mavispuford

A great look at the creative process in music from one of my favorite singers/songwriters/multi-instrumentalists, Matt Embree.  

matthewembree:

Matthew Embree, RX Bandits, Love You Moon

The RX Bandits sound fuses elements of rock, reggae, ska, and jazz.  Their multi-dimensional approach should come as no surprise, though, once you understand the creative process of songwriter Matt Embree. He writes all the time, and not just songs: Embree is an avid poet. And like any good poet, he finds inspiration everywhere.  He doesn’t necessarily seek out inspiration, but he puts himself in situations where it comes easily: he’s gone on a 2,000 mile motorcycle ride, and he’s hitchhiked all throughout Central America. When you engage with your environment as much as Embree does - whether it’s the physical environment of the wilderness or the people in a small village in Costa Rica - inspiration is easy to come by. And the songs that are the product of that creative process are rich in their influences.

RX Bandits are now on their farewell summer tour, though according to band member Steve Choi, they aren’t breaking up.  Rather, they are just doing their last tour.  So have no fear, RX Bandits fans, they will not disappear. Read my interview with Matt Embree after the video.

   What other creative outlets do you have besides songwriting?

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Made this for my wife.  Description on deviantART:

For my wife.

This is our cat Abby. She absolutely loves this weird rubber ball we got her. Nine times out of ten, if we can’t find it anywhere, it’s under the couch. When we fish the ball out from under there, Abby FLIPS out in excitement. Seriously, I’ve never seen a cat do this. It’s like when a dog starts barking in excitement when you are going to take it for a walk, except replace those barks with meows, and you’ve got Abby. On top of that, she actually plays fetch with the thing. You throw it, and she brings it right back and drops it by your feet. This further proves our theory that Abby is actually a dog in disguise.

Created with an Inkscape .48 prerelease build.

(Click the thumbnail to see a bigger version)

I just thought I would talk a bit about how I solved an annoying problem with my DSI: Miami widget since I had a really hard time finding a solution online. The problem would show up every time the home screen would change orientations (from portrait to landscape and vice versa).  If there was an orientation change, the widget would freeze and the button/text box wouldn’t respond anymore.  This drove me nuts!  I finally solve the stupid problem today.  This is what was happening:

-I have an IntentService class called UpdateService which basically throws a PendingIntent out there to listen for the button press.  Here’s the code that is in it’s buildUpdate method:

        private RemoteViews buildUpdate(Context context) {
            RemoteViews updateViews = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(), R.layout.widget_message);

            Intent i = new Intent(this, DSIMiamiWidget.class);
            i.setAction(REFRESH_QUOTE);
            PendingIntent pi = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, 0, i, 0);
            updateViews.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.WidgetButton, pi);
                   
            return (updateViews);
        }

-This code was fine, actually.  It worked great when the home screen stayed in the orientation in which the widget was born.

-The problem was when the button was pressed, it called a changeText() method which updated the text box, requiring me to do a new RemoteViews update. Here’s the gist of the code:

     public void changeText(Context context)
     {
        RemoteViews updateViews = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(), R.layout.widget_message);
//         int textSize;
        
         if (!randomQuotes.isEmpty())
             updateViews.setTextViewText(R.id.WidgetTextView, randomQuotes.get(0));
         else
         {
             if (quotes == null)
                 this.quotes = context.getResources().getStringArray(R.array.quotes);
             convertArrayToList();
             randomizeQuotes();
             updateViews.setTextViewText(R.id.WidgetTextView, randomQuotes.get(0));
         }
        
         randomQuotes.remove(0);
        
        ComponentName thisWidget = new ComponentName(context, DSIMiamiWidget.class);
        AppWidgetManager manager = AppWidgetManager.getInstance(context);
        manager.updateAppWidget(thisWidget, updateViews);
     }

-Well, I didn’t realize that I had to REDO all the PendingIntent stuff after doing that, too.  So, I threw this in right before “ComponentName thisWidget = new ComponentName…” at the bottom:

        Intent i = new Intent(context, this.getClass());
        i.setAction(REFRESH_QUOTE);
        PendingIntent pi = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, 0, i, 0);
        updateViews.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.WidgetButton, pi);

TADAAAAAAAAAA.  That was a pain…

So I’m working on a game engine for Android right now.  It’s gonna use OpenGL ES and hopefully it’ll be super sweet sauce (awesome alliteration there).  In the end I hope to have the typical sprites/parallax scrolling backgrounds/physics, along with particle effects and some extra doodads.

I’ll try to keep this blog updated in the process.

I guess this’ll be my new home for a while.  Nice and shiny.