Cody Russell

What I’m up to

Everything is finally getting started here. I’m playing a piano quintet, but we’re not sure which one yet. Either Brahms or Shostakovich. I went out to Sarasota a couple days ago to audition at the Florida West Coast Symphony, and they put me on the sub list. I might also start playing with a couple orchestras around West Palm Beach. So that’s cool.

I’m not usually all that into anime stuff. I liked Cowboy Bebop though, and I got into Inuyasha for awhile. But now I found some newer show called Bleach that’s not out yet in US and I’ve gotten totally addicted to it, pulling down the new episodes from BitTorrent whenever they’re available.

Updates

I’ve been setting up a new Scratchbox/Maemo environment on my new Ubuntu partition. I had it setup under Fedora, but I killed my Fedora partition and replaced it with Ubuntu Hoary. I had some problems installing Hoary on this system using the 5.04 ISO, and ended up having to use the previous version, 4.10 Warty, and then upgrade the system to 5.04 Hoary using Synaptic.

Amela came back from Albania recently and had lots of photos, but for some reason couldn’t get the photos off the CD that was given to her. She thought there is a virus on the disc or something, so I took the disc and pulled the images off of it for her. It looked like a fun trip.

Lesley has moved to El Paso. I talked to her before she moved there and she was very excited about it. I keep meaning to call now that she’s been there a couple weeks and find out how it is. She’s teaching violin and viola and helping Ben Loeb get his new chamber orchestra started, as far as I understand. Sounds exciting!

I moved out of Baltimore around the same time Lesley was leaving Santa Barbara, but I haven’t reached my final destination yet. I took a break to hang out in Texas with some friends and family right now. I’m leaving for Florida next week to get back into music more. I’m pretty excited about that. Ralph is teaching here now, and that was what made me interested in going there. So I’ll be preparing for orchestral auditions with Ralph, and doing some chamber music and orchestra stuff there.

I’ve been reading through some chamber music stuff with Amirosh and Kelly a little bit recently, and yesterday we read through a Brahms piano quartet with Elena Tsvetkova. We’re thinking about maybe doing a concert here in December sometime. Amirosh and I are also interested still in trying to do another concert around that time

GDC

Well, I’m back. I went to GDC in San Francisco, and it was pretty cool. I went to a couple of the sessions, walked many miles around the downtown San Francisco area, heard the San Francisco Symphony do Mahler 7, and met shaver, vlad, pavlov, and another Mozilla guy named Brendan. I also managed to get a moment to meet Mark Healy from Lionhead Studios and I saw his demo of Ragdoll Kung-fu in the “experimental gameplay” session. That was really cool. I had been talking with him in email last summer about the possibility of porting that over to Linux and MacOS for him. I’d still like to do that after it’s released, if I can.

Then my company went out to Mammoth ski resort. Fortunately it was only for a couple days. I did try to go skiing, but I didn’t really enjoy it. From there we drove down to Los Angeles and flew out of LAX.

Off to San Francisco

I’m taking off today for San Francisco. I’m going to be at GDC 2005 for the whole week with the company, then we’re going on a ski trip somewhere. I don’t even know where. I sort of don’t care.

Saying I sort of don’t care is a little more than an understatement. I’m so disinterested in the skiing part of this trip. I wish I could just take an earlier flight than the rest of them and come back home a few days sooner. I’ve never been skiing, and I just have no interest in it right now. Even more than that is that I’d rather just be back home either practicing or hanging out with my friends. Or renting a car and driving down to Santa Barbara to hang out with Lesley. Or going up to New York to hang visit Carolyn. Or something. But no.. I’m going skiing.

Actually, I’m not. I’m sitting in my hotel room, probably reading the new GPU Gems 2 book, while everyone else goes skiing.

I also found out Sunday that I need a ski jacket, ski pants, some sort of really heavy extra-long ski socks, and who knows what else. How much does this stuff cost? A couple hundred dollars. Am I going to spend that kind of money for a damn ski trip that I don’t even want to go on? Hell no! If you’ve seen how I dress, you know that I desperately need to go out and buy new clothes that I’ll actually wear more than once. I think I have exactly one piece of clothing right now that I got within the past three years, and that’s a t-shirt that Hiroshi Iizuka gave me when I was visiting him one time. Spending any amount of money at all on some clothes I’ll wear once? I’m too cheap to do that, even if I wanted to go skiing.

Gnome 2.8

I installed Gnome 2.8 yesterday, using the RPMs in the test directory of Fedora‘s download server. To be perfectly honest, I can’t feel much of a difference between this and Gnome 2.6. Then again, I think that’s a good thing. I’ve read the changes for this version, and they’re great. But they’re also not at all in-your-face, which is a big plus.

The biggest improvement for me is the release of Evolution 2.0. I’ve been a big fan of Evolution for a long time now, and I always use it for mail. But in the past few years I’ve started receiving a lot of SPAM mail, and I had to set up my own SPAM filters for Evolution 1.x. It worked, but it was not very convenient. It was also a big hassle to train my SPAM software. Now Evolution 2.0 has this stuff integrated into it, so that if a piece of SPAM is missed by the SPAM filter you can click the “Junk” button to train the filtering software. Other than the junk mail stuff, Evolution 2.0 feels quite a bit faster to me. The startup time is insignificant now, which is great.