din's blog

December the 16th is Beethoven's birthday if you didn't know (I mean who doesn't know that?!). So if you're in the DC area, you can tune to wgms (104.1 or wgms.com with live feeds) to hear a lot of him mixed in with the traditional holiday crap.

He's definitely one of my favorite composers and it's probably a toss up between him and Chopin for most stuff I've played. His stuff is so much fun to play, if sort of a pain in the ass to learn. My favorites are all "named" sonatas (do I like them because they're famous or are they famous because they're awesome?). I usually tell people that I'd pick what I'd want to learn by whether it'd let me show off or not. And all of these fit squarely within that category - flashy, technical pieces that everyone loves. In the order that I learned them:

Tempest - This was the first one that I played. I forget how young I was, but I remember not liking it at the time, but I think I've changed my mind.
Pathetique - I love the opening movement. It's such a shock as the first note slams into you and then goes super quiet before going loud again. Imagine me as a youngish teenager getting to basically play with as much force and contrast as I was capable before suddenly cutting into a quick tempo :)
Moonlight - Everyone, and I mean everyone, has heard the first movement: it's beautiful, haunting, blahblahblah. It's boring as shit to play. On the other hand, no one knows the 3rd movement which is set at a presto! tempo and consists primarily of long runs of arpeggios. This was the first piece where my hands were actually tired after playing. The 3rd movement was also the piece that got me into learning Beethoven in the first place. I was really little when I heard someone perform this at one of the recitals that our piano teacher would hold for all her students and wanted to play it ever since.
Waldstein - The opening 2 bars are a perfect example of Beethoven's ability to make music out of a very simple arrangement of 4 notes. It opens with a repeated staccato of chords with no melody! He keeps at it somehow creating a melody out of that mess. Wonderful piece to play, but again your wrists are so tired at the end. The 3rd movement has a beautiful melody and it's one of my favorite pieces to play. Feature of note is that on your right hand, you've got a continuous trill in your thumb and forefinger while the melody moves through the rest of the fingers and even sometimes into the trill fingers. Try keeping that going fast without dropping the trill!
Appassionata - I'd always wanted to play this piece when I was younger, but it was still out of my ability level. I lost to some dorky russian kid who played this at a competition when I was playing the Pathetique. My consolation was that I didn't practice 8 hours a day like he did or wear girly gloves before the competition so his hands would stay warm. I still hate him. This is the only piece that I've got an mp3 recording of me playing the first movement. Although writing this reminds me that I should get around to converting all the tapes of me playing when I was a kid to digital audio. Anyway, if you've gotten this far, here's my recording (if you've known me after college, you've heard this before). Vox is generating an error when I try to upload it so you just get a link (also it's really really quiet and I probably need to adjust the volume setting next time when I upload it).

I know I've been sorta quiet on the blogging front, but it's been pretty busy at work, which is my normal blogging time :)

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vt / clemson aftermath

nobody@vox.com(din) — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:20:25 -0400

fireworks celebration 1

We won!!!! 24-7! Unranked vt blew up #10 clemson!

Talk about a simple game plan.

Stop their running backs and force their shaky qb (will proctor) to throw - check
Run the ball with Brandon Ore - check
Don't fuck up - half check

warmup

Before this game, clemson rb's averaged 185 yds per game and their offense led the nation in scoring at 42 ppg. We held them to 80 yards rushing and 7 points. Brandon Ore had 37 carries for 203 yards and almost broke a tech record for most carries in a game. Our o-line and d-line played fantastic games! In fact, the only thing that went wrong was sean glennon doing his michael vick impression and fumbling the ball in the 3rd quarter.

td celebration

I bitch and moan about the playcalling of our offensive coordinator all the time, but last night was definitely one of his better nights. He did a great job setting up all the big plays. The sequence that stands out in my mind was 2 handoffs to ore to the right side, one quick out to clowney on the right, and finally the playaction pass to wheeler that went deep down the right sideline. You could see clemson safety on that side position himself closer and closer to the line each play and then see him totally bite on the playfake. The only reason the pass didn't go for a td was that wheeler is a big, slow tight end. Basically the whole

tuba hokie pokie lineup

night, everything that stinespring called worked perfectly.

Anyway, I posted a flickr set that has more pics! I'm not sure how to get access to all the flickr pics in that set as adding photos to vox doesn't seem to grab all of them for me to choose from, nor does it give me multiple page options on the flickr tab.

(for those of you unfamiliar with college football, we're called the virginia tech hokies. So after the 3rd quarter, the tuba's all line up and play the hokie pokie while people do the dance)

fans streaming onto field 2

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virginia tech vs clemson

nobody@vox.com(din) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:58:56 -0400

Going to the game tomorrow night! woot! It'll be cold and possibly rainy [edit: it snowed on last night's practice], but it's a night home game on espn. And the stadium is going to be crazy rocking. One of my old buddies from college is flying in from california to go to the game as well and we'll be driving down thursday morning. Hah, when we picked this game as the one to go, we were expecting both teams to come in relatively unscathed with great records. Well, one team did that, but it wasn't tech :(

Right now, it's pretty safe to say that clemson is the cream of the crop in the ACC. They're #1 or #2 in every offensive/defensive category in the conference. They have the most experienced (3 sr), talented, and nfl ready (avg 6'5" 320lbs) offensive line that tech will see all year. I've been reading comparisons of their two running backs, cj spiller and james davis, to reggie bush and lendale white. And actually, for the most part, everything I've read or seen about clemson bodes ill for tech. On the plus side, they've been bitten by a couple big injuries. Lost 2 of their starting lb's for the year. Their #1 wr was out for a couple weeks with an ankle injury and did not play in the big GT game saturday, so I'm hopign that he won't be ready for tomorrow. But both their offensive and defensive lines are fully healthy... and that's where tech is the weakest. It's going to be a long night if our lines continue to get pushed around.

However, there's a couple intangibles that look to be in tech's favor. First thing I have hope for is that clemson perenially finds ways to lose games that they should win, specifically on the road. They're also 1-5 on thursday nights (espn games). And finally, tech hasn't been an underdog at home very often - the last time that happened, miami came in 2003 and got blown out 31-7.

So, with all that, I can't pick against clemson. The talent on paper looks ridiculous and tech's got so many problems (not enough room in this post to document, maybe another post). Anyway, if the cameras are on me, I should be easy to pick out. I'll still be wearing the dumb sling.

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another WoW video

nobody@vox.com(din) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 16:21:32 -0400

What do you get when you combine world of warcraft with michael jackson?

billy maclure

There's some low level alliance quests involving a kid named billy maclure. Combine this with the jackson inspired male nightelf dance and you get this mashup :) If you're interested, the comments on the youtube page have the lyrics.

I <3 machinima.

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first day back

nobody@vox.com(din) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 12:15:17 -0400

So it's my first day back at work after the surgery. I've been in the office for about 2 hours or so now and I'm ready to go home :) It suuuuuucks. For some reason, this chair I'm sitting in is uncomfortable and I haven't found a good position yet. I'm sure it's just a psychological thing in that I'd rather be home rather than at work.

It's been pretty quiet so far. Not sure a lot of people know I'm back yet since I haven't been wandering the halls or anything. Followup with the doc happens in a couple hours and I'm hoping he'll be like "look at that amazing recovery, you won't have to wear the sling much longer. Certainly not the 6 weeks we originally expected."

Stupid fucking sling.

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AHHHHHH

nobody@vox.com(din) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:15:15 -0400

Last day of free use* of my left arm for like 6 weeks! I'm so nervous. and sick. haha, yeah I managed to pick up a cold over the weekend. It's awesome. Tomorrow I'll be in surgery and there should be some awesome/gross pictures to share when I'm home!**. Thanks again for driving glynn!

*if you define free use as anything that doesn't require me to put a strain on the shoulder that could potentially pop it out.

** This assumes I can easily get the pictures off my camera. Stupid xp+sp2 seems to trigger some retarded microsoft camera/scanner program that doesn't interface with the camera correctly instead of just mounting the camera as a removable drive. Dumb dumb dumb. Guess I need to buy a card reader after all.

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it's weird al video day

nobody@vox.com(din) — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:15:40 -0400

No, he's not dead.

wow hardware store. It's apparently an original weird al song. The fan video is really good.

WoW Hardware store

Not going to embed the other actual weird al videos I just watched, but they're also hilarious :) white an nerdy. Ebay

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