Wibblelog

Rhapsody in Bloooo

April 15th 2006 Posted in Music

The other day, I played an actual real-life piano for the first time in at least a couple of years. There’s a nice Yamaha baby grand piano in the lobby of building 42 at work, and I summoned the courage to go play on it for a while. The feel of that thing is COMPLETELY different from my keyboard at home, despite both being manufactured by Yamaha, and the keyboard’s attempt to feel as much like a real piano as possible. I brought with me some random sheet music, and I ended up playing all the way through Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The whole thing! It’s 30 pages long and it’s supposed to take around 13 minutes, but I’m sure I took longer than that because I suck. Also, one thing I might want to keep in mind next time: exercising on the climbing wall for half an hour immediately before playing the piano is not a good idea. My wrists were *sore* after that, and it affected my performance negatively. Oh well, nobody I knew saw me or heard me. One guy came out of the woodwork when I was finished and thanked me profusely for playing that piece, because it is his favourite music in the whole entire universe. I guess he heard me playing from all the way across the building, despite my efforts to keep the volume down. Maybe if it had occurred to me to close the lid of the piano before playing it… again, oh well. Next time I’ll do better.

One final thought: the last few bars of Rhapsody in Blue are just awesome. That is one of the most powerful sections of music I know of. Now if only I could play it without sucking terribly. :)

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Life In The Goog

April 06th 2006 Posted in Google, Random

So I was wandering around a few days ago and I noticed that we have our very own manhole cover now. Pretty sweet if you ask me. It was actually sunny today for the first time since approximately January, so I took my camera along and snapped a picture. What’s great is that someone actually had to go to the trouble of making a die and casting this thing out of actual solid metal. There’s some sort of philosophical significance to this, but I’m really not sure what it is.

Also, I think I saw all of my group’s scooters in the same place for the first time in … oh, forever. There’s actually one missing - the one with the crazy broken throttle. That one is the best to ride, because it has two speed settings: off and EXTREMELY FAST. You control it by squeezing two bare wires together. When the wires touch, you accelerate as fast as the scooter can go. It’s awesome. Awesomely dangerous, that is.