Braindump!
February 7, 2010 – 10:30 pmThis weekend was a nice relaxing catch-up-on-backlog weekend; I’m still walking slowly through mine, but it feels good. I may also have found a reason to learn how to knit. Well, two. Behold: Captain Capacitor and Resisty the Resistor.
Spent the day occasionally learning bits of “In My Life” in fingerstyle guitar. The arrangement is from a library book, but I’m modifying them to sound more “right” (to me) and stretch my (small) hands less painfully. So far I can crawl through the intro and everything except the last few bars of the verse; the bridge will be a challenge. I’m committing everything to memory immediately, as opposed to the piano, where I sightread everything and therefore find myself severely limited without a songbook. I’m also doing my practicing in spurts for the same reason I do Rachmaninoff in spurts; my hands can only stretch so far for so long.
Friday (or maybe Saturday morning) will be a good test of my recent musical adventures; I’ve found myself in the role of rhythm section (keyboard and/or guitar, although I’ll probably stick with my comfort zone and play the former) for a musical jam (blues!) at DJ and Ginneh’s place up in Malden. DJ is a bassist and a bass and Ginneh is a cellist and an alto – I decline to inflict my singing on anyone, but should also (literally) have my hands full with whatever instrument-that-plays-chords I am playing for whatever songs we attempt. It’s been a long time since I played with other people, and I’m looking forward to it.
Last night I actually acted sort of like a normal 23-year-old and went out drinking with some friends from college. Pizza, beer, conversations about Drupal (…okay, I said “sort of normal”) and a giant plate of nachos. Far more nachos and pizza than beer for me; I tend to drink relatively infrequently and in comparatively small quantities because the thing I like about beer is the taste and how it interplays with food (the actual sensation of inebriation is displeasing to me, so I stop after a drink or two).
Ergonomics: I don’t have a great system yet, but now that I have my large monitor back from Nikki, I will try that out tomorrow morning while working from home. Large monitor + nice speaker set + keyboard = not that bad, really. I still need to try the “portable music stand as portable typing tray” idea; I wonder who I can borrow a music stand from to test this out without having to plonk down $$ for Yet Another Thing To Own before I know it works.
It’s time well spent at the end of the day when I take a few minutes to drink some hot tea and plan out the next day. I have a tendency, otherwise, to do a lot of stuff during the day, but not necessarily accomplish anything particularly definite – which is… not terrible, but… not the best I could do, certainly. I’m also learning that I need a whiteboard (ideal) or a sheet of paper (when not by a whiteboard) for my daily to-do list; my notebook or a text document on the computer work, but not as well. I need the Large Physical Object Constantly Within My Field Of Vision to remind me to context-switch back to where I will be most productive at any given time.
And on that note, I’m going to turn off my computer now, and whiteboard out tomorrow with a cup of nice hot tea. And then I’m going to bed.
One Response to “Braindump!”
I have found that anything laminated from a store like staples with an unmarked, white surface can be used with eraseable markers and act like a whiteboard vs getting an official expensive whiteboard. As for a keyboard stand, I often take whatever book, box, or other building blocks that are around and build a platform for my keyboard. My current one uses some styrofoam boxes which are light and can be reduced in size with an large knife.
By Kevin Mark on Feb 8, 2010