I know that I haven't mentioned my progression with bass guitar very often in my blog, but it's been coming along well. I've certainly advanced a lot from the buzzes and squeaks which characterized my early songs. My tone has gotten better, I've gotten faster at strumming and can play across the strings with relative ease. The problem is, I've reached a plateau.
At this point, I can sort of play any tablature which gets placed in front of me. It may take a little while to work up, but the basic mechanics of how to play and makes notes come out is there. What I currently lack is the ability to take those notes and really make music.
The other day I bought a gigantic book of music theory for the bass. Looking through it, I got very excited. The things in this book are what I've severely lacked in my own playing: actual music. It's been so long since I had formal music lessons that I had forgotten how important the basics such as scales and chords are. But now, with an actual course of study ahead of me, I might just be able to someday pass myself off as a musician.
Alrighty, a large number of changes have now been instituted. All of the pages should now be HTML5. The style sheet has been completely rewritten, most of it from scratch, to accommodate the new markup. Each and every blog post has been edited by hand to adapt its code to the new format. I don't expect you to actually care about this: I just wanted to let you know how hard it was.
Of course, some things are broken: The mobile site is totally busted, the print styles are totally busted, Internet Explorer support is totally busted, and all other events are pending. Sorry, The Lonely Island's Space Olympics just jumped in my head.
In any case, if you see anything else broken, let me know.
Caution: Yet another nerdy, self referential post follows
In building this website, I opted to code everything by hand. In doing so, I've had a lot of mess ups, I've learned a lot about web development, and, most importantly, I've had a blast doing it. Today I am announcing the next phase of my development.
For the past decade, the web has been powered by the 4th version of the Hypertext Markup Language, HTML4. As you may have noticed, the internet neither looks nor acts much like it did at the turn of the century: the web has evolved, but the language used has not kept up.
HTML4 has been good, but it's time to do better. For the past few years, teams of devoted developers have been writing a complete overhaul to the system: HTML5 (catchy name, huh?). I know that most of you will not find the incrementing of version numbers particularly interesting, but as a web developer, it's really awesome.
Why HTML5 Matters
For years, there has been some semantic nature to the tags used to mark up web documents. The <p> tag marks up paragraphs. The <blockquote> tag marks up large blocks of quotation. While I doubt many of you have ever seen these tags, they are invaluable to search engines like Google when figuring out what a page means, to unsighted people reading the internet with screen readers, and a host of others.
HTML5 lets me mark up more of the document in ways that directly helps these users. No longer is navigation considered just an arbitrary place in the document: instead it is readily apparent as a navigation bar. The words that you read have meaning, and with HTML5, the structure of the document is a part of that meaning.
How Does This Affect You?
Over the next few weeks I will be transitioning my pages to this new standard. It's a surprisingly large amount of work, but I quite enjoy doing it. The site may have to come down several times, so expect seemingly random delays. But, in the end, it's gonna be great. I've got some cool ideas for things I can do in conjunction with this project, and hopefully the site will be prettier, faster, easier to use, and updated more often.
Thanks for the patience, support, and reading of posts that are really, truly, uninteresting
These past few weeks have been interesting. I would have posted about them more, but I was too busy doing things to tell people about them.
Football, Part 1: Clemson vs. USC
The first game that I got to go to last weekend was the famed Clemson vs. USC game. Ok, so I only got in because it was a soccer match, but still. It's technically a Clemson vs. USC 'football' game.
Despite the fact that I haven't been to a soccer game since, well, the last time I played in elementary school, I had a good time. By every account except the final score, Clemson was sort-of dominating. We had better control of the ball, we shot at the goal more often, and still managed to lose 0-1. Soccer's a weird sport.
On a related note, the soccer stadium, despite being rather miniscule, is almost exactly the same size as Summerville's football stadium. It adds a weird sense of scale to life here at college.
Nearly a full week has passed since Dad and I braved the elements, risking both life and limb, to move most of my worldly belongings to a small settlement in the middle nowhere. It was like playing a very easy game of "The Carolina Trail," but with less river fording and dying of dysentery.
Moving In
What a difference a year makes. Last year, we arrived early to beat the crowds of freaking out freshman to the good parking spaces. Little did we realize that this precaution by definition makes one a freaking out freshman, so we still have to walk approximately 9001 miles to actually reach the dorm. This year, I managed to arrive so late that I all of the freshman had moved in, and most of the rest of the students had done likewise. It worked so much better this way.
Arranging the Dorm
My suitemates this year are Brian, John, and Daniel. Yes, that's right, the same group that lived with me (either de jure or de facto). We had planned out exactly how things should be arranged months in advance, and threw out those plans within minutes of beginning to move furniture.
The main idea of the arrangement remains, though: beds in one room, and all of the entertainment stuff in the other. This way, our desks are in the room most likely to be quiet. (Well, Brian's is in the louder room, but only because he has a habit of staying up absurdly late at night.) The other room then has huge (relatively) amounts of floor space and can easily hold John's drum set, my bass, Brian's piano and cello, the entire entertainment system, a couch, table, and other stuff. It's quite nice.
Settling In
To re-acclimate to college life, we dove in headfirst with the noblest of college traditions: Disk golf in the middle of campus. Despite Clemson having a well-defined, well-publicized, secret course through its center, we once again blazed our own trail, pulling the best qualities from each of our prior treks. We're finally settling into a good groove on that account.
Start of Classes
My classes this year consist of Calculus 3, Physics 2, Engineering Graphics, the History of Science and Technology, and Statics. After a few days of class, I'm rather enjoying this lineup. Let's hope that they continue to work well.
The Weekend
I know that talking about the weekend already seems a bit like cheating, since I skipped over three days of class in just as many sentences. Oh, well, sue me.
Image by Matt Lang
Friday night we moved in several chairs and had a dozen people in our room watching "A Very Potter Musical."A collection of students at the University of Michigan wrote this musical which effectively satirizes the entire Harry Potter series. It was one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time.
Saturday was surprisingly athletic for me. We played three, um, whatever they're calleds. Sets, maybe? I don't know, In any case it was a lot of fun. We went to the indoor tennis courts. The building was not air conditioned much if at all, so it was quite warm in there. Without the sun beating down on us, though, it stayed a consistently hot temperature, and was therefore quite bearable. Sports are much easier without the sun.
Carrying on with that theme, we played ultimate frisbee on Bowman field. At night. With a light-up frisbee. It was so much fun! I tend not to enjoy ultimate because of all the running, but the change of scenery, the inability to clearly see teammates, and the glowing green disk made it just different enough that it was awesome. I hope we do it again at some point soon.
Sadly, this now brings me up to the present. Daniel's doing homework. Brian's at band. John is still sleeping, having gotten in at 7:00 this morning (perhaps it's his desk which should be in the other room). I hope the next few days are just as good as these past few have been.
