I'm very excited. I've been in touch with Chicago's only bodhran maker, and he's currently working on a drum for me. For the first time in my life, I'll have an actual green drum. Yes! It's supposed to be finished in just under three weeks, and I can't wait.
Of course, now that I've gotten all excited about it, the one I have now (on loan from my teacher, with the option to buy, over which I've been going back and forth) is sounding really good. It must be getting jealous. I've been having trouble getting it sounding the way I want, so I messed around with the tuning yesterday. I guess I did something right, because it was sounding great today.
These drums use heads made of goatskin, which is extremely sensitive to humidity and temperature. Chicago's winters are very cold and dry, which tightens the heads up. With a tuneable drum you can easily tighten a drum that's too loose, but you can only go so far if the drum is too tight because of the weather. If you loosen them too much, the heads are in danger of just falling off the frame, or separating from one another (in the case of a two or three skin drum). Your drum will sound weird if the skins separate, but they're a pain to fix, so an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure in this case.
I'm not sure if it's the slightly warmer weather, the tuning, or what, but I was having fun practicing today. A well-tuned instrument sometimes feels like it plays itself.
On the nerd front, I got a little sick of the iframe business on this page, so I've gone to a more boring, webloggy layout while I try to think of something more interesting to do with this home page. I plan to do more, maybe add another color or two to the page (gasp!), but I'm not sure what I want to do yet, so this will do for now.
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Had a nice time Monday night with a group of Chicago web people (not this one, this one). Who was in attendance? At my table: Heather, Jes, Alicia, Shylo, Phineas, Paul, Naz; and at the upper table: Alex, Chris, Eulalia and Troy, Cinammon, Andrew, Leigh and Matt (thanks to everyone else for already posting easily copied lists). I enjoyed myself, although Lisa couldn't come because a) she had a class at the Old Town School, and b) she was too sick to go to class, so she didn't want to push it by going out with 16 people. Next time.
The food was good, the company was good, and there wasn't too much smoke in the restaurant, if any. This was in stark constast to Martyr's and the New Apartment Lounge, where I've spent some time over the past couple nights. And speaking of smoke...
I really, truly hope Chicago institutes a smoking ban. I've spent a fair amount of time out hearing and playing music since we moved here, and I'm starting to get very uncomfortable feelings in smoky clubs. Strangely, my stomach seems to feel it before my lungs, getting all queasy and almost achy. It's very strange, and definitely not comfortable.
All the arguments that I've heard about what will happen to Chicago's clubs and restaurants should smoking be banned are pretty vapid. Does any really believe that people are going to go running to the suburbs because they can smoke indoors? Have the restaurant or entertainment industries died out in other cities with smoking bans (hint: the answer starts with "no"). Now, I'll grant that during the winter the typical "go outside to have a smoke" thing isn't going to work as easily. But then again, anything that you can't stop doing for a couple hours while you're watching a band or eating your dinner is probably a problem that you need to evaluate.
Of course, the biggest legitimate concern is that of the restaurant workers, who are constantly subjected to tremendous amounts of second-hand smoke. It's almost as bad for musicians that play in these places, because we're there working our asses off, breathing that nasty air and taking days off our lives doing what we love. We should be protected.
There must be some way that everyone's needs can be accommodated. It's not like people who smoke are evil, or that they want to cause everyone around them to die earlier. I just know it gets harder all the time for me to go out, because I know I'm going to come home stinking of smoke, with a tight stomach and dirty lungs. It's a price I'm willing to pay now, but I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to put up with it.
Because I have several friends who are using it, I asked Brian for a LiveJournal account (only active LJ users can bestow free accounts), and he gave me one today.
This gives me the power not only to have my own, but more importantly to be able to post comments with my name on them. LiveJournal doesn't stick a regular name field in with comments; you're either a registered LiveJournal user (you can't get a free account without an invitation, and invitations are limited), or anonymous. Better still, it gives me a page where all of my friends latest entries can be read. That alone makes it worth the trip.
I like some of the things LiveJournal offers (that friends page rulez), but it has certainly reminded me of one major drawback about Blogger (and the reason I ended up switching to Greymatter a while ago): being at the mercy of someone else's software (in particular where it comes to speed). Yes, I have a shared hosting account, so to some degree I'm always at someone else's mercy, but I like having my blogging software on my server. I control it completely, and it's a lot faster than the often-slow LiveJournal servers. That's not their fault, they just have far more users than my host does, and those people are hitting LJ's servers much harder.
I'm going to enjoy LiveJournal, but I really enjoy doing things myself too.
I need to start a new blog for little things. I remember my weblog used to have links to little various things I found online--I guess that's what they were originally used for, right? I decided at some point that I don't really like just posting "hey look at this" stuff here. I guess I look at this more as stuff about me, keeping up with me for people who want to do that, and random web crap doesn't fit in there.
That said, I plan to do that once we're back in Chicago and I don't have to wait through each little step in MT it's going to require for me to do that. Each step is fairly easy, but there will be enough that my terrible less-than-28.8 connection here in Portage is not going to cut it.
For the moment, then, here's an espn article Brian forwarded me about a new ad featuring Michael Jordan playing against his younger self. Pretty nifty.
My brother is part of a serious research team in Maryland. They study amphibians, mostly salamanders these days, although they lovingly call all their creatures "herps" (herpetology is the study of reptiles and amphibians). They are a very serious team that writes serious papers for serious publications and serious conferences.
Some parts of their site, however, are not so serious. And for that, we must all be thankful to my beloved brother.
My least favorite part of the holidays was breaking my camera. The evil strap caught on the corner of a table and sent it crashing to the floor. It still took pictures, but couldn't zoom, making terrible, grinding noises when I tried.
Manly man that I am, I decided I'd take it apart. You know, maybe something was jammed or a piece fell off inside and got in the way of... something. I certainly felt confident have successfully taken apart and reassembled Lis's iBook four times. Taking stuff apart (and being able to put said stuff back together) is part of what being an adult is all about. Right?!
It didn't work out. In fact, it got worse. The lens would not only not zoom, it wouldn't telescope out when the camera turned on. I couldn't tell why (all I did was take it apart, look, twiddle a few parts, put it back together) but it didn't work at all. Just in time for everyone to show up for Party2K2. I have no party pictures as a result (although I'm pestering Daisy for the sledding footage).
This happened, of course, one and a half months after my extended warranty expired. I'm sure you've heard this before, but for crying out loud don't get an extended warranty unless you're buying something very expensive.
Thinking about the fast-moving nature of technology, I figured I might as well buy a new camera. I did some research, and decided against it. The C-2040Z is still the best camera at its price if you want manual control of everything, a good lens, and everything else. I sent the camera back to Olympus once I found out their prices for repair, which are considerably less than buying a comparable new camera (and only a few dollars more than the scam warranty). In the future, I'll always research the price for repair before buying something like this—it's valuable information.
I shipped it back last week, and it's there now, being repaired, and I can't wait to get it back. There are all these things I want to shoot (wedding bands, our amaryllis, Irish sessions), but I have to be patient. Where's the fun in that?
Did you buy any CDs between 1995 and 2000? If so, you should become part of the class action suit that was brought against some big members of the RIAA.
Basically, you will be sent a check for five to twenty dollars at some point in the future, and it will be a nice surprise, and you will be acknowledged as someone who hates this whole business of price fixing.
More information, and the short form to fill out, is available on the website, in English and Spanish.
One thing I forgot to mention.
Rule #1 of Mafia is not do not talk about Mafia.
Rule #1 of Mafia is Kill Brian!
Perhaps it's cruel, but it is vital. Brian is going to be moderator in any Mafia game I'm playing for the rest of his life.
We're back from the holidays. Actually, we've been back for several days. Only now do I feel decompressed enough to do some writing about it.
This years marked the second time my family hosted the huge mini-reunion New Year party we called PartY2K. This year it was Party2K2. Many were invited, many showed up. We had something on the order of sixteen guests over the course of three or four days.
The main purpose of these gatherings (other than playing big games of Balderdash, of course) is to see all the people we miss from college. We're a pretty tight group, but we're not as good as we might like to be about keeping in the touch the normal way: email, letter-writing, phone calls, and that sort of thing. It's the sort of group where we can get together after (in some cases) not having seen each other for a year or more, and it's as if no time has passed. Beautiful.
Then, of course, there were the couple of people I really hadn't seen in years, or whom I had seen maybe a couple times in my life. It's interesting when you remember liking someone the first time you meet them, but they impress you even more when you spend a few days together.
As much for my own benefit as yours, I'm going to write down all the things we did.