Categories: Uncategorized

Piano lessons on YouTube

I’ve been wanting to play piano since about November 2005. While playing guitar, it never struck me that I could apply the same concepts to learning the piano, i.e. learning to form chords and then play using different rythms and patterns. So when I finally hit on this revelation, I eagerly spent hours learning to form all the basic chords and their variations on the keyboard. Anyway, that dream lay dormant for a year and a half now, and my pastor’s keyboard, that I borrowed back then, has been gathering (proverbial only!) dust.

Now however, I found that there are a huge number of piano lessons and tutorials onYouTube, which have rekindled my hope of being a piano virtuoso. I am currently in the process of downloading and converting some of these clips from FLV to AVI (for burning to SVCD or whatever).

In the long run, I would like to learn to read music as well. (I can, mind you. It just takes me about a minute to find each individual note on the keyboard.) I don’t aim to be able to sightread – maybe only in the distant future. I understand the basics, but it seems that there is just so much more of a short-term win in being able to play by learning chords.

Watch this space.


Categories: Comment, SAP

Regulating contractor placement

Abraham (who you may have seen commenting on this blog) and myself were having a discussion last week around the state of contracting and placement. Being both independent contractors in the SAP arena, we feel there are some aspects to placement that could do with some regulation, to protect both contractors and clients.


Categories: Comment, Ruby

Why I stopped reading why

(Stop! Don’t read this. Someone hacked my WordPress site many years ago and wrote this filthy rubbish. I wish).

Like my friend Helmut, one of my ambitions is to conquer the Ruby language, and then move on to Rails, the web framework that catapulted it into web history fame. He has gotten much further in his endeavours though, having managed to read through the whole of why the lucky stiff‘s book “A (poignant) guide to Ruby“. I haven’t.

(When I wrote this, I was a fair bit younger and much unwiser. The truth is, communities grow around guys like whytheluckystiff. When I think back to that awful time that why (the guy we now know as Johnathan Gillette) disappeared, I got this sick feeling in my stomach. What if he had read my blog post and decided that he could no longer do this for ingrates like the stupid guy who wrote this blog? Why, if you are out there, I am so, so sorry man. For what it’s worth, I ended up going back and reading that crazy book of yours. And I enjoyed it. It’s a true work of art.).


Categories: Ideas/Insights

Trying out WYSIWYG in MediaWiki

In my last publication, I made rather a big fuss about being able to use WYSIWYG in a wiki, or at least, that I thought it a vital requirement to drive usage of a wiki (something to that effect anyway). So I went ahead and tried one of the documented solutions for adding WYSIWYG capability to MediaWiki.