| Don't really have much to say. Don't really remember the last time I posted.
Highlights... (from the past two months or so):
- Job. It's pretty good. Paychecks are nice.
- Went to a bunch of concerts. AUO, EWSB, Kiltie. Allegheny Brass Band. Chatham Baroque, Apollo's Fire. Music is wonderful. I still miss being on the other side. I think it's starting to get better. At least I hope so.
- Computer Club Cabal. I think I'm spending more time socializing at my old house than when I lived there. It is really nice still being Pittsburgh, and still being able to spend time with friends I've had for a while. Although, on the other hand, perhaps it's getting in my way, causing me to not meet as many new people. Me and my introverted cave...
- Enjoyed going to VA for Thanksgiving. Love my family, and the escapism of being "home." Looking forward to Christmas, which is coming up really soon.
- Played online games with people one night. That was fun, although don't seem to be doing it quite as much as we used to. (Now that I'm much less busy.)
- Had to deal with some loose ends related to my paper. Kind of annoying, but meh... Hopefully won't need to worry about it too much more. And then, after I go to the conference, I'm completely free.
I still have that partially-written epic tuba post. I guess the problem with that, is that I prefer not to dwell on it too much. Brooding isn't particularly constructive. Easier to close your eyes and ride the roller coaster, than to dwell on every twist and turn, yes?
--Keith | comments: Leave a comment   |
| | Current Music: | Symphony No. 3 "Eroica": I. Allegro con brio - Ludwig van Beethoven | | Subject: | Tick Tock Tick... | | Time: | 10:44 pm |
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| | I should spend more time doing things, and less time brooding. Oh, so much brooding. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I've been thinking I should write an entry about what's been going on the past three or four months. Craziness. It was a whirlwind.
This isn't it. Maybe it will come soon. As I've mentioned, I don't actually like writing very much, and, as a result, haven't really been motivated to write a lengthy LiveJournal post. But I think should. Mostly because it scares me how much I forget.
Here's an outline:
- Work, work, stress, work, panic
- Successful thesis defense
- Work, work, work
- Completed thesis
- Virginia, for not very long
- Demo night!
- Started working at NetApp
- The real world?
I hope everybody's doing well.
--Keith | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Sometimes I really wish I could have my life back.
School: Omnomnomnom!
Keith: Awww...
School: =P
Keith: *looks dejected*
School: Haha!
I just need to "beat the final boss." Then I'm done with this silly game called graduate school. Two and a half weeks... | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Symphony No. 2 in D minor - Johannes Brahms | | Subject: | On the Cusp... | | Time: | 12:56 am |
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| At this point, I am so ready to move on with my life. It's not entirely clear when exactly I'm going to be done. But it's going to be at most three weeks. I wish they'd hurry up and pass. And that my thesis would finish writing itself. I've had enough.
I really, really hope most of the strange issues I've been having are just stress taking its toll on me. So I'll be better once I escape. That I'll be able to constructively work at overcoming my suspected embouchure dystonia playing tuba. That my hands and arms stop shaking. That I'll be able to pick up an oboe or clarinet without my thumb convulsing. That I'll find some peace of mind.
I've really missed band. This Monday was the first rehearsal after six weeks of concerts (it was fun watching three of them, but I would've rather been playing in them). I definitely felt a pang of sorrow when I didn't drive out to Forest Hills last night. Band, and playing music in general, was always a sort of solace for me. Loosing that solace, I believe, is one the big reasons why I'm coming so much more unglued than I normally would.
This week, I'm going to be actively searching for a place to live come September. Because I can't put it off any longer. I also intend to start making some token efforts at putting things in boxes. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd | | Subject: | Twilight Calm | | Time: | 11:53 pm |
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| When I left my house at about 6:00pm today, to go get dinner with friends, I discovered that it was actually a very nice day. I'd been chugging along, with my typical, slowly work away at something I don't really want to do approach, with occasional distractions.
Walking home from dinner, I kept thinking about how I should be enjoying days like this more.
My hope is that pretty soon, I'll find more peace of mind, and get more joy out of simple things like a nice day. Even better, I'm sure, would be sharing that joy with somebody special.
I also thought about how it would've been a wonderful night to be playing an outdoor band concert...
Hopefully I'll be able to get that back eventually. The meeting two weeks ago definitely gave me more hope. I tried some exercises, saw the point, and what I should be doing/thinking, and playing felt a bit more right, a bit less wrong. But I also concluded that I'd need more patience, and need to be more relaxed than I am right now. Currently, my plan is to get this master's thesis thing behind me. Presumably, after that, I'll be a lot less stressed out, and better able to face my tuba-demons. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Russian Easter Festival Overture - Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov | | Subject: | Nine, Oh-Nine | | Time: | 01:15 am |
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| What do you do when you can't do what you love?
I kind of wonder if the last month or so will look less hellish when I look back on it later.
What's happened? I've...
- Been missing a huge part of my life
- Felt lost, and unsure about where my work needed to go
- Panicked, seeing that "a long time" had turned into a little over a month
- Questioned my mental health
- Had a bad argument with my adviser
- Stayed up until stupid-early o'clock in the morning talking to a friend
- Seen a psychologist
- Resolved the situation with my adviser, perhaps not completely, but hopefully well enough
- Been to a couple band concerts
- Had to explain why I was in the audience at said band concerts
- Been a work-aholic
- Felt like the world was out to get me, given the frequency of "silly" problems I was encountering
- Questioned my physical health
- Wondered if my research is just an exercise in futility
So things haven't really been going that well. I'm getting by though... I have awesome friends, and a very supportive family—and that helps a good deal.
One good thing, is that I should be done with school pretty soon. Not as soon as I'd originally hoped, but still pretty soon. Given how much of a disaster last week was, and that I felt I was working pretty slowly this week, I'm targeting the end of August now, rather than the middle of the month. One needs to be realistic... although I'd really been hoping for more downtime before starting my job.
My hope is that having a real job will be much less stressful. I don't really feel like I can really handle stress very well anymore.
I should probably go to bed. Good night. Maybe there will be more later... | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| | Now, time for some less gloomy news. I have two awesome job offers to choose between. Now I just need to decide... And then finish my Master's. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Overture to Tannhauser - Richard Wagner | | Subject: | Dystonia | | Time: | 01:54 am |
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| A long, long time ago...
I can still rememeber
How that music used to make me smile.
I guess it's time for me to explain myself. What my last post was about. Why I may seem somewhat out of it.
To make things easier, I'm just going to post an email I wrote earlier today. Going over this once was hard enough. It took me about five hours to write, and I felt like I was either actually or on the verge of shaking uncontrollably throughout the process.
( The email... )
Right now I don't think I can say very much more. Other (mostly good) things have happened, but this issue has probably been the foremost thing concerning me recently.
One of the things I always thought was wonderful about my passion for music and playing tuba was that I believed it would last forever. But now it doesn't seem like that's necessarily the case. And that thought's haunting me. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| ( Apathy... )
Trip to South Carolina was good fun. It was awesome seeing ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) theschizm. Although I'm afraid the stressful [largely compiler] antics of the previous week caused my disposition to be a bit less rosy than it should have been.
I have been yawning a fair bit writing this, so maybe I will try going to bed.
Until next time... | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Notes | | Time: | 11:56 pm |
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| I've started to acquire a sizable collection of Post-it notes with things written on them. I'm mildly amused.
Tomorrow will be a day in which I apply for several jobs. For some reason I'm not particularly excited.
Apathy apathy that's our cry!
A-P-A- eh...
I'm hoping the somewhat reasonable amount of sleep I had last night cured me of the insomnia I've been experiencing the past week or so. It all started that night I slept two hours in an attempt to finish that homework 5 days before it was due (of course, I did not know the due date written on the assignment handout was not actually the due date).
It's going to be less warm again. I'm sad. The last 5 or so days were really pleasant, temperature-wise.
EWSB, Kiltie, and AUO are awesome.
I can't think of anything else particularly coherent.
The end. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | The Planets: IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity - Gustav Holst | | Subject: | Small-Integer AM Thought | | Time: | 10:28 pm |
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| After one of my stupid o'clock posts due to insomnia last month, I came up with a little truth. I didn't post it to LJ then, (that would've involved an even-more-stupid o'clock post), but I wrote it on a post-it note, and it's been on my monitor since then.
The first step to living your dream is remembering what it is.
That is all. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Finally, as promised, I'm posting a couple things I made when I took a computer music class Spring 2007.
Purple Color (00:30, 177k)
Purple Color was the result of one of the first assignments I was given. The premise was very simple: record myself, and then do something interesting with Audacity. Not being particularly creative, I looked for something vaguely interesting to read. I found a package of Elmer's School Glue Sticks.
The main techniques I used creating Purple Color were splicing small pieces of my original recording together in interesting ways, shifting pitch and layer parts together to develop a harmony of sorts, and adjusting tempo. The net result has interesting rhythmic aspects due to repetition, and presents a nice contrast between color and colorlessness.
Night Wanderings (04:41, 3.3M)
Night Wanderings was my final composition project. It was written in Nyquist, which is a LISP-based language that was designed by our professor. I couldn't really think of a good name; I eventually came up with Night Wanderings because the first real theme sort of gave me images of some solitary person walking in the dark.
The most interesting part of Night Wanderings to me, is the sounds used. Two were built using additive synthesis, and a third was built using FM synthesis. After an introduction by two stereo-separated voices (designed to have a somewhat percussive-feel), the piece is largely tonal (I was also taking a class on harmony that semester), but is interesting due to underlying rhythmic motifs and the unique sounds of the electronic voices. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| Clearly the last time I slept (between this Tuesday and Wednesday), it was for too long. Of course, that was due to the small amount sleep between Monday and Tuesday. Silly homework. Silly distractions for preventing me from doing the homework earlier. Well, maybe getting up for the 11:00am meeting with my advisor will help me un-hork my sleep schedule. (An aside; I just recalled that advisor is an interesting word, it appears that advisor and adviser are equivalent. I wonder if different regions prefer one spelling over the other).
On the other hand, apparently my not falling asleep when I want to is the leading cause of me writing LiveJournal entries. Well, maybe that's arguably not a good thing.
One fun thing that's been happening recently, is that I've been playing more online board/card games with friends. While it's not quite the same as doing it in person, it brings back some of the fun times that were had before people graduated and moved away. All those good times spent in Tim's apartment...
(Another aside; my earlier aside happened because for some reason I thought the two versions of advisor were different. I looked it up. Now I remember why I thought they might have been different; counselor and councilor really are different.)
I wish writing was easier for me...
Since I can't find a way to say what I wanted to say in this paragraph very well, I'll just summarize the general idea. I love music. Maybe a better description of how my involvement in music has come to mean more to me again over the last two years will come in a future post. One thing that's true, is that I'd probably deal with my insomnia by playing an instrument, if that wasn't considered a rude thing to do at 3:00 in the morning.
Well, at this point I think I'm frustrated enough with my poor ability to meld thoughts into coherent sentences that I should end this post. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I was attempting to fall asleep, and decided it probably wasn't going to work, at least not for a little while. So I thought to myself, maybe I should post a LiveJournal entry.
But then I got distracted by pictures from the AUO concert last November. Wow... I was fairly surprised by what I looked like. First, it was fairly weird seeing myself playing an oboe. But, I was expecting that, seeing as I was playing oboe at the concert. The thing that I found more strange, was how old I looked. In at least a few of the pictures, it looked like I was a 30-something year-old workaholic. I honestly don't remember what insanity may have been ensuing then, but wow.
In other news, I was disappointed I didn't get a chance to play any instruments [logical] today. Computer Club meetings in the evening on Tuesdays tend to make it so I don't get home until fairly late.
I wonder if it was the caffeine in the green tea I drank because it was cold that's keeping me up. I can't say I'm a big fan of winter. At least it's a bit warmer this week than it was last week.
No Purple Color today, sorry. I don't remember where I put it. And besides, I'd need to write a nice blurb about what it was, and how it came to be. And really, I'm not a big fan of writing. Maybe that's the root cause for my dwindling number of posts.
Anyway, I think I might be feeling slightly sleepy now. I should really try get up at some reasonable hour [logical] tomorrow. However, it usually seems like it's only perceived necessity that can convince to get myself out of my nice warm bed in the morning. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| At some point I should try and figure out what exactly happened this semester. It's pretty blurry right now. It's not quite done as of yet; there's probably still some work on the DSN paper, and the modified version that my group's submitting for the class project. But my parts are minor, so things shouldn't be too bad.
At this point, I'm not exactly sure when I'll get to go home. Tuesday's likely the latest, unless I decide for some reason I want to hang around Pittsburgh longer. I'm definitely looking forward to home, and seeing my parents, brother, and sister.
There might be some hope for my Thinkpad. Apparently folks have had some success repairing video problems using aluminum foil, a heat gun, an infrared thermometer, and patience. I'm thinking I might as well attempt the crazy process, since the worst case is that I kill my dead laptop more.
Installing Windows in a virtual machine takes a long time. But, as a result of those efforts, I can use my scanner again.
Well, I'm rambling. I was going to post Purple Color, (it's easy to see when applying!), but right now I'm not feeling so inclined to dig through my backups. At some point it will be done, and LJ will be able to experience the awesomeness. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, I'll explain later. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| The last 2.5 weeks (with the exception of the Thanksgiving holiday) have been pretty awful, although in retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why (well... other than my trusty Thinkpad dying on 11/21... RIP).
Also, buckets of angst. Oh man, it burns.
On the other hand, humans are awesome.
Fortunately, it won't be too long before I can go home for break. Unfortunately, it's likely the intervening days will be rather painful. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | October - Eric Whitacre | | Subject: | Pittsburgh | | Time: | 01:53 am |
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| I returned to Pittsburgh Sunday, August 24, 2008. At this point it seems like it was long, long ago. Monday the 25th and Tuesday the 26th, it was disorienting since I'd been in California just a few days before. Whoosh describes that experience best, I believe. By Wednesday the 27th, it seemed like the whole California thing was a memory of bygone days months ago. Special...
There's one major thing I've found unsettling since being back; I walk around campus, and don't see nearly as many people that I know. I guess I hadn't realized how many people I'd known because we were in the same graduating class. This still seems weird, but I'm getting a bit more used to it.
Running into younger folks that I know can also be somewhat strange. Their first reaction is often, "Wait... didn't you graduate?" I explain the whole "graduate student" thing, and then they nod, and we all continue on our ways.
Settling in to my new room/house... I guess that it's progressing well, if slowly. I think I can now safely conclude that I have too much stuff. The minimalist part of me that strives for simplicity sighs. I got a small (and cheap) storage unit to deal with the overflow. Maybe I'll cover more ground arranging things reasonably next week. The current state's pretty good at least, it's enough for me to concentrate on the other things that need to be done.
Being back in Pittsburgh's been very nice. Since I was away, I'm appreciating the things I like about the city even more. Fall's one of the pleasant seasons, I guess (or at least it is this year). And I really love my activities. I guess that's mostly music ensembles and Computer Club now. I definitely missed those over the summer (despite the fact I had some substitutes).
Anyway, I should probably stop and go to bed now. My second class of the semester is [logical] tomorrow at 10:30am. Maybe I'll ponder the question, "What the heck am I going to with my life?" next time. Probably not though. I'm rarely in the mood for that. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| It would be nice if making phone calls didn't scare me to death. I guess that's my number one irrational fear. Stupid shy personality bit. It really gets in the way some times.
For some reason I've had a bunch (well... two, but that's two more than normal) of distopian dreams this week. It's kind of bizarre.
Maybe I'll write a real LJ post later. Bye. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
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