Phil Christensen
Esotericist Extraordinare
Enjoy my extra-minimalist webpage!

Projectification 		I was in attendance of a lovely dinner party in celebration of a friend's birthday. As is common at such gatherings, the large group broke up into smaller factions, each holding their own conversation. Thinking myself to be a cool conversationalist, I joined one of them. To this day I cannot remember the subject matter, only that when I spoke, someone else's words left my mouth. Unable to control my voice, I found I began shouting, without any care as to who heard me, or the scene I was making. It seemed that I needed some time to myself, so I made a retreat to the restroom. After collecting my thoughts, I returned to the party, only to find that in my absence, the guests in attendance had all transformed into brain-sucking monsters. Unable to stand the sight of them, I left, and, walking in the cold night air, tried to understand what was causing this breakdown of my senses.

you have always been here

Much of my time is spent working on projects for my consulting company, Bubblehouse Industries. However, I do enjoy spontaneous programming exercises from time to time:

  • SoundGlue - A perl script to convert between some file formats common to the etree network, namely, to convert SHNs and FLACs to MP3s. Requires the free command-line utilities flac, shorten, and ffmpeg.
  • ftpretry - A perl script to assist in downloading live music from the etree network. This uses curl to connect to an ftp server and download a directory, after retrying with a user-specified delay. Requires the CPAN module Term::Prompt.
  • linksys-dhs-update - A perl script that grabs your IP address from a LinkSys BEFSR41 Cable/DSL router and updates your dhs.org dynamic address with it. Neato.
  • wabi.cgi - my first foray into the realm of Python programming. Kinda similar to the Everything project, wabi.cgi is an experiment in word association and an open-source-ish web engine. Source code is available here.
  • SerialMusic.py - This is a library of functions I've written to help work with serial music procedures (such as twelve-tone serialism). This script accepts a prime row and returns the "magic matrix" for the row, which contains all the various permutations allowed in 12-tone serialism. A proof-of-concept page which aids in the creation of tone matrices is here.
  • InnerSpace - One of my passions, InnerSpace is a MUD/MOO/whatever framework. Written in Python, with a Java front end, InnerSpace integrates a multi-user code execution environment, with the intent of allowing any user to be safely given programmer's rights.
  • TwistedMatrix Labs - This group's first project was a game framework called TwistedReality. Now, TR is evolving into much more. I am an occaisional accomplice here.

i met my crush with eyeliner and she said look everybody hurts while you think have an orange crush i said star me kitten you make me feel like i belong you are the everything i knew that i was at an all time low but she made me stand i listened to the radio song and afterwards learned about the world leader pretend what could i do im not the king of comedy these strange currencies i had to deal with would bring about the end of the world as we know it (and i feel fine) i wish i could see her snake but the sidewinder sleeps tonight there were far too many shiny happy people on star 69 i was tired but i dont sleep i dream im just out of time and i can no longer document this monster im losing my religion and am no longer automatic for the people time for some new adventures in hifi thats the end of this code for fucking i was the wrong child i remember california but ill never see the man on the moon i once asked a man whats the frequency kenneth and i recieved a blank stare now i can only wish i was near wild heaven
Musicality

My one true passion, of course, is music. For a while I was in a band called Drop Box. We were a funk/jazz trio which tended to lean more towards the side of improvisational composition. I like to think we'll appear somewhere again in the near future.

  • 4-20-2000 - One of our first jam sessions, split into parts ( 1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| 8)
  • 3-9-2001 - One of our originals, called Who Stepped On Diz's Horn as performed at Old City Hall, in Oswego, NY

Drop Box was put on the backburner, basically due to the fact that I live in Central New York, and Matt and Morgan are both from downstate. So time passed and I eventually put together another trio, called sesshomaru. I don't know why this band had a website and Drop Box didn't, since sesshomaru to this date has played less shows than DB!

On a slightly different tangent, my friend Nick Munger has a great rock band called anythingbutpleased. They rock.

Miscellaneous
  • My resume in (ugh!) Microsoft Word format
ifyoucouldhearthedreamsivehadmydeartheywouldgiveyounightmaresforaweek
What's thee idea? This is thee idea: you get into your car that you bought this year on some huge mortgage scheme and will have to replace in another year or so after you've killed a few birds mammals and maybe a child or two and drive to the soopermarket past all the shops that have been put out of business by the soopermarket and park on a huge expanse of concrete that has been put on a field or a wood then walk probably furthur than you would to a corner shop and commandeer a huge trolley and go into the soopermarket and fill up the trolley with things you don't want don't need and can't afford then have an argument with whoever you're with because the whole experience is beginning to destroy you and then you queue up behind a line of similarly soul-damaged people then a poor unfortunate kid or pensioner who probably dreams in bleeps reeds the barcodes on everything and doesn't want to hear you say anything and is obliged to ask you if you have a loyalty card and if you want cashback, (yes please I'll have the fucking lot back and you can keep all this crap in my trolley), then you have to cart it all back to your car and load it up in the boot and get in and get out of the garganchuan carpark then drive home through the bleak wasteland occupied only by those too poor to own a car and unload it all again into your dream home and then consume it all and when you've shat it all out you have to fucking go back again. WHAT A NIGHTMARE.
text(radiohead), voice(fred) 
     .-'~~~-.
   .'o oOOOo`.        "I am ... a mushroom
  :~~~-.oOo   o`.     On whom the dew of heaven 
   `. \ ~-.  oOOo.    drops now and then."
     `.; / ~.  OO:              - John Ford
     .'  ;-- `.o.'
    ,' ; ~~--'~       phil-spam@bubblehouse.org
    ;  ; 
_\\;_\\//_
Okay, it could have been more minimalist. But would it have still been functional as well?