kjp

Tonight was band's first rehearsal for the year. Blew out a few cobwebs...

A fair few people were still away on holidays. Somewhat disturbingly (especially for me, and also for the group, given that it's a concert band...), there was just a single clarinet present!

I think I've found my birthday present to myself here

I've found some pretty cool music notation (ie: sheet music generation) software called Lilypond. I've used it to just tranpose a piece a tone higher. It's much easier to copy and paste a couple of lines of text than writing by hand 8 or so bars. I only gone through some of it's features (just putting lyrics, chords on a single part) but the examples given indicate that it is quite powerful.

A couple of good things:

• If I want to transpose the piece again, then I can just add a "transpose from-key to-key" command it will to it all automatically. Sweet


• It's essentially marked up text - no fiddling around placing notes, etc, on the page.


• It creates a midi file of the piece, so you can listen to it to very easily pick out mistakes in the text that you've entered


• It's free (open source)


• The lyric placement on the page is very good (although it took a little bit of fiddling to get it working correctly)


• There's only one small watermark at the bottom of the last page.

It's a pretty big download, but worth it, methinks.

There's: doco; index; cheat sheet.

Yup, I found a snake in our garage on Saturday night. A goodly amount of excitement followed:

I opened the door, about to walk in the garage (barefoot) to put my car away. About to put my foot down when I see something there. "That looks like a snake". My first reaction was: it's a bit of cord / rag. But then it started moving. Yikes! Kind of luckily it just slowly went away, under a rack of shoes and clothes, and curled up between my bike and a spare tyre: I'll be washing my bike down on the weekend...

It stayed there overnight. Sunday morning we got a guy to come out (we got some names / numbers from the Australia Zoo) to pick it up. Firstly, out from behind my bike onto the floor:

Then caught by the guy:

...and then all the fun was over.

It turned out to be relatively harmless ("just" a Carpet Python), and was about 1.8 m long. Apparently it had been injured somehow - a cut about 30 cm from the tip of the tail: thank goodness it wasn't pregnant... All pythons are non-venomous - they kill by slowly constricting their prey.

Pretty aptly the third photo (above) is of a Carpet Python on carpet. Chortle chortle.

Yikes! Earlier this evening I nearly stepped on a snake - in our garage!!!

More (and photos) to come.

Snakes are supposed to stay behind glass cages at Zoos. Near / in part of your house is way too close.

Apparently (assuming it's true...) apples and oranges are pretty similar.

我是澳大利亚人

Learning a little bit here and there....

Try the invaluble babelfish if you don't get it.

There's an interesting article interpreting Hallelujah - the Jeff Buckley (Cohen) version.

A guy at work has been doing a course of two at the Institute of Modern Languages. Looks pretty good. Especially one of these.

One of the things I don't like about yours truely is that I get annoyed at myself when I make the tiniest of mistakes. sigh.

OK, completely different topic, but here I go:

There are a few, only a few important things in life. Then there's a big bunch of stuff that's not important. Most things are in the unimportant category. There's some things that heaps of people tend to think of important that aren't. The trick is to find out / know what, for you, what parts of life are in each category.

For me: Important = family, friends, & having deep, rich experiences maybe.?? (probably better said as "enjoying life")...

Because at the end of the year when you come to make a (single) photo album CD of the year, you've got way too many images, so you have to spend an afternoon and an evening trawling through them to find the best ones...

I don't get much spam (thank goodness); most of what I do get is picked up by the catch all email account on this domain. I've just got one which I thought was pretty funny:

on january 1st, 2004... the united states government made law confirming that... BROADCAST EMAIL ADVERTISING is a completely acceptable, ethical, and legal form of internet advertising for every single resident and business.

..tens of thousands of businesses are BROADCAST EMAIL ADVERTISING to promote their web site to millions of people for free... right now... are you...?

---------

note: this is a non-commercial BROADCAST EMAIL ANNOUNCEMENT. no products or services for sale or lease are endorsed in this BROADCAST EMAIL ADVISORY.

Acceptable? Ethical? Legal? !!!

How does this display???

Hello!

你好

ni hao (acute on the ni; caron on the hao.....)

Thankyou:

谢谢

xi�xie = shyeh-shyeh

My mobile is dying. Probably will get a new one this weekend...

Has to:
* Be able to lock the keypad in x seconds
* Usable in China - What are the GSM bands there?
* Not turn off at random intervals
* Must not have a battery that has a pretty big crack in it.
* Fit in the mobile phone pocket of my shorts

Maybe:
* FM Radio
* Camera (Maybe handy when I don't have my good camera on me)
* That bounce game that J has on his mobile

Not sure / don't care about
* Colour screen (This is probably standard though)
* Internet / WAP (I've got a decent screen with fast access at home, don't need it on the road)

Since earlish November last year, I have had a grand total of 4 "proper" games of Go - one just a short time ago on KGS and 3 on Wednesday. The main problem is that I'm not concentrating enough for the duration of the game - just making stupid mistakes (going with first impression instead of trying to avoid traps) towards the ends of the game. A bit more mental discipline required? Due to the loss of the KGS game and my absence of playing there (and the gradual decline in ranks due to not playing), I'm listed with a rank of 17k?. Should be 5k (or a bit more?) better...

Holidays are great for making me relaxed!

I'm (seriously) thinking of travelling to China later this year (probably sometime in August / September / October). I've been thinking about this for a while, but it's highly probable that I'll go later this year. I've almost decided to go (but this depends on the very last point, below).

Not going overseas in 2003 is a big regret of mine. It was a bludgy year for me - where I spent the year (between uni and full time work) working part time and generally doing not much at all. Overseas travel is better late than never, I suppose.

Anyhow, the main things at the moment to sort out:
* Where I will go (which, if any of the surrounding countries). Thailand / Vietnam (to the South) and Kyrgyzstan / Mongolia (to the North / West ) look kind of cool. I kind of don't really want to go to the places everyone else goes to (hence the "weirder" countries). But, the advantage of Thailand / Vietnam is the low amount of $$ required.
* How will I travel around - join tour(s) or fly solo. Backpack? I've never been overseas by myself; and I've heard from several people that China is not the easiest country in the region to go around by yourself in: a pointer to going in a group. Also, if you don't have the most amount of time available or experience in the country (like me), going around in a group is probably more time efficient. I've heard good things about Intrepid.
* How much time can I get off work. I can probably get around 4 and a bit weeks by August. I'd be happy to take a couple of weeks off as leave without pay. But this depends on what I'll be doing in the section that I'm going to (and the work that I'd be doing there). This will be sorted out in February (or so).

However, the major factor is the condition of a young chappie down in Canberra with a thing in his head....

At some point in the future I'll put a whole bunch of photos and stuff up here about my recent holiday down in Canberra / Broulee. But first are a couple of bright ideas for when you go away:
* Lock your car. Duuurrr.
* Don't leave money lying around in semi-public places.

Nothing adverse happened, just stupid of me to miss these. (Probably exciting to be seeing family / having a break...)

Oops.

It's highly likely that I'll be moving out before the end of January: the lease ends on the 25th, and my housemates don't want to continue with it. We looked at one place earlier this afternoon, and will look at another on Thursday. The place today was ok, not great; it's further out from the city and is in a yuckier area. It's not as good as the current place (in the burbs of McDowall). The place to be checked on Thursday is just around the corner. I suppose a "good" place for me is a place that is quick and easy for me to get into the city (I need to get in there more)... sigh...

Having an engineering streak, I was impressed when I heard about the Millau Viaduct, (info in English). Nifty.