A couple of songs

(Click on the links to play. Blogger doesn't host MP3s so I'm using box.net).

I'm rather proud of these pieces, even if they are one-off doodles.

No Expectations (aka "wheat")

In this piece I was playing with a few melody ideas, and one new left-hand idea: a quick 3-chord descending progression that I never used before. My right hand got inspired by the newness of what the left was doing, and this is the result.

A Mood

This piece is a lot more intense, and far more textured. Might make good background in an intense movie scene. I don't think I could do this on an acoustic piano because I'm holding the sustanuto pedal down the whole time, relying on the piano's polyphany limits to reduce the mushiness. I was intentionally trying to be repetative, at least in the beginning, but I hear a lot of nice variation anyway. The variation is more rhythmic than tonal, although there is some interesting melody/harmony stuff after the mid-track dynamic shift.

I'm proud of both pieces, and this is the first time I've publically posted anything to the internet. Anyone who's heard me play knows that this is basically what I do: I compose on-the-fly.

Finally got around to putting up a company site.

Well, I finally got around to putting something online for JavaJosh Enterprises. I had a static page up for a long time, decided to take it down and didn't replace it with anything. Well, now it's done. I went with the easiest possible solution, which is Wordpress on a VPS. The more familiar solution would have been hand-written JSPs running on GAE/J. However, Google has never made it easy to point custom domain names to your GAE applications, imposing arbitrary restrictions to boot. Besides, it's probably not the best thing to have to redeploy every time I want to change content.

Yes, there are some GAE/J hosted CMSes. Heck, I even wrote the beginnings of one myself (not published, but based on a really simple JSON/Datastore proxy I wrote in like one page of JSP). But Wordpress has some secret sauce. What is the sauce? Primarily, great designs. Good web design is really hard, and love it or hate it, Wordpress provides great designs in an easily redistributable package ready for your content. The second secret sauce of course, is that it adds through-the-web editing of site content. All you have to do is set it up.

(Wordpress has it's downsides too. Personally, I'm not a fan of the LAMP architecture in general, and PHP is not not the nicest language. But the real problem with WP is something that has nothing to do with LAMP or PHP, and in fact is shared with a lot of modern web architectures:  HTML designs must be crammed into templates. That is unncessary and costly, and eventually I think most web app frameworks will move to a templates-free structure.)