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| So we cruised next to a hurricane... it was a little ridiculous, and very rainy.
While we were in Cozumel, we got off the boat, despite the downpour going on. I had my computer and ipod in my backpack... which was really in no way enough to keep the water off. So both of those things got kinda wet... especially the ipod, which stopped working for a day. Fortunately it started working again... I guess they're pretty good at making electronics that purposely don't work until everything's dry so that nothing gets ruined.
My computer got a little wet, but the metal case is pretty good for not letting just a little on the outside do much. My battery is charging extremely slowly however... actually it says "not charging", though I discovered it actually does eventually. At some point I'm gonna see if I can find a screwdriver and check to make sure nothing inside needs to dry off some more or whatever. In any case, it's just a minor inconvenience anyway.
Oh, so I discovered just the other day that there are non-state-but-still-in-the-US quarters now. I got an American Samoa quarter, and was just kinda like... what??? So yeah... guess I got some more quarters to look for :)
Oh what else... I dunno... got direct deposit set up, which is good, cause getting 1200 in cash every other week would be awkward.
I dunno, I guess that's all for now.
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| So I recently got a MacBook Pro.
I already have a windows computer that still works, but the motherboard is a bit messed up, causing it to crash for any or no reason... and it’s a desktop, which doesn’t exactly easily fly and carry onto a ship with little space in my room. So I needed a laptop.
The next debate... windows or mac...
Side note, I had a friend who told me not to count out the other systems... and then proceeded to tell he didn’t recommend the other systems anyway haha.
Anyway, from my first sentence, obviously I chose Mac. Why? Well one reason is just so that I could at least have one of both. Not knowing what the future may hold for me in terms of a future job means not really knowing what I’m going to need to use computer-wise. Having both a mac and a windows pretty much means that I’ve got 99.9% of the stuff out there covered. In actuality that’s not the case, cause I’ve got Windows XP, so things that were made specifically for Vista might not work... but whatever, you get the idea.
And actually I took a section of my hard drive and installed windows onto it, so that way I can use either.
So now that I’ve had this computer for a month or so, and my ipod touch for half a year, there’s some things I’ve noticed about Apple...
They’re all about being pretty. It sometimes disguises a program as being able to do more than it actually can.
Let’s take iWeb for example... watch the intro and it looks great! Easily make a great-looking web page! But you can only use .mac (something like that) locations. And what about existing web pages? Nope, you can’t do anything with them. I was in charge of the Hawkapella website the past maybe year and a half... iWeb would’ve done nothing for me.
iMovie: Ok, so I have dealt extremely little with video stuff, largely due to very rarely having a video camera... but with the built-in webcam, I can actually deal with video now if I want. One thing in particular I can imagine I could use quite a bit is recording myself doing multiple parts to music (a cappella songs anyone?).
So let’s take a look at the iMovie intro... cool, you can use transitions and such... and put music on top... and even put a second video in a section of the screen...
Then I tried what I thought would be really simple: making a video that has me singing the 4 parts to a barbershop tag. Recorded the bass, then played it back while recording the baritone part. Off to iMovie to see if could get them to share the screen...
Well sure, I can add the baritone video to the bass video... but then it’s covering part of the bass video... I couldn’t figure out how to actually make the starting video smaller!
What I ended up having to do was just deal with it partially covered, export it as a video, then plop it in as it’s own single video and put the bass part in again, this time able to be small and in another corner. Export it as a video again, plop it in again, put the lead part in another corner, export it again, plop it in again, put the tenor part in the final corner. Done, but for such a simple task, it took an awful lot. (Any tips on better ways to do it would be appreciated)
GarageBand: Ok, so I’m a ProTools user. Unfortunately, as of two weeks ago, they have yet to create a ProTools that works with this newest system of Mac. Which means that until they do/until I have time to download it, I have to settle for GarageBand.
Coming from ProTools, GarageBand is just kinda like... what the heck is this? At least my mbox 2 mini works with it... but it just doesn’t match up software-wise.
I had audio that was in “stereo”, but actually the sound was only out of the left channel. Could I split the halves up into two separate mono channels? Nope...
What the heck, why not?
And I want to briefly mention Numbers as well. Start up a new “blank” spreadsheet, and... what’s this? Why are the first column and row shaded? Did I say I wanted them shaded? I thought this was supposed to be “blank”... Most of the time I use spreadsheets for my own purposes, and it’s not necessarily the very first column and row that I want to stand out.
Can you do a lot with a Mac? Well, sure... just as long as it’s stuff that Apple has said you can do. Can you imagine if everybody made videos using the setups and transitions in iMovie? Or webpages using the templates in iWeb? Everything would start to look the same really really quickly.
Now on the ipod touch and iphone, there’s this awesome game called Tap Tap Revenge. The maker, Tapulous, has released quite a number of apps now, most recently Tap Tap Revenge 3. Some months ago, an employee of Tapulous guest lectured at a Stanford iPhone developer programming class. The videos of that class are all available for free in iTunes, so I decided to check out her talk. It was very informative.
One thing I want to particularly notice is that she mentioned how much Apple is about looks. If you make an iphone program that visually goes along with the whole Mac scheme of things, Apple is more likely to promote you. She also mentioned that one of the things they need to accomplish as a company is to make the product look really nice, without compromising too much on performance.
And this is one of the big things about Tap Tap Revenge 2 (and 3 from what I hear). TTR2 looks really awesome! And then as you play more and more you discover... oh, my game just lagged? And then later... um... I definitely tapped there, so why didn’t it register? Similar games without such flashy graphics seem to do much better in terms of registering taps and such.
Apple is good stuff... but far from ideal. I even had the Mac equivalent of a “blue screen of death”, in the form of a panic message that gives you even less info than the windows message does.
But as my friend said... there is no great system... it’s just about choosing from the lesser of the evils.
What do you think? Is Apple too based on appearances?
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| Greetings from Miami!
Yes, that would mean I have officially left for my new job :)
A number of people seem to be interested in keeping up with what I'm doing, so I decided to create another xanga to specifically be about my job. So I'll write something new there soon: theshipblog.xanga.com
So the past couple weeks I spent visiting people, and I gotta say, it was great!!! Went down to Regent University in Virginia Beach to visit Rachael, stopped by in Delaware to visit Whitney, and then Rachael's mom, up to Penn State with Cindy to visit some of the many HHS kids there (included watching a blue band rehearsal), then up to Hartford to chill with the new Hawkapella, as well as some other good friends still at school there, up to Springfield, MA to visit Matt T, over to south of Boston to see Steph, went to Alyssa's wedding and saw many more Hartford people, including a lot who have also already graduated. This last thing was particularly fun. It felt like we were back to IVCF 4 years ago, and we got to hang out for a while after the wedding as well :)
Thanks everybody! | | |
| Wrote this for a class last semester. I actually really enjoyed writing it, so I thought I'd share it with you :) This was called a Music and Me Inventory, and we had some guideline questions to try and answer concerning what music is to us, and this is what I came up with: [xanga-friendly links included, and additional notes in brackets]
Music is, and always has been, very much a part of my life. I grew up in a family of musicians. My mom and dad were music education majors in college, and both currently teach music, while my two siblings and I all play multiple instruments as well. Being around the house, music could often be heard, whether it was my mom playing piano for fun, any of us kids practicing some instrument, or one of my parents teaching a lesson. This is excluding, of course, any records, cassette tapes, or CDs that might be playing, or perhaps music on TV in some way.
My personal music instruction actually began very early on. When I was four and a half years old, I began taking piano lessons using the Suzuki method, which is basically all about learning to play by ear at first. In the many years since, I’ve learned to read music, and along the way have picked up many other instruments, including French horn, guitar, electric bass, and miscellaneous others. There wasn’t exactly a point where I started singing, but I’ve really been doing so as long as I can remember. Whether it’s for a purpose, or with my family randomly, or just for my own amusement, I love singing.
Throughout the years, I’ve really enjoyed being in various musical activities, from band and chorus to musicals to just about anything accessible to me. My experiences in musical groups could be a paper in itself. It will probably suffice to say that a rather significant portion of my life has been spent learning about, and experiencing playing, music.
Music is many things to me. First, I consider it so much a part of my life that’s it’s nearly essential. I don’t think I will be able to go very long in life without being part of some musical group in some way. And then, even in my other activities, I often long for music to be playing. Here and now, as I’m writing this paper, I have music playing in the background. In car trips with my family, I’m nearly always the first one to have brought music along, or request that some be turned on. It has gotten to the point where my family jokes that I can’t go 5 minutes without music. This is obviously not true, but does somewhat portray how much I enjoy having music.
Although I do, as a general rule, enjoy music, there are certainly some things I am more inclined to enjoy than others. One thing that I kind of find really odd about myself is that I’m terrible with lyrics. I can listen to a song many, many times, and have absolutely no clue what the lyrics are, let alone the meaning of the song. Then, when I do actually know the lyrics, I will likely still have no clue what the song means. I would connect this partially to being the same way with poetry. In English classes throughout school, I was never a fan of poetry units, largely because I never had any clue what all the imagery and such meant. If something is said directly, I can probably get the meaning of it, but if it goes on and on using fancy wording, I probably got lost somewhere along the way. The one thing I did enjoy about poetry was making it rhyme and have a sort of rhythm to it, which logically comes from my music background. But I believe that it is because I am not good with lyrics and meanings that I do not particularly enjoy rap music. If I were to make an over-generalization of rap music, I would say it is typically extremely repetitive as far as a musical tune and accompaniment go. Rap music is all about the lyrics and what they mean. Since that is low in significance to my mind, rap music is also somewhat low in significance. Lyrics just aren’t why I listen to music.
So why do I listen to music? Well a lot of my reasons come from enjoying good harmonies. This is one reason I love singing in a group so much. Whether it’s in chamber singers here at the Hartt school [the music school within the University of Hartford], or in my guy’s a cappella group, Hawkapella, one of the best feelings is when I’m singing part of a chord that just totally rings. When voices get in tune with each other and the harmonics line up, the music just totally has a new feeling to it. It actually extremely fascinates me how that kind of thing works. Being an acoustics major, we’ve talked briefly about tunings and timbres, but at some point I’d love to really go in depth, learning about why certain balances of a chord are better than others and the way different timbres sound with each other.
It’s not just about ringing chords though. Sometimes it can be the way two lines move relative to each other. Another big thing I’ve particularly come to appreciate in the past few years is a good chord progression. I’ve actually noticed certain chords or types of chords that I typically like. Often IV [if you don't know much about music, it could take a while for you to really understand what I'm talking about, but you can check this page out anyway] chords will particularly sound good to me. I remember listening to a song, and noticing a particular moment in the chorus that I really liked. Doing some mental theory, I figured out it was a vi chord moving to a IV chord. Since then I have noticed numerous times where there will be an awesome moment in a song, and I’ll think about the chords, and sure enough, it’s vi moving to IV. I’ve also noticed that I enjoy iii chords when they occur. With some of these cases, I wonder if maybe some of this has to do with the simple half-step differences. The only thing necessary for a vi chord to move to a IV chord is for one note to move up a half step. In the case of a iii chord, this can either be considered as one note being a half step lower than a tonic chord, or as the chord in general being just a half step below a IV chord.
This may sound like I’m getting really analytical about music, but really I don’t go that much into it. Generally, I just really appreciate the moments that give you goosebumps. Recently we’ve been singing a large work [Dona Nobis Pacem by Vaughan Williams by the way...] in choir, which has many great chords for one reason or another. Sometimes I can try and pinpoint what makes the chord so great, but when it comes down to it, it’s about the way it actually sounds. I have had some experience with composing music, and I try to use a mixture of those ideas. Music has always come naturally to me, and I have a pretty good sense as to what is going to sound good or not, but in addition, there are some key things I know I particularly like that I will attempt to work in somehow. But when it comes down to it, if I’m thinking of going down one direction, but then musically I just sense something else is going to work, I have to go with that instead.
So on the flip side, if harmonies are a big plus for me, then logically that means a lack of harmonies would be a minus. In many cases this is true. I am not a fan at all of solo pieces. One instrument playing one line is not my idea of interesting music. I feel like music is largely about the interactions between the various lines or instruments. When the focus is simply on one person, the music is no longer about the interactions; it has moved to being about the emotion and meaning (and occasionally simply the difficulty). Naturally, some exceptions to this would be something like piano or guitar, which can indeed have multiple notes or lines going at once. Then you can get some harmonies back into the mix.
I mentioned briefly about some music being about the difficulty. This is another aspect of music that I don’t totally line up with. Music can be hard and complex, but if it’s not enjoyable to listen to, then who cares? I’m sure some people do care, but to me, it seems that performing music is about the audience at least as much as the performers. Using an example: here at Hartt there are basically two concert bands. The better one may perform harder music, but often times I enjoy the lower band much more, because it seems in that band it’s less about playing difficult music and more about playing the moving pieces or the enjoyable pieces.
With all this talk about harmonies, is that the only excellent thing about music to me? Not at all. Rhythm also plays a very important role for me. Certain songs just have a really driving beat or an excellent groove to them. Further than that, some rhythms are just fun to listen to or beat along with or play. Many people have noticed that if I have song in my head, I will start tapping out the beat or maybe even beat-boxing it. I have always sort of been a rhythm person, and this has come out even more since my brother got the game rock band, which includes a set of pads set up to simulate a drum set as you play along with songs. These days I’m often trying to beat out a rhythm as if I’m actually playing drums.
There are many other parts of music I could probably identify as being important to me if I really went into depth, but those aspects at least touch on some of the most prominent parts. But even with the songs I do enjoy, there are variations in what I will listen to depending on the circumstances. If other people are around me listening as well, I am more likely to choose something that I think they will enjoy. If I am by myself, it even changes then depending on my mood. There are certain times where I will particularly go for some instrumental music. Other times, I just want something to sing along and rock out with. And then of course there are times where I will listen to something just for the sake of getting a little more familiar with it, such as when I have just acquired a CD I have not previously listened to. Many times, however, I just put my whole music playlist on shuffle, so that I get whatever random song happens to come up next. Occasionally I might skip a song; how frequently doing so determined either by what else I’m doing, or again, my mood and what I just feel like listening to.
I could go on for much longer about all my experiences, feelings, and thoughts concerning music, but I believe that gives a nice look into the basics of what music is to me. Throughout my life, music has always been there, and I’m sure it will always continue to play an important role in my everyday life.
Well, congratulations if you actually read all that :)
And to make this a proper xanga entry...
What is music to YOU? | | |
| (major props to anybody who can come up with what random video I'm thinking of with that quote)
Ok, so if you've talked to me at all in the past, like, year or so, you probably are aware that things have been extremely up in the air for me concerning a job and such. I didn't know what kind of work I want to do, and quite honestly I still don't.
But, I do finally have some concrete information about what the next little part of my life is going to be like!
But first, a quick remembering of the past... Hawkapella videos from this past school year are finally up on youtube! Here's some (I'm beatboxing in both of these): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GScuRMVxkJY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzHteaHBnvY and here's one with me singing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-_60cZFQ84
And there's 15 more that have been uploaded in the past week, so have fun checking them out!
Ok, back to the big subject:
So earlier this summer, I decided to audition to be a Show Band Piano Player through Carnival cruise lines. We set up an audition time, and 1 hour before hand, they sent me music in an e-mail. Then audition time came and they called my cell phone. The guy would tell me what section to play, and then I would put the phone on the piano and do so. So it's an interesting audition.
So he told me I passed the audition, and after going through a bunch of stuff, like getting a physical (annoyingly expensive), I finally found out where I'm going to be.
So yeah, I'm going to be playing piano in a group that consists of I think piano, drums, guitar, bass, a saxophone player, and a vocalist. October 4th I leave to go to Miami, where I get to practice with the band for a while. A little later, we leave to go to Galveston, TX, which is where the ship, Carnival Ecstasy, actually is. The ship will be traveling down to Cozumel and Progreso, Yucatan, in Mexico, and back again in cruises that are 4 or 5 days long. I will be there for at least 5 months... longer if I'm ok with it.
It should be a cool experience! It'll be weird being kinda disconnected from the world, though I will have some chances to use phone and internet, particularly when in port. On the other hand, I'm gonna be living on a cruise ship... free living... free eating... and getting paid 600/week to play piano lol. Not bad :)
So that's coming up awfully fast! Well if you want to see me before I leave, let me know, and I'll see about driving to you :) I've already got thoughts of going northeast including Hartford, southeast through Delaware, and northwest up to Penn State. So definitely let me know if you're in those directions :) And I'll probably be contacting a number of you pretty soon about visiting.
Also, if you want to see me while I'm playing on the ship, obviously you could book a cruise. However, my family is in the process of organizing a group to go on a cruise on my ship over President's Day weekend. In other words, you would get better rates due to being in a large group. So contact any of us if you're interested :)
So yeah, that's what's up in my life for the next while :) Feel free to ask questions or leave comments (you don't have to have xanga to comment here... just click on "Anonymous" (you don't actually have to sign up)), and I'll do my best to answer things! | | |
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