Archive for April, 2008
Telephone
Apr 7th
Flying High
Apr 4th
Flying High, originally uploaded by Heraldk.
Black and white shot taken from the plane on the way to Turin, Italy. I added some heavy vignetting from Aperture.
Eileen Ivers Concert Review
Apr 4th
A few months ago, Diane asked me if I wanted to go to a concert with her in April. It was an awfully long time in the future, but I booked it in. Last night was the concert in question, and it turned out we were there to see a fiddler by the name of Eileen Ivers. Now, I’ll admit that while I do love the style of music, I haven’t been very proactive in finding more of it to listen to. I have a few Leahy CDs, but that’s about it. So I was pretty excited to find another collection of quality fiddle music.
Eileen has a pretty impressive resume. She has won nine All-Ireland fiddle championships, and she toured with Riverdance starting in 1995. So that’s pretty cool. The band she was touring with featured several excellent musicians in their own right. They put on quite a show.
The music they played varied quite a bit with several pieces fusing a few genres. In the last song before the intermission, they played a song called “Gravelwalk” that she described as Celtic fiddling meets the Bronx. Early on, I was surprised that she broke out a wah pedal for her fiddle. I became astonished as she began to make her fiddle sound like a full out distortion guitar. Huh. I mean, I know and like Apocalyptica, which does distortion Cello, but I didn’t expect to see it on the violin.
Edit: here’s the only video I could find of Eileen playing gravelwalk. It’s too bad it’s just the distortion part, because it sounds much better in context.
(as a side note, Apocalyptica is getting air time on Sonic 102.9, a local radio station. I think this is fantastic).
The show was wonderful and the only thing missing from the audience clapping and singing (for 2 songs anyways), and foot stomping fun was a couple pints of Guinness.
Thanks sweety for getting us tickets 
Heraldk
Chair Assembler
Apr 3rd
Chair Assembler, originally uploaded by Heraldk.
At the MIT museum, there was this strange gear thing with 6 pieces of a chair attached. The chair pieces would stick out and move slowly around for awhile and then come together very quickly to form the chair. They would then fly out quickly and then repeat the process over and over again. Kinda neat, but hard to get a photo of the formed chair.
Pulled This Way and That
Apr 3rd
It feel to me that I’ve got too many open threads to work on. The past couple of weeks have been pretty productive for me at work, but I kind of feel like they could’ve been more so. Part of that is that I’m regularly getting distracted by all kinds of little things.
It’s an exciting time at the CPRG. We’ve got several projects that we have high hopes for paying dividends at this year’s competitions. Results have been around the corner for the past little while, and we might even be able to show some of them to the group soon. Hopefully our ideas will keep us in front of a quickly growing field of strong competition.
My mass uploading of photos to Flickr continues. It turns out it takes a long time to caption and title most of the photos I pick to upload. I’m trying to get a photoset or two up every night (although I might not be able to tonight, since I’m going to a concert with Diane). Last night I uploaded photos from my trip to AAAI in Boston in 2006. You can head on over to my Flickr photos to check on my progress, or you can check out my new gallery page courtesy of the Slickr plugin. I haven’t added a link to the navigation at the top yet – I haven’t had a chance to tweak this design to suit my purposes a little more. I really like, and I hope you do too, but it’s got to change a little bit to give space for a couple of navigation details.
Then there’s this whole interview thing. Diane and I are getting flown over to visit Dublin and meet the team sometime in the next couple of weeks. I need to figure out a way I can impress the development team. Any ideas on a good demo I could prepare? I’ve got to fit in some time to work on preparing something amongst my blog updates and photo uploading. Weeee!
Oh yeah, and there’s a wedding coming up that I’ve got to work on planning the details. It’s almost exactly two months away at this point. Might be a good idea to get working on that too.
It’s gonna be a crazy few months here. Let’s just hope I can stay sane until August.
Heraldk
Woah!
Apr 1st
Recent Comments