Witchy shares this recipe for a cake that is sure to be special this holiday season. :o)
Suzy and I have noted with interest that neither of our kids or friends the age of our kids use land line telephones anymore. All they have is their cell phone. If/when the battery runs out or the phone is turned off, they’ll get their messages via a service. We still have a land line and use it all the time. But we are not sure whether it is a good deal or not.
Our phone service is part of a Verizon package that includes blazingly fast (think megabytes) Internet access, HD-quality cable TV brought over FiOS (fiber optics) to our house. You might remember I put FiOS wiring through out my house when we built it in 2000. We still are using the LAN cabling today.
My parents have been going through the pain of moving from regular cable TV to a service that provides DVD-r services so that they can record and watch shows on their schedules. Since they can’t get Verizon FiOS in their neighborhood they went with Comcast. The day after the service was installed they received this email from a close friend.
I was watching the AMA on ABC last week and the blocking was so bad it was hardly watchable for the fast moving performances. I use the free local stations coverage of Comcast using Clear QAM.
What the heck! It’s always about the money and not the quality of the service. For more info see: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1008271.
A rather savvy fellow in our circle of acquaintances notes:
As I already rip my DVDs and view them using Media Extenders, I wondered if I could put tuner cards in my Media Center PC and just use that. Turns out that even though Comcast is required to deliver signals in the clear, there are limits and they use that to their advantage. First, they are only required to provide a limited set of basic channels. Second, they don’t have to tell you where they are and they can change them whenever they want. The AVS threads think it is a conspiracy to lock you into Comcast’s equipment.
Regardless, I did buy a card. The issue is finding out what channels I get and what they are. I’ve done a couple of scans and there are some websites that help but it is a poor representation of the overall channel offering and it still has the compression problem mentioned above.
I believe all of this will eventually move to the Internet with all but major events being on demand. Comcast and Verizon will charge you for bandwidth, latency, and traffic. The more you pay, the better the signal you get. They will try to be your first source for video but the FCC will limit their choke hold.
So things will be better for those technically savvy enough to advantage themselves of the new technology but nothing for the masses for another five or ten years.
Yikes! Although we have had Verizon FiOS for a while now (and luv it) we did buy into NetFlix last month. Suzy also bought a Roku adapter for the TV so we have instant access to much of the NetFlix library which is also very nice. The service including the two DVDs at a time service costs around $10 a month. I just uploaded Dexter, season one to the Instant access queue for example.
So as we go into the Fall break and all our favorite shows go on holiday break, we now have a huge library of movies and TV to select from. I have to say, the NetFlix movie suggestion app is very cool and gets more accurate as I select movies for us to watch. I was thinking that the combinations of Discovery station to James Bond to Duets kind of movies we watch would make us hard to peg. Not so. Fortunately neither Suzy or I are too worried that our movie selections will be provided to the world such that we would lose some privacy. Besides, she can always blame me for the questionable movie selections. Reminds me of when we were teenagers and I took her to see Last Tango in Paris. You can’t do that now a days.
As I’ve mentioned in a lot of posts on different sax forums and in discussions with musicians, I’ve discovered the trick to playing the soprano sax well. Actually playing ‘well’ is a relative term as I am a hobbyist. I was reading Keri Degg’s “The ‘nino has landed” blog post and was moved to explain my theory on playing the higher saxes better. Oh, and I asked her to post pics of the ‘nino cuz, “Guys like to watch”. :o)
When I finally ventured away from my beloved alto sax to try the tenor sax, it took me years to get the sound even close to what I wanted to hear. I still battle that even though Ray found me a Berg Larson 110/2 mouthpiece which seems to make the best of my talents.
So with some dread I ordered my first soprano sax. When I got it, a nice Yani sc901 curvy, my sound was horrible. I discovered, thanks to SaxManGlen on SOTW, that I had to push the mouthpiece way in to even start to come in tune with the instrument. three years and six soprano saxes later (Suzy and Aaron each have ones I selected for them) I still wasn’t quite getting the sound I was looking for. And I’m not talking about the intonation with the altissimo range, that will always be a challenge for me. But I’m talking about looking for a sound that doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a duck.
So on a lark, I purchased a Yani Elimona sopranino. After wrestling with that baby for a couple of months, I noticed how much better my soprano sax playing was coming. I had much less time with the clarion range (in the staff D to palm key D for the sake of argument) and the palm key notes spoke much easier. Suzy had no problem with soprano or sopranino, but then she is a clarinet play from way back and plays the Eb sopranino clarinet in the Wind Symphony.
I was so happy with the improvement in my soprano sax playing that I thought, what the heck and I purchased an Eppelsheim soprillo sax. This piccolo sax is so hard to play that Benedikt provides this warning on the site where you view them for purchase:
“Attention: Due to its extreme range and the required very firm embouchure only professional players can play the Soprillo.It may take several months of practice to reach the highest notes.”
After a couple of months of work, not dedicated to just the soprillo sax, was able to get to the B above the first staff. My goal is to play the range of the instrument. But that may be a long time coming. And I did a Bb blues riff on it at a gig the first year I owned the instrument. The soprillo does create quite the stir when I bring it to gigs and practices.
So you have some options here. You can put in the 10,000 hours required to become a pro to get that sound you really want on these squeakers. Or, you can cheat a little and reduce the the time by:
1. Buying the next level higher sax
2. Taking lessons
3. Spending at least 10 hours a week on your craft.
Doing all three of those might reduce you time to becoming a pro by a couple of thousand of hours. But if you are play for the love of music, I mean if you really have the passion to play and play well, then it’s not about being the best player you can be is it? It’s probably more about the journey. Enjoy.
Sad but true video from mintlife.com at http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/unemployment-rate-video/ . Here’s the chart:
My son Aaron sent this to me and I, the proud grampa, just had to share:
When I get home from work, after Addie eats dinner she wants to play Rock Band, and she’ll ask me “Rock?”, then the game will start and she’ll say “rarrr” (because that what they game says when the game starts up), and plays her guitar and at the end of each song raise her arms into the air, then says, “more?”
Addie watches her parents very carefully. Scientist say that kids at her age so want to be like their parents. Of course that will change as they get older. Still, Addie will also try to play trumpet and sax when Aaron lets her. Theirs is a house filled with love, family, friends, and music. What more could you ask for?
My Dad asked me for the simple rules I use to teach my grandkids to play chess. So here are the Chess 101 rules:
1. White is right. Make sure that as you face your side of the board, the white square is on the right.
2. Queen goes on her own color. Black queen goes on black square in the middle of the first row.
3. Never move your queen too fast. Rookie are so eager to get the queen out there where they chance losing her.
4. Knights (horsies) should not be moved to the edges of the board if possible. They lose half of their move options there.
5. Own the middle of the board and you own the game.
These are very simplistic, but a good way to start. The other thing that you can do is to play until your youngster thinks all is lost and then switch sides. I do recommend however that you save this chess board for playing with your buddies:
Cheers.
I have been espousing the 10,000 hours to become a professional (in this case for music) for a while now and a friend of mine attributed that to the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Wikipedia has a nice little blurb about the book.
“Outliers is a non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.” – Wikipedia
So I ordered the book for my Christmas break reading on my Kindle. Beth Jameson sez this about the book:
“The main tenet of Outliers is that there is a logic behind why some people become successful, and it has more to do with legacy and opportunity than high IQ. In his latest book, New Yorker contributor Gladwell casts his inquisitive eye on those who have risen meteorically to the top of their fields, analyzing developmental patterns and searching for a common thread. The author asserts that there is no such thing as a self-made man, that "the true origins of high achievement" lie instead in the circumstances and influences of one’s upbringing, combined with excellent timing. The Beatles had Hamburg in 1960-62; Bill Gates had access to an ASR-33 Teletype in 1968. Both put in thousands of hours-Gladwell posits that 10,000 is the magic number-on their craft at a young age, resulting in an above-average head start.”
Should be an interesting read. What’s on your list for the holiday season?
I took a look at solar power for residential use this year. The last time I did the analysis was in 2004 and the payback was over 15 years, best case. It is now down to 12 years best case. After a lot of research I went with Puget Sound Solar for my estimates. They are the most honest and have a nice presentation on the Internet. They also had a number of installations on the East Side of Seattle for me to consider.
Also I looked at wind turbines, but if you mount the turbine on your roof, any gust of wind over 25 miles an hour will shake the whole house. Running the turbine on a tower is a very costly solution with the need to climb the towers yearly for maintenance. And there is apparently a lot of noise associated with wind turbines.
The solar power option I was looking at was a photovoltaic system:
For those nay-sayers who think that we don’t get enough sun, I think if you did the research you would be surprised. Although we don’t have the sun of say, Death Valley, we have enough to harness depending upon the efficiency of the collection device.
My plan was to shy away from the battery part of the program, rather choosing to sell any overages to Puget power to offset my usage. That eliminated the space required to store that batteries, cost of buying and maintaining them, and off gassing.
Even with the significant tax savings from county, state and federal and the selling to the grid through Puget Power, my payback was going to be very long. Here is a chart one of the eastside home owners gave me charting his pay back schedule. (Click on the chart to enlarge.)
The home owner wrote: The installation was professional, he worked with me to give a good price and I have had zero problems with the system since the day it was installed. Net power product at this point is around 30 megawatt hours. Even with the incentives, it’s still a LONG ROI to break even (see attached spreadsheet for system performance and costs/income). Since the system was put in more than five years ago the cost basis and some of the incentives will have changed. I’m glad I did it – I’m looking at putting in a hot water solar system in addition which also has a much shorter ROI (few years).
Me: Wow, very illuminating and close to what Sean was telling me at Puget Sound Solar. It’s better than it was ten years ago, but not good enough to invest in if you use the accounting standard that recommends investment if you start getting a return over the costs in seven years or less. Even with the 30% fed rebate on the cost of the system and the other incentives adding up to 50% off initial costs, it’s still not ready for prime time.
Home owner: From a pure monetary perspective this is true – but I knew this going in and considered the investment in encouraging solar production in the Northwest and the net energy savings to be worthwhile the relative cost. The flip side is any solar plan should be accompanied with a conservation plan also (CFL lights, turning things off etc).
So I’ll relook in another five years. This looks promising though. :o)
It was announced this week that we are moving to another building on the same campus we are currently working at. So I grabbed my cell phone and took some pictures. The first picture is of the park north of our buildings. This is the view I will be giving up for a view of the side of an office building:
I’ve also included a picture of my desk and the door to my office. Yes, that is a Saxophone calendar above my desk. We were in the Marvel theme’d building. I’ll have to change my ‘privacy’ poster to something else for this move. Maybe I’ll move back to the film noir theme.
You get used to a space after spending time there. Let’s see we will have been in this building for around 18 months. Moving is just one of the things you get used to when working at Microsoft. In 18 years I’ve moved over 20 times. Some times it just seemed everyone was moving one office over. But team change, re-orgs happen, and life moves on. And I do have a great job with many, many friends, and very cool projects and products.
Sometimes there is beauty in unexpected places. Musical Transformations is but one example of this. Click on the picture above for the blog.
Quinn the Eskimo Vintage Horns
The Bis Key Chronicles 