Walking all over the place == tired

Yesterday was a strangely fun day. First of all, being the first day of school, the entire atmosphere was considerably relaxed as compared to the usual. Secondly, there were only two classes for me on Mondays, so it was amazingly fun in its own right. Thirdly, the TA for the second class (a recitation) did not arrive and so it was a free period in the end, which meant that I actually left much earlier than I'm supposed to be.

That aside, it was fun because it was the first time that I had entered a marching band—the Kiltie Band. The folks there were an interesting bunch; completely funny and spontaneous, things that I actually missed when I was in the Chinese Orchestra. The music is not hard, but the scores are really tiny in size (it is a marching band after all) and the pace of the rehearsal (not practice) was fairly fast, which resulted in me just sitting there and stoning for the most part, since I could not grasp the pace fast enough. And since most of the notes for the flutes are in the upper ledger lines, I had absolutely no clue what I was playing (I'm bad at the upper ledger line notes) which further enhanced the sit-there-and-stone effect.

The marching part was quite trivial, considering that I had done real marching while I was still doing NS. The only cute part was the halt; we had to do this weird leap-up-kick-your-legs-to-the-right-then-land move (there was a much shorter name for this dance manoeuvre but it slipped my mind). Other than that, the marching was pretty mundane.

Oh, did I add that in the entire flute section, there are only 2 guys, including me? That's right... there seems to be only two guys in the entire flute section. Danielle told me that it was normal to find more females playing the flute, which I think to be kind of strange, considering the fact that the opposite effect is evident among the 笛子 players. I think I should be able to survive well in the band; already talked to the band director about my issues and he says that it is fine, so I think that it should really be fine.

If I still can't read the score, I'll just memorise how it sounds and blitz my way through; no one will know the difference hur hur hur.

Okay, apart from all of that, I've decided to actually start putting together all my poems that I've blogged/written on the forums into one nice anthology. This project should take a while because I am going to take the opportunity to do fine-tuning and editing of some of obvious errors in the poems. This project should take a little while to complete, and I'll probably post a link to where it can be gotten once it is done.

In other news, I am messing around with the sound API for Java to write my own tuner. As ludicrous as it may seem, I never owned a tuner, despite the fact that I actually play so many different types of instruments over so many years. It should prove to be an interesting exercise for my signal processing chops, silly GUI chops and cross-platform stuff. Should prove to be fruitful.

Alright, that's all for now.