[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindump of the Mel. Seek coherency and relevance at your own risk.

I can has brain!

I think my brain is a little better now. Thank you, Andrew, sheet lightning, fresh mozzarella cheese, and French bread, and jazz piano.

I’d like to read this paper on free universities, but don’t know how/where I can get access to it. Time to email libraries…

The history and philosophy of the free university, defined as an organization that offers noncredit classes to the general public in which “anyone can teach and anyone can learn,” is explored. Offered is practical advice for starting a free university center or exchange and ensuring its success.

It talks about several free universities like the ones in Baltimore and Colorado. To that I’d add things like Arbitrary Hour and the employee-run open tutorial sessions at places like Google (according to Greg), TOPP (huzzah for dwins and topp-talks!), OLPC (or so I’ve heard, though they started after we left for Chicago), and - well, wait… why doesn’t every company do this?

What does a good documentation portal look like? (Yes, I’m thinking of OLPC and TOPP as I look through these). Here’s the Creative Commons Documentation page. What things should be emulated, what discarded?

Tomorrow I am planning on teaching myself how to BBQ by way of providing food for the family and friends. I have not done this before. Hamburgers (real ones, not preformed patties - and with cheese folded into a pocket in the middle), hot dogs, red peppers, shrimp, zucchini, asparagus, and anything else that looks like its tastiness will be improved by FIRE. Marshmallow toasting as well. Berry smoothies.

Oh. Speaking of family and friends, the house is quite full. Nikki and I are in my room, my cousins Melanie and Mia are staying with Melanie’s mom and sister Audrey in my brother Jason’s room; Jason himself is on the floor of the office-loft, and two of his friends are in the music room on the sofa. My grandmother is in the guest room. Chris and Andrew were in the basement, but Chris is out this weekend so it’s just Andrew down there now. And of course my parents, who are used to having their house turned into a hostel by now.

I like living in a full house (or at least a temporarily full house - I need space sometimes as well). Last night I ended up in a chokehold on the kitchen floor scrabbling to take a stuffed dog away from a 4-year-old. (Tormenting each other! It’s such a fun bonding experience!)

We have too many ripe bananas at the office. I will remedy this shortly.

Downside: With people in the music room, I can’t play even my dinky electric keyboard with headphones, because the keys make a clicky-clack noise. And I’m not called the master of keyboard thunder for nothing.

My brain isn’t all the way back together - lack of cohesion in my writing is good evidence of such - but at least I feel like a Mel again, and that’s pretty darn good.

July 3, 2008 – 2:10 pm | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Brain fibrillation

This post isn’t particularly useful, and people who have Things To Do (as in, “if you don’t want to waste your time”) can skip it.

Sometimes my mind fibrillates. This has roughly the same effect on my thought processes as ventricular fibrillation does on your circulatory system, except with less intensity and without the “sudden death within minutes” bit. It’s more like a temporary inability to do anything useful because the mind flits between too many things at once and can’t stop (but at the same time is conscious of and frustrated by this flailing. Alas, they do not sell brain-AEDs.

This one was very mild, but it bubbled close enough to the surface that I figured a venting might not be bad. I went wandering and blasted my ears out walking by a concert in the park nearby, turned cartwheels and rolls in the field until my arms got tired and started collapsing underneath me, and lay back in the grass and blew away the bugs that tried to land on my face. Did some other stuff too. And I went for a “cussing run,” which is where I race along saying all the stupid self-doubting insults rummaging around in my head to get them out of my system*. Only this time I was out of shape so it was more “run, curse, gasp, walk. Run, curse, gasp, walk. Curse walking. Curse while walking. Repeat.”

*for a while.

Managed to get that wordless fibrillation under control enough to walk into the house fairly normal two hours later and attack some potato salad, then sort of languidly poke at the piano (though not with any sense of seriousness or musicality), read some math and electronics books and IEEE transactions on education papers, then yammer a lot in writing (case in point: this). Really, I’m just waiting for everyone else in the house to go to sleep so I can seep out a little. Just have to do it before my mom leaves for eucharistic adoration in the wee hours of the morning so I don’t catch an earful.

I’m always fascinated at how I can write about things here that I have a hard time talking to people about face to face. Having a mediating artifact buffer gives me the ability to be more honest and forthright and raw because I can vent* without feeling overly guilty about taking up someone else’s time (since you can all just skip this post and come back when there’s more usefulness in the feed.) See? Blathering uselessly here means I don’t have to do it as much in real life.

*inasmuch as this is venting. It’s still very controlled. Higher intensities involve the inability to cease locomotion. I have been lucky enough to have a series of roommates who are deep sleepers, because I thrash when I’m restless. Sometimes, if I’m really restless, I completely rearrange my room… which only works if I have a single. (EricVW, circa 3am: “Wait… wasn’t your bed on that… other… wall? And lofted?” Me: “Yeah, I couldn’t sleep and I had a screwdriver.”)

I’m also grinning because I know that there’s a good chance that at least one or two people reading this post will be sitting across a table from me as they read it, and I’m amused at the differences between the Mel they’re reading from now and the one runnng around (hopefully doing Useful Things) several feet away. (Hi.) I much prefer the other, occasionally-competent, far-less-venty Mel other people sometimes see me as, but Venty Ranty Ineffective Mel sometimes needs to run around as a counterpoint. Part of why I love being up in the middle of the night is that the night is my time, but I’m not missing anything.

I’m tired, but not exhausted enough to sleep. I’d hoped running around for two hours would drain enough energy out of me to knock me out, but that’s not the case. I’ll try that anyway. Thrash around for a while. Pass out. Hopefully wake up and do Productive Things. Stuff.

Or maybe I’ll read more Horowitz and Hill. Or another article from the journal in front of me. Or find Greg’s letter in the swamp that the table has turned into. Feh. Will post this. Then turn off computer. Then decide. Eventually sleep.

July 1, 2008 – 9:54 pm | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I can has musik!

My brain’s turned off and I can’t write about or create things that don’t yet exist, so this will be an attempt to break out of that by writing about things that have already happened. It’s also a thank-you for all the recommendations on piano music. (It’s also a great exhibition of how I postpone the start of actual content by putting meta-content and disclaimers before it.)

The first piece I’m working on was From The Interwebs (thanks, public domain!) and it’s the Rachmaninoff op. 3 no. 2 (prelude in C-sharp minor) because… I was downloading pdfs of music and started playing this one (my laptop was balanced on top of the horizontally-flattened music stand). It sounded good. I started memorizing it. At that point, I figured I might as well go for it.

After a while (memorizing the first 7 bars), I noticed my hands had started to hurt in that lovely “I’ve been typing too long” way. Rachmaninoff had big hands, and his stretches of broad chords rooting deep into the keys are one of the things I adore about playing his pieces - but I do not have big hands, and splaying them out to grasp the notes becomes a strain after a while. (Side note: one of the nice things over the last week has been going through the sonatas I played as a kid and playing them without the modifications I’d had to make when my tinier-then fingers couldn’t reach octaves and stretch out to arpeggios. I’m playing them very lazily and badly, but the fact that I can play them lazily now is pretty nifty.)

Back to the “Rachmaninoff had big hands” deal: fortunately, one of my usual practice modalities is in the “ooo-shiny” vein - that is, I alternate between playing a few phrases on the piano and working on whatever I’m in the middle of (code, reading a book, math, whatever), switching back and forth the instant my attention wanes. One of my dorm room arrangements had my piano directly behind my desk, so I’d swivel my chair back and forth between my computer and piano keyboards - I liked that arrangement and would love to do it again once I have an apartment and a keyboard. Anyhow, this keeps my fingers from being hyperextended for too long, and it’s how I’m going to have to learn the prelude if I want to have things that (1) sound good and (2) don’t hurt.

After a trip to the music store, I also have Debussy’s Arabesque #1 (thanks, Katie!) Tank’s mom had this on the piano when we visited her house, I played through it and made a terrible mess. The nice thing about Debussy is that his music just floats clear of sounding incoherent, and that’s what gives it such a dream-like quality… and makes it difficult for me to sightread. At some point I’ll actually study it rather than sightreading it badly each time I play, but I think I’ll work the Rachmaninoff through first.

Nikki also found some clarinet pieces with piano accompaniments, but the piano bits are fairly easy, so that shouldn’t be too bad. Then we found some clarinet-cello-piano trios and settled on a Ferdinand Ries trio in B flat major (Op. 28) for the three of us to play (Tank on cello, Nikki on clarinet, myself on piano). It’s not bad either - the challenge is that half the notes Nikki (and my right hand, for that matter) are playing are outside my hearing range. Also that I have to go through and do fingerings for the streams of rapid arpeggios running through the 40 pages (…yay) because my hands have forgotten how to turn around each other.

Also coming down the line:

Bach-Busoni Chaconne in D minor, suggested by cjb. After (slowly) sightreading through about half of it this evening, I am slightly skeptical that the piece is actually physically possible for a human being with two 10-fingered hands to play (It is, apparently - I just need to figure out how). It requires your hands to rapidly switch between odd intersections with each other, and then do crossovers three octaves over, and then switch back up and down and up and… at one point the music splits into three staffs because the range of frequencies being played simultaneously is just ridiculous. It’s going to be brutally difficult and take a long time. It is going to be very, very pretty.

At some point I’d love to be able to take on Rhapsody in Blue. And do jazz improvisation with a trio (or more)… and play swing piano. In my inanely wild dreams, I will also someday play bass (string and electric) and percussion (for jazz/swing music, and/or perhaps back to taiko drumming again). And, y’know, if a Madrigals troupe needs an alto recorder player, I might hop back into that for a spell. This starts getting into Ridiculously Overambitious Territory, though, and if I can play the prelude in C# minor and stumble my way through the Ries trio by the time we hit Boston again in August I’ll be a pretty durn happy camper. I do, however, resolve not to pick up an oboe again. That was a bad idea back in 5th grade. Me + reeds = unhappy reeds.

Someday I’ll be able to afford piano lessons again. I’d like to take them then. I wonder how good I’d be if I hadn’t stopped playing 8 years ago. Ah well. I’ve got a lifetime to get back into it again. And someday I’ll buy electronic instruments and headphones so I don’t eternally bother my housemates and neighbors with the cacophony of practice, and so when I play on real instruments it’ll sound good.

Brain-cobwebs are a little clearer, but not gone yet. I’ll keep writing.

July 1, 2008 – 8:28 pm | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Small sampling of topics on brain during last 24 hours

June 29, 2008 – 9:18 pm | Uncategorized | No Comments »

Book meme