Two posts ago, I was talking about piano lessons on YouTube. Since then, I have started taking piano lessons at a nearby music school. This was just what I needed. You can only get so far on your own; then you need someone to guide you along and challenge you. I must thank my brother-in-law though, because although I’ve been talking about taking lessons for a while, he urged me to do it, having taken guitar lessons himself. I’m glad he did. All I needed was a gentle kick up the butt.
Not really. I’m simply about to reinstall Windows. But as I was about to go “Start -> Turn Off Computer” on this installation, it suddenly felt very final. I was not going to see this installation again. I had another look around to make sure that I had backed everything up, that everything was packed and ready to go. I was a bit nervous about whether my backups would end up OK on the other side.
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.
If there was one change I could make to the English language, it would be to have two words for “we”; one meaning “us including you” and one meaning “us excluding you”. Think of all the confusion that would avoid. For starters, that persona non grata (some would say spare wheel) would quickly get the message when you say: “We (excluding you) are going to the pub now”.
Of significance too, but of lesser importance perhaps, would be singular and plural versions of “you”.
Of course, if you combine the two, you would have four variants of the phrases covering the different cases of “we” stated above.
Oh boy, it seems everyone is jumping on the bandwagon! I’ve just been over to Netbeans, where I saw that there is a preview release (M9) of Netbeans 6.0, and lo and behold – Ruby and Rails support! Mind you, I never bothered to check whether someone had created Ruby/Rails plugins for Netbeans, so I’m not sure whether this is the culmination of long-term work from another project. It sure comes as a surprise to me!
With Mother’s day over, it’s time to reflect again on the other special persons in ones life. Today I had an amusing discussion with two colleagues about who’s Basis guy is the best. It turned out very much like a discussion between some five-year olds about who’s dad is the strongest.
There is this interesting article comparing Ubuntu to Windows Vista at InformationWeek. It pits the two in on a number of aspects like installation, hardware support, etc. The funny thing is that the price Ubuntu (i.e. it being free) only gets a small mention right at the end. If the comparison of the two were changed to a value for money comparison, it would become totally absurd.
It was with great excitement that I went to the Post Office yesterday to fetch my two Ruby books that I ordered from Amazon: Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails. Since starting to delve into Ruby a short while ago, I have fallen head over heels for this once obscure programming language, and the web framework that everyone has been talking about for so long.
If it were up to me, I would require all documentation on a project to be done in a wiki. I mean everything. For example: documenting business processes, problems and their solutions, people’s contact details, system details, project issues, project processes, ideas, proposed ways of doing things, FAQs, etc. What stops you from putting meeting minutes into a wiki? I guess nothing, provided you can implement some form of access control, which fortunately, good wikis provide.
I am in the process of creating a website from scratch, which is proving to be my first real encounter with PHP. For a while, I was looking at several PHP frameworks out there, but decided that I would rather get to know the language first than attempt to learn a framework.
One of the things I got hung up on was how I could redirect to a particular page depending on the logic of the currently executing page (by doing a redirect on the server). An example would be if you access a particular page for which you need to be logged in. At this point, you would want to redirect the user to a logon page. I searched all over and found people asking the same question, even someone asking how to redirect in PHP the way one does in Struts, which I realize now is not a very sensible question, as Struts is a framework, and PHP is a language.