Miscellaneous topics about hobbies. Nothing about medicine.
I was feeling melancholy last night (April 13, 2011), and here’s what it was like, ( me, improv piano, 5MB mp3 files) Halls – Audio_003 Halls – Audio_004
Aug 8 update: you might also like this sweet little guitar-sound tune, or more from a different improv day, (audio_12, audio_16 but only if you’re liking this sadder complex stuff, which isn’t to everyones tastes.)
Aargh. My at-work PCs are forcing a screensaver with a password after 15 minutes of inactivity. Well.. I won’t put up with that. [Read more…]
I sent this throughout my hospital on April 1st. [Read more…]
August 10, 2011 update:
I’ve made a few things “useful” things with my lathe, but here’s my first piece of jewelery, a holder for a lucky penny.
Yea! I recently bought Lot #2 and subsequently Lot #3 on Hudson Island. (GPS at N 48.968, E -123.679 ). It’s in the Gulf Islands, north of Salt Spring Island, near Thetis Island, near Chemanius and Nanaimo BC.
Here’s a post in the “Unrelated” category. Today we got up early, drove to Camrose, Alberta by sunrise, got loaded and in the air by 9am, and flew to Kamloops BC, where we refueled the plane to full tanks, and had lunch with some relatives. We invited them flying, and took off in the early afternoon, flew to Sechelt, BC and stretched our legs, then flew up Sechelt inlet to look at oceanfront properties for sale, then flew back to Kamloops. [Read more…]
Another unrelated post. Here’s a video of the same kind of airplane that I have, an Expedition E350. It doesn’t stall or spin very well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skH3MSKMSqQ
(That’s a good thing, meaning its a wing that self-corrects if the pilot screws up and stalls or spins the plane.) To see the HD quality, when you get to youTube, change it from 360p to 1080p, and then choose Pop-Out or Full-Screen to view it.
Here’s a video of its short takeoff distance and landings.
http://www.youtube.com/v/Kj6sdtCbjWE
Here’s a video, showing my airplane, an Expedition E350, being maneuvered back into its hangar, using a cool product, a Trace Towbot. (The link is a video is in quicktime .mov format.)
My piano at home is a Yamaha Clavinova CVP-409. It has a record button, which lets it capture exactly what you play, and replay it, and it also lets you Save it to the USB drive. However, I was disappointed to discover that it saves .mid files (midi), which sound crappy when you play them on a PC (using the default synthesizer voices of windows media player).
However, I discovered a separate feature that records direct to the USB drive. The feature is quite limited.. simply Record ON and OFF. It stores .wav files on the USB drive, that sound quite good. However, they were huge! I used Sony SoundForge 9.0 to convert them into .mp3’s. A problem I found was that the recordings are very low volume, and when you Normalize them to increase the volume, some “wobbly pitch instability” appears in the sound.
Anyway, this post is to also test the WordPress feature of uploading music. So without furter adeu, here are a few improvised things I’ve recorded.
(Goot thing there’s no “furter” adeu, eh?)
| Yes, these were all improvised at the spur of the moment, no plan beforehand. | Download mp3 |
|---|---|
| Audio_1 | Audio_1 |
| Audio_2 | Audio_2 |
| Guitar sound. This is a nice sweet little piece. | Audio_3 |
| Audio_4 | Audio_4 |
| Left-hand does most of the melody here. | Audio_5 |
| (deleted Audio_6) | |
| Audio_7 | Audio_7 |
| Audio_8 | Audio_8 |
| Piano sounds great, in a short simple thing. | Audio_9 |
| Audio_10 | Audio_10 |
| Audio_11 | Audio_11 |
| Audio_12 | Audio_12 |
| Audio_14 | Audio_14 |
| Audio_15 | Audio_15 |
| Audio_16 | Audio_16 |
| Audio_17 | Audio_17 |
| Audio_18 | Audio_18 |
| Audio_19 | Audio_19 |
| Audio_20 | Audio_20 |
| Audio_21 | Audio_21 |
| Audio_22 | Audio_22 |
| Audio_23 | Audio_23 |
| Audio_24 | Audio_24 |
SO, some of that music sounds pretty good, maybe just to me, and not all of it it good. But I didn’t post this to show off. This post actually started because I struck up an email conversation with a fellow in Japan who shares some other interests, and we got talking about the qualities of different Yamaha keyboards. I uploaded these to give him a sample of the sound of the Clavinova. But then I decided to leave them here, at least long enough for my brother and my mother to hear, both of whom are excellent musicians.
