作譜

Aren’t you a little young?

Teh Gay

What’s with these kids today? Coming out at age 13? Back in my day, we waited till we were fully adults and not constrained by the limitations of economic dependency to experience the full insecurities of having no practice at going on dates and having meaningful romantic relationships!

Snark aside, there’s something encouraging about young people having the guts to self-identify at such an age. But it’s still disheartening the reaction those kids get by a still largely hostile society. I’m pessimistic enough to assume that I’m not going to be alive by the time coming out at 13 is a non-issue.

Refurbished

Administrative

Like the new design? It’s actually a variation on a previous design.

Before I went with the design with all the non-scrolling elements, this site and its companions had a simple, centered text column with vertical navigation and the masthead on the right side. It had far more color than the black background of the last design.

Well, I’ve gone back to that design with some variations. The masthead and navigation now follows a more "Western" approach, and I’m using the technologically cool Tahoma typeface than Trebuchet MS.

I wanted to abandon using images for text, so if you see question marks in the masthead, it just means you don’t have Japanese fonts installed. This site still looks weird in IE6, but you know what? I don’t care. I’m tired of IE’s non-compliance with web standards, and I’m not going to hack for that browser any more.

I’ve been wanting to redesign for a while now, but I didn’t get inspired till I browsed around Open Web Design. I’m not slick enough to go for a full Web 2.0 treatment.

Open designs

Technophilia Professional

Found this on dzone: Open Web Design, web design templates for free.

My laziness and creativity are battling each other — I’m not fond of creating front-end designs, and I’d be more than happy to grab something for free. At the same time, I would like my sites to look like, well, me.

String me along

Vital Signs

Now I get to be the annoying neighbor.

Last night, I tried to eek out some sound on my newly acquired violin. I was marginally successful because I didn’t know how much rosin to put on the bow.

I ran into my future violin teacher — she’s a coworker, and we start lessons in two weeks — and I told her I tried to play it. I asked her about the rosin. She told me the first time I play it, I’ll need to apply a lot of rosin on it, till the yellow hairs turn white. If the rosin is smooth, I would need to score it to get the powder to stick to the bow. My rosin cake was indeed smooth.

So I did what she advised, and tonight, I got some sound out of the violin. And man, is that thing loud! And since I don’t have any bowing technique, I wasn’t making the prettiest of sounds.

My next-door neighbors have loud conversations on the terrace, while my downstairs neighbor does obnoxious things in the early morning. Now I get to return the favor of their asshattery and play violin badly in the evenings. What comes around …

Oh dear

Vital Signs

The Brook Mays music store around the corner from my apartment is closing, and this week, it was advertising up to 70 percent off everything in the store.

"What would it hurt just to look?" I asked myself. Perhaps I can get a pair of monitor speakers I’ve been meaning to acquire.

The only monitor speaker I found was a Roland model I had passed over back in December. Instead, I found a copy of Finale sitting next to the speaker. I asked a sales clerk about it, and he asked his supervisor. It turned out to be 40 percent off $179, which totalled $110 with tax. So I got it.

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As anal as a gay man, as lazy as a programmer

Technophilia Aural

Last night, I mastered some karaoke mixes of my Eponymous 4 demos, and I created some MP3s out of the mixes.

I’m usually a stickler about my MP3 tagging, but the tools I use for my demos don’t really deal with tagging. I don’t use the MP3 export function in Cakewalk because I trust LAME far too much, so I use winLAME to convert my demo WAV files to MP3. The version of winLAME I have doesn’t include an interface to tag.

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Still not letting go

Technophilia

An update from the previous entry …

I found a USB2.0 PCI card at Fry’s for $18, $2 shy of the minimum budgeted amount. It looks like its works because Acronis True Image told me it would take only 2 hours to compress the main partition of my old computer, rather than the 7 hours it took using the USB1.1 ports.

Unfortunately, the 80GB partition of that same drive with 65GB worth of MP3s required 6 hours of processing time. At first, it predicted a compression size of 30GB. Little did Acronis True Image know that MP3s don’t compress very well. I only ended up with about 2GB of savings.

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Let it go, let it go

Technophilia

It’s been 19 months since I bought a new computer and 19 months since I paid my old computer any mind.

I use it now as a web server, and I do all development work on it.

It’s eight years old and creaky. Here’s a feature comparrison between it and my newer machine.

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A week of not suck

Vital Signs

I really hated this past week. I knew technology would be my bane the moment the ATM ate my card, and I’ve run on little sleep every night. But it wasn’t all bad. Some of it was quite nice.

Monday: During class, my instructor offers up a really good Michael Caine quote: "You may hate the movie, but you’ll love the house I bought it with." My instructor is co-writing with a hitmaking songwriter on a project, and they’re doing something geared for radio. When some of my classmates teased him for selling out, his response was, "Eat me."

Tuesday: I stop by Waterloo to compare prices on the Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 DVD set. At first, I decide to get it from Best Buy when I bought my new hard drive, but then I got to talking with the classical expert about Shostakovich’s string quartets. I end up getting the Fitzwilliam Quartet cycle, and I figure since I’m spending that much, I’ll just throw in Battlestar Galactica with it. Season 3 starts Oct. 6!

Wednesday: I go to the Blogger meet-up, my first in a long time.

Thursday: I worry about my performance review at work because I blew off this research project I was supposed to be doing, but as it turned out, the head of the department has cooled off on the project itself. So I dodge that bullet. Aside from that, everyone loves me.

Friday: I discover Acronis True Image.

Damn!

Technophilia

If I hadn’t done a Google search for "windows boot external hard drive", I wouldn’t have come across this article which mentioned Acronis True Image.

I’m not a complete stranger to the concept of drive images — my department at work uses them all the time — but it wasn’t until I faced my own backup needs did I need to create an image of my drive.

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