Ho boy
I saw 2 folding bikes! Exciting, although they were better brands than mine (Dahon). I also swear that I’ll be putting out that bike review soon…
Yeah, not much noteworthy happened this week. Though, Stay tuned.
So I’ve been to Carnegie Hall twice in two weeks, and haven’t written anything about either of those events, so… I suppose I should rectify that.
First, a little background. Despite my grounding in classical music, I hadn’t gotten into Carnegie Hall in the nearly 7 months I’ve been in New York. I know, shame, shame. However, I really didn’t have any excuses during spring break, and Mahler was being played by the Boston Philharmonic, so off I went to get some student tickets.
First impressions: while it’s not modern like Benaroya Hall, it’s also not overly ornate like the Rialto Theater (which I spent a fair amount of my high school years in). The seats are passable, but the seating in the balcony is tremendously steep.
Oh, you want me to talk about the music and acoustics? Well, it was somewhat disappointing for string enthusiasts, because when you get so far up the balcony, all the strings kind of get mushy and lose a lot of their definition, especially when playing softly. And really, strings shine when they go down to ppp and leave off the vibrato, so that didn’t work out so well. The brass came through much better, but there’s not really a time when the brass don’t come through, so that wasn’t a plus (winds? what winds?).
The poor acoustics may have contributed, but I didn’t really enjoy Mahler’s 9th: I thought that since I was really into his 5th and 6th symphonies, that his 9th should also be fantastic. However, it didn’t really have any hooks like the other two, and the brass tended to ride on top of the strings without letting them through except for when the entire orchestra dropped low, and by that time the strings just didn’t come through at all. So, Mahler’s 9th is not my favorite yet: I do want to listen to a recording before I pass judgement.
I went to Carnegie Hall for the 2nd time today, to do something completely different: there was a screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s work, specifically, 2 shorts by Studio Ghibli that have never been screened in the USA before.
So, wow. After watching those simple animations, I realize that my story telling prowess needs work. A lot of work. I simply could not see myself coming up with or writing those sorts of stories, or storyboarding them, and the animating was fantastic. So. Yeah. I think I’m still in Creative-Output shock. I’ll figure out what I’m thinking sometime.
Okay, now it’s time to watch Ask an Engineer. And then after that, work some more on the advanced programming project of death, and maybe even doing some work on the algorithms homework of death!
Too late for an End of Year Review now. Oh well, it’s not like I had much to say anyways (At least, stuff that I haven’t already said or won’t say at some point in time).
I whipped up an animation in too many weeks, tis on my youtube.
Now… time to apply to internships!
I swear I’ll be back in blogging shape soon. Until then… ta ta!
So, it turns out that I didn’t get into Columbia’s Comp Eng program, but the EE program. I must have chickened out at the very at minute when applying and changed my major. When I look at what EE’s do for a living, though, I’m more and more convinced that it’s not what I want to do, and that while I could just do EE and take the cards life hands me after graduation, I would rather do Comp Eng. I think some emails to the Comp Eng department at Columbia are in order, although it might take some more finger crossing and pig sacrifices to get myself into the program.
When I lay awake at night, I (sometimes) think about the reprap. Again, I don’t think I’m going to finish it, and I’m getting more certain every day. I have 2.5 weeks of school left, and almost exactly 4 weeks until break really starts. Will my professors be around after then? Who knows? Can I finish an extruder, or even two? Who knows? Can my partner finish this on his own? Can I even finish soldering all the electronics together? Can I recoup the costs of putting a double order of electronics in (the school needs some results by next week, or they can’t reimburse me for this year)? Where can I find a tooling ball, and find someone that knows how to use one? If I started cutting, really cutting, at the very beginning of the semester, would I be done by now? I’m worrying about these things, and I can’t seem to forget them. I really want this to get into a working state, as kind of a validation of the force of my own will. At least, I’m guessing that ’s why I’m so concerned about this.
So, I better find out how to cut those corner brackets with or without tooling balls, and get myself a hotplate so I can start soldering smd components once the digikey parts come in.
And then, there’s everything else. I was reminded of all of it when my friend asked me, first, how to program: after trying to figure out why a microbiologist wanted to program, he told me he wanted to animate something. He has a ways to go, but so do I: god, everything that I want to do is on hold, and it’s bothering me. It’s making life harder than it needs to be…
Anyways, time to stop complaining and time to do homework.