Cody Russell

23 Feb 2001

Reality is what refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

Peabody audition

Things went very well, I think. I only got to play my Bach prelude and fugue, and my Schubert sonata’s first movement. They didn’t ask for any of the Hindemith concerto. The Bach was pretty much well in-tune, and my bow was mostly solid. There’s one point where I have an open G and open D at the same time, and it’s very quiet pianissimo.. that’s the point that I am afraid of my bow becoming unstable, but it was rock-solid in the audition.

I got to hang out with Cameron, and some of the other Peabody people. We hung out with Bill, Rebecca, and Lesley. It was really cool to see Lesley again. She’s also auditioning for the masters program at Peabody for next year. I really hope she goes there.

We spent so much time playing Rainbow Six and Unreal Tournament on Rebecca’s computer. Every night we got to sleep pretty late, and so it’s sort of surprising that my audition went so well.

Off to Peabody..

Yeah, I leave today for Baltimore. My audition for Peabody Conservatory is on Monday morning. I’ll get to see some of my friends, like Cameron and Lesley. I’m actually looking forward to this trip and audition quite a lot, unlike my Cleveland trip a couple weeks ago.

Computers suck!

Yeah, I got the GeForce2 GTS in and so far I’ve had nothing but problems. The problems aren’t due to the GeForce2, exactly. They’re mostly problems with the mainboard not wanting items on certain PCI slots or something. I don’t know that much about PCI or IRQ sharing or whatever, but it’s a huge pain in the ass. I suspect that if I could fit one of my devices into the PCI slot next to the AGP port, things would be fine.. but the GeForce2 has such a huge heat sink that this is impossible, and so I no longer have enough PCI slots for all my devices.

I’m solving this problem, though. I was planning to build a new machine in another month and give this computer to my mom, because she wants one. So, I’ve just bumped forward the timetable and started buying the parts now. =)

Josh’s new CDs

My friend Josh ran across some pretty sweet deals online. He bought this 11 CD set of Horowitz recordings for like $70 or something, while it costs like $260 at Barnes and Noble. He also found the complete Shostakovich string quartets performed by Emerson for about $50. That’s the recording I really want. I listened to Nos. 7 and 8 in the car, and they were quite cool.

My new video card:

I totally had the intention of just buying an nVidia GeForce2 MX 32MB video card. Really. I went online and was clicking around, and before I knew it I had just purchased an nVidia GeForce2 GTS 32MB DDR. Yes, it costs twice as much. Is it worth it? Probably not.

I downloaded the Linux kernel module and the GLX module for the GeForce2 cards today also. I’m told that they’re very good, and they’re also released with source. I’m very pleased about this. I really think nVidia seems cool.

I really dig the idea that I may be able to program stuff to use GeForce2′s hardware accelerations. What I’d really like to see is a hardware-accelerated libart. This would do all kinds of cool shit, including hardware-accelerated GnomeCanvas.

My new strings:

Quite some time ago, Pirastro sent me a free set of Obligato strings. I just put them on yesterday, and so far I can’t say that I’m very impressed with them at all. As soon as I can get some, I’m going back to Tonica. Obligato strings suck.

I really want to try Zyex strings sometime also. I hear that they have a great tone, but aren’t quite as powerful.

Oni:

I’ve been playing Oni. Holy shit this game rocks. I played it briefly on Playstation 2 also, and I did not like it as much. The game played more smoothly (which is why I’m buying a GeForce2 now), but the controls were horrible. The camera control is this right analog stick that you move with your right thumb, while the actual movement controls you control with your left thumb (up, down, left, rigth), and then duck, jump, punch, and kick are the buttons on the right that you use with your right thumb. The problem is obvious, then: you can’t move your camera at the same time you’re punching or kicking or crouching or jumping. This is a huge problem, I think. The PC controls are very good. It’s obvious that this game was designed for PC originally. I think PC games don’t translate well into console game machines due to controls.

Cleveland audition

Things went reasonably well at my CIM audition. The only bad thing was that I wasn’t very prepared to play more than two pages of Schubert, and I was asked to. I still played it, but it didn’t go as well as I would have liked.

CIM was a really cool place, I thought. There is this pond across East Boulevard from Severance Hall, and it was totally frozen over. I had never seen a frozen pond before, so I was fascinated by this. I went out onto the pond and tapped my foot on it a few times (it was clearly frozen solid where I was standing, and it was very, very shallow, so I could not possibly have fallen in). Some Case Western students were apparently watching this and found it very amusing. I wonder if people go ice skating on that pond.

I heard a small orchestra rehearsing what sounded like a Mozart piano concerto, where the conductor and the pianist were the same person. That was really cool. I listened for a few minutes, but then I felt sort of awkward standing there, so I left.

USC audition:

This audition didn’t happen at all. I got sick last Friday, on the 26th, and couldn’t catch my plane to LA. I haven’t talked to the teacher at USC yet, but perhaps he’ll let me come out and audition still.

Fort Worth Symphony this week:

This is an awesome week at Symphony. We’re doing the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, the second Wieniawski violin concerto, and the greatest thing ever written for orchestra. That’s right, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra!! It’s really incredible. The soloist on the Wieniawski is this guy named Corey Cerovsek. He’s really good, I think. I don’t particularly care for that concerto, though. Our conductor is Christian Arming, this Austrian guy. He’s quite good, I think.

Ludwig van:

A lot of people have been emailing me about Ludwig van recently, because of some Slashdot questions about notation software. I can answer a few questions here for you. Yes, Ludwig van is in CVS. It’s on GNOME’s CVS server, so if you visit http://developer.gnome.org/ you can find information on how to login to GNOME’s anoncvs. Like I said before, Ludwig van doesn’t do much right now but you can see some older screenshots of its anti-aliased TrueType font rendering at this link, and another screenshot of it rendering just a plain five-line staff here. If anyone knows how to make high quality TrueType fonts, consider making a good music glyph font that can be used in a music notation program! =) I’m afraid I won’t be doing any more development on Ludwig van until all my graduate school auditions are finished. My Peabody audition is February 19, and as you read above I still don’t know when, or if, I will be auditioning for USC.