What has happened since August of 2009, you may ask? I admit, not much. My final fall semester came and went without much to-do. I passed all of my classes, including computer Architecture and Databases, meaning that the only other computer course I had to pass in the spring was Software Engineering, with Dr. Sam. Honestly I figured it was going to be my worst class this semester but I have been pleasantly surprised. More on that later.

Other than school, not much happened last semester. I did, however, purchase another ukulele. That’s right, now I have two: the soprano I bought this past summer, and now a tenor, which is really the only one I ever play anymore. I’ve learned every basic 7 chord that exists, that is, every m7, M7, and diminished 7 chord. This is evidenced by the fact that I can play through the entire “Tune Up” song on the Aebersold album of the same name. Tune Up is a song which, every chorus, moves up a half step. And the play-a-long does twelve choruses, ensuring that every single version of the above-mentioned chords appear somewhere.

And now that I know my minors, majors, and diminisheds (shut up, I know it’s not a word), I also can play them over other chords, where the upper structure forms that chord. For example, C7b9 (that’s C7 flat 9; stupid font) is simply a C#dim chord, over a C. And since I’m playing a ukulele, I don’t really ever have to worry about the bass note, so I just move the root up a half step and play a diminished chord. Similarly, the upper structure of Dm9 is FM7. Since I only have four strings to work with, substitutions like this are always necessary. And if I’m playing jazz (which, let’s face it, I usually am), the upper structure is always the most important part of the chord anyway, really.

Sorry to geek out there for a moment. I’ve been doing a lot of ukulele playing over the past few weeks, so it’s kind-of on my mind.

So, that brings us to this semester, I suppose. My course load isn’t the most insane thing that has ever existed, but I’m constantly reminded that if I actually passed all the courses I attempted on the first go, I would have far fewer classes right now. Oh well, though.

I have Public Speaking, which is criminally easy. I have Astronomy, which is fairly easy, even if the professor likes to pretend it’s a super hard class where you will absolutely fail if you are not Stephen Hawking. I have Modern Concepts of Math, which is supposedly easy but I am a total failure at math, so it’s actually pretty hard for me. I definitely will not be passing that one with an A. But I will pass, dammit. I must.

Then there’s Geomorphology, which is a terrible class. Every day at 10:00 AM (9:00 on Fridays), we go sit in a room and have the professor read off slides that are freely available on the network drive. He reads them in an almost incomprehensible Chinese accent, and doesn’t really explain anything. Then, for the tests, I have no idea if he writes them or steals them from other professors / the authors of the book, but they are so in-depth and cover material most of which we never even looked at in class. Instead, they come from the gigantic Book of Doom we needed to buy for this class, which is full of nothing but insanely technical explanations for every single chemical reaction that ever takes place at any point on the planet, ever.

However, I foresee myself passing the course, just because everyone else in the class (with the exception of one guy who is a geology major) is in the same boat as I am. So, we’ll see.

And I guess that brings us to Software Engineering. This class was touted as the absolute worst class you ever have to take in the Comp Sci department. On top of that, it’s taught by the “meanest” teacher in the department (this is true, actually). Honestly though, if you actually go in and do the work for the project (something I have always done; I may not be great at remembering to do homework, but if I am assigned a project I will do the hell out of it), you will have no problems whatsoever in the class.

Our project is to make a web application that utilizes three mapping services, Yahoo, Bing, and Google, to display information the user requests. It really hasn’t been too bad so far. We’ll see how he grades it at the end of the semester in three weeks. Four weeks. Something like that.

I was going to mention one other thing. I totally don’t remember what it is though. Oh well, I’ll remember later. This entry is long enough as is.

Oh, and happy Easter or something.

I read a story just a few minutes ago which infuriates me to a level like only political dumbassery could.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090813/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_end_of_life_2

Blumenauer said the controversy [over the healthcare bill's "death panels"] was helping Democrats in a “perverse way.”

By continuing to spread a widely refuted claim, Republican critics are undercutting their own credibility, he said. The controversy has drawn more attention to the original proposal, which passed largely unnoticed when a health overhaul was approved by three House committees.

Blumenauer, if I may address you personally, I appreciate you and your views on political discourse. Some of my best friends are intelligent conservatives and I enjoy debating with them immensely. I believe that proper debate is the only way to arrive at the most equitable solution in almost any given situation.

However, republican critics are not interested in their own credibility. They’re not worried about the credibility of their statements; they’re not worried about the credibility of their political party; they’re not worried about the state of political discourse in this country. The only thing these conservative commentators (and by “these conservative commentators” I mean the legions of conservatives who march around bearing a banner for Fox News) are interested in is riling up the largest number of people they can possibly rile up.

Look at the place in the bill that has caused all this controversy. The following paragraphs describe the “advanced planning consultation” which the bill says it will cover every 5 years for citizens who qualify. Remember, these meetings are completely voluntary. Let’s see what these consultations will cover.

(A) An explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to.

(B) An explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses.

(C) An explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.

(D) The provision by the practitioner of a list of national and State-specific resources to assist consumers and their families with advance care planning, including the national toll-free hotline, the advance care planning clearinghouses, and State legal service organizations (including those funded through the Older Americans Act of 1965).

(E) An explanation by the practitioner of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice, and benefits for such services and supports that are available under this title.

It seems as though the entire section on advanced care planning describes nothing but informational medical sessions for older citizens.

This has been pointed out time and time again. I would like to give conservatives credit enough to assume that the ones railing against the bill have actually read it. I can only then assume that the only reason Palin and her ilk are spreading such misinformation is malicious intent.

The reason I get so riled up about these things is because it completely floors me that organizations such as Fox News and Freedomworks have goals that involve nothing but whipping large numbers of blissfully ignorant Americans into a frenzy that tears our country further apart among party lines.

I’m disgusted.

I upgraded the linux install on my laptop to the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 9.04, and so far it’s working out really well. I’ve been playing with the keyboard layouts, and I’m enjoying the international layout quite a bit. For example, I didn’t know there was a need for a character ś. Or ḿ. Or ĺ (that’s an L with an accent, for those of you playing the home game). If someone forced me to guess which language used consonants with accents over the letters, I’d probably say Vietnamese. Maybe I should look it up.

Just did. Turns out it’s Polish. Among others. I fail hardcore.

I’m bored. Updating my blog when I have nothing of value to say makes me feel like this guy. Maybe I should just call it a night.

I’m not saying I suffer from depression. Much of what I’m feeling right now, I’m sure, has to do with the fact that I’m stuck here at home, away from school and friends, with nothing to do and no car. I’m sure that contributes more than anything else, really.

I’ve seen a therapist about this situation, and his proposed solution is for me to get out more. To be sure, it’s something I need to do. It’s a problem I’ve always had, and he’s helped me realize that the problem I have isn’t necessarily that I’m too much into video games. It’s more that I use things like video games as an escape.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I have still had this overwhelming lethargy and inability to motivate myself to actually do anything. That doesn’t necessarily mean hang out with friends. I enjoy writing, and this blog is my only outlet for that. You can see by the calendar, then, that I really haven’t been writing that often. And when I do write, it’s really just to complain about something (like right now).

I love programming and writing and composing music. However, when I open an IDE or a word processing program or Sibelius, I just end up staring blankly at the screen. Not only do I have no motivation to do the things I love, but it seems that any semblance of inspiration has been chased out of my brain by this wave of indifference.

Today, I became fed up with it all. I began to look back through my life and to look for anything that could be considered a constant. The only thing I found was, of course, music. As long as I live, music will always be a huge part of my life. But how could I use that to get myself out of this slump?

I play trumpet, obviously. But after all these years, practicing has become a chore. I still enjoy playing with other people, especially jazz, but playing by myself is really just boring. The only reason I do it anymore is to keep my muscles in some semblance of shape.

Hmm. That reminds me. I need to practice today.

But if I can’t derive pleasure out of trumpet, and I have no motivation or inspiration to compose, and I don’t have access to a piano (or even a remote level of aptitude for the instrument), what could I do?

So I went on eBay and bought myself a ukulele.

It came after I realized a few simple truths.

1. Ukuleles are ridiculously cheap (versus other instruments, of course).
2. I have been informed that they are easy to learn (even easier, I would guess, for someone with an extensive music theory background).
3. It’s impossible to listen to a ukulele and not feel better about life.

Once I had bought it, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time it was that I bought something random just to make myself happy. I’m happier right now just having done it, and I’m bugging my friends to tell them about my impulse buy.

I’ll update with pictures when the instrument arrives!

I am referring to, of course, the apartment situation for next year. For those of you who don’t know about this clusterfuck of a situation, I’ll go ahead and give a brief synopsis. We had a four-person apartment last year, which worked out well, and then Ed graduated, leaving us with three people. The people we chose to be our fourth roommates all decided to do different things, but not until after we had signed a “renewal” form thing. The renewal form only really counts if we are extending the current lease, which we thought we were. But since we had to add someone else to the apartment, we actually just needed to sit down and sign a completely new lease for the same apartment.

We didn’t do that, of course, because by the time we realized we needed to make a new lease we knew we only had three people. Instead, we went to the office, explained the situation, and requested a three-person apartment.

Well, they refuse to rent us a three-person apartment until the four-person we were in last year is rented to other people. They have people interested, but they haven’t come in to sign the lease, so as of today, Thursday, June 25, we have no apartment next year.

My plan is thus: I’m going to have to go up to Slippery Rock eventually this summer to make appointments with my advisor and the head of the department and the dean concerning transferring these calculus credits to SRU, so when I do that I’m going to go to the office and explain that there is no way I will be able to afford living with only two other people in a four-person apartment; that I won’t be able to afford splitting rent for four people three ways. Therefore, I will not be living in a four-person apartment.

So their options are: 1) Rent us the three-person apartment and make money, or 2) We will rent another three-person apartment with a different company (we looked into it and there are some still available, though they are in a slightly less convenient location). We never signed a lease, and they told us that the renewal form we signed doesn’t even matter if we had to add someone to the lease. Legally, I don’t think they have any way to force us to pay rent for an empty apartment, as that would be utterly absurd.

I’m just sick of this treatment, and I’m going to go up and tell them so.

I created another blog. I’m not going to be using it yet, and for all my current blogging needs (which… you know, don’t exist), this blog will be the target of my verbose rants. However, that blog is specifically targetted at my aims of international travel. As time draws nearer and nearer to the outset of my adventure into the Orient, I’m gonna be using that blog more and more until it becomes my new main blog.

However, I’m gonna try to keep depressing shit out of that one, so I’ll keep this one in the event that I need to rant about something that people don’t want to freaking hear about.

So if you are one of the poor souls who actually reads this blog, might want to keep your eye on that one too. I’ll be updating it with my progress of applying to the JET Programme over the coming school year.

In unrelated news, I’m considering doing NaNoWriMo again this year. But this year, you know.. actually finishing it.

I think I’m gonna go to bed.

Seriously. A few weeks ago, we performed with a Mr. Kurt Elling, a jazz vocalist, philosopher, poet, and all-around incredible guy. It was one of the best performance experiences I’ve ever had. And then just today, we performed for a bunch of high schoolers in the big auditorium with none other than Michael Philip Mossman. You may not know who he is, but within the jazz community, he’s an icon. I’m sure everyone in any sort of big band has played at least one of his arrangements or compositions.

He’s also, though,  a fantastic trumpet player, and gave the brass players from SRU a great masterclass on brass playing that was incredibly insightful. I generally don’t get much out of masterclass-style presentations; they annoy and bore me more than anything, because they’re always about “use more air” and “listen to music more” and “think about articulation.” Don’t get me wrong, those are all incredibly important subjects, but I think that, especially at a college level, people know these things already. Subjects like those seem to me like cop-outs and I find that I really hate masterclasses like that.

Michael’s masterclass covered some of the basics, but he did it in a way that really made sense to me. His concept of things like practice and tone production really struck a chord (ha ha) with me. And I know now that whenever I play from now on I’ll be thinking about the things he said today. He then moved on to more “high-level” subjects like motivation for playing and creating energy with the way that you play.

I guess it wouldn’t have been so impressive to me if he hadn’t demonstrated these things to us himself. Many times when someone gives a masterclass when they play, they demonstrate the dumbest stuff that really doesn’t inspire us. For example, they’ll talk about using air, and then demonstrate this by playing a note using a tiny pinched embouchre, and then the same note with a huge sound and lots of air, and then say “see the difference?” Well, yeah, we see the difference, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s an obvious difference and we’ve all heard it a million times before.

But the thing that set Mossman apart from others was that he was actually able to use less air and sound good, as a demonstration. That’s a lot of people’s problem, myself included. We use less air than we should and rely more on chops, which works until you have to play higher and louder and end up cramming the horn into your face and potentially doing damage to yourself. He demonstrated the difference in these two playing styles most expertly and I found it to be a great help in my quest to not suck at trumpet fundamentals so much.

The concert tonight really drove it home, too. He soloed a lot and sounded like no less than one million U.S. dollars. I wish I could sound like that someday. And from the way he was talking to us, I start to believe… that maybe I can.

Yeah, me neither.

Also, I heard some very interesting eternal-damnation-related news! Apparently the Vatican has announced seven additional deadly sins, these being of a more “social” variety. They are as follows:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening the divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

First of all, it looks like they ran out of ideas after sin 5. You could list 6 and 7 under 5 and no one would really bat an eyelash. I guess they just wanted to set up a sequel to that Se7en movie. Four14en perhaps?

“Bioethical” violations such as birth control? That’s a difficult one to touch. Obviously the church is against the whole premarital sex thing, but if these new-and-improved sins are meant for a more “modern” world, is it really necessary to go so far as to turn the use of birth control–including the pill which many women use to regulate their cycles–into one of the social deadly sins? It seems to me that if people take this seriously (which we all know that they won’t) this would effect a sharp increase in the numbers of unplanned teenage pregnancies, leading to situations where either children are shuffled through the foster system or simply saddled with a life of incredible hardship with parents who are incapable of parenting. But maybe I just lack the bishop credentials that allow one to see the inherent evil in trying to reduce the occurrences of situations like these.

“Morally dubious” is such a subjective phrase that it’s almost humorous. My favorite part about this particular social sin is the quote from the Bloomberg link above, from Bishop Gianfranco Giratti:

“You offend God not only by stealing, taking the Lord’s name in vain or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by wrecking the environment, carrying out morally debatable experiments that manipulate DNA or harm embryos.”

Right. That’s a very good point. If God wanted us to debate morals, he would have given us brains and minds capable of comprehending abstract concepts like morality.

Drug abuse and polluting the environment, huh. I guess I can’t say anything about these. I’m not against most drugs but if the Vatican is, I guess that’s they’re perogative. I don’t really see the point of making these official damnation-worthy sins, but hey, what do I know?

Finally, the Vatican is putting everyone on Earth who happens to live in a capitalist society in a very awkward situation. Working hard and earning money violates sins 5, 6, AND 7 on the social-sin-o-meter. Really, I can only parse this two ways: first, perhaps it’s the fact that the church is telling us it’s a sin to make money, which I find to be unlikely, or secondly, perhaps the church is telling us that God finds it offensive that we don’t give all of our hard-earned cash to the poor. I guess that would mean that God’s a commie. Interesting.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m not Catholic, but I just don’t understand why Catholics even listen to this stuff anymore. What happened to the days when the ten commandments and the original 7 deadly sins were enough? Honestly, they’re timeless. Plus, a lot of these social sins fall into these predefined categories already. Off the top of my head:

• The Sin of Making Money and Not Giving It All to Poor People could fall into gluttony or the “you shall have no other gods before me” commandment
• The Sin of Snorting Crack and Other Fun Activities That God Hates Apparently is also a prime candidate for gluttony
• The Sin of Making Sure Children are Brought Up in a Properly Planned Environment is dicey, but I’m sure you can spin it to sound bad enough to be included with “thou shalt not kill”
• The Sin of Tossing Your Twinkie Wrappers Out the Car Window on the Interstate definitely falls into the “sloth” category

I’m just making these up as I go, but I just can’t see why we need seven additional one-way tickets to hell when we’ve had dozens of them sitting right here in front of us being ignored for so long. Do we really need seven more rules to feel guilty about completely ignoring?

Catholic church, stop trying so hard. Please.