Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
–Thomas Edison

I don’t like this quote. For starters, Thomas Edison was a rotten human being – so his advice is questionable at best.

I also dislike the quote because it’s incorrect. Genius is not solely a function of working hard. Genius is a function of many factors, including working smart. (Edison clearly didn’t get this, as evidenced by how much time he wasted on obviously bad ideas.)

I may not be a genius, but many brilliant people have offered better advice than Edison. For example, I prefer this quote:

This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name
– “Remember the Name” by Fort Minor

(When it comes to “inspiration”, Mike Shinoda is far more qualified to comment than Edison. My $0.02.)

I have found the creative process to be much closer to the 10+20+15+5+50 rule. Working hard is important – to be sure – but it’s just one small part of the puzzle. If you want to maximize creativity, a certain amount of luck, skill, training, planning, research, and education is required. (Case in point: Edison’s utter failure in promoting direct current (DC) for general power distribution. To quote the aforementioned wiki article: “Edison was a brute-force experimenter, but was no mathematician. AC cannot be properly understood or exploited without a substantial understanding of mathematics and mathematical physics, which Tesla possessed.” Said another way – Edison could work his ass off, but all the experimentation in the world couldn’t replace the need for education.)

So to summarize: genius – and by extension, creativity – is not about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It’s a complex interaction between many factors, including some that can be controlled (research, perspiration, education) and some that cannot (luck, innate talent).

As a supplement to the 10+20+15+5+50 rule, I’ve noticed that my creative process operates like a pendulum – a pendulum swinging between inspiration and perspiration. I’ll periodically experiences bursts of inspiration where I can create without effort; whether it’s music or programming or writing, the good ideas flow unabated when the pendulum hits the “inspiration” apex of its arc.

Then the pendulum swings the other way, and I have to apply a great deal of perspiration to sort out and clean up ideas from the creative stage. This stage seems to represent the “50% pain” component… but it’s pain well-spent. For writing, this is the editing stage. With music, it’s orchestrating and remastering. Programming requires optimizing, debugging, and commenting.

Any good idea requires a certain amount of effort before it can be transformed into something concrete. Even Edison understood that.

Why this sudden analysis of the creative process? Because after a year+ worth of “perspiration time”, the pendulum has finally started its swing back to the inspiration side. WOOHOO!

In other words, here is what’s coming to THDC in the coming months.

Writing

Teal, my CC-licensed science fiction novel, is complete.  Yes, you read that right – as far as the text is concerned, Teal is 100% finished.  A surprise manuscript request from a superb agent motivated me to crank on the manuscript and finish up the final round of edits.  (I may want to double-check the last few chapters, since I finished them around 4:00 in the morning… but that shouldn’t take long. :)

With the text and cover design complete, all that’s left is a bit of polish on the manuscript design and Teal will be ready for publication.  I don’t know who will publish it (Amazon? a traditional publishing company?)… I guess it hinges on what the aforementioned agent thinks of the manuscript.  Either way, I should have a better idea several weeks from now.

Until I hear otherwise, I’ll continue posting a chapter a week online.  PDF downloads of the novel have slowly picked up steam (400-ish so far), while several thousand individuals have taken a look at the various online chapters.  I don’t have a great way of tracking specific paths through the chapters, but the most popular chapter (Chapter 12) has received ~700 hits… so between pdfs and online views, I think it’s safe to say at least a thousand people have read a good portion of the book.  Considering that the average self-published book sells somewhere between 50 and 150 copies, I find this to be an encouraging number of “reads” for being online only three months.  I still haven’t begun work on a coordinated advertising campaign for the online copy… but depending on how the next few weeks go, it may be time to start on that.  We’ll see what happens.

Many thanks to everyone who has already donated and/or submitted feedback for Teal.  Your contributions are invaluable!

Music

As I’ve discussed before, I’ve got big plans for the music available on this site.  Those plans have already led to good things – for example, 2010 has already seen the addition of seven new songs (more than the last several years combined).

I’ve also spent this year remastering all the music currently available for download.  This has been… well, a TON more work than I anticipated.  Producing music that plays properly across a huge range of devices and formats is surprisingly complicated.  It has taken a great deal of research (and many false-starts), but I finally have a very nice step-by-step process for producing professional-quality audio.  Maybe someday I’ll condense the process into a nice online guide…

However, all this remastering has led to an interesting quandary – what’s the best way to get music into the hands (ears?) of potential listeners?  Posting all my mp3/Ogg/MIDIs on this site is a good start, but it’s not very efficient in terms of overall exposure.

So I’m working on something better.

Step one is getting all the music to professional quality.  This is happening… it’s happening slowly, but it’s happening.  This includes a huge amount of pre- and post-production work, but the process culminates in a delightfully robust FLAC file that can be converted to any format imaginable (mp3s and Oggs as far as this site is concerned).  So far, seven songs have been completed.  Seven out of ~fifty.  <sigh>  Fortunately, I’m getting more and more proficient with every track, so hopefully the process will accelerate.

The remastering process has also led to a number of non-sound issues – for example, how to best tag finished files.  What album title(s) should be used?  What about track numbers? Do songs need album art? (I think they do.)

These questions led to the realization that I need to be more organized with how I present my music.  To that end, I’m going to be releasing my music as part of three very official albums.

Awesome, right? I’m very happy with how the album art turned out.  Each album cover is 100% designed by me, and that means each one has been produced using nothing but FOSS (go GIMP!).  I even had to write my own software for the “Songs from an American Video Game” cover, because I couldn’t find a way to automate a mosaic effect of progressively shrinking tiles…

As part of the album art, I wanted to utilize at least one piece of recurring symbology.  After many attempts, I settled on this logo:

For those without musical experience, that’s three bass clefs (or F-clefs) superimposed over each other.  I plan on working this logo into all future musical endeavors.  Exciting stuff!

As for the albums themselves, the plan is to distribute my songs according to the following criteria:

• My most popular downloads and personal favorites will end up in “Songs from an American Video Game.”  If all goes as planned, I’m going to formally release this as a legit album – e.g. you’ll be able to purchase a CD of it and/or download it from online music stores.  The songs will continue to be available for free on this site, but purchase of a CD will provide a great way to support the site as well as share the music with others.
• Any original compositions not appearing in “Songs from an American Video Game” will be placed in the “THDC Originals” album.  These songs may eventually be moved into another album… but all new releases and “miscellaneous” tracks will live here.
• Remixes will obviously be placed in the “THDC Remixes” album.  I’m quite happy with the artwork for this – it’s clearly a remixed image of the original.  Get it?  ;)  I’d love to include some remixes in the “Songs from an American Video Game” album, but until I can work out copyright issues in a CC-license-pleasing manner, I have no choice but to leave them off anything involving physical media.

The idea of releasing formal albums – including at least one in CD form – gets me very excited.  It also motivates me to continue working through the horribly mind-numbing process of remastering my entire music collection!

In other, less exciting news, I have finally built an intelligent backend into my blog for automatically posting new music.  Rather than manually creating links to uploaded music files, music articles are now smart enough to scan for music files themselves.  Download links are automatically populated for MIDI, mp3, Ogg, and FLAC files when available.  This allows me to upload remastered music and make it immediately available for download with minimal work on my part – a MUCH better solution than manually re-editing every music article when changes are made.

As for when these albums and/or remastered tracks will be available… good question.  Hehe.  I’m still torn between uploading new tracks individually or in large chunks.

Regardless, I’ll post some sort of article or notification once new music goes live.

Programming

While I don’t have as much exciting information for the programming section of THDC, at least one major change has already happened – all code is now available in two forms: a source-code only zip file, and a source code + executable zip file.  This is a better solution for many reasons (including security).  All zip files have been edited with README files, improved commenting, and removal of any licensing terms that conflict with the all-encompassing BSD license now covering my programming work.

I also have two new programming projects ready for upload, and hopefully a few more will wrap up before the end of the year.

Tanner Helland (dot) Com

Depending on how often you frequent the site, you may have already noticed a host of small changes.  This week consisted of rebuilding the header, including moving the search bar to the sidebar.  I realize that the header looks painfully bare now, but fear not – that’s on purpose.

I’m currently working on a redesign of the entire header area, and it’ll include some awesome original artwork.  (And not abstract artwork, like the album covers above – this will be concrete forms and characters!)  I have no idea when it will be finished, but you’ll know when it is because the site will look very different.  :)

Over the last six months, I’ve also spent a ton of time cleaning up the site backend.  Besides the automated scanning feature for music (and an identical one for programming project download links), I’ve slowly cleaned out unnecessary code and restyled things to better match the orange/blue theme I’m working toward.  I’ve also switched to a better caching engine, which should decrease load times for most visitors.

There are many improvements left to make (converting standalone images to sprites is next on the checklist), but overall things are heading in the right direction.

In Summary…

In case you haven’t noticed, I like staying busy.  :)  I hope this new, more orderly approach helps me be better about working “smart” instead of just working “hard.”

Also, I should mention that there is one area where I disagree with Shinoda’s take on the creative process – in my opinion, the adventure is 50% pleasure and 5% pain. That 5% really sucks, but the 50% more than makes up for it.

Hopefully some of the new projects will contribute to your 50%!

I’m finally getting around to posting a follow-up, so for those interested – here’s how tannerhelland.com traffic has grown over the last 18 months.

Tanner Helland (dot) Com visitor and unique visitor counts, by quarter

Two interesting trends stand out to me:

• First, I am excited about the steady growth of visitors.  (Note that this chart shows human visits – bots aren’t included.)
• Less exciting (to me) is an ongoing decrease in the site’s unique visitor / total visitor ratio.  In the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2009, the number of visits per visitor hovered between 2.5 and 2.6, implying that most site visitors returned at least once or twice.  In the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2010, this ratio has dropped to less than 1.4 – implying that the majority of visitors only visit once.  While this isn’t inherently bad – especially considering that most of tannerhelland.com’s traffic is search-generated – it could certainly be better with some work on my part.

Another interesting metric is the site’s ratio of visits and pageviews:

Tanner Helland (dot) Com visitors and pageviews, by quarter

As you can see, the average tannerhelland.com visitor looks at quite a few pages on a given visit.  The pages/visitor ratio hasn’t changed significantly over time (it peaked at 5.2 in 4th Q ’09 and is currently 4.8), possibly because the site hosts a number of multi-part articles.

Next comes a chart for pageviews and hits.  Hits represent any file pulled from the site – so a single page could easily represent multiple hits once all the images, stylesheets, and accompanying .js files are counted:

Tanner Helland (dot) Com pageviews and hits, by quarter

My hits/page ratio has grown over time (from 4.8 last winter to 6.6 this spring), thanks in part to the addition of more icons and images to most of my posts.  I’d like to work this number back down as part of an increased emphasis on site optimization, which should benefit those of you browsing the site from mobile devices or (gasp!) still stuck on dial-up.

Finally, here’s how much bandwidth the site has served up over the last 18 months:

Tanner Helland (dot) Com bandwidth, by quarter

I try to keep the bandwidth down whenever possible (particularly when it comes to images), but some growth is an inevitable side-effect of more visitors and more content.  I hope it doesn’t skyrocket too much when I make FLAC versions of my music available for download… ;)

Before ending this article, I wanted to share some fun site stats for the year ending 2009:

• The busiest day of the week for visitors was Friday, but the busiest day for bandwidth (e.g. music and code downloads) was Sunday.
• Visitors came from 167 different countries.  The top five countries were United States, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, and France.
• Average time per visit was 4 minutes 46 seconds.
• In 2009, roughly 16 .zip files, 6 mp3s, and 3 midis were downloaded daily from the site.  So far in 2010, those numbers have increased to 26 .zip files, 31 mp3s, and 4 midis a day.  (People prefer mp3s to midis?  Who knew!  :p)
• In 2009, my most popular article was “The Only Feature Ubuntu 10.04 Needs” – 23,416 views in total.
• 55.5% of my visitors used Windows, 34.4% used Linux, and 6.2% used Macs.  I had 1 hit – just one – from an OS/2 machine.  300 hits came from Wiis.
• 55.8% of my visitors used Firefox.  Another 19.9% used IE, 7.8% used Chrome, 3.7% used Opera, and 3.6% used Safari.

To all who visit the site – I hope you find something you like!  If you have any suggestions for improving the site or its content, please let me know.

(THAT sounds narcissistic)

Many apologies for the momentary bout of RSS “spam” in tannerhelland.com feeds.  I’ve been working on integrating my Twitter and WordPress accounts (which should eventually lead to more quality content both places).  An unfortunate side-effect is that once everything got connected, a bunch of Twitter posts got sucked into WordPress, making it look like there were TONS of new posts.  To make matters worse, WordPress has trouble assigning intelligent titles to tweets – especially if the tweet starts with a URL – so it makes the RSS look full of gibberish.  I’m working on a system to remedy that.

I promise this won’t happen again, although as I fix some of the terrible auto-generated titles your reader may get confused and think these are yet more new posts.  Sorry in advance!  :)

At any rate, several months of inactivity doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about the site. A number of improvements to the site’s layout are in the works (note the new icons top-right, for example), and I’ve got some cool projects just about ready for uploading:

• Two cool new VB projects (one game, one graphics) are in the final stages of “clean-up”
• Newly equalized mp3s for all my music – which will make them WAY more mp3-player-friendly
• If all goes according to plan, a re-licensing of my first novel under a CC license, which would allow me to release it online for your reading pleasure. (This is something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile.)

Along with these updates are some back-end site improvements you (hopefully) won’t notice, which should make it easier for me to update the site. I’m hoping that will motivate me to post more regularly, and if nothing else it will simplify the process of getting content off my hard drive and into your hands. :)

So pardon the dust as the site undergoes some much-needed updates, and look forward to a 2010 chock full of new and improved content.

I’ll spare you the gory details, but I obviously decided against that career path.  Today I am employed as a scientist by day and writer by night (with the occasional dabble in music composition and/or programming).

I’m glad I made the choice I did.

Many things deterred me from pursuing IP law, not least of which is the fact that current IP laws are a bane upon consumers.  From DRM to software patents to P2P throttling, the digital world is consistently held back by ignorant, consumer-unfriendly corporation-sponsored lawmaking.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with the joke called DRM – one of the silliest inventions of the modern era.

As a strong supporter of the EFF and a believer that the DMCA is severely flawed, it’s a bit of a shame that it took me so long to make tannerhelland.com copyleft friendly…but better late then never, right?

You’ll notice two main changes to the site as of this week.

1) All tannerhelland.com music is now available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. In layman’s terms, this means that anyone can remix, tweak, and build upon these songs – even for commercial reasons – as long as they credit me and license their creations under identical terms.

So please – download the complete tannerhelland.com music collection and share it with everyone you know!

2) All source code available on tannerhelland.com is now available under a BSD License.  I settled on the BSD license after a fair amount of research, and I strongly feel it is the best fit for the style and type of code I provide.  A BSD License allows unlimited redistribution of code for any purpose, provided all copyright notices and disclaimers of warranty are maintained.  Also, my name may not be used for endorsement of a derived work without specific permission.

Importantly, the BSD license also allows my code to be incorporated into proprietary commercial products – including closed-source products.  This clause is quite important to me.  While I admire the GPL/LGPL and similar licenses – and feel they play a very important role in the software ecosystem – I also understand that many programmers make a living writing closed-source software.  I want all the code on this site to be freely usable by anyone, including those who write closed-source software for a living.  My code and tutorials are meant to be educational and informative, and I hope they help as many programmers as possible to solve otherwise difficult problems.

As always, if you would like to use any site content (music, source code, or others) under a license other than what is explicitly stated on the content’s page, please contact me.

In the meantime, I would strongly recommend learning more about the EFF and the service(s) they provide.  Also, Creative Commons has an excellent site with boatloads of information on sharing your work without sacrificing ownership or copyrights.

I’ve had a change of heart.

I’ll spare you the gory details, but lately I have developed major reservations about Google.  I know many of you think Google is the benevolent dictator of the internet – but there is nothing benevolent about them.  Google is an enemy to freedom, an enemy to open source, an enemy to free-market competition, and unless people stop turning a blind eye to them it’s only a matter of time before they do to the greater internet what Microsoft did to the OS market – monopolize it, then make it suck.

In lieu of a lengthy rant from me, this famous blog entry a good place to read about some of Google’s problems (and though the article is 3 years old, it remains relevant today): http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/060313-161500.

I’ll write more about the Googlemonster in coming weeks, but first things first.

I am removing all things Google from this blog.  That includes analytics and adsense.  I’m not sure why I put adsense on this site in the first place.  Mostly I was hoping to make enough in ad revenue to cover server costs, but I no longer think that is a valid trade.  Instead, I will be looking at donation options to pay for future hosting costs.  No longer will I allow MY corner of the internet to be littered with nonsensical google crap, and I apologize for imposing useless ads upon visitors for the last 6 months.

As part of these changes, some layout changes may be necessary to redistribute site content more aesthetically.  (This is especially true for the homepage.)  If you’ve been using Adblock Plus for Firefox, I suppose nothing will change…but that’s okay!  Hehe.

As always, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more Google-specific rants.  I have quite a few of them stored up… :)

I know, I know – it’s been (literally) years since I made any updates to my music entries, but in all fairness I’ve been a busy man.  Working full-time, writing a 400 page novel, and being married to my best friend all consume a lot of time.

But no more excuses!  I’ve finished my novel and am currently working on signing up an agent, so with my newfound free time I’m working on updating my poor, forgotten music.

Here’s how this is going to work.

Starting with my earliest music entries, I’m rewriting each song description/article.  The old descriptions were thrown together in haste, then cut-and-pasted from T.H.I.S. (Tanner Helland Independent Sound, my old music studio), and they are in desperate need of a rewrite.  So first things first, the descriptions are being rewritten.  (This includes writing proper excerpts so song pages aren’t useless on the search results screen.)

Next, I am tweaking and fine-tuning the MIDIs for all MIDI-based songs.  This includes remixing most of my drum tracks, stripping out dissonant notes, and cleaning up sloppy orchestration.  This is the most time-consuming step of the process and most of you probably won’t even notice these little changes.

But that’s okay, because you will notice the final step in my revamp process.

The final step is to produce all MIDIs with full soundfont orchestration.  Previously, most of my MIDIs were generated with the default XP soundfont, leaving them sounding tinny, synthesized, and weak.  While professional soundfonts aren’t quite up to par with a real orchestra/rock band (obviously), they are markedly better than the default XP soundfont – and the corresponding difference in my music will be huge.  For example, check out Ominosity (old mp3 and new mp3) and Surreptitious (old mp3 and new mp3).  Notice the difference?

As each song is updated, the old mp3 will be renamed as <songname>_old.mp3 if you’d like to compare versions.  Otherwise, keep an eye out for updates as I work my way through my large music repository.

I am also looking into licensing all my music under a Creative Commons license, which I think would be a great move.  I’ll let you know if this formally happens.

Finally, if you’ve never listened to any of my music, now would be a good time!  :)  Here are some of my favorite tracks to get you started:

Bloody Tears (Castlevania II Remix)

Leaving Millie

Retribution

FFVII – Aerith’s Theme (Remix for Solo Piano)

And – dare I say it – once all my existing songs have been updated, you may even get to see some all-new, totally original music.

<gasp>

Stay tuned!

Totally Revamped Site Search

The normal WordPress search function leaves a lot to be desired – but with the help of a couple excellent plugins, you can turn blog searches into something surprisingly intuitive and useful.  Some of this site’s recent updates include:

• Tags, categories, URLs, meta data, and comments are now searchable.
• Search terms are now highlighted, and appropriate excerpts are shown on the search results screen.
• Search results are sorted by relevance – not date.
• Searches that return multiple pages now have a “jump to page” feature (unlike the former “previous page” and “next” page only).

Iconified Links

Outgoing links now have a Wikipedia-like icon (like so), and each outgoing link will spawn a new tab/window.  Links to downloadable files will also show an appropriate icon, (i.e. zips or mp3s).

Improved VB Code Zips

A good chunk of this site is dedicated to game programming, so I’ve taken the time to go through each code .zip file and clean it up.  Now each .zip includes a README file, proper comments, and the most up-to-date version of my award-winning FastGraphics class (which gives easy access to DIB sections).  I’ve also removed useless files (like .vbw) to keep .zip sizes down.

Minor Aesthetic Changes

Some small aesthetic changes have crept onto the site, including more use of orange (orange is a grossly underutilized web color, IMO), some font adjustments (to make titles more readable), and the addition of a new “Now Playing” box in the top-right.  I figure this will provide a fun insight into my eclectic music collection.  :)

SEO galore

This feature has mostly happened behind-the-scenes, but I’m happy to say that SEO most definitely works.  After several weeks of research and behind-the-scenes tweaking, this site now plays much friendlier with search bots.  As a result, traffic from searches has more than quadrupled in the last month, and my hope is that it continues to grow.  More traffic = more advertising revenue = a bigger and better site for everyone.

***

Many thanks to all my visitors for your interest and comments, and I hope to have some big, exciting announcements in the next couple weeks.  Stay tuned!

Though I was late getting this up, here’s what the stats for 2008 looked like (as collected by the excellent AWStats tool).

2008 was a big year for the site.  After living on free hosting services for almost ten years, tannerhelland.com finally found a real home on a real server (woohoo!).  Rather than static html, the site is now driven by WordPress, and the visual layout is currently derived from the excellent “The Morning After” theme by Arun Kale.  My previous disparate music, programming, and personal blog sites have all been condensed into one messy whole – and I like it.  A lot.

This is what a day on the
frontpage of Digg can do
to your site traffic.

As you can see above, from when the new site launched in August through December 31st, some 20,000 visitors hit the site.  A massive chunk of this (over half) came when my R.I.P. Windows XP article went frontpage on Digg.  What’s funny is that this is one of my least original posts (it’s really more of a rant), and I had absolutely no idea that the article had gone frontpage until I checked my email the next day and had page after page of angry/congratulatory/sarcastic/friendly emails.  I learned a lot from that experience, and subsequent posts have been more carefully constructed…

One of my goals for the coming year is to double each of these stats.  I’d like to see closer to 30,000 unique visitors in 2009, and it’d be great if the number of visits per visitor could get bumped closer to 2.0.  Part of the way I plan to accomplish this is with a renewed emphasis on regular posting (which I hope you’ve enjoyed!) and a host of SEO changes, along with the continual addition of content from my old programming and music sites.  It’s all a work in progress, but hey – at least it’s progressing!

Also, in the coming weeks my general article content will be shifting somewhat. Stay tuned for details – and thanks for visiting.  If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed of your choice at the very bottom of this page!

• tannerhelland.com finally has a real home.  2008 marked the merging of all my previous sites into one cohesive whole.   (I know, I know – “it’s about time!”)
• 2008 was the last year I used a Microsoft OS.  I made the switch to Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux and absolutely love it.
• 2008 was the year I finally picked up a PS3.  It’s a beautiful device.
• For the first time in 20+ years, 2008 was my first school-free year.  Being done with university has been GREAT, and being able to “just work” for an entire year was a godsend.  In fact, the only things I miss from university life are student tax breaks.
• 2008 was the year I officially became an author.  The year started with placement as a semifinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) competition, and hopefully 2009 will be the year that my first novel finds a home with a major publisher.  In the meantime, pick up an advance copy of the book at http://www.createspace.com/3341273.
  

2008 was a great year, and 2009 looks to be even better.  Hopefully you can say the same.  :)

Happy New Year!