March 12, 2001
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Marc Ramirez and Olivia Hajioff gave a duo recital last night that was quite cool. They played a Schnittke duo called MOZ-ART that I loved, a duo by Stephen Hartke called Oh Them Rats is Mean in My Kitchen that was great, and a Suite in e minor, Op. 15 by Jacques Aubert. I loved all three of those. They also played some selected duets by Bela Bartok that I liked, and a Mozart duo (G major, K423) that I did not like. Marc and Olivia are cool. They taught at the Heifetz Institute in Maryland that I was at last summer.
I forgot to mention that Megan Finley’s horn recital was on March 4, and it was really cool. Megan kicks so much ass, I think. Horn is a really difficult instrument to play. I think it would kick my ass if I tried, and so I have a lot of respect for good horn players like Megan. On top of that, Megan is just a really cool person. She’s one of the cooler people who go to school at UTA. I’ll stop here, because I feel a rant about everyone else at UTA coming on and I don’t want to get into that now.
Ellen Rose is performing a little recital at UTA tonight. It’s not being publicized at all, and she’s pretty much only doing it for the viola students here. I’m really looking forward to it.
Hacking:
I’m excited, because I have finally fixed the configure and build scripts in Ludwig van, and made the XML, Glade, and font files install correctly for people other than myself.
I’ve been interested in getting involved in GNOME 2.0 development, so I have been hacking in a very minor way on ORBit2 and linc stuff today. Later this week I’ll try to go after things that really need some work.
March 6, 2001
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Last weekend Paul Coletti was here again, and it was very fun. Coletti taught a master class, and I performed Schubert in it. Later on he performed a recital that was very, very cool. He played Bach suites 3 and 5, Beethoven Notturno, a piece by Percy Grainger, and a piece called Circus that he wrote. At the end, the audience was all equipped with cigarette lighters and lit them and waved them around like a rock concert. After Coletti’s own piece, though, it seemed appropriate. In Circus, Coletti sort of seems like some sort of rock star.
New machine:
Yeah, I finally finished building this new machine. I gave the old one to my mom. The new one is a 1000mhz Athlon Thunderbird with an Asus A7V133 motherboard, 256 megs PC133 memory, a 60 gig drive, and of course the GeForce2 that I posted about before.
It kicks all kinds of ass!
USC:
I went out to USC on Wednesday, and was thoroughly impressed by it. I think that school rocks now. Ralph and Valerie were really nice and drove me around and stuff. The viola teacher, Donald McInnes, is very nice and his students are very excellent violists! USC also has a building of practice rooms separate of the music building, and the practice rooms are all sound-proofed! That is the coolest thing! I was walking down the hall looking at all the people practicing, but I couldn’t hear them!
Fort Worth Symphony:
We did Brahms’ German Requiem last week, and it was very fun. Of course, everyone knows I’m already a huge Brahms freak so this was a lot of fun to me. I didn’t think the choir sounded quite as good as they usually do, but it was still very cool.
Crouching Tiger:
I got my Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon DVD in the other day and watched it. It is so damned cool! I love this movie so much! This is, unfortunately, a bootleg DVD of course. The cover says it’s Region 3, but it works in my DVD player.
Oni:
I finished Oni yesterday. That game is so awesome! It still doesn’t rank as high as Half-Life to me, but it’s certainly one of the most fun games since Half-Life to me.
