone made a forum topic on George Bush, and this person posted saying “Huh? I don’t get it”. Haha, and guess what? Someone actually went and tried to explain the whole joke to “me”! OK fine, maybe I am pretty stupid… 
Anyway, after contacting the right authorities and people, I managed to find out exactly who the mysterious replica of me is. I’d just like to say two things to this person:
I have a copy of the website and responses from people / authorities. I’ll send it to you if you want, and hopefully it’ll make your day like it made mine!
In other news, I’d just like to announce that my lovely Christy is finally back from France!
This guy did a damn good job. I haven’t seen anyone make a lipsync quite as well before. The song rocks too! Enjoy.
