Archive for category Music
Everybody (or: I’m a proud big brother)
My sister will kill me if she finds out I posted this on the Internet but I just had to share. I’m so proud of her.
She’s performing an arrangement of Ingrid Michaelson’s “Everybody” with her school’s jazz choir.
The long dark tea-time of the soul
It looks like I’ve been too busy living life to stop and blog about it. I think this is an overall not-too-bad thing – it’s nice to have something resembling “a life”. But I remain filled with ideas, and I find that the best way to let these ideas grow and develop is to force myself to put them up for the whole Internet to see.
So: I intend to make several posts in the next few days, as it looks like I’ll have lots of free time. Apologies to the month of May: it’s not your fault you got no Blandfill posts.
A tiny little snippet: I am in the tropical and rainy town of Hilo, Hawaii. Today is King Kamehameha day: a celebration of the unification of the Hawaiian islands, a day off of work for state employees including those of the University of Hawaii, and a chance for childhood Tom to chuckle at an obscure anime reference. I like it here, even when I don’t have much to do on account of being transportation-less. Life is lived more slowly, I keep my windows wide open 24/7, there are real people. There’s an elegant simplicity to things, despite the fact that this community doesn’t have all that much money (in comparison to developed tourist centers on the other islands). Most of all, I like how this place is the polar opposite of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dear readers: unless I am whisked away on some sort of adventure in the near future, I shall make more posts soon. Until then, listen to some Dio.
GChat
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, hacks, science, the Internet, video games, videos on December 13, 2009
Someone in the room mentioned that we should create a GChat bot that would let us all talk together without the hassle of creating a chat room each time. Having used xmpppy before, I went and did it.
The result:
(Charles changed my GNOME theme to pink some weeks ago.)
Tom then wanted me to write a post about how I did it, so here it is. Without going into a description of the library itself, it works as follows: when it gets a message from one of us, it prepends the appropriate initial and sends the message to the rest of us.
I guess I can go a little more into the details of the library (especially because the documentation is pretty annoying). (There still isn’t really that much to say.) You run some commands in the library to create a connection and log in, then register a function with the connection object to handle incoming messages. I suppose I can add more description if anyone wants. Code.
So that I can get all the tags:
http://acme.com/jef/singing_science/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0ib4GxLPw
Long overdue
Posted by duncan in Music, college life, computers, science, the Internet, videos on November 25, 2009
Hello readers; I realize that it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted, since exciting things like meteor showers, drastic concentration changes, and creepy conversations online with strangers aren’t things that happen to me. But the rest of the Blandfill has been good to me and hasn’t heckled me for not posting, as I have done to them many times. So here’s my update.
Will Ramsey bit me today at the hockey game. It was refreshing and terrifying. Read the rest of this entry »
Stars
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, science, the Internet, videos on November 19, 2009
This one’s for Rachel. Thanks for taking care of our wet music.
As Tom mentioned below, we went, along with a bunch of other people, to see the stars. (Nominally the meteors, but there weren’t very many of them.) I’ve got a little tripod, so I took some long-exposure (15 seconds, so not really that long) shots of the sky.
Cassiopeia over the horizon.
Orion.
This is the PLEIADES.
And now for something completely different.
This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.
Blogs are wonderful means of procrastination
Posted by duncan in Music, college life, science, the Internet on November 1, 2009
This has been a pretty fun weekend. I’m going to tell you about it. Lucky you! As an aside, everything I’ve done in the following had the effect of postponing the completion of my CS50 problem set that was due 26 hours ago (as of yet uncompleted). But I digress.
This turned out to be Freshman Parents’ Weekend, which involved some fun awkward gigs for band, and a great Glee Club concert. We went to Sanders Theater and played some fight songs. They had a very strange panel table, and two comfy red chairs enclosed by two coffee tables with water jugs and glasses on them. Obviously, when it come time to play Ten Thou, Ed and I sat in those chairs. I had a good time with that. Then there was a rehearsal from 4-6, which made getting to Sanders in tails at 6:30 a bit of an issue, but an easily resolved one (and resolved it was, by leaving the rehearsal early).
The Glee Club concert went fantastically. It was great to be on stage in front of an almost full house, although I had forgotten how much I sweat while under those bright lights.
Everything you just read was written about a week ago, mostly because I got tired of blogging and stopped. Then I felt guilty for not blogging in three weeks, so I’m going to finish this now. Isn’t that fun? Since the last time I posted, my cell phone has been acting strange. I woke up about 6 hours after going to sleep Sunday morning and discovered that my cell phone had a funny colored bar on the left side o the screen. I was perturbed, but not too worried; I could still use it, right? Well. As the day went on, I found that every other row of pixels had turned white, so I could only half see what was on the screen. Again, not a huge deal, I could see what I was doing, but I was beginning to get a little worried. By the time I went to sleep that night, my cell phone screen had turned completely white, and as of right now it has a lovely crack across the screen from me banging it to see if that would make it work better. Turns out it didn’t. Regardless, my phone still works, but now I just don’t text, and I have to hope that whoever calls me is someone I actually want to talk to.
Oh yes, the HUB 90th reunion was this past weekend, and it was fantastic; I’ll be posting the video of it as soon as it goes online. It’s worth a watch. Granted, there are bands that are 300+ without alumni, but something about seeing 40 years worth of crusties and undergrads scramble on a field is very impressive; it’s like Brownian motion, but with a purpose. Pretty cool, eh? That in itself makes this post a science post. I’ll link to the wikipedia article on Brownian Motion as well. Now this post can be about the Internet as well! Fantastic!
xeyes!
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, the Internet, videos on October 5, 2009
Sometimes when I’m not using my giant CRT monitor, I put xclock on it. (Okay, so I’ve only done it once before today.) Today I decided that that was boring, so I remembered xeyes:
They stare into your soul.
Unrelatedly:
I guess they’re making a computer on a spaceship…
Posted by duncan in Music, college life on September 25, 2009
Tonight marks the first time that I’ve finished a problem set well before the deadline (read: more than 12 hours) and having not crammed it all into one sitting. Not to be a nerd, but I actually enjoyed solving the problems. This makes me feel like I would really enjoy my schoolwork if I executed it sensibly, which I never do. Maybe I will start this semester.
I spoke with Professor Dave Charbonneau on Tuesday, between a section and a dinner with the HSS to talk about why I should or shouldn’t concentrate in astrophysics. Read the rest of this entry »
Writing writing writing
Posted by duncan in Music, college life, computers, videos on September 8, 2009
It wouldn’t be Harvard if I wasn’t behind on something. I found myself cramming in a bunch of reading for Chinese Pop Culture, which was actually entertaining (even though I probably should have gotten a better understanding/done close reading; damn my lack of interest) and I straight up haven’t done any reading for astronomy or sex lit. Of course, my inactivity in all my other classes must be due to some other commitment, right? Right. In this case, it’s problem set 0 for CS50. It’s actually the easiest problem set as far as technical skill goes, but it took me about five days to think of a project that I can even do. I’ll post a link to the problem set so you can see the software and stuff if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
http://www.cs50.net/psets/
There were really two roots for this problem (this problem being my inability to come up with an idea for the program despite thinking about it a long time). The first was that I had this desire, stemming from the last vestiges of arrogance I had from actually getting into Harvard and being the smartest person in a small high school, to make a project that was better than the average project. So I wanted to make it more complex than the dancing cookies video, but less complex than the DDR thing, but close to DDR, right? However, when trying to think up a program, the second root came up, which was that I couldn’t think of anything, simple or complex. That was a little distressing as well, since it sort of implied that I don’t have the creative skills to think up something cool (when I say implied, I mean mouthing it and pointing in my direction), which really made me feel worse about that first bit. [I have a really focused stream of consciousness, don't I. /sarcasm/] I’m too tired to really belabor that last point anymore, but I did finally think of something that I can implement fairly simply. It involves Spongebob jellyfishing, but at the same time trying not to get stung by jellyfish. It’s definitely something I can get finished by Friday at 7:00 PM, but I could see myself finishing around 6:30. The most frustrating part about this project is that it is taking me a lot of time to implement (I’d definitely put myself in the less experienced column, btdubbs) but I know that when I’m finished with it, it won’t be very impressive. I suppose that’s what separates the boys from the men (or girls from the women, etc.), and no one said it would be easy. This is way too stream of consciousness. I’m gonna break it up with something high-larious.
I’m starting to get more excited about the freshmen for Glee Club. Less so for band, but that’s mostly because you can never tell if they’ll stick with it. But with Glee Club, it’s gonna be a lot of fun. Sing-ins are on Sunday, and I remember that being one of the most exciting moments of the first semester for me, so I’d definitely like to share that experience with new members, almost like new brothers. I tell you, the Harvard Glee Club is like a fraternity, but with less exploiting women and more singing.
Tom recommended a prescription for these blog posts that he’s sort of followed for his, but I can’t remember what it was, and I’m fine with however this turns out. But I do hope that these posts are interesting to people other than me. And I will try to cut down on the stream of consciousness in the future, but it’s just so much fun! Thanks for taking the time to read, I know this was a little excessive.
Sax-a-ma-phone
Posted by tom in Music, college life on September 7, 2009
Hello everybody. Lemme tell you a story.
Once upon a time, I played the saxophone a lot and got pretty good. (They even wrote a newspaper article about me: http://www.oregonlive.com/living/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/living/1209176704150210.xml&coll=7 ; tremendous apologies for the self-promotion.) Then my senior year of high school ended and I got lazy and stopped playing. Then my freshman year of college came, and I decided I wanted to focus on school more than music, so I didn’t join any music groups, and ultimately didn’t play my sax at all. In the end I left my horn completely unused for 15 months.
This summer, though, I realized that I’d given up a piece of my life that I’d really enjoyed, so I decided once I got back to school I’d get back in the groove. And — somehow — I’ve held to it! After fetching my sax out of summer storage last week, I started practicing again on Thursday. I even decided that I’d audition for the Jazz Band here. With only four days to prepare, I didn’t think I’d do all that great, but it couldn’t have hurt in any case.
A clip of what I sounded like on Saturday, day 3 of me “coming out of retirement”: sax_prax2
Today was my audition. I played significantly better than what you can hear in the audio file, but nothing terribly impressive. Still, I told my story to the band directors and they were quite sympathetic to my situation, saying that “you’re at the toughest point, getting back into it right now, but keep on playing; it’s great that you’re picking it up again”. It was really nice to hear that encouragement. And, even though I got an email from them at 6 PM telling me that “we are unable to offer you a regular playing opportunity”, I feel like I’m ready to get back into regular practice again. Perhaps that is all that matters.
Well, tomorrow morning Charles is taking us out to Dim Sum, woo! It’ll be my first time. And today we saw District 9, which is way cool. I’ll go shopping tomorrow for school-related stuff; I’ve gotta get some notebooks and maybe binders if I hope to keep organized this year. And maybe I’ll even finish up my CS project. Things are going decently well for a new year.