irrelevancy

I had grown tired of watching my pitiful guitar collect dust. Knew it was missing some strings, but I found that I had a pack so I restrung it. I haven’t tuned a guitar in years. Found low E, but it got worse from there. Found a cable to plug into my sound card and downloaded the Free Music Instrument Tuner from the Ubuntu repositories (apt-get install fmit).

After learning a couple easy songs, I looked around for some recording software. I basically just wanted to end up with a decent quality MP3. As much hype as it was getting in the beginning, Jokosher just didn’t work for me. Tried everything and it just couldn’t pick up a source. I found that Audacity worked well, even if working with the program can be a pain. Crashed on me a couple times and I have to have no playback going when it’s started, otherwise the program doesn’t recognize any output.

I made a couple recordings, but they are quite noisy as it’s a sloppy setup. There’s no stereo. I know I can play these songs smoother, but I got nervous during the recording and would just be happy I got the notes right. Timing is way off and made worse by the sloppy editing. Just a test.

KH – Tetris Theme A (Korobeiniki by Nikolay Nekrasov)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

KH – Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – Gerudo Valley Theme (by Koji Kondo)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This blog has not been abandoned, but I understand how one would come to this conclusion. I’d give you some nonsense about how I’ve been too busy and could even provide some vague details that would solidify this assertion. It wouldn’t be the truth. There just hasn’t been much going on.

School certainly takes a lot of time and thought, but these last couple terms have been easy. Too easy. I get bored easily if there’s no challenge and a school whose curriculum was developed for the lowest common denominator constantly disappoints. The core classes are okay and get more exciting the higher I go, but the general education classes are such a joke.

I don’t know where I got derailed. I feel like I just can’t get my head together lately.

Miscellaneous news. I turned 26. It’s not a milestone, an even number, or an aesthetically-pleasing one. People even seem disappointed when they find out. I eagerly await the day that someone comes up with a good reason for having your birthday on Christmas.

I think this blog has been going for just over 3 years. On the plus side, I think I sound more sane. Negatively, not as much variety around here lately. I guess there hasn’t been much of anything lately. School, excuses, repeat.

I vowed last year to take more pictures. Utterly failed. I don’t think I even took a photo since that declaration. I love photography and I would love to snap all day, but I can’t get over this irrational fear of what people will think when they see me with a camera in my hand.

2009 is going to be a big year for me. A lot of changes are coming. It’s too early to expand on that in a coherent way. There’s much work to be done. I’m terrified.

Getting worse at keeping up with this. Fudging dates just to have at least once a month, I’m so neurotic. Couldn’t get into the administration page for a while, PHP error about memory. I hope fall lasts forever.

Ouch, you know it’s bad when you can’t remember the TLD of your own site. I’ve been busy, but not overwhelmingly so. I’ve just been so lazy the past school term. Students have been graduating and we’ve been losing valuable staff members, so it’s a little depressing.

I was excited about taking Linux Security, but I found it to be a little easy. I passed the class on the first day as the final grade depended upon getting root access to a test machine. I really think I need to get serious about getting ready for a career. Life can get too comfortable without advancement. I was stressing over writing a paper, but for no good reason. I do this every term: wait until the very last minute and make myself sick with anxiety in every previous moment. The paper earned a 100%. I need to have a little more faith in myself and just get it done!

I’ve been dying to see the new Batman movie, but I’ve been insisting on seeing it at the IMAX theater, which has proven to be very inconvenient. We drove all the way out there on Friday, but all the showings were sold out, so we caught The Mummy: Return of the Dragon Emperor Strikes Back or whatever. I can certainly understand the bad reviews. After Indy 4, I had enough of the father and son adventuring. I’ve seen parts of the first Mummy and I remember it being a little humorous, but this one was so contrived. I did like the style of the times (clothing, vehicles, etc), and I did enjoy the cinematography, particularly the gun fight during a light snowfall.

As many as I’m a part of, I was always a little wary of social networks. I use a number of them, but I’m not really involved in any of them. I love Last.fm and how easy it was to upload tracks played from Amarok. I love seeing the statistics and recommendations, but I’ve never really made an effort to connect with other people. While I couldn’t see a use for it at first, I really enjoyed using Twitter to write random thoughts. Again, I rarely try and connect with people. I thought I’d like using Jaiku as it was like Twitter, but with some location features. It was a bit cumbersome to use and most people using it didn’t use English.

I’ve found that I really like BrightKite. I’m usually not up to anything exciting, but I think it’s interesting to track where I’ve been. I think it’s useful for motivation to try new things. Using the site has been really easy, even from a cell phone. My only complaint is that it doesn’t seem to recognize a lot of businesses, particularly ones located within strip malls. It’s easy from the web, but if you’re out and about it’s a pain to send text messages back and forth to the site. I also really enjoy looking at the Universe tab. I love seeing little random things going on around the world.

I think it’d be interesting to run into other BrightKiters, but there aren’t a ton of people around my areas, conceding that the site is still in a beta version. I haven’t told anyone I know in real life as I’m too embarrassed. Not really sure why. I’ve always been very reserved and I’ve always kept all the little facets of my life separate from each other.