It's been a while, so let's ramble
Almost a month since I posted. What kept me at bay? Quite a lot of things.
First off, a rant (skip please) : I am now extremely irritated at not having a laptop for the past 6 weeks. So I'm not able to listen to music or plug in my guitar or watch a video or do some quick calculation or communicate with friends/family or ... virtually everything gets difficult without a computer. To make matters worse, professors assume that everyone of us has access to a computer despite the fact that there are hardly any public-access computing clusters at IUB. The only place is the library with its 4-odd Sun Microsystems consoles, inaccessible after 11:30 pm.
The big problem is not being able to study properly. Homeworks, notes, slides, everything is online. Important communication is via email or the course forums. There have been instances when I have almost missed homework deadlines or quizzes due to lack of information. Let's hope I get my poor laptop back.
Enough rambling (way to begin a post, yeah!).
The good thing is that I am regaining my love for the Keyboard - piano to be specific. It's a great feeling to have 88 ivory/black keys at your disposal. It's the same 88 notes but your fingers can make it sound however you like it. It's amazing. I am now perfecting the first movement of Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven, Op 27, #2) and am learning Etude in E major (Chopin, Op 10, #3) which I can barely play past the first 5 seconds as of now. It's not a piece one would begin playing with (it's an etude after all, has 3 separate melodies played by, well, two hands... it might take me like a year to get right!) But I really like it so why not. That said, I am getting increasingly worse at playing guitar. There has been no progress during the past 2 weeks that I have played with my band, and I have gotten even sloppier than I already was. Sad.
Next up - I'm back to my horrendous reading appetite. That's right, after a long break (of course because of lack of books themselves) Ich bin back in business, having checked out 22 books from the library as of now (and paid 10 Euro in late fines for having forgotten their due dates)... It's amazing. Everything from History of the Ancient World to Artificial Intelligence to Genetic Programming to Independent Component Analysis to Guy de Maupassant Collected Works to Undiscovered Chekhov... PARADISE! In fact learning new stuff is so cool, just last Wednesday I was reading about the 3x+1 problem in one of the books and next day I go to my Symbolic Software lab class and bang - the same problem appears as one of the parts of that week's assignment!
Also, I will probably re-start my techno-music show this Sunday on campus radio IWAVE. Am pretty excited since I've gathered a few amazing lounge/techno tracks. One of which that I especially like is a lounge/tech remix of Mozart's Symphony #40 (that guy composed freakin 50 symphonies?! No wonder he was Beethoven's teacher).
Talking of music, my band (Casey, Steffen, Iza and me) is scaling new heights with quiet a few covers we've been practising or plan to. Our repertoire currently is (the only two perfected songs are the ones starred) -
Alanis Morisette - Uninvited
Incubus - 11 am*
Incubus - The Warmth*
Incubus - Just a phase
Audioslave - Like a stone
Vertical Horizon - On the sea
Muse - Time is running out - watch video here - nice song.
... and more being added. Pretty soon we'll be able to just pick up any song and play it. (And yeah we play a lot of Incubus).
But coming back to sad news, I was not able to make my deadline to complete the AudioPrint project. Which means nil chances of submitting somewhere. Oh well. Maybe next year. But I have at least some interesting results - one of which is being able to segment an audio file into musically (or at least energetically) meaningful sections. But more info on that later (when I actually have concrete results rather than bump-ins).
With that I guess this post comes to an end. I got a quiz in less than 2 hours from now. It's about two-port theory and non-linear analysis, if anyone is interested (sounds formidable but that's how most of EECS is... simple concepts with big big names). Bbye to whoever visits this hut, apart from people looking for "FlyAKiteOSX" :-\ from one of my wayyy old posts (I know you are out there).........
First off, a rant (skip please) : I am now extremely irritated at not having a laptop for the past 6 weeks. So I'm not able to listen to music or plug in my guitar or watch a video or do some quick calculation or communicate with friends/family or ... virtually everything gets difficult without a computer. To make matters worse, professors assume that everyone of us has access to a computer despite the fact that there are hardly any public-access computing clusters at IUB. The only place is the library with its 4-odd Sun Microsystems consoles, inaccessible after 11:30 pm.
The big problem is not being able to study properly. Homeworks, notes, slides, everything is online. Important communication is via email or the course forums. There have been instances when I have almost missed homework deadlines or quizzes due to lack of information. Let's hope I get my poor laptop back.
Enough rambling (way to begin a post, yeah!).
The good thing is that I am regaining my love for the Keyboard - piano to be specific. It's a great feeling to have 88 ivory/black keys at your disposal. It's the same 88 notes but your fingers can make it sound however you like it. It's amazing. I am now perfecting the first movement of Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven, Op 27, #2) and am learning Etude in E major (Chopin, Op 10, #3) which I can barely play past the first 5 seconds as of now. It's not a piece one would begin playing with (it's an etude after all, has 3 separate melodies played by, well, two hands... it might take me like a year to get right!) But I really like it so why not. That said, I am getting increasingly worse at playing guitar. There has been no progress during the past 2 weeks that I have played with my band, and I have gotten even sloppier than I already was. Sad.
Next up - I'm back to my horrendous reading appetite. That's right, after a long break (of course because of lack of books themselves) Ich bin back in business, having checked out 22 books from the library as of now (and paid 10 Euro in late fines for having forgotten their due dates)... It's amazing. Everything from History of the Ancient World to Artificial Intelligence to Genetic Programming to Independent Component Analysis to Guy de Maupassant Collected Works to Undiscovered Chekhov... PARADISE! In fact learning new stuff is so cool, just last Wednesday I was reading about the 3x+1 problem in one of the books and next day I go to my Symbolic Software lab class and bang - the same problem appears as one of the parts of that week's assignment!
Also, I will probably re-start my techno-music show this Sunday on campus radio IWAVE. Am pretty excited since I've gathered a few amazing lounge/techno tracks. One of which that I especially like is a lounge/tech remix of Mozart's Symphony #40 (that guy composed freakin 50 symphonies?! No wonder he was Beethoven's teacher).
Talking of music, my band (Casey, Steffen, Iza and me) is scaling new heights with quiet a few covers we've been practising or plan to. Our repertoire currently is (the only two perfected songs are the ones starred) -
Alanis Morisette - Uninvited
Incubus - 11 am*
Incubus - The Warmth*
Incubus - Just a phase
Audioslave - Like a stone
Vertical Horizon - On the sea
Muse - Time is running out - watch video here - nice song.
... and more being added. Pretty soon we'll be able to just pick up any song and play it. (And yeah we play a lot of Incubus).
But coming back to sad news, I was not able to make my deadline to complete the AudioPrint project. Which means nil chances of submitting somewhere. Oh well. Maybe next year. But I have at least some interesting results - one of which is being able to segment an audio file into musically (or at least energetically) meaningful sections. But more info on that later (when I actually have concrete results rather than bump-ins).
With that I guess this post comes to an end. I got a quiz in less than 2 hours from now. It's about two-port theory and non-linear analysis, if anyone is interested (sounds formidable but that's how most of EECS is... simple concepts with big big names). Bbye to whoever visits this hut, apart from people looking for "FlyAKiteOSX" :-\ from one of my wayyy old posts (I know you are out there).........
