¡Foiled por TiVo!

The other night I set up the TiVo to tape the first presidential debate, but not knowing the time or the channel, I tried using a wishlist with the word 'debate'. It returned a couple of results - way fewer than I expected, but I couldn't tell much of a difference from the descriptions, so I just picked one. It should be noted that this point that TiVo doesn't really tell you much about the channel, it just shows an icon (which I didn't recognize).

I came back tonight to check that the recording was ok, and surprise surprise, it's.... in Spanish!?! Son of a...

I'm recording another showing, but I've missed the first half hour or so. Hopefully they'll have more on at some point... at least I have the other debates programmed in so I shouldn't have this problem again.

Update - I grabbed another full copy from even later that night. Thanks for the other suggestions though :)

Earthsway day

We had an earthquake out here this morning - probably the second biggest I've felt since I've been out here. Although it had made quite a few news stories, it really didn't cause any problems around here. It did make the blinds in my office sway back and forth slightly, which will take some time to recover (sniff).

Eric asked me what the standard earthquake procedure is around here, to which I replied: "you go out into the hallway to talk about it". It was a pretty gentle swaying back and forth, with the back of my mind worrying and remembering that these things sometimes knock over buildings. Of course you're probably supposed to stand in a doorway or hide under a desk, but being from the midwest I only know how to deal with tornados.

If I was still in my old office though, I probably wouldn't have even noticed today's gentle sway. The office was somehow perched on the most resonant spot of our floor - so any time someone would walk down the hallway it would feel like a small earthquake occurred. That got old fast.

If you want to see a map, check out this page at the usgs.gov site. Look soon if you want to see this one, since the map only shows the quakes from the past week.
And this page has the info for today's quake, which probably won't ever change.

LEGOs! and Star Wars

Ah, the return of the exclamation point in the subject, we all knew it was going to happen sooner or later.

This evening we had a slightly creepy meal at an italian place where everyone seemed to know everybody - except us. Waiters knew guests, guests knew other guests, and a party in one of the large rooms sang a very strange version of 'happy birthday' that included dog howling without any dogs actually present.

We then headed off to the mall for some shopping - probably the first time I've been to Valley Fair in six months or so. After I picked up a couple of pairs of sunglasses we wandered around aimlessly for a while. I saw a number of kids with LEGO bags, and wondered what store would have those bags.... and eventually we found out :)

VALLEY FAIR HAS A FRIGGIN' LEGO STORE!!!!!!!!

If I were 12 this would probably be the greatest thing in my life, but it's still really cool. The back wall has a bunch of containers with various colored parts - you can buy a glass full whichever parts you want for about $10. If I had the time and motivation to build anything, my wallet would have emptied very quickly.

These days I don't do much 'thinking outside the box' LEGO building - I just follow the instructions for my Star Wars sets, and then admire them on the shelf. I'm a sucker for anything from the original trilogy, but I've mostly stayed away from EP1&2 sets. My latest purchase was the Millenium Falcon (v2, the ESB version), which I'm happy to report (to Wade, mostly :) uses mostly standard parts and has a pretty cool design. It was on sale, so give me a break...

I also caved and bought the Star Wars trilogy DVDs this week. I'm not as excited about them because they the 'special' editions, with even more 'specialness' thrown in. So far we've only watched EP4, and the CG stuff they added still looks out of place.

Another lesson learned is to NEVER BUY ANYTHING NEW FROM RASPUTIN'S (for you non-CA folks, it's a mini-chain that sells mostly used and some new CDs and DVDs; however it probably wouldn't be a good idea to buy anything from the evil monk either). I signed the receipt without really paying attention to the price, only to realize later that they charged me $59 for the DVDs (it would have been $69 without the membership card). Amazon ($42), I will never doubt you again.

Sibelius vs. Finale

I spent a long time deciding which music notation program to use before I finally bought Sibelius back in January of this year. I had used various versions of Finale that band directors had since back when I was in high school, but I never really liked it. Back in the day Encore was pretty good, but I don't think it's been updated for years. Finale was originally supposed to be brought to Mac OS X a ... well, a while ago. I don't remember the original date, but it got pushed back to August 2003, then that month they delayed it for another couple of months, when that came around, it got delayed until January 2004. You can get some more background over at MacMusic.org. I also found it funny that many of the features listed for Finale 2004 were things that you either got for free moving to OS X, or things you were required to do to move to X - you can see a list of some of them here.

I was down at the NAMM show in Los Angeles when they finally did release the OS X version, and a quick glance at it showed that it still had some of the same problems that the classic version did - slow redraw, problems muting sounds, and other things that I can't remember now.

I tried the demo of Sibelius at some point in the middle of all this waiting, but it was difficult to get much done in the crippled demo version that doesn't allow saving files (Not that I blame them for this limitation - it's cool that you can try out 99% of the features of a pretty expensive program for free). I don't know exactly how I found it, but I started looking at Virtual Drumline from TapSpace at that time as well, and they mention their preference for Sibelius just about any chance they get. Of course one of their employees is sponsored by Sibelius, so I guess that makes sense...

Anyway, I bought Sibelius (and Virtual Drumline) despite the fact that the band director was (and is) still using Finale. And I couldn't be much happier with my decision.

Sibelius does a few smart things for percussionists - first off, it plays back any diddles you write in the music. They are much easier to create (there is a shortcut key in the numeric keypad), and the extra glyph for the diddle stays with the note when it gets moved. Since diddles are used quite often, this saves me a lot of time. And since it actually plays back the sound as it was written, I don't have to translate anything in my head when I listen to it.

The second nice thing for percussionists is the mapping capabilities for notes. In Sibelius you can assign different notes on the staff different pitches, and each different notehead can have a different pitch as well. I tried doing some of this in Finale, but it was pretty time consuming and didn't work well. One of the silly things about Finale was when you would try to create a standard snare drum note it wouldn't sound like a snare drum. You needed to put a sharp on the note for it to sound right (and to make it more confusing, the sharp was invisible once it was there). The maps in Sibelius are pretty easy to use, and once you have them set up, you can easily import them into other documents.

Sibelius has quite a few other features that I really like that aren't specific to percussion - it's really easy to create rehearsal letters, and the program is smart about handling them (it doesn't print them for every line in score form, but it does print them for each extracted part). It's really easy to make selections for different parts of the music and edit them, something which required lots of different tools in Finale.

I really like the ability to move around the score by clicking and dragging on the background of the page. It's something that I didn't like or use much at first, but now that I've spent over 100 hours using the program, I really can't do without it. In fact, I sometimes find myself trying to drag the background in Safari, Mail, and Xcode to navigate around :)

Of course there are issues with Sibelius, like there are with any program. It's got a few scrolling bugs, and the mixer window is pretty slow. Every once in a while I get a crash when plugging or unplugging my MIDI device, and waking from sleep sometimes aggravates it more.

Overall, I'm really glad I switched to Sibelius. It's very well suited for percussion writing, and well... that's what I do :) I'll keep updating this page with more notes as I think of them - feel free to let me know of any corrections (or info about then new Finale 2005, since I haven't tried it).

The music is done!

I'm happy to say that as of Friday night I am done with the music for this fall's show! Of course no marching band music is ever really finished - we always change little bits up until the last performance, but the main chunk of writing is done. Now I can spend my time thinking about the balance on the field, instead of what I hear on my computer, the visual aspect of it all, and maybe even start thinking about music for the winter show. No, I'll probably wait a while before I do that :)

If you want to check out any of the stuff, you can go to the Fremont High School Marching Band page - www.firebirdmarchingband.com and then go to the creatively named "Corey's Page".

T-shirts from the web

A link for Tina: Monkeys are good people
"I am ten ninjas" and some others seem pretty good as well...

13 months of blogging

I finally got a post done, so I might as well do another :)
Everyone seems to do their "I've been blogging for x years" post, but you are going to have to settle for this. I'm almost done with music for marching band, so I'm feeling like I have a bit more time on my hands. Unfortunately all of the posts that I think of tend to be longer than this, and would take too much time to flush out. I'll get to them eventually...

In the meantime - any requests for (quick) things to blog about?

Nebraska State Fair and Programming

This past weekend I ran across an article on Buzz (a site that deserves a separate post all to itself) talking about how the Nebraska state fair faces extinction . Well, it really took me back.

I was born in Nebraska, and lived there until half way through the 6th grade. And since my parents were good Nebraskans, we always spent a day during the summer running all over the fair grounds - watching cattle competitions, buying and eating really good taffy, looking at big vegetables, buying dinosaur-shaped erasers, etc. As I got older I started entering in various 4H competitions: art, photography, baking (which my mom reminded me about... it seemed I had blocked it from my memory), and probably the most important - programming.

My dad and I were members of the "Bits and Bytes Computer Club", which was a monthly meeting to learn about programming and computers in general. Apple II's were all the rage back then, and we had an Apple IIe that I could try things out on. One of the projects for the club was a conversion program - going from metric to english and back. I wrote the program for both the club and the fair, and I spent quite a bit of time on it. It was quite a task for a 4th grader - since I was writing code to do equations without knowing algebra. Of course it helped that my dad is an engineer, but true to his nature he wouldn't _tell_ me anything, he had to teach me how it all worked :)

So after a lot of hard work I ended up with a program in BASIC that was about 43K in size - which seemed like a lot at the time. We hauled our IIe to the fair so I could present the program, and I won a purple ribbon (1st prize) which also got me a $50 gift certificate to a local computer store. My dad suggested that we spend the money on a modem, so we could connect to BBSes and other computers, but I said something like "why would anyone want to do that?", and bought a couple of games. Heh, quite the visionary :)

I don't know if they still have programming competitions at the fair, but it would be a shame for kids to not have the opportunity to experience all of the things that the fair provides. Plus, Husker fans really need to do _something_ with their free time other than watch football :p (go blackshirts!)