My violin teacher recommended Naxos Classical Music to me last week as a place where I could listen to recordings of the pieces I am working on. It looks like for US$19.95 (or EUR€19.95 ?? Was someone too lazy to do the currency conversion? Or do the intertubes cost more in Europe?) you can get a year’s subscription to them where you can download all the classical music you want to listen to. It sounds like they also have Historical, Film Music, Jazz/Blues, Nostalgia, and World/New Age, but I’m not sure to what extent. You can also get a free subscription where you hear 25% of each track. I’m thinking of doing that to see what kind of selection they have. I think it would be great for someone like me who has a very limited classical and jazz cd collection, but would like to start listening to more without spending hundreds of dollars.
[Update: I don’t know if it will work on my MacBook, and the search capability is a little crummy. Also, maybe the service is cheaper in the US since it apparently does not include the Jazz Legends recordings, which is a bummer.]
Just a quick update on Mr. Fish (aka Shadow). Apparently he felt his little fishy life was complete after such a great song was written for him. He has left us to swim the fishy heavens. And for the record, I cleaned his tank last weekend just like I said I would.
I thought this was an interesting article about how germs that were taken into space come back stronger than germs that were not taken into space.
So are we more susceptible to germs while we’re in space than we are here? Does our gravity actually help keep germs weaker than they would be in low-grav environments? Should astronauts be quarantined when they come back? Is our entire civilization going to one day be destroyed by… SPACE BUGS??? (Or have I been reading too much sci-fi?)
As I always mention, I’m very happy with my MacBook. Also, I know of at least 2 people in my office other than me (and I only hear from about 30 people or so) that have recently puchased Macs. So I predict that the market share for Mac is going to start going up and up and everyone realizes how cool it is and how they really don’t need to run Microsoft Word (and that they actually could if they really wanted to. Infact, Excel for Mac seems even better for Excel for Windows according to my husband.)
So now is the time to become a Mac Programmer! Everything seems to be prettier on the Mac, actually. Even websites that look kind of crummy by themselves look nicer on the Mac since each window has a drop shadow, and it makes the website look a little 3d. Apparently, the reason everything looks nice and consistent is the Cocoa toolkit. I did a tutorial with xcode when I installed xcode in order to get gcc. It was fun, and I created a Hello World window in Cocoa, but I didn’t really understand what was going on, especially since I had never even seen Objective C before.
Anyways, I recently came across this article from someone who made the switch, and it seems like a pretty interesting thing to try out! Maybe in all my spare time
I’ve recently completed a project for a friend of my mom’s. I knew years of my mom’s bragging about me would eventually come back to haunt me, and here it was — my mom’s friend, Robin, a science teacher, who had heard all about my genius, super-incredible, awesome musical talent, asked me to help her finish up some science songs she had been recording. I had just bought my new MacBook and had played with Garage Band a bit, but I was wanting a reason to play with it some more, so I agreed to help out.
It was a lot of fun, although I couldn’t use Garage Band’s loops in most cases since she had guitar, drums, harmonica, and vocals pre-recorded and mixed together already, and I couldn’t get Garage Band to really lock onto the beat. So I had to play a lot of it myself — I did keyboards (midi keyboard), bass lines (midi keyboard), flutes (midi keyboard), and some goofy sound effects through garage band. I also recorded vocal harmonies. Overall it was a lot of fun, and it came out sounding pretty good. The songs were very amusing, and educational! They cover arthropods, echinoderms, phloem, and more… And they’re very very catchy so John winds up singing them all day after I work on them.
I had thought about posting a song or two here, but they’re Robin’s songs that she intends to sell, and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to post a snippet of it. So instead, I recorded a Melinda Weathers original song, “Good Morning, Mr. Fish”. (And yes, I seriously sing the chorus of this to my fish when I feed him in the morning. And yes, I’m insane. I had to write the verse and the rest of the words this morning when I decided to record it.)
(Click the play button to hear it…)
All the instruments are coming from Garage Band. There’s drums, a bass line, piano, and some synth stuff, and I didn’t record any of it. Well, I did have to play the synth melody, but I used Garage Band’s built in musical typing (where the keys on the mac keyboard represent keys on a musical keyboard) instead of hooking up my midi cable to my midi keyboard. And I transposed the piano and bass lines to go along with my chord changes.
I gave back the condensing mic I was borrowing already, so I recorded this with my Karaoke Revolution USB headset. I’m currently pricing condensing mics since I already have a USB pre-amp and phantom power supply that Robin bought for me as a gift for helping her out, but I havent’ picked one yet so for now the USB headset did pretty well. Also I didn’t really want to spend that long on it, so I only did a couple takes and left the out-of-tune bits alone. I figure when the record companies call, they will want me to re-record in a studio anyways
So anyways, Garage Band is a lot of fun. Everyone who has a mac should try it out (It’s part of the iLife suite that comes with every new mac). I recommend the on-line iLife tutorial. It’s very easy to put pieces together and make fun little songs even if you aren’t genius, super-incredible, awesome like I hear that I am from my mom’s friends
Someone mentioned to me that they liked my day-glo blog, and I thought to myself. Hmmm, they’re color blind. And then I looked at it on a regular monitor (rather than my laptop which I tilt in an odd way when I sit on the couch) and I thought Augh! it *is* day-glo. Anyways, these are closer to the colors that I thought I was choosing before. (I still can’t get it quite right, and that gray rectangle is still there, of course.) The moral of the story is not to use your laptop to pick colors. (My first attempt was apparently a hideous bright green against rusty orange. John walked downstairs and looked at me funny and then tilted my laptop to the proper angle. But then I guess it un-tilted as I re-selected the colors.)
Last year around May, my husband and I purchased a 2007 Honda Fit. We were among the very first Fit owners — I signed up for the mailing list, and we emailed the dealer as soon as we saw they were available. We got the lowest email quote (by a good bit) from Ed Voyles Honda, and wound up buying there. We are very happy with it. We love the blue color (which was decided because I was the winner of a round of mini-golf — John wanted red at first, but now he likes the blue.) We love the way the seats fold up and down and how much space there is. We love how it handles and feels and everything. We love the plug-in for our MP3 player. Etc, etc, etc.
Anyways, people always ask what kind of gas mileage it gets. And I always make up some number between about 25 and 50 mpg depending on how good of a mood I’m in. But now we’re going to find out what gas mileage it reeeealllly gets!
Well, sort of. My tracking system isn’t the best. I don’t record what kind of driving I was doing at the time, and I don’t always record anything if we forget to reset the trip meter. But otherwise I write the mileage on my gas receipt and stuff it in the glove compartment. So I decided it was time to empty the glove compartment.
Here’s a graph of the MPG data. The average of this data is 27.2 MPG.
Here is the original data:
Date
MPG
Miles
Gallon
6/23/2006
23.83
147.3
6.182
7/14/2006
35.84
276.1
7.704
9/7/2006
29.42
268.9
9.139
9/8/2006
30.94
171.4
5.539
9/20/2006
29.74
275.3
9.258
10/14/2006
26.6
252
9.474
10/21/2006
25.74
220.1
8.552
10/29/2006
26.87
241.8
9
4/16/2007
26.85
279.1
10.395
4/22/2007
26.57
260.7
9.813
5/24/2007
29.87
276.1
9.242
6/17/2007
24.65
219.6
8.91
6/27/2007
23.14
239.2
10.338
7/7/2007
24.18
233
9.635
7/17/2007
24.36
229.9
9.439
8/31/2007
25.42
239.2
9.411
9/5/2007
28.47
268.7
9.438
So, how does this compare with the published stats?
On Honda’s website, the posted mileage for the 2008 model given the new 2008 EPA mileage estimates is 27/33/29 (City/Highway/Combined).
I’d say that’s pretty close (assuming the 2007 and 2008 Fits have comparable gas mileage), especially since I live 5 miles from work, and most of my driving is not highway driving. Kudos to the EPA for enforcing some reasonable standard, I guess!
The stats for the 2007 model before the 2008 EPA standards, according to Edmunds was 33/38 (City/Highway). Which is… ah… optimistic, shall we say.
So anyways, my conclusion is that the Fit is pretty fit. Although on a somewhat related note, I read a cool interview regarding the Volt and the possible rebirth of the Electric Car. Yay, fuel economy!
I just wanted to point out that until very recently, “Melinthropy” was an Antegooglewhackblatt. I think that’s cool mainly because I didn’t know there was a word for that
As of the time of this posting, we have a googlewhack with “wrathful melinthropy” (but not for long!)
I’ve already sent this out to a bunch of people, but I wanted to post it here because I find it so amusing. I’m afraid I identify with quite a bit of it!
I was just writing my “About” page and talking about how I like languages — I’ve tried to learn French, Japanese, Irish Gaelic, Cantonese and German at various times through various means with varying levels of success. I will probably add Italian, Esperanto, Latin, and who knows what else to my list in the future.
But the most recent one is Spanish. Living in Smyrna, I have a lot of need for it, really. I’ve actually had two particular instances that stand out in my mind when it would have come in handy. It would have been good to be able to say “You can activate the gas pump by pressing the green button” and “Oh my god, why is your car sticking out of my neighbor’s house? Do you need an ambulance?”. These were separate occasions, by the way. Also, I would like to be able to understand the zany dj’s on the Spanish radio station (Viva! 105.3 Tan Latina Como Tu!).
So I started out with a Spanish Reader which was very interesting. It has stories with English on one side and Spanish on the other. It was fun. The stories were a little morbid. But I’m sure one day I’ll need to say “And in this state, death surprised him” some time. I also picked up a Colloquial Spanish of Latin America book and cd set, and a “Laugh and Learn” book which has “For Better or For Worse” comics in Spanish, with translations, lessons, and questions. (Very cool, by the way)
But the latest thing is the Learn In Your Car cd set from Penton Overseas, Inc. I’ve seen the Learn In Your Car stuff before an always kind of wondered how well it would work. I tried it out today (and I managed not to get in an accident) and I really liked it! I can see it would be a good way to get a little more vocabulary down. They read a word or phrase once in English, then pause, then Spanish, then pause, Spanish, pause. So you can repeat it in the pauses. And when you re-do the lessons you can do it in the pause after the English phrase.
Anyways, it’s a fun thing to do when I’m in the car by myself. (My husband will probably resort to poisoning my food if I do it while he is in the car.) And we’ll see how it goes. Maybe the next time I need a Spanish phrase I’ll be able to come up with one! Here’s hoping I need to ask where the bathroom is, because I’ve got that one NAILED.
