Cody Russell

Tokyo String Quartet

The Tokyo String Quartet was here on Thursday. They performed Beethoven Op.59/1, and it was great. Then they taught a master class and my quartet played first. It went pretty well.

Happy birthday, Benjamin Britten!

Last night was my cast’s first performance of this year’s Peabody opera, Albert Herring by Benjamin Britten. The other cast performed it the previous night, and will again tonight, then my cast performs again tomorrow night.

Yesterday was also Britten’s birthday. I think it would have been his 89th birthday or something like that, but he’s still dead so it doesn’t matter much. It was a pretty good performance, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Macs

Just when I thought everything was cool, I found out our sysadmin went and screwed something up again. I’m not quite sure how, so in a way I’m a little bit impressed with his ability to fuck things up.

I finally got my Project Builder setup working with SourceForge’s CVS, tunneling through SSH. This was cool. However, now I’ve realized that I can no longer test my software. It all builds just fine, but it can’t create windows anymore. At first I thought it was just in Carbon, but it appears he’s fucked up Cocoa as well somehow. When I test on the other Mac the same code builds and runs just fine, so it’s not an issue with my code. I can’t use the other computer though, because I don’t have my own account on it and I’m not leaving a private SSH key on a public account. =)

Opera

Things are going well with opera, except that yesterday I screwed up my schedule. I was scheduled to perform Vieuxtemps sonata in studio class at 5:00, but I had forgotten that opera rehearsal was from 2:30 to 6:30, so I didn’t show up to studio class.

Dawn, GeForceFX

The screenshots look absolutely beautiful. The ogre and rusty car look nice too, but the Dawn demo is amazing. I can’t wait to get my grubby hands on one of these video boards.

Quartet

We had a long and productive rehearsal last night and a coaching this morning with Michael Kannen. We’re getting ready to play for the Tokyo String Quartet on Thursday. That will be quite cool. Mr. Kannen asked us if we were interested in doing this string quartet seminar in North Carolina during winter break, where we would study Beethoven with the Mendelssohn String Quartet, but we haven’t really discussed it yet.

Other cool stuff going on here..

Leon Fleisher did an interesting master class a few days ago, and yesterday the Brentano String Quartet did a master class. Tomorrow is the big Brahms seminar at Shriver Hall at Johns Hopkins. Robert Levin and a few other people will be discussing the Opus 120 sonatas, Charles Neidich will teach a clarinet master class on the sonatas, then Kim Kashkashian and Robert Levin will perform them.

NeoEngine

I won first place in the NeoEngine contest by porting it to MacOS X. I’d like to keep working on NeoEngine I think, but the main thing I’ve learned from this experience is that I still don’t like Macintosh. MacOS X is better than OS9, but it still blows fat greasy chunks.

I’d still rather use the Macs at school than the PCs simply because of the way the PCs are configured to be as non-functional as possible. You can’t even right-click in Internet Explorer.

Screen capture on MacOS X

amars: I did something like <Apple-Shift-3> and it created a PDF file on my desktop that contained a screenshot of the current state. I’ll try exporting that to a PNG or something in Preview next time I use that computer. Thanks!

MacOS X rendering

I finally got NeoEngine rendering on MacOS X this morning. Here’s a simple screenshot (in PDF format, since that’s what MacOS X takes screenshots in.. I’ll make a PNG later on when I know how maybe) of a triangle being rendered into a window.