RouseWorld | Main -- December 2005 Archives

Music is hard, period

I can spin a lot of explanations as to why I can only play "On Top of Old Smokey," but the truth is that decent music is hard. At least it is more non-musical genius types like me. Chords, keeping time and stuff just doesn't come naturally I'm afraid.

So, I mentioned wanting to learn "Gilgarry Mountain" (also know as "There's Whiskey in the Jar")?

Well, I was at it for a while and could hear that the notes I was playing seemed to be the right notes — but I couldn't hear the song in what I was playing. What I was doing didn't even begin to resemble the actual song. Turns out the song, which I thought was reasonably simple, is played at like 170 bpm. And don't even get me started about "A Rocky Road to Dublin."

So, it may take a while to climb old Gilgarry.

In the mean time — because it fits along with "On Top of Old Smokey" and "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star," — I'm making good progress with "Yankee Doodle Dandy." All I have to worry about is two strings and just a few frets. Heck, as long as I stick to a generally slow beat and only one string at a time I can do pretty well.

It's just hard to bring the rock with songs like that (sigh).

SETI, BOINC and Solaris 2.7

I've been running SETI@home on and off since Dec 16, 2000 and yesterday the project switched over to a new software package called BOINC, which is designed to allow people to donate CPU power to a variety of different projects, including SETI.

I've spent a bit of time today converting one of my machines over to the new software.

Happy Christmas and Birthday to Me

As I struggle with the whole Guitar thing I've noticed that I'm really not rocking that much. Partially because even the songs that I think would be simple have turned out to be really complex (Iron Man, I'm looking at you, easy except for the solos indeed) and partially because if I had some kind of innate talent I wouldn't have waited until my late 30s to start playing (at least I hope not, that would suck).

So anyway, I've been playing a fair amount of non-electric stuff on the electric and that doesn't always make sense from an audio standpoint and also it is difficult to just grab the thing and play, I have to decide which amp to use and maybe wait for that to warm up.

I'm sure you can see where this is going.