Cody Russell

Sign-in day, and free food

The wonders of sign-in day here. I finally got my card, so I can now get into the school without having to hope the police will believe that I’m a new student.

I never ate anything today because I knew there would be free food tonight at the reception in the plaza. So, I went to the plaza at 7:30, and Bill shows up asking for help to move his junk from Ms. Chiang’s studio to his apartment. Then I came back and began meeting the rest of the class, and we all hung around talking. I did get a little bit to eat, but not very much. I’m sure I’ll be starving in another hour or two.

Cameron is supposed to arrive in Baltimore sometime today, so I’m sure he’ll want to go out and get something to eat soon. Cameron always wants to eat.

Practice

It’s going better today. I’ve pretty much learned my Mozart excerpts, and I started looking at the Brahms excerpts finally. The Strauss is getting better, but still isn’t great, and the Beethoven excerpt sucks. The Beethoven excerpt is the least fun to play, so I don’t really put any time into it.

There was a measure in my Bach prelude that I couldn’t remember since I got here, but finally I remember how the measure goes. Then I almost forgot how the second measure goes, but I remembered again pretty quickly. If I forget the second measure of that piece during my audition I’m going to be fucking pissed.

Baltimore

I’m in Baltimore now. I have been for almost a week now, I think. It’s pretty cool. My apartment is small and ratty, but it’ll work for a year. The worst thing about it is no air conditioning, because it’s been sort of hot so far. I’ve been spending the days up and school mostly.

I’ve seen a few people I know now. I saw Bill, Lesley, and Min. I met a few new people, like Sam and Clarissa.

On my second day here I got to play in a recording for a movie. That’s pretty cool. I can’t remember the name of the movie, but it is going to be sent off for the Sundance Film Festival. The music was all minimalist music. The music was written for nine people: string octet, plus a bass. However, there were only five people, so we had to do some interesting stuff. We recorded first five of the parts that gave the most continuous rhythmic stuff, then we went back and recorded the other four parts while listening to the first five, then they were all mixed together. Pretty cool stuff.

Hacking

I just put my computer together yesterday, I think, so I haven’t really done too much with it yet. I did manage to get some work done on the instrument creation dialog. It looks a lot more sensible than what I was trying to do before, and shows you a little preview of a staff with the clef you’re choosing and stuff in a little canvas. The main thing I want to do with that canvas now is have it show instrument transpositions for wind and brass instruments.

I’d like to post a screenshot, but I don’t have an Internet connection at my apartment yet. Right now I’m up at Peabody using one of their shitty little Linux/KDE terminals.

Email

I still don’t have my email working. I will post an entry when I do.

Practicing

It’s not really been going very well the past few days. I’m really looking forward to starting my lessons with Ms. Chiang. I’ve had like four or maybe five lessons since my recital in October.

OpenGL

Before I left for Peabody I started getting into some OpenGL hacking on Linux using Mesa3D. It was really fun. I need to post some screenshots when I get my Internet connection installed.

Doom 3

I suppose you can treat this as more of a rumor at this point than anything, but it’s still interesting. One of my friends was talking to John Carmack recently, and he was asking about the new Doom 3 engine. Carmack said something like that a 1.5ghz Pentium IV with a GeForce 3 will not be able to really handle this new game engine. Whoa!

If that’s true, it sort of makes you wonder how that will affect the Xbox.

Finished

I finally finished everything I have to do at school here (today, actually), and I leave for Baltimore on Tuesday. Whew!

That’s right, Cameron, I graduated before you! Eat my shorts!

I earned more credit this summer than was thought possible. I think it was like 21 credit hours or something stupid like that.

Ludwig van

I haven’t done shit with Ludwig van for a long time it seems. I committed a couple patches last night and today that update some things for GTK 2. That branch still a pretty fearsome pile of code, though. Stay away at all costs.

OpenGL

The past few days I’ve been fooling around with Mesa3D, the OpenGL clone. I’ll post some screenshots pretty soon.

I’ve been thoroughly disinterested in Gnome recently. I think OpenGL seems like a fun thing to start fooling around with. I downloaded the NVidia OpenGL SDK for Windows yesterday, but I haven’t started fooling around with it yet really.

Considering how I’m getting sick of the whole Linux and Gnome thing, I might start doing some OpenGL hacking on Windows. But for now I’m still using Mesa3D on Linux.

Calling all GEGLs!!

I’m making a little GEGL shrine, so anyone who has GEGL photos or GEGL artwork of some sort, email me and I’ll add it to the page.

The page is at http://www.gnome.org/~bratsche/gegl.html

Rush Hour 2

It may look hokey or whatever, but this was funny as shit. It was very cool, I thought. If you liked the first, you’ll like this one even more. If you didn’t like the first, you may still like this one.

I like Jackie Chan, I like Chris Tucker.

I really like Zhang Zi Yi!! Wow, she is really beautiful. She will be mine.. oh, yes! She will be mine..

And, really, this is what it all comes down to now. I think hot Chinese girls who kick ass are the wave of the future, as far as films go. As great as Lord of the Rings will probably be, it probably won’t achieve its full potential unless Zhang is in it as some ass-kicking elf chick or something. I think even Kubrick wouldn’t be able to deny the power of Zhang. Imagine if he had made this revelation in time to produce Barry Lyndon.. it might have been a good movie!

GEGL photo

I posted a photo of my GEGL that Rebecca Walter made for me. Isn’t it cute?