So I might have been a little angry at the start of uni because things have changed. And I hate change.

But anyway… I managed to maybe post about it on Facebook. And ranted a bit. And bitched about people within the university hierarchy.

And I maybe might have the people I ranted and raved and insulted added as my friends on Facebook.

And maybe, they might have read it and commented it on it.

And maybe that could be very embarrassing.

So, yeah…

Brilliant…

Saska

So, anyway.. Off to Europe!

In another 290 days, but still, going to Europe.

Got preeeeetty much everything planned. Know the flights, accommodation, most of what we wanna see (although we haven’t started on organising what days or anything neurotic like that… I’m not crazy!).. It’s all happening!

So, about to start another crazy year at uni… Starting to miss it, but I do enjoy holidays! I have enjoyed having 4 weeks teaching & all of that prep work before going back to uni though – no one wants to have 5 things all going on at once! I mean, I pretty much spent an entire day just doing my timetable, for it to be proven wrong almost straight away, and me having to revise and start it again! Not quite what I wanted, that’s for sure…

But its all working out alright, I haven’t had too many trials and tribulations. Been interesting working out exactly who I have to teach and what, and it turns out I have ended up having to teach it over two days! I mean, I don’t have that many students, but there are just so many times that it’s difficult to teach, and with a 40 minute extra each week, and having to transport students from junior school to senior and back again, it can be very time consuming.

I just want to put a shout out here, to all those crazy drivers who seem insistent on trying to kill me. Like slamming their brakes on full pelt, and then do a right hand turn, with no indication or anything. Or just generally pulling out without looking – I know I have a dark coloured car, but it’s still not that difficult to miss! Don’t just pull out of strange courts in the middle of Tourak, forcing me to slam my brakes on to avoid hitting you. And please, please, please, work out the size of your car! Some of you are trying to squeeze into spaces that don’t exist, and other just think the car is 10 times bigger than it is.

Like, for instance, a car that was driving, and driving directly in the middle of two lanes. It doesn’t need to take up both lanes, seriously. I might want to overtake you, or whatever. It is rude, dangerous, and just generally stupid!

So, I went to House Music on Friday night – that was pretty extreme! Congrats to everyone! Cuthbert were amazing, but I didn’t think the points for the rest of the groups was quite fair – Grease was amazing! And while Scrubs was good, I totally wasn’t expecting equal second! Close, definitely close – and Guy Love was easily the best song of the entire evening – but I didn’t think the instrumental, in particular, was quite up to the same standard as Landy. Although, I can’t really say much… The year that we won when I was leading, it was basically just because we had so many half assed bits and pieces put together – nothing quite worked on its own, but put it all together, and it seemed to work ok as a whole! Porter performed admirably – but Footloose is such a difficult musical… Someone had considered it each of the previous 2 years and decided against it, and it was great to see someone finally have a go (and frankly, that’s 12 musicals down – there aren’t that many others that would work in the 30 minute format!), but it was soo difficult, and they did a great job!

Anyway, bed calls…

Saska

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

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

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 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….

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

//**LINK**\\

It’s pretty good!

Second, I thought I would leave it at that.

Saska

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

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