October 28, 2003, 06:07 PM - New piano pieces

This week I started working on the first of Ruggles' Evocations. Ruggles is a mid twentieth-century American composer, and thus his pieces are...interesting, to say the least. And by "interesting" I mean "sounds like random pounding." Then again, a few years ago, Scriabin sounded like that, too, and a few years before that, Rachmaninoff did. I guess real music is an acquired taste.

I'm also picking up Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini again; I started learning it a few years ago, but then lost interest. Now, since I have a piano teacher, it's more fun to learn since he can play the orchestral reduction. I've forgotten how good this piece was, too. It's certainly one of Rachmaninoff's more playful works, or at least compared to his more usual dark, Russian sound. And of course, there's the (slightly overplayed) famous XVIIIth variation. I actually couldn't resist skipping ahead to sight-read it; it's a shame Rachmaninoff didn't develop that variation further, though.

I remember a while ago I saw an edition of Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu with an alternate passage for one of the descending runs in the middle section. I've memorized it, and it's become one of my favorite alternate passages, but now I can't seem to find that edition. I even went down to the music libary but the definitive Polish edition doesn't seem to have it, either, which was surprising considering that it usually has tons of extras for each piece. Below is the passage, as I remember it:

October 27, 2003, 09:06 AM - Blah.

Yet another all-nighter. And not even halfway through the quarter; definitely a bad sign. And I'm not even done yet. I have to study for my Japanese kanji quiz that is in, oh, less than 45 minutes from now.

At least I'm finding the kanji easy to memorize. What I learned from Heisig, although I didn't get to complete the course yet, has come in quite handy in unexpected times, but I think that the fact that I've been exposed to it for so much already has contributed more to my newfound ability. I'm finally getting an inkling of how Japanese people, among others, manage to get around with a character system of unbounded complexity.

Then again, if my role was exactly reversed, I'd be writing about how I'm finally getting an inkling of how American people, among others, manage to get around with a phonology of unbounded complexity.

On an unrelated note, the latest iTunes update fixed the bugs I was having. It still doesn't handle corrupt mp3s as well as Winamp does, but at least it doesn't crash and burn like a, well, like a first-generation piece of software.

I must sleep early tomorrow, (oh, whoops, today) and by sleep early I mean early like 9 PM, not early like 12 PM which is my usual definition. I have an amazon.com interview at 9 AM sharp on Wednesday and a midterm two hours later. But seeing as how I don't get out of class until 6 PM today it might be tough to fully prepare for it. I might have to cut the classes that I can watch on video later; again, having to do this this early in the quarter is a bad sign.

That's it for now. 10 more minutes to study, and then off to the start of a busy day. This is only my 18th hour up; I think I got at least a couple more hours in me.

October 24, 2003, 09:07 AM - Yet another all nighter...

But this time it was for work, as opposed to schoolwork. It's nice to be writing code that's actually being used, but it sucks having to wade through code that I wrote two years ago, especially since it's barely documented. Oh, well.

The PHP developers need to stop renaming their functions with each point release, by the way. Having a function called set_socket_timeout in one release, changing it to socket_set_timeout in another, and then finally settling on stream_set_timeout is not the best way to encourage people to use your language.

October 20, 2003, 03:02 PM - The iPlot thickens...

So I finally figured out which songs were causing iTunes to not work correctly: "Real Emotion" by Koda Kumi. (Which I in no way pirated and own a legal copy of. Yeah.) It's strange because I originally thought it was a problem arising from bad extended characters, and it turns out to be (I'm guessing) just a corrupt MP3, although it plays fine on my iPod and on Winamp.

Also, Naotarou Moriyama's "Sakura" (which I own a legal copy of, etc.) refuses to be added to iTunes, for some reason. Like I try to add the file and it just does nothing. Another corrupt MP3, I'm guessing, although it too plays fine on my iPod and on WinAmp.

I'm guessing iTunes' MP3 decoder is just sensitive to MP3 errors, and it wasn't a character set problem after all. I guess it's time for me to eat some crow.

October 19, 2003, 07:32 AM - I'm starting to think...

Korean girls are hotter than Japanese girls. Maybe it's because I got desensitized from my stay in Japan.

Wow, it's early. Time to head to bed.

October 17, 2003, 01:29 PM - Where did my phone go?

It disappeared! I last remember it at Tressider Gym, where it was at my cubicle along with my wallet and keys. Sometime between then and when I realized it was gone a few hours later, I lost track of it. I thought I left it at the gym but I went back this morning and it wasn't there. I had someone ring it for me but they only got voice mail, which presumably means it's either off or getting no reception.

I bet it's hidden in my room somewhere.

I should be in bed by now. I have a Japanese test tomorrow at 9:30. I seem to do this to myself too much; convincing myself that I'll go to bed after "just one more thing." In this case, it was trying to get the new iTunes to work. Apparently, it has some issues with extended characters being used in song filenames and ID3 tags; of course, lots of my Asian pop songs have those, so it crashed everytime I connected my iPod to my computer. Incidentally, I tried it on my laptop too and got a nice "Divide by zero" message when I tried connecting my iPod to that.

Doesn't quite leave me with a good impression of Apple, especially with the bugs in my iPod. I was thinking about getting a new PowerBook but I think I'll hold off for a while. I don't expect perfection, but I expect all the silly bugs--like the left/right output channels on the iPod switching randomly, and this latest extended character set bug, which, considering Apple is an international company, is inexcusable--to be fixed before release.

Anyway, I also spent a lot of time today tweaking MovableType to work better. Although I still have to get this one annoying bug fixed; everytime MovableType or any other CGI program creates a file in my cgi-bin directory, it does so with no permissions set. There were some switches in MovableType's config file to fix this, but those didn't work; I suspect it has something to do with Stanford's CGI sandboxing setup. I might bother the IT people about this; it's quickly getting annoying having a terminal window open and typing "chmod -R 755 *" everytime I update my blog settings.

Oh, well, back to studying. And sleep.

October 16, 2003, 12:05 AM - zzzz....

I am so tired. I just pulled an all nighter last night to finish my four problem sets that were due today. Never again. I'd better get started on next week's batch early if I don't want to get caught off guard again. My bed's going to feel like heaven tonight. G'night.

I finally managed to get Movable Type to play nice with PHP and Stanford's CGI sandbox software. Everything should work, except for possibly the news feed. Hopefully I'll be able to add in the more dynamic features of Movable Type later. (comments, etc.)

October 13, 2003, 11:50 PM - Yay for CGI support!

At long last, Stanford has finally decided to offer CGI support for students. Now I can PHP my web page to my heart's content.