Haiku

She smiles and looks
I notice and return glance
I was not her choice

The silence speaks words
I listen and wait for her
Her words can't be heard

Silence is not golden
It cannot be heard by us
You're the only one

There is no us just
You and I but We are Us
And we combined

Their words sting sometimes
I salve the hurt with your love
I don't hurt any more

It is just a trick
My heart tells me it is real
My love's a fierce beast

It's tender but bold
Mess it up and it's deadly
It protects our love

It never hurts you
You are free and so is love
Beasts protect freedom

You choose my pure heart
I've been waiting a long time
You've been there all along

My fear is nought pure
It yields before my courage
You've learnt my faith true

I'm nought lone with her
Her tender kiss at distance
Her words can be felt

© Copyright 2011-2025 Brian Joseph Johns

Dreams: Believing Is Seeing 2012

For foolishness and what it seems
It often fires the fuel of dreams
It doesn't take much if you try
To touch the ground; to reach the sky

We sail its waves all through the day
At night we break it all away
Its sturdy when we hold on tight
Its fringes furled with aether' slight

Beyond its shores we come alive
Without bounds whence do we thrive
Where shapes become and come undone
Potential manifest in the eyes of years

Coincidence and circumstance
The shaping of a notion
Visions seen all through mind's eye:

The cerebral quantum ocean

© Copyright 2012 Brian Joseph Johns

Some Software I'd Like To See

Hello everyone, I'm back from the underworld for another blog entry here in my micro paradise of prose.

Every once in a while I sit down and want to do something or have a hankering to try something different on the computer, in terms education and entertainment. The more you can get out of a program in terms of what you take with you when you are away from it, the better it is. To better illustrate what I'm, talking about, here is what I am talking about.

Some programs that I'd like to see in the near future if not already:

1. Physical Training Programs For Kinect
   
   There are some great programs available for Microsoft Kinect that address physical activity in many different venues from the ever popular dancing software titles (of which Kinect Star Wars Dance Off is perhaps the funniest and my favourite). Software that measures dance form and technique is what I am talking about.
   
   There are other dance titles as well. Nike has a physical training program that evaluates your form as you exercise and grades you, making it a great stand alone trainer or a stand in for your real world trainer but never as a complete replacement for a human trainer. Such technology can augment a real world training program by allowing you to receive expert advice and analysis of your form while practicing in your living space. Physical trainers of the future will likely utilize such technology quite often as outlined in this One that I would really like to see is a trainer for elements of practice in Martial Arts exercise programs that focus on fitness, form and technique with grading for evaluation of katas (you might need a bit of room for some katas). One such contender is a program called Virtual Sensei, which uses time and motion analysis to rate an athletic performance of the performance of a student's moves in terms of martial arts. The developer has a great resource for the subject so if you are into it, check it out!
   
   
2. Fashion Business Game
   
   How about a video game that simulates the Fashion Industry and running a fashion business with elements of design and business smarts incorporated into the game?
   
   
   There is one such game called Fashion Tycoon which looks promising and maybe they need the attention of a publishing house to push it into the some of the appropriate distribution networks. It appears to incorporate all of the business aspects to building and running a multi-million dollar fashion business with every aspect including clothing, cosmetics and fragrances. As I haven't tried this software it would be interesting to see if it actually incorporates design elements into the software as well as that aspect of such a piece of software as there is already a huge community of fashion related modding for just about every game imaginable. Vanity is a great form of communicating and conveying information about yourself, your interests and your current mood to others in and out of social circle, your partner or a potential partner. Virtual vanity has incredible potential in future markets, where our identities online will have as much impact as our physical ones, if not more. That is why they are both so important to protect.
   
   
   
   

Two Pianos For The Price Of One

Two Pianos For The Price Of One - Support Your Local Community Drop In Centre

Greets to everyone. Just thought I'd pop this onto to here as I am keeping all the good stuff here and the gripes elsewhere. It began as part of a gripe and I thought "this deserves mention on the good blog" as I have to spend time appreciating good things like this.

I decided to support a local social program seeing as I spouted off about supporting community business and social programs by going out and spending every once in while. If times are tight then budget comes first. If you are confined to your house via mobility problems, then order in every once in while. Its good for you and importantly its good for the community. I decided to put my money where my mouth is and went to the local community drop in center. Much to my surprise, they two pianos which was awesome as I haven't played a real piano in years (as much as I love my keyboard which I can make sound like just about any instrument, but its nice to hear it played by a real player with the real instrument when one is available) and I honestly love the feel and action of a piano keyboard, and that was awesome and I thanked the staff for the opportunity. 

I played music for about an hour and a half, a mixture or jazz covers, some blues improv and some rock covers and then went to use the computer after feeling pretty good. Very nice pianos. One was an apartment sized upright, with a light to the touch action, making it great for dextrous playing and other high speed maneuvers. Nice for the ballads as well, with very nice action and little resistance. The second one, an older and much more worn full sized upright had the full action and character reminiscent of its appearance. It looked like someone could have taken it from a barrelhouse in the 1920s.

Both were in tune, though I the elder had the right amount of detuning to make it ideal for honky tonk and blues piano, and had the character to back it up, with chipped keys and the occasional lower register keys out of tune just enough to remind me that it had been around the block a few times before I had probably learned how to walk. The apartment sized piano had a nice crystal clear sound with good resonance considering the size of its acoustic chamber compared to other. I could tell that I probably could have put it out of tune in about a couple hours of playing if I wasn't light handed enough on the action. 

Definitely a great piano for those who are used to the world of synths and midi controllers, as the action is reminiscent of the weighted action of a weighted midi controller. I've been into this stuff for a long time, and I'm not speaking through someone else or "stealing" the credit of knowing about these things from someone else. I've been a midi user since before the General Midi spec existed and before Stevie Wonder did his first promotions for EMU's parallel interface, a competitor with the MIDI spec that lost out because of the limited cable length allowance for the EMU parallel cables (around 15-25') versus 100' for MIDI's serial version. EMU still made some great samplers though. I used to love pushing out prophet 5 patches onto a tape deck (which stored the patch information so you could reload it before a gig or in the studio) when I was 12 years old. (No Pinnochio there either).

There's a kitchen as well and they serve coffee and a great lunch and snacks.

The pianos won my support right away! Support the programs there by dropping in:

650 Queen St. E.
Toronto, Ontario

West of Broadview Ave and East of the Don Valley Parkway.

For all you pianoless piano players out there, and if you want guitar lessons, apparently they have a great guitar class there. So drop in and talk to the great staff there.