Elbie at Trig dot Net

It burns! It burns!

No sooner did the summer solstice occur then the temperature and humidity reach height of summer levels. The week has been hot and humid. It's been a little difficult to sleep nights, so for most of the week I was relatively useless. But that said, it was really gratifying to see that big flaming ball in the sky so much this past week. I had an opportunity to get out and run around a bit a couple of times, throwing a frisbee around, which was nice.

June has been a decent month on most fronts. Drumming has been going a bit slowly, but not terribly. There's a final project for the History of Mathematics class, which I did a bit of research, finding books to draw material from. This week will be busier, as I madly try to throw together my first draft.

Not dead, just busy.

Yikes. It's the end of May already. Better throw together a blog entry so that I'm not completely negligent of my blogging duties.

Lots of stuff going on these days. I'm taking a History of Mathematics course, and the drumming lessons continue.

Went to the Empty Bowls event with Thingo, clvrmnky and L. It was the lunchtime seating, and I took the whole afternoon off. It was arguably the nicest day of the year so far.

There. On to June!

Quirky brand of hackneyed phrases.

I haven't updated much recently. I've been pretty tired lately, partly from fighting off a cold.

We got our (hopefully) last snow storm of the year, at the start of April. It was pretty tame, only 10cm or so. But it was right on cue, so with luck we're on to Spring. Actually yesterday was pretty damned gorgeous out, going above 20 degrees for the first time this year. Easter weekend wasn't too bad either, hung out in the Comfy Lounge on Friday for the annual games day with all sorts of UW alumni, and the rest of the sunny weekend was seeing all sorts of people I rarely see. In fact the only thing we've not had a lot of this Spring is rain. The grass is still pretty dead, though slowly coming back. A shower or two would help.

This past week's kw.pm meeting was quite successful. We'd been showing off various Arduino based hacking projects. All sorts of people came out of the woodwork. Some people from the local LUG, and the Make:KW group.

Apropos of random conversations I was having in the kw.pm IRC chat room, I did a Google search on "quirky brand of", quotes included, looking to see how overused that phrase has become. The first page of 2510 results are summarized as follows:

quirky brand of thoroughly English chintz and charm
quirky brand of fantasy
quirky brand of rhyming slang
quirky brand of beauty babes
quirky brand of electronic arrangements
quirky brand of the young outsider
quirky brand of travel documentary
quirky brand of sardonic pop harmonies
quirky brand of observational humour
quirky brand of comedy rock

These are of course ranked strictly by page rank. It would be nice to find an easy way to instead break that down by number of results for the words immediately following "quirky brand of". Anyone have any ideas?

A wasted weekend.

Had a pretty damned fantastic weekend of doing a whole lot of nothing. Or possibly things, but in a very relaxed way. Played some video games, went to a couch-warming party, stayed up far too late, slept in far too late, watched some TV, practiced drumming. Not too shabby.

That's one lesson learned

Drum lessons are going pretty well still. I am convinced that I'm going to stick with it enough that I do indeed need to practice on something that responds more like a real kit, so I broke down and ordered a midi sequencer through eBay a couple of weeks ago. I finally got it last Saturday, and hooked it up and started playing with it.

The first thing I noticed was that I was in sore need of a true kick pedal. The Ion drum kit comes with a pedal, but it's a high hat pedal, which I also need, but the high hat pedal is really only for stuff that's more advanced anyway. Okay, so I need to price out and eventually buy a new kick pedal, and because a kick pedal by itself is insufficient, a trigger pad for the pedal, so I can actually plug it into my sequencer and have it make a proper boomy noise.

The second thing I noticed is while the frame of the kit is sturdy enough to take a beating, it's not sturdy enough to prevent excessive vibrations from hitting one pad from causing the sequencer to thing that other pads are being hit at the same time. Oh well, the sequencer has a way of actually compensating for that somewhat, but it will take some playing around with the configuration before I fully get that figured out.

Had my third lesson last night. I wore sandals. Not a good idea. I now have a small circular bruise on the top of my foot from where the back of the kick pedal's hammer kept striking me. So there you go. I've learned not to wear sandals while drumming.

Coming in from the cold.

Oops, did I say I was going to try to post weekly? I uh... I was sick. Yeah, that's it.

Actually that was true for at least the first little while. I managed to catch something a few weekends ago, then recovered just enough to not have a really good excuse to miss work but still be pretty sniffly and congested.

What a difference a month makes though. It went from crisp, and cold and sunny to warm and Spring like and sunny in that time. Plus, the amount of actual daylight we get, not just because of Daylight Savings Time, but because the days are getting noticeably longer is so very welcome.

I've started taking drumming lessons! I bought the Ion Drum Rocker to use with Rock Band, thinking at the time that I was enjoying drumming enough to actually consider learning to play the drums for real. At the start of March I finally went down to one of the local music stores and signed up for half hour lessons. I have some musical background, grade 8 Conservatory piano. It would seem that, combined with the skills I've developed playing Rock Band has had some benefit. We breezed through a lot of the rudimentary stuff. But like anything else, this will take a lot of time, and practice if I want to get good at it. We'll see how long I keep at it.

A modest improvement.

December and January were a whirlwind of spending, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago. Granted, a lot of that was tied up in two big purchases, but there were still far more smaller, frivolous purchases that I probably could do without for the time being.

So I'm trying a little trick to keep my spending under control more. I have a little notebook that I can keep with my wallet, and any time I use my credit card, I make a note in the notebook of when, where and how much I spent. It's more of a trick than it seems. The primary purpose is not to actually tally my spending, but to force an extra step that will make me question if I really want to spend that money right then. It's working reasonably well, but whether it's because I'm still feeling the pinch of the previous month's spending or not remains to be seen.

1 random thing

Chris is not participating in the 25 random things meme.