I have a new mission. I want my cell phone to make one or all of the following sci-fi sounds: the communicator sound from Star Trek: TOS, the cell phone sound from Global Frequency and the oscillation overthruster sound from Buckaroo Banzai.

So far I've tried to take the sound files and turn them into midi files. The program WIDI does an okay job at changing a wav to a midi, but not quite good enough to make the conversion convincing, just enough to give some hints. Maybe it does a better job with more musical sounds.

As soon as I get something respectable, I'll see about posting it.

I gave blood today. The nurse who took it was from Romania. I decided to avoid the obvious set of jokes, because you just gotta. For every guy who thinks he's making an orginal joke about an obvious thing there's 40 other guys who say the exact same joke. I'm sure this nice lady has heard every variation of vampire jokes from every guy that finds out she's from Romania.

I've heard that pizza delivery guys hate delivering in mall because at least 10 guys will say "oh, that's for me" thinking they are the only ones who ever thought up the bit. I really don't want to be that guy.

Okay, I've calmed down. Whew! The short-cut keys are, well, key. Part of the problem, I realize now, is there is a bug when accidentals are shown. Using the option to show a curtesy accidental will then reveal accidentals that are entered but are invisible.

Clunky interfaces combined with actual bugs have a magical synergy that makes a product oh so fun!

Things that are making me a little cranky today...

So there's an arrangement of Marche Slave that I'm playing with the community band that is pretty terrible in a very specific way.... the page turns are at some of the worst places possible. I tried scanning the music and then making a smallish version of it (4 pages to a page) but it's just too small to see. I then thought, some of my music friends talk about Finale, I should give that a try.

I haven't been this angry at a computer program in a really long time. Finale just drives me nuts. Here's my beef: In a word processor if you select a character and push the bold or italics or whatever button the selected text goes bold or italics or whatever. If you select a note and press sharp, natural or flat.... nothing. It just sits there. I'm sure somewhere there is a way to add an accidental to a note, but whatever the way it isn't the way that you would guess, which is the whole point of an intuitive interface.

Oh, and there's a bug in the counting of complicated triplets in measures so that I get short-changed by an 16th note within the triplet. How do I know it's a bug, well when the program insists on doing something that is simply wrong, it's a bug. Luckily, "check for extra notes" can be turned off.

So here's what I recommend to the Finale people, on the off chance that they stumble across my modest blog: have a mode where the mouse is a pointer. When the mouse selects a note allow for additions of accidentals or changes to other notes by changing the buttons that define what the note does. So if a quarter note is selected the quarter note setting is depressed and if another note value is press, then the note changes to that value.

hmm... grrr.... I'm still angry.

I think the last time I was this mad was when I was making numbered lists in word and word decided to be extra helpful. I hate when word tries to be extra helpful.

Speaking of pet peeves, has anyone else noticed the trend in DVD's to make the previews not only the first thing you see, but now I seen DVD's where you can't really bypass the previews. It's bad enough that DVD's won't let you bypass the copywrite notice (which everyone has seen a billion time) or the notice that the commentary is for entertainment purposes only (which is one of the other dumbest thing I've seen... exactly what are they worried about, I really would like to know who would sue over the sorts of things that are in the commentary), but not letting you bypass the previews; that just makes my angry.

My choice has been made, and I am relieved.

I chose the Fresno State jog option and I feeling pretty good about it. Fresno definitely has some drawbacks. The weather isn't great. The air quality is pretty bad. It's pretty red-state out there. But then on the other hand the physics professors I'm going to work with are great people. I haven't seen a more professional group of people in my life. On top of that they are great people.

Back when I was a grad student, when my bike was stolen in Fresno, my physics professors knew how much I loved that bike and so took up a collection to help me buy a new one. This pretty much exemplifies the respect I have for people of Fresno's physics department.

If all goes well, I'll be teaching the physics section of the Science and Nonsense class. From what I've seen and heard that class is a fun class to teach and to take and so I can't think of a better way to start a career of teaching college level physics. Okay, making a million times more money, but in the real world that pretty much one of the best options.

Still, I think about the other options, and wonder what they would be like. Astrocamp sounded like a lot of fun. He's one of the minor Marvel characters, but I really like the idea of the power that Multiple Man has. He could create duplicates of himself which could later remerge with the main person. With a power like that a person wouldn't have to make some of these hard choices, they could just pop out a duplicate and do both.

Still, maybe one of me is quite enough.

So I'm going a little nuts now. I have two jobs to decide between and it is going to be a hard decision. Decided between colleges or career paths or anything major and life changing has always been a tough thing for me. I'm completely torn and I have to make my decision by tomorrow.

On a positive note I just played a nice concert with my jazz band, the Chabot College Night band. I play bass bone with those guys and we have a tone of fun. It was an outdoor concert, with a brisk wind, so the page turns were interesting, to say the least. But we put on a good show.

I played with that band back in the early ninety's and had lots of fun. We even went to Japan. It's only a slight exaggeration to compare the experience of someone who's 6'8'' in Japan with Gulliver's travels.

There's a weird sort of perceptual shift that occured when I visited Japan. It's hard to describe, it was like they became more familiar somehow. Now, I know in theory that just about every group of people has the best that humanity has to offer and every group has it's knuckleheads, but I just haven't met any Japanese knuckleheads. My friend Akira says that there are, and I believe him, perhaps it's just statistics of small numbers that I don't have a more rounded view. It's as though there was a subtle, but profound shift in the amount of benefit of the doubt that I subconsciously give to the Japanese, mainly as a result of this trip.

I would love to go back someday.

Welcome to the serenity of my blog.

My life has recently just gotten a little more interesting. After a year of looking for a job (after pooping out of grad school) , I now have not one, but two job offers. These are the times that I wish I could be unstuck in time and be able to peek ahead and see how the alternate choices looked.

Just for the record, I haven't been completely goofing around this year. I am a natural born teacher (voted most-likely-to-tutor-an-innocent-bystander by my physics friends at Fresno State) and so although I did do a bit of goofing around (City of Heroes was my addiction of choice, blame my little brother) I've been doing a fair bit of private math tutoring in the interim and I've applied for physics instructor positions around the county. So yeah, almost completely, but not completely goofing around.

So, as you can probably tell, I'm a physics graduate. I'm not entirely sure if physics is a calling or a mental illness, but if this is madness, so be it. Besides, I've always been more of a Don Quixote than a Don Juan.

Speaking of madness, I head one of the dumbest things I've ever heard the other day. There was a congressman (Representative Joe Wilson, I think) who, upon hearing about the abuses at Gitmo, decided to go see for himself. He came back and reported that he didn't see a single thing that was out of line. Wow! What are the odds that when a congressman was touring that they wouldn't have prisoners chained to the floor! Now when Jessica Simpson gets mixed up and says the things she says, that's one thing, but when a congressman not only says the dumbest thing but thinks it as well, then I know the country is in serious trouble.

I would really like to be able to turn on the TV and hear someone in office say something that makes me say "Wow! what a great idea... I would have never thought of such a good idea. I sure am glad we have such smart people in office." The closest I've come to that feeling was when I heard about a general (or one of the powers that be) in Iraq who had to get a factory up and running. As I remember it, he tracked down the factory manager, gave him a job, then they tracked down the former employees, hired them and got the factory back up and running for a small fraction of the projected cost.

Why can't we have more of that?