Cody Russell

Awesome looking new video board from ATI

Check this out!

Time spending

I hurt my back the other day, and it’s been hurting all day Sunday, Monday, and today. It’s quite a bit better now, though, because I can actually walk around today. But for the past couple days I’ve been pretty much sitting in the apartment practicing Hindemith and Bruch, playing Grand Theft Auto 3, and doing a little bit of hacking.

I’m working on the second and third movements of the Hindemith 1939 sonata now, and learning the Bruch double concerto. The Hindemith is pretty tough, but it’s one of the best Hindemith viola sonatas there is. Op.11/4, the 1939, and Op.25/1 are definitely the three really great ones. I think that’s probably my order of preference, too.

The terrain code is going well. I’m basing it upon the ROAM algorithm, although I’m not really sure if that’s the best one for my purposes or not. If it doesn’t work well, I’ll do some more research and implement something else, but I think it’ll be okay. I’ll post screenshots sometime.

DSL

It turns out that we’re not getting DSL after all. I went up to Jessica’s apartment to try to install her DSL for her, but the status light, or whatever kept flashing and wouldn’t turn solid green. So, I checked again to make sure I had the cables plugged in correctly. It still wasn’t working, so we called Verizon tech support and they told us that her line couldn’t do DSL, and she would have to send the DSL modem back in order not to be billed by them for it.

This really sucks.

The weird thing is that hers is the very apartment that I lived in last year and I had DSL. Why would the same apartment suddenly not be able to handle DSL? I asked the guy, but he gave me some BS answer that didn’t really make any sense, so I figured he probably didn’t know the answer.

Sledding

Snow is great,
snow is cool..
I went sledding like a crazy fool!

The kiddies may like
the bunny slope..
but I think Federal Hill is fly and dope!

Say your prayers,
grab the cord..
go down the hill on a boogie board!

NeoEngine

Today I finished everything in the MacOS X code that I had planned for the 0.4.1 release of NeoEngine. I think I’m finished doing Mac work on it for awhile and I can focus on finishing my terrain code.

DSL

I have the Linksys wireless router and PCI network adapter card, and they’re up and running just fine. I had to rearrange my furniture in my room and put my computer up to a higher elevation than the floor in order to get optimal signal strength, but it’s working now. However, I still don’t have a net connection. There are entries in the setup for “host name” and “domain name”, and I’m not sure what to put in there. I’m also not certain that Jessica has her username and password correct, so she needs to call Verizon and get that stuff, then we should all be up and running.

Snow

I heard that this was the second most amount of snow Baltimore has had in recorded history. The cars are mostly all covered completely. It’s beautiful. It’s very cool.

The only thing that sucks about it is that JHU closes down, and then Peabody closes down. That means the mail room closed down, and thus I couldn’t get the Bruch concerto that was shipped to me. That sucks mightily.

GTA Vice City

I’m excited. The release date for PC is May 13.

Scores

Good news all around, here. I have been having all sorts of troubles finding music this semester. My string trio is assigned to learn the Schnittke trio for chamber music seminar, but the Peabody library doesn’t have it. I had found the parts at Frank Music Company in New York, but it was $90 and none of us was eager to shell out that sort of money. So, I turned in an inter-library loan request, and the library finally received the parts today. Whee!

My other problem was that I’m supposed to play the Bruch double concerto with Wendy for my recital in April, but neither of us have the music to it, the school library doesn’t have the music, Ms Chiang doesn’t have it, and it’s quite difficult to find now. Patelson Music told me to call again in eight weeks, which is obviously not an option, and Frank Music Company didn’t have it. However, Frank Music Company is an exceptionally cool place, in my opinion, and they actually told me why it’s not possible for them to order it right now. Apparently, the publisher of the music is Schauer, and they’re currently without an American distributor for their music. They fired their previous distributor, for whatever reason, and they’re either negotiating a contract with a new one, or have just negotiated one, but in either event their stock is not yet with the new distributor and there is no way to get it.

However, I did find a music store that happened to have one copy of the concerto left on their shelves, and it’s being shipped to me right now, so all is good.

Hindemith sonata

Not all is really great right now. It seems that Dmitri couldn’t get the recital date that he originally thought he would get, and so his is now on April 18. This means he can’t play the Hindemith sonata with me for my recital, because my recital is on April 15. I have to find a new pianist now. That sucks.

Memory

I bought another 512mb of memory recently. It only cost $39, so it seemed worth it. So far I think it was worth it. Windows XP runs a lot better with more than 256mb of memory. When I first restarted the machine after putting in the memory, though, I had an internal compiler error in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, but this was also after updating the code and it turns out this always happens on this code and I need to get the latest service pack from Microsoft in order to fix it. This is hard to do right now, without a network connection, so I’ll just have to deal with it a little longer. The code builds under Linux, so I’ll have to work on it from there for now. In addition to the internal compiler error, Visual Studio was lagging terribly and not responding immediately to mouseovers and other events, so I quit out of it. So then I decided to start up Grand Theft Auto 3, and I noticed I was getting horribly, horribly low framerates. It just kept getting worse and worse, so I finally quit, and then Windows reported that my video driver was freaking out and it dumped the memory and restarted Windows. Everything has been fine since then. I’m not really sure what happened.

Quartet

Finally we settled on playing Mendelssohn Op.13 quartet in a minor. This thing totally rocks. I was beginning to worry that we would do nothing this semester but go out for wings and beer.

We went out on Thursday to the Yacht Club for two pitchers of beer, some fries, and I split a salad with Daphne. The first pitcher was pretty good; it was New Castle. The second was Harp, which I didn’t like nearly as much. Still, Valerie got drunk enough for a hangover the next morning. I was really annoyed by the karaoke that night, though. The Yacht is just too small of a bar to be doing that sort of shit, because it was unbearably loud.

Karaoke

I’ve figured out what the purpose of karaoke is now, though: to make really bad music sound even worse, so that when you hear it again in its non-karaoke form you think, “This isn’t nearly as bad as I remembered it being.” In this way, they make you think it’s not as bad as it is. It’s a weird brain trick, and I’m sure someone out there trying to find a DMA research project in psychology or some shit could use it.

Last night we went over to George’s place for dinner. He made us sushi, we argued over what television shows suck, and we made cookies. While George was making sushi and while we were waiting for Valerie to show up, Daphne and I were watching some show and I made the observation that the show appeared to really suck, although I didn’t know what it was because I never watch television because I don’t have one. And so Daff was all, “This is one of my favorite shows! This is Will and Grace!” So then later, it was on “That 70s Show”. I didn’t watch that show for awhile when it first came out because it had such a stupid name, and I figured the show would suck. However, once I did see it I thought it was great. Well, Daff doesn’t like it. Seinfeld was on at some point, and someone didn’t really like it, but I forgot now who that was. It wasn’t George, because he has every episode of Seinfeld on CD so he obviously loves it. Anyway, the cookies didn’t turn out too well because Valerie wanted to make them too big, I took them out of the oven after ~14 minutes, which may not have been long enough, and since George doesn’t have a baking sheet we had to bake them on aluminum foil. When I pulled them out of the oven, the foil folded in and some still-soft half-baked cookies rolled over on top of one another and made quite a mess on the foil.

Invisibility

This is freaky, but cool. According to this site, some Japanese scientist has invented a way to make stuff invisible, and the article includes a photo of someone wearing an invisibility cloak.

Concerts

Peabody Symphony Orchestra had a concert on Saturday night. We played Strauss Vier Letzte Lieder and Mahler Symphony No 5. It was a good concert, and I really enjoyed playing the Mahler. The Strauss is a really beautiful piece.

I’m finally finished with the Peabody Chamber Opera. It’s been going on for a couple weeks. We had several performances (six, I think), and it finally finished yesterday. There were two small one-act operas in the show. The first was Mahagonny by Kurt Weill. I didn’t play in this one, and I’m not really sure how much I like it. However, it’s the basis for a song by the Doors, so it can’t be all that bad. The second opera was Die weiße Rose by Udo Zimmermann. It was more interesting to me, but it was quite difficult. As cool as it was, I’m definitely glad it’s finished now.

Chamber Music

I’m in two groups this semester. Of course I’m still playing in the quartet with Valerie, Daphne, and George. We’re not exactly sure what we’re going to work on this semester. George brought several things for us to read one day, but some of it was total shit. He brought the Grieg quartet and the Verdi quartet. He also brought a really cool Schubert quartet, but both Val and Daffs had already played it. The next time we got together, we all brought stuff that didn’t suck. I brought Bartók quartet no 1 and Schubert G major quartet. The Schubert was loved by all, especially George who was going apeshit over it, but it was rejected by Val and Daffs because it’s so damned long. We ended up settling on Shostakovich quartet no 7, but then our teacher, Ms Lambros, emailed us and said she wanted us to do something more challenging. She suggested Bartók quartets 2 or 4, which was cool with me because I have to learn the second quartet for an audition anyway. Our quartet hasn’t gotten together to discuss her suggestions yet because Daphne had an audition at USC and, I think Rice, and George had an audition at Rice, and Val is in Chicago now for the CSO audition. So, I guess we’ll figure it out eventually.

My other group is a string trio. We’re in the chamber music seminar this semester, which is focused on Russian chamber music. Since Mr Kannen and Ms Lambros came to Peabody this year, they’ve started making chamber music seminar have themes each semester. Last semester was early 20th century stuff, like Berg, Bartók, or Schönberg. So, with the Russian theme in mind my trio is going to play the Schnittke string trio. We still don’t have the music yet, because it’s not in the Peabody library. Aurélie, our violinist, suggested that one of us just bite the bullet and buy the parts, but I found them at Frank Music Company for about $90 so we decided that was a bad idea. I put in an inter-library loan request, but the parts still haven’t arrived. I’m not sure when they will. I’m looking forward to playing this piece, though, because I really dig Schnittke.

NeoEngine

Mattias released version 0.4.0 of NeoEngine, and it contains my MacOS X port. It also builds now on FreeBSD, which is pretty cool since NVidia is beginning to support FreeBSD, and I heard a rumor that ATI is going to be releasing some FreeBSD drivers sometime. I’ve started working on some cloth animation code for the engine now, and I’m planning to get to work on inverse kinematics physics code as soon as the cloth is working. I started working on some enhancements to material code, but I’m not going to commit that until I get a new video card that handles shaders and get that stuff into the material objects.

Computer lab annoyances

These machines are so screwed up in here. As I type in this entry to Advogato’s form, Internet Explorer periodically decides it doesn’t want to handle any more input and so it ceases to echo my keystrokes on the screen and the mouse cursor turns into an hourglass. However, the system hasn’t frozen and the application hasn’t frozen. If I minimize IE, it minimizes just fine, then when I restore it there is no problem and it redraws its window just fine. It just stops receiving input. After awhile it changes the cursor back and begins receiving input again, and whatever I typed while it was frozen appears on the form.

And don’t tell me that it’s IE that’s fucked up, I know better than that. IE may suck in various ways, but this computer is the thing that’s screwed up. I don’t like it.

Wireless Networking

I have my own computer in Baltimore this semester, and I decided to plug it into the DSL line the girls upstairs have. I ordered a Linksys wireless 802.11g-Draft router and PCI card, but they haven’t yet arrived. The router should be in any day now, but for some reason the PCI card won’t be here until around the 13th. I’ve never used wireless networking stuff before, so I’m sort of curious to see how it works.