Man, last week was intense.

And when I mean intense, I mean, in-friggin-tense.

Hard to say where to begin, frankly! I’d say at the beginning, but I’m not sure if I can remember it!

Sunday:
Very busy day… Had to get to Hawthorn, got a little lost, found some awesome parking, and then… The packing.

How can I describe it? Putting 70+ pieces of music into 2 envelopes. We had to load up the two rooms twice to get it all…

110 times. By 6 people.

Oh my….

6 hours later?….

Monday:
Set up day! 7am arrival, and a lot of running around, setting up tables, throwing chairs around, sorting food, sorting out registration, showing people to rooms, setting rooms up with chairs, music stands, and all of that. Met loads of people, and got to know the peeps that I was working with!

Tuesday:
Conductors arrive! More chairs, more registration, more setting up. A lot of hassle, and a lot of new people. Great and terrible at the same time.

Ow, shit – my wrist has just given up on me. I don’t like typing on my laptop, I normally use a keyboard!

Anyway – onwards

Wednesday:
No idea what happened on Wednesday. Other than being there from 7am til past 9pm… Almost 10pm? I was very, very tired!

Thursday:
Had an amazing evening! I really enjoyed my dinner – it was a wonderful chance to relax and get to know my peeps, and all that business! Lots of friends, bonded through pure tiredness and Solfège!…

Friday:
Had a piece of mine sung/played/conducted. Pack up.

Yeah, you know, I can’t actually remember anything what happened. I remember the people so much more than the events!

So my next little challenge -> Write lots of choir music! Be a better music teacher! And build a computer…

That last one is happening soon. And what a trial it is!

It’s a HTPC – as in a DVR, HDTV recorder/player, all whizz, all bang – and for no buck! $AUD400 exactly – so like pennies!

I’ve worked it all out perfect – a GPU that is silent, but does full HD, and does video transcoding to boot, a TV tuner card that does 2 channels, a really decent processor, MB, case – and for that much money? Seems like a steal…

Bed time now! I’ll write about the Decemberists concert and stuff after last week. But my brain is frazzled…

Saska

I really do hate Australian weather.

Why should there ever be a day at 41C ?

It doesn’t make sense! It’s too hot!

And thus, I love airconditioning.

But I hate it too. It gives me a cold.

I always get nose issues, and throat issues.

I hate it.

Sleep now.

Saska

I just had one of the scariest driving experiences of my life.

It’s pretty intense.

Driving along, minding my own business when *WHAM* I’ve got a purple Ford Mustang behind me, revving its engine while we’re at the lights. I don’t have any choice, I can’t go any faster, there is a red light infront of me..

*VROOM**VROOOOM*

Ok, ok, hold your horses, light’s gone green…

Starts moving before I do. I couldn’t see the front of his car in my rear view mirror anyway, and I definitely can’t see it now, but I see his car jerk as he very quickly puts his brake on… You can’t jump the light when a) You’re not the front car and b) You’re incredibly close to the car in front.

So I start driving my normal pace. I’m not going to let some dick control *my* speed and make me do something dangerous.

Now I gotta go round some pretty tricky speed slower downers, which they say to go around at 20kmph. I know the road, I normally go through them at about 30-35kmph, maybe a bit faster if I’m feeling good. I wasn’t feeling good.

Dick is right up my arse the entire time. I can’t see the front of his car at all, I can’t even see much of his bonnet – quite a feat in a mustang! It’s starting to annoy me, because its dangerous, and really wasn’t necessary. He just wanted to get somewhere fast, and I was in his way. Despite doing exactly or over the speed limit the entire time, I still was going too slow.

We get to another schucane chicane and now he gets really riled, because now we’re both stuck behind an old granny who is going through it at 10kmph. She turns into the shopping center, and we continue on our way.

But he’s getting pissed, he’s driving even closer to the back of me, and he’s turned his music up. I can hear it over my air-con and music. It’s loud, and it’s angry.

So I do what any normal person would do. I went at exactly the speed limit and not a smidgen over. He wants to get pissed at me not breaking the law, so be it. Nothing I can do about that.

We come up to a set of lights at a T juntion. It’s green, but I drive this road pretty much every time I go home. I know that unless I go at like 100kmph I will not get round the bend before it turns red. And low and behold as we approach it turns orange. And just as I get to the line it turns red – lucky I wasn’t going fast, having slowed down for the corner.

Was the guy behind happy? Was he hell. So he jerks into the next lane across, which is a right hand turn lane only – and goes through a red light, turning left!

Yes, he not only turned left from a right hand turn only lane, but he went through on red. Not a little bit red, but very red. Like, people who had just started coming across the T junction had to slam their brakes on. And he tooted his horn and gave me the finger.

What a prick.

That’s a stylised version of what happened. I’m no good at animating or anything beautiful or technical like that. I enjoy it though, so that’s my half an hour attempt at trying to show what happened. Notice no line markings on the road? That’s because I couldn’t manage it… Oops!

Saska

I’m stuck. I’ve a dilemma.

I am in the process of writing a choir piece. Only choral pieces generally, unfortunately, have words.

This is a problem.

Mainly because I can’t write words. Not at all… It’s very frustrating!

It’s weird. Where was I this time last year? About to embark on my first year of University. Leaving most of my friends behind as they left to pursue different things, different courses, and some hadn’t finished school yet. And this year? I’m a teacher, I’ve got a car, I’m embarking on my journey.

But my god, am I tired.

And I can get very grumpy.

And Sleepy….

Another new design! OMG!

This time, though, it all works. I did it all in 7 hours, one long straight shot. Pretty nifty, if you ask me.

Now I’m on holiday, I’ll be posting a bit more, especially about all the little music stuff I’m doing.

Other news? I’m currently writing a commission for the Youth Voices of Melbourne, which is very nifty! I’m also doing lots of.. Well, sitting around on my arse, mainly.

I have a car now. Which is kinda swell! Except I’ve run out of money after Christmas, so I can’t really go many places in it these holidays… Oh wells!

And I’m tired now, so I’ll leave it here… New blogs soon, honest!

Saska

First, I thought I’d add a wonderful MP3 of a glorious recording of me and Nathan doing improvised 4 part vocals…

//**LINK**\\

It’s pretty good!

Second, I thought I would leave it at that.

Saska

Well, I’m a bit of a nerd. Well, a bit more of a nerd that I care to admit. But unfortunately I am a very lazy nerd.

Recently, about a month a go, I purchased a very small, completely silent motherboard/CPU combination off of eBay. It was perfect, it’s tiny, it was fast enough for what I wanted to do with it, and it was absolutely silent. I was going to build a file server with it, the motherboard wasn’t much bigger than a 3.5″ hard drive, so it was going to be very small and well contained. It didn’t need to be fast, just send out data when asked for. I already have a file server running, a prebuilt NAS, and it works well. But it does get a little clogged up when more than 2 people are accessing it, which is a very big shame.

So the motherboard sat there for a week. Two weeks. Three weeks. Right, I said, enough is enough, I shall either do something with it, or get rid of it.

I said I was lazy, right? So, anyway, long story short, I just finished selling it on ebay.

Cool story.

In other nerdy news, I am currently forwarding all of my uni email to another email address, so that I might be able to check my uni email via Thunderbird, which it is currently not possible to do for some ridiculously bureaucratic reason. That was fun, took about 5 minutes, made me feel nerdily impressed.

I decided that the new design I made for my front page doesn’t look professional enough, so I’m going back to the drawing board. It was cool, I’d admit that, and it did look good, but not good enough for my liking. Plus it was being an arse to me in CSS land, and refused to work in all the browsers equally. Bastards.

Off to write some music now, tataaaa

Saska

I want to do two things. Draw people’s attention to the fact, and then complain about the fact that I might not be able to.

Everyone should go to Monash for the Music in the Round music festival because one of my pieces is getting performed there. It would be really swell if I could see people there, it’s a fairly big moment for me, it’s basically my debut into proper performances, by really professionals, of my work. I’ve co-written this piece with a friend of mine, and it is really very cool. Hence it would be good for people to come.

On the downside, however, there is a strong possibility that I myself won’t get to see the piece performed due to being on stage at the same time as the performance is scheduled, about 10 minutes away. Which is ridiculous, and makes me angry.

Very angry.

I want to see the piece, I really do. I don’t want to just see the rehearsal an hour before, I want to see the actual performance, with an actual audience. To hear the announcer stumble over my name (as is usual, I should start calling myself Tom or Fred or Alex (my middle name)), to watch the slightly bemused expressions of the audience who probably won’t quite get the music but will enjoy it all the same, to hear the applause. Name in lights, sparkly tights, dancing, I want it!

*Sigh* So it goes.

Saska

I just went and had a look at my bandwidth usage across all of the sites that I host, and I noticed something weird…

Normally I transfer about 600-800MBs a month of stuff, images and music mainly. That goes up and down with the number of MP3s I upload, but it’s fairly static.

Then last month what should I find but one of the subdomains that hasn’t been updated or probably viewed for more than 3 years (last update was 26th Feb 2006…) had somehow magically uploaded 21.56GBs last month..

To say I was shocked is an understatement. It’s a static page. A static 8kb page. To upload 21.56GBs… It had to be viewed some 2.7 million times.

That’s fairly extreme… And more to the point, it was only 3 IPs..

I would say it would be a DDOS, but it wouldn’t make sense, and I wouldn’t be so arrogant. First of all, it’s only 3 IPs that are all just 1 digit different to each other, says they’re owned by a company. Probably a spam company of some sort, the page did have a “comment” type thing that put the entry straight into a mysql database. So if I check that…

Cheers

Saska

**EDIT** Wooo, 56000 spam posts in the database! Serves me right, I guess!

I procrastinated today, instead of doing uni work, and wrote a little 8bit tune..

8bitMonkeyBalls

Enjoy!

Saska