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| Monday, December 31st, 2007 | | 9:51 pm |
Learning the mandolin
Not doing anything fancy for Hogmanay because we're all knackered out from sorting stuff out in the flat. My new year's resolution will involve yet more flat-packs, I fear. All very tiring, even if it does provide incredibly neat and tidy albeit pine-scented storage. Too tiring to talk about all that right now. I got a mandolin for Christmas!
Storme may disagree, but I'm finding it pretty easy to learn—it's an interesting exercise in transferrable skills. It has four pairs of strings, tuned in fifths: GDAE. (This is the same as the violin, which I did not know beforehand, although if I hadn't read it in an online tutorial I'd probably have guessed pretty quickly because when you strum the open strings it sounds exactly like an orchestra tuning up.) If you've played the guitar, you soon realise that the mandolin's tuning is just the first four strings of the guitar's EADGBE, only upside-down. Any guitar chord can instantly be turned into a mandolin chord! They come out as funny inversions because the notes are upside-down, but in general they work fairly well. For example, G is 320003 on the guitar, 0023 on the mandolin (numbers for frets, 0 for open string, low-sounding string first).
Finding new chords by experiment seems a bit easier on the mandolin than the guitar, too, just because there are fewer strings to deal with. In principle you can fret every string without running out of fingers. In practice, a surprisingly high fraction of playable fingerings result in nice-sounding chords. Here's a nice little progression I found yesterday (and then had stuck in my head all night): 0023 0002 0301 0320 0103 0303 0023 2002 (G D F C Cm F7 G or thereabouts, with a bass G throughout, then D/A). Nothing special, but it's really pleasing that you can find stuff like this just by thinking "hmm, I wonder if I can turn this C into a C minor just by moving down one fret?", and finding that it actually works, whereas on the guitar there's always that extra string or two playing a bum note.
Picking out tunes seems to be a little easier too. I'm not quite sure why: it could be that fifths are a slightly more convenient interval than fourths; it could be that the intervals are all consistent, whereas the guitar has that idiosyncratic third at the second-last string (G to B); it could just be that fewer strings is easier to get your head around. The online guides recommend using violin-style fingering, where in "first position" you play frets 1 and 2 with the index finger, 3-4 with the middle finger, 5-6 with the ring finger and 7 with the pinky. This is a wider stretch than I normally use on the guitar, but it's not too hard because the frets are closer together on the mandolin. I probably should use that fingering on the guitar (higher up the neck, at least) so this might be a skill I can transfer the other way.
The hard bit: hitting those tiny little frets with my big fat fingers, firmly enough to make both strings ring correctly but without hitting the adjacent strings. Argh. (This is why the chord progression I proudly posted above never uses the same fret on adjacent strings—my fingers just don't goddamned fit. I guess I could try to barre it, except that I can't barre for the life of me.) Even more so than the guitar, I'm really going to have to buy a nail file if I want to get half-decent at this. | | Monday, December 10th, 2007 | | 11:12 pm |
Haus!
We got the keys! Plus I'm now in debt to a near-infinite degree. I guess that means it's too late to back out of this house-buying thing, if we wanted to do so. Luckily we don't want to, at least not just yet.
We went round to see the place tonight. Impressions: yikes, it's big. And yikes, it's filthy. We're going to get a professional cleaner in before the big move on Friday; I'm not expecting wonders, but it should make a big difference. There's plenty of scope for decorating, at least. I'm enjoying being able to think seriously about serious alterations for once, rather than putting up with the generic cheap decor in rented flats.
Holloway is, hmm, a bit bland and faceless at best. In principle it shouldn't be any worse than Bounds Green, where we lived for a couple of years. The commute to my workplace is okay, Storme's is not so great (but she can work from home most days). Definitely going to miss Bloomsbury. Oh well. Too late now.
Thinking about paint colours. | | Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 | | 8:13 pm |
The wall Guitar Hero 3: I'm stuck, at the final "boss battle", and I'm only on Hard! Up to this point, I've had basically no problems at all, apart from failing the Slayer song a couple of times. But man, all the battle sections are totally annoying. Instead of "star power" you pick up attacks that you can inflict on the other player—increase the difficulty, disable one of their buttons, flip to left-handed notes, and so on. So when playing against the computer, you have to deal with these random obstacles, pick up all the attacks, and inflict them on the computer at the appropriate points. You can't just survive to the end, you must force the computer to lose. I'm not as badly stuck as I was on a few GH2 songs on Expert, but this battle is just a huge irritating chore. And this is only Hard, bah. I guess I ought to make a start on Expert. Will I ever get around to finishing Hard? Hmmm. ( other stuff )( favourite songs ) | | Friday, October 26th, 2007 | | 9:54 am |
Flat flat who's got the flat Went to a gig featuring ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) immortalradical last night. Great fun—I like his "Shades of Blue" a lot, although the best song of the night was either the host's one (which had no name) or Chris Tye's final song before the encore (which probably had a name, but I forget what it was; lyrics tend to just bounce off me, I'm afraid). A couple of people asked how our flat purchase is going on. The basic answer is "very very slowly", but I just now got a slightly panicked call from the estate agent in response to a snotty e-mail I sent him (I'd left lots of voice mail but it apparently vanished into the ether). The tenants have been served notice and are absolutely definitely moving out by the 25th of November, probably. Maybe even sooner! I'd heard some talk of allowing them to stay on for a few months after we exchange contracts, but it sounds like my solicitor has firmly nipped that idea in the bud, and is generally doing an awesome job of playing hardball with them. Again, I definitely recommend Lyndales if you need a solicitor for conveyancing. So, we may actually be able to move in November, though early December still feels more likely. Pretty soon we'll have to give notice to our own landlord, and book a removals company. Last time round, we hired one guy with a small van; that worked out okay, and it was cheap, but I made a mental note for next time to just spend the extra cash and use some big company like Pickfords who'll send a bunch of guys round and handle everything magically with no fuss. I plan to take my own advice. | | Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 | | 11:20 am |
I'm in the news I don't often get to pierce the veil of secrecy over our precious googlesecrets, but the project I'm working on has a writeup in the New York Times today. Cool! | | Monday, September 24th, 2007 | | 12:13 pm |
One Laptop For You One Laptop Per Child is a fascinating project. Not only are its goals pretty laudable, but from a nerdy perspective, they've packed a lot of really clever technology into those little "XO" laptops to get the most bang for the buck. The only problem is that they don't intend to sell them to individuals—the idea is that governments in developing countries will make bulk orders. However, a co-worker pointed me to XO Giving, where they're advertising a "give one, get one" offer that starts in November. Pay $400 for two laptops; one is donated to the project, one is sent to you! Not bad. | | Thursday, September 13th, 2007 | | 8:43 pm |
Careers guidance Via yhlee and others: - Go to http://www.careercruising.com
- Username: nycareers, password: landmark
- Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions, then "refine the results".
- Post the top umpty results.
I found my results surprising and oddly pleasing: - Composer
- Artist
- Civil Engineering Tech
- Technical Writer
- Website Designer
- Multimedia Developer
- Cartographer
- Historian
- Special Effects Technician
- Anthropologist
1 and 2 are definitely jobs I'd love to do. The closest to my actual job is probably "Computer Engineer", way down at 28. | | Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 | | 9:46 pm |
PS2 4ever Storme is getting close to finishing Kingdom Hearts, yay. After which we need to pick up Kingdom Hearts 2! So it's got me wondering again about how much life the PS2 still has in it. It's still outselling the PS3 and giving the 360 a run for its money, amazingly, but eventually the supply of great games has to dry up. Games I'm still thinking of getting include:
- Both God of War games got great reviews, hmmmm.
- I have just been reminded that I haven't played any Katamari games.
- I hear that Guitar Hero 3 and/or Rock Band may come to the PS2 (!?!)
But that's a pretty short list! Is there anything else I've overlooked? Metacritic has a big list of all the review scores ever but that needs some careful interpretation because there are plenty of game genres I just don't like at all—anything with "Madden" in the title can be tossed away, for a start. I guess my all-time favourite PS2 games list looks something like this:
- Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
- Psychonauts
- Ico
- Guitar Hero
- Lego Star Wars
- Kingdom Hearts
Essentially, I love most platformy adventure games, and I like some other games with wacky and/or compelling gimmicks. Games I currently have on the go, and may or may not finish: Shadow of the Colossus, Bully, Okami. So: anyone have recommendations? If you have some favourite PS2 game from like 2003 that I've probably never heard of, I'd love to know! | | Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 | | 9:19 am |
Question for teachers
What the rest of the world calls "IT", teachers (and only teachers) call "ICT". Why is that?
I happened to meet a teacher at work the other day, and asked him about this. He knew what ICT means, but couldn't say why teachers have their own special acronym. Maybe they're just trying to confuse the kids. | | Thursday, August 9th, 2007 | | 8:45 am |
Bolo Anyone remember Bolo? We played this a fair amount at university; along with Escape Velocity, it was one of the few reasons for ever going into the Mac lab. I just met the guy who wrote it—he's the husband of the head of my team at Google. Bizarre. | | Friday, August 3rd, 2007 | | 6:45 pm |
I'm suddenly seeing lots of posts where people timestamp their edits with "ETA". What does that mean here?
ETA: apparently it means Edited To Add. But I don't think that's something the world needs yet another acronym for, so I'm not going to start using it. | | Thursday, July 12th, 2007 | | 4:37 pm |
Yiikes
So they set up a Wii in the atrium in our office. Storme and I and a co-worker of mine actually tried it out a few nights ago, in one of our weekly boardgame sessions -- made Miis for ourselves, played a little ten-pin bowling, that sort of thing.
Today, people are drifting in and out, mainly playing tennis. But they don't seem to have figured out the whole business with the Mii channel yet. I just walked past for an interview and there are people playing tennis AS ME. | | Monday, July 2nd, 2007 | | 8:18 pm |
etc No idea if the poster really is who she claims to be, but I'm highly amused at the (currently) latest comment on the Telegraph's dismissive article on the Doctor Who finale. Here's another fun article on the BBC that suggests that it may not be a fake. And since I'm posting random links, I was tickled by this one about why Star Wars fans hate Star Wars (via fmi_agent and sargent). Makes a very good point, which I think could be applied equally well to Who. | | Sunday, July 1st, 2007 | | 12:00 am |
Food/booze/Wii/etc Just got back from a pretty nice party at coalescent's parents' house, where various people had birthdays. There was some Wii and suchlike. Oh, and Doctor Who. And now it's my birthday: I am typing this on my new DS Lite browser! Typing slowly. | | Friday, May 18th, 2007 | | 2:34 pm |
London Haskell User's Group A co-worker just pointed me to this, which may be of interest to techie types in the UK: the London Haskell User's Group are having their first meeting at City University next Wednesday. For those who don't follow the functional programming scene, Simon Peyton Jones is amazingly prolific and has written dozens of brilliant papers, as well as actually implementing lots of compilers and other tools. I've never been to a talk by him before, so I'm definitely considering going to this. | | Sunday, April 15th, 2007 | | 11:18 am |
Not-so-secret project Quite a few people have asked what I'm working on at Google, but until recently it was under wraps. Anyway, I'm working on TV advertising. Soon you'll be able to upload a video to Google AdWords, enter your bid price per viewer, and have it appear on TVs across America (assuming your bid was high enough). This is not at all what I thought I'd be working on. Before I joined, I thought the whole advertising thing was the least interesting aspect of Google, but it's actually pretty fascinating stuff. And it's great finally to be involved in a tech project with a solid business plan, backed by a company with lots of money. (Oh boy do we have lots of money. Did we really just buy DoubleClick? Sheesh.) I guess I've been pretty quiet on my usual online haunts like LJ and ifMUD. I think this is just a cyclic thing; aside from business trips to California, I released another version of Comal, and it's all left me feeling a little drained. Right now I'm mainly relaxing with videogames on our fancy new TV. Will be more sociable later, I promise. | | Sunday, February 11th, 2007 | | 3:36 pm |
The Iron Dragon's Daughter The books I've been enjoying recently seem to have a common thread of compellingly weird settings. I liked Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake enough to read her first novel The Exile Waiting, which seems to be set in the same universe but is one of the strangest narratives I've ever read. It has a plot of sorts, but not one that follows any laws of causality and motivation that I can grasp. There are two fantastic, bizarre characters who act like a sort of yin and yang of Spock; I can definitely see how McIntyre ended up doing Trek novelisations. I'm not sure whether I exactly recommend it, but it's quite something. And today I finished reading Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which has a lot of things going for it, but the aspect that hooked me initially was the crazy setting. The protagonist Jane is a changeling—a human child kidnapped by the elves—growing up in a fantasy world, but that isn't as cute and fluffy as it sounds. Young kids slave away in factories building electronic dragons; at high school, the prom queen is ritualistically burned in a wicker cage; the mall is a magical realm where time stands still, but only the high elves can afford to buy the most fashionable charms. This is fabulous. The laws that the world runs by are only partially explained, but one deep motif is that everything has a spark of life: it's like an old Disney cartoon where every minor object is animate and bops along to the soundtrack, but old Walt would never have dreamed of touching material as dark as this. (It reminds me a lot of Jeff Noon's Vurt, which also builds a world that's dripping at the seams with feverish life, and also succeeds in turning a fundamentally unpleasant world into a compelling read by dint of sheer linguistic bravado.) There's a plot, too, although it teeters precariously on the brink of collapsing into a heap of symbology. Some of the online reviews talk about a central theme of rejection; I confess I don't quite follow this, unless they mean a refusal to submit to the vagaries of fate. The book strikes me more as a twisted cousin to Replay, as Jane repeatedly tries to make sense of the world and find her place in it, only to be thrown back into the same situations to make the same mistakes all over again. The driving force behind her universe is either malicious or completely impersonal, and in either case she's powerless to control her destiny. There's an unspoken metatextual aspect to this that reminds me of Little, Big: in that book, the characters seemed to be drawn into the structure of the story itself, representing the fantasy world; whereas in The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Jane struggles to escape the logic of the story. Does she succeed? Well, the book does have an ending. | | Saturday, February 10th, 2007 | | 7:56 pm |
Guilty pleasures Storme and I just cleaned up our bookshelves, and I took the opportunity to see once and for all who has the biggest collections of which authors. All measurements in shelf-inches.
- Terry Pratchett: 43"
- Mercedes Lackey: 33½"
- Jack Vance: 33"
- Fantasy Masterworks: 30"
- Philip K Dick: 27½"
- SF Masterworks: 19½"
- Patrick O'Brian: 19"
- Arthur C Clarke: 18½"
- Diana Wynne Jones: 18"
- Isaac Asimov: 16"
And most pleasingly: It's probably fairly easy to guess who owns which set. (Comics not included, otherwise Neil Gaiman would break into the top 10, along with Battle Royale and Lone Wolf and Cub.) | | Monday, January 29th, 2007 | | 8:21 am |
Business travel (economy class) I'm seeing a lot of airports these days. In fact right now I'm in a breakfast bar in Heathrow, just finishing my full English and just starting an hour of wi-fi. So this probably a good time to post about what I've been up to. (Although as I started typing this the waiter tried to steal my last sausage, foolishly thinking I didn't want it. I fought him off with my little blunt-nosed knife.) ( Last week: Italy )( This week: California )The only problem with all this work-related travelling is that I'm not getting a lot of actual work done, so not only am I busy when I'm away, I'm busy when I get home too. I'm really behind on updates to my Comal app (a tool for computer science lessons in secondary schools), but I ought to be able to work on it this week—Mountain View isn't exactly heavy on nightlife, and hotel TV just isn't that compelling either. Whoa, my hour's almost up. See you later! Current Music: Spinal Tap | | Friday, January 5th, 2007 | | 12:22 am |
Wii are family  |
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