Ball x Pit

Well, at least the bots are not hiding themselves, and are being honest about where they are from.

I still don't like the crawling though. But what can one do when one is using a ``free'' almost-always available tool for blogging?

Anyway, it's finally November. NaNoWriMo the organisation has imploded, so NaNoWriMo the event is kind of dead, at least officially. Personally, I probably should continue with the whole ``writing a novel in a month'' deal, but realistically, it's a nice change to do something a little different.

Last month was a doozy. Much happened at work (I won't talk about it other than pointing out that all the waiting for details is exhausting), and even more happened in not-work. The Great Yamaha has arrived! It's a maple great bass recorder from Yamaha (YRGB-61), and according to Wee Aik, it's the first time he's ever heard/seen anyone order it. Mind you, he's a Yamaha products veteran for nearly two decades, so that statement has way more heft to it than expected.

First impressions of The Great Yamaha are good---the tone is sweet, the range is similar to that of the bass flute. I had a brain fart in my excitement at receiving The Great Yamaha that I forgot that the recorder is tuned by moving the headjoint away from the body---we were trying to tune by adjusting the adjustable boccal.

🤦‍♂️

There is a minor issue that I'll need Sean to help remedy---the felt on one of the bumpers seemed to be a little too thin, making it a little harder to hold down the lever that ought to cover the two linked holes. But that's something for the upcoming Friday.

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I went and played with Atelier Flute Ensemble (AFE) JB over the previous weekend at the auditorium of Afiniti Medini in Medini Iskandar (it's ``across the road'' from Malaysia's Legoland). It's a nice space, but as an auditorium, it meant that it was better at absorbing sound than acoustically bouncing stuff nicely the way some recital spaces do. I spent two nights over at Yong Kang's mum's place, with Friday and Saturday almost fully locked in on the rehearsal and performance respectively. Yong Kang was a good host, but I think that my ``rock bottom'' expectations from living a mostly monk-ish lifestyle probably threw him off by a lot, giving him some serious anxiety of whether his hosting was adequate.

It was more than adequate, for sure. But let's be real:

• I sleep on a mattress on a floor at home;
• The apartment I live in has no air-conditioner;
• I average about one-and-change meals a day;
• My philosophy to food is usually ``eat to live'';
• Armed with Eirian-VI, I can kill time better than most people; and
• I don't really have this urge to buy random junk.

All in all, my expectations are really ``rock bottom'' due to the way I have chosen to live my life, and not because I was trying to be polite or anything.

I think it really throws people off because there really isn't any other obvious indicator that in addition to acting like a weirdo, I actually do live like one [apparently].

Ah well.

The concert itself was fun---I thoroughly enjoyed playing the repertoire that was put together. Going nuts on the articulation with Davie was something that I had not expected myself to do, but considering some of the crazier dynamics that are written for the low flutes, I think it fully justified. One interesting thing to note was the use of direct amplification on the contrabass flute, as well as us bass flutes---it served as a good alternative to the KFC way of having another friendly low instrument player (contrabass or bass clarinet) to join in. They even had me play something for the demo when they were introducing the flute family---I started with a fragment from 《平湖秋月》 to feature the low-B at the penultimate rehearsal but was told it was too short, so I switched to a transposed version of 《瑶族舞曲》, but then someone made a comment about it being played in an orchestra, so I finally just played a transposed version of 《草原的思念》, all to show off that low-B on the bass flute. I think they liked it.

At the end of the concert was a whole series of photo-taking sessions. I was a part of the main groups, but as everyone else had their friends and families coming up to them for a photo in memory of the event, hardly anyone came to me, and I just sat there and absorbed the environment.

It felt a little melancholic, but it was fine---I felt contented from having played more [bass] flute. The location was not in SIN city, and therefore I never really felt comfortable trying to get folks from within SIN city to get tickets to travel waaaaaaaaaaay out of the way just to hear me play the bass line. No matter how I swing it, it just sounds ludicrous.

That said, if AFE JB were to have another concert, I would happily join in and play with them, should they still want me.

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In other news, Ball x Pit is taking time from Silksong, Persona 5, and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 2.

It's Arkanoid combined with Vampire Survivors for the action part, and then there's a bit of Tetris with Plinko for the city-building part (which is a slightly more convoluted mechanism for unlocking new characters and get bonus stat increases---now they involve skill, and feature additional resource gathering/management).

It's fun, and I'm still really new in it. Stay tuned for more information as I [slowly] unlock stuff.

If there's a reason to get a portable hand-held, it might be this one.

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I've restarted on some digital signal processing work involving the FFT once again. Reason: I needed a better way to extract the chords from sample music files, and I didn't want to rely on some dodgy third party website to do that.

The last time I was experimenting with FFT, I ended up needing scipy and other random-ass Python packages to install. On a Cygwin set up, this is a royal pain in the ass.

The solution is to grab FFTW and libsndfile, and write my own C++ program to do the expensive part of running the FFT, before using Python to do the processing after.

The FFT part is done, and I'm now working on the bucketing of the resultant Discrete Fourier Transform to propose the associated pitches for examination.

But Ball x Pit awaits me!

I think that's about it for now. Till the next update then.

Ass

Ass. A royal pain in the ass.

Okay, since the last entry where I called out the bot-masters who have been unsympathetically hopping IP addresses but still with the same spoofed user agent information of ``Chrome 125.0/OS X/800×600'', things have been going all over the place for me.

The most recent pain in the ass (literally), is getting hit with gastroenteritis. Not fun, and not sure why I even got hit with this, but I am assuming that it has something to do with the increased stress levels that have muted my immune response, which resulted in the rise of the effects of the nasty-ass bugs that have always been lurking within the body, ready to strike when the forces that usually keep them at bay have lowered their vigilance.

The previous two nights with respect to gastroenteritis wasn't pleasant. The first night (Thursday night), I had very fitful sleep, having to sprint out of ``bed'' to evacuate my bowels. Then I messed up, having the foresight to wear more pants ``just in case'', but forgetting to realise that I was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor (hence ``bed''). So when I finally got into some semblence of deep sleep, a bad leak occurred, and I ended up having to do late night washing, and subsequent sunning of the very lightly soiled (just fluids that made it through the four layers of cloth) mattress.

Last night, I just slept on the floor hard core, no mattress. Drugged up with the right types of meds, I slept fine, without any embarrassing leakages and what-not. The day between the nights was spent sleeping fitfully on the same floor, in a bid to try and recover whatever missing sleep that I had from the night prior, and to just avoid having to think/be conscious about the bloatedness and discomfort that came from gastroenteritis.

Today, I feel better. Gassy as one can get, burping and farting (I don't trust anything that comes out of that orifice!). Head's feeling less woozy to the point that I can sit here and start writing about the nonsense that I had undergone. It also meant that I had to forego the penultimate rehearsal that was held this week for the upcoming concert on 2025-10-25. That is fine---there's one more rehearsal this upcoming Friday, just before the performance. And considering that I'm playing on Davie, a bass flute, we're good, especially since I had fixed the compacted score for one of the pieces---I had missed out an entire row, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that.

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If one had checked out my domain recently, one would notice that there's a new field that is located in the lower right corner that talks about when the page was ``created''. And a closer look at the usual ``updated'' field on the lower left corner would also reveal that its form has changed somewhat. If the dates look like some ISO-8601 nonsense, it means that the underlying Javascript file is still the very old cached version---it is best to force refresh without using the cache to get the updated version.

Anyway, this is actually part of the mild adjustment of how I handle the ``fuzzification'' of dates, and the realisation that despite having the timestamp of when I updated a page, the provenance (particularly on when the page first came about) was missing. This is something that I had been thinking of doing for some time, but before the changes that I did to conform to the ``new'' security headers, I had no natural space to put that information. With the external validation links for the page with respect to its HTML5/CSS standards conformity having to be retired, I now have the space to put that information, and thus that's where the ``created'' timestamp (with suitable fuzzification) is located.

``But MT, how'd you get these information? Isn't it hard to track when the page is first created?''

See, this is where having my entire website hosted on my own source code repository comes into play. Each page has their own history stored across the commits/revisions/time, and it was just a boring case of finding timestamp of the earliest incarnation of the file. I did that over an evening, and slapped it all together, and finally have what you see today.

And yes, I have this website for at least 17 years as at today. So anyone who claims that they cannot find me on the 'net really hasn't tried hard enough. Hell, this blog has been in existence since 2006, so there's really no excuse whatsoever.

It is the same with finding me by cellphone number---that stupid number has not changed since 2003. So anyone who claims that they cannot find me... haven't really tried.

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``So MT, you were talking about wanting to cry in some recent post, and yet you cannot. How's that going?''

Oh... I still want to cry, don't get me wrong. But it's getting less terrible, at least for now. Some semblence of a direction has been provided, with some form of assurance being made by someone whom we have little reason to distrust. The gears of bureaucracy have finally started grinding, and it is still a matter of time before we truly see what/where we are heading.

Incidentally, I wrote an extractor specifically to pull out Psalms from ESV, and have been reading through it. Psalms is an interesting form of wisdom literature---they are songs that teach us, songs that show the entire range of emotion of the human condition, while at the same time, reminding us of who/how God is to us.

It is comforting in many ways, and I would like to think of Psalms as being less studied as compared to say Isaiah, Luke or even Romans.

Because how does one go about studying 150 seemingly disparate poems that have crappy meter due to the translation from the original Hebrew to English?

And I think that's all that I want to yammer about for today. This weekend is a long one that is supposed to be relaxing, and I fully intend to try and relax in it, despite the ongoing troubles with gastroenteritis.

May God allow me to heal before the next segment where I need to run hard once more. Amen.

The Calm Before The Storm

No, do not expect posts to come here like clockwork. I still say things when I feel like doing so.

I had to swallow my pride and drop my principles for two unrelated events and do things that I did not particularly agree with, and that does not make me a happy camper.

``MT, you could've walked away.''

I could have. But the ramifications of walking away are worse than the consequences of just biting my tongue, doing what needs to be done, and never going back to them again in future.

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I just joined the Atelier Flute Ensemble JB (AFE JB) for my first rehearsal with them for the upcoming concert on 2025-10-25. The trip to the rehearsal grounds was a cross-border adventure of going through the Woodlands checkpoint, the CIQ checkpoint, dining and chilling at Restoran Khi Ten, having the rehearsal, before the mad scramble back across the border after to catch the last bus back home from Woodlands interchange.

I won't go into too much details of the adventure, but I will share that folks from AFE JB were confused when I pointed out that it was my first trip out to Johor Bahru. I mean, I'm not exactly the kind of person who ``travels for the sake of travelling''---even when I was visiting the US back in the past, it was to visit old friends. I don't really like being the touristy tourist, nor am I the sort to travel ``for the sake of'' shopping for ``cheap'' goods (the price of anything one gets should always take the opporunity-cost into account as well).

AFE JB was very welcoming of me, and they remind me much of TGCC Chinese orchestra in terms of engagement, ethos, and skill level. I definitely have found a sort of kindred spirit for flute-playing with them away from SIN city. If you happen to be in the area over the time frame, do consider getting a ticket to check AFE JB out in concert.

I'm playing on Davie for this concert, and am looking forward to it!

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In other news, pay day came and went, and I got myself a Hollow Knight: Silksong. So far, it's been fun-enough. Yes, I still get my ass kicked by the bosses, but that's to be expected for an old fart with shit-tier coordination especially with controllers (these contraptions use reversed controls, where the left hand is for movement while the right are for actions, something completely different from when I play with just the keyboard).

For some reason, I tend to fare a little better with the 2D side scrolling type games, compared to the 3D stuff like Elden Ring. But considering that I'm still in the ``tutorial area'' (i.e. Act 1), I won't be holding my breath for a completion of the game any time soon.

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Phases 1--3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were a fun watch. Not as fun as John Wick (which I'm going to re-watch again for the sick gun-kata-esque moves), but still fun enough. Not sure if/when I'll start on phases 4 and beyond.

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I recently curated a collection of all national anthems for listening. I got inspired to do this from my recent readings on A Critical History of New Music in China by Liu Ching-chih (tr. Caroline Mason), particularly on how music was co-opted to instill inspiration and will for the... nation 😏. Maybe this collection of national anthems can act as a strong pick-me-up for days where I just want to kill myself.

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``MT, that's a lot of random <hr />-esque segues in this one post.''

I am well aware. This is just a short update on things that have happened.

I call this week, ``the calm before the storm'', because lots of really high-stakes events are happening next week. It also does not help that for many of these high-stakes events, I have more or less exhausted all actions that I can take, and am at the mercy of happenstance.

That's all for now. We'll see what happens ahead. Future-me, hope you are doing well; Present-me is exhausted from being this anxious about what may come, as the weather continues its unrelentless steamed broiling.

Eliana's First Proper Gig

That was... confusing.

So, despite having Eliana since 2021, I have never really taken her out on an ``official'' gig---I play on her a lot in between as part of the long-standing principle of ``cross-training'' that sifu has taught me nearly two decades ago. But for a proper gig, that has never happened.

The reason is much simpler: alto flutes need their score to be transposed a perfect fourth lower from concert pitch. The reason for this is practical---unlike the crazy recorder players (with all due respect of course), flute players tend to like playing using their ``instrument'' keys, mostly because the music for the flute tends to be very technical, and thus writing in the same ``fingering pattern'' (i.e. the instrument keys) makes it much easier for the regular concert flute (or C-flute) player to adapt accordingly.

But most music isn't transposed, so it becomes hard to just grab an alto flute out to play to scores originally written for concert flute. There's also the issue of ambitus, but that is usually more obvious---the highly technical stuff will span the full three octaves and thus cannot be easily transposed for playing, while most ``singable'' things stay within two octaves.

Which brings us to today.

Aurelia and Stella have traded places with Davie, and are now at MusicGearWindWorks undergoing their annual servicing (clean, oil, & adjust). I could bring out Azumi, and I was trying her out again last night as part of preparation for serving at the music ministry. But I sounded poor on her---and there was something clacky about her keys that made me draw pause. I dropped in some heavy key oil (probably too high a viscosity), and it helped a bit, but that was when I had a thought.

Why not bring out Eliana?

The pieces were in D-key, B♭-key, A♭-key, and C-key. The tempi weren't too drastic (they were hymns, and therefore needed to match up to what your regular church-goer can sing), and were therefore the best pieces to pick up transposing on-the-fly on Eliana.

It all worked fine, except when times I was confused with concert high-C, concert high-D♭ and concert high-E♭.

Oh, and a surprise hymn requested by senior pastor that was in G-key.

The trick, it seems, is to forget all the rubbish theory that people tell you ``oh, it's like reading the bass clef's top space onwards'' and just play the damn thing, remembering that the default scale runs with F♯ that needs to be taken care of. It's about reassociating where in the [treble clef] scale the fingering patterns are located, and just going without thinking too hard.

With enough repetition, it becomes easier. I dare not say that it becomes ``second nature'' until I can hot-swap between C-flutes and alto flute within the same gig without going nuts.

And that's all I wanted to talk about to day. Am still recovering from whatever the hell I had caught on Friday.

Till the next update.

Part Two of Pain: Done

Ah... Monday. And tomorrow I have to be on course for two days to officially learn the ropes of proper goal setting and appraisal for my people (it's basically SMART).

But for today, or whatever is left of today, I get to chill due to being on leave.

Yesterday saw the successful staging of the concert with King's Flute Choir at Esplanade Recital Studio. That is actually the first time that I was playing at the Esplanade complex, and while I have explored much of the publicly accessible areas on my various ``annual pilgrimages'' to the place, I was simply not prepared for the warren of mazes that comprise the back stage.

Entry is naturally controlled---a performer's pass needed to be obtained from the security office (main from the B1 parking area, or the satellite one opposite from Marina Square). Once inside, it was just corridors upon corridors of rooms, equipment, and signage pointing to places. The first floor was largely towards the main concert hall, and since I entered through the main back stage door, I had to filter my way back towards Lift CH 3, where the Recital Studio can be reached on the second floor.

It was a real doozy in the beginning, but I soon got the hang of it.

The performers' rooms were spartan and utilitarian---dressing tables with mirrors that had strong lights that could be used to assist in make up, attached combination toilet/shower room, and even self-serviced combination lock lockers for any other things that one might want locked away. I spent much of the time outside of sound check and the actual performance in one of the rooms, just chilling, or working on some of the more difficult parts on Davie, sharing the room with fellow contrabass flautist, the double bassist, the harpist, and a few other low flute folks.

That is, until we started getting exiles from the other performers' room, mostly to escape the piccolos that were doing much of the same last-minute practices that I was doing. It's understandable, and in between their own practices and my general pre-performance ``any more work I am going to put in is going to do fuck-all'' attitude, I shot the breeze with some of my fellow performers.

The concert went through as well as it could, despite my own bumbling here and there (I'd like to think I cover it well enough that I was tolerated due to being one of only a few low flute players). GY and a few folks from TGCO were there to watch, and they all had a good time, with GY particularly impressed at the quality of the musicians (as it should be---the core players are actual professionals). I caught up with the TGCO folks after the concert for drinks at Harry's, while GY had to run off, while suggesting that we catch up again some time later.

Davie did well---I think that I definitely need to level up more as the player. I've had low flutes on hand for 8 years, ever since I first got hold of Mio, but I don't think that I had really put in a serious effort to develop my low flute techniques more strongly, mostly because I never had the need to play it ``big'' (like in a flute choir) before. Much of the time, it was mostly playing melody lines an octave lower, or that one time I was covering for the cello, which explains my rudimentary control over Davie and Mio.

But the key thing to note is that for bass (and later on, contrabass) flutes in the flute choir setting, that pesky low-C is used way more often than might be expected. And this is something that I haven't really been working on, which prompted my earlier comment of needing to put in serious effort to develop my low flute techniques more strongly. The use of the low-C was so often that I had to abandon the use of the Oval-8 splints on my right pinky, just to avoid the problem of numbness that I got the first time I was drilling through Ruslan and Ludmilla and William Tell. The Oval-8 splint did its job of holding back the hyperextension of the proximal interphalangeal joint of my right pinky, but due to the sheer amount of force I was pushing through holding the low-C due to poor technique (and a bit of imperfect maintenance of Davie due to no COA done since purchase), the splint was crushing my nerve in my finger, causing the finger tip to be tingly for days after.

So, no Oval-8 splints. But the irony of course is that with more strength in the pinky (through drilling on the difficult parts in the pieces), the less the hyperextension becomes a problem because of the increased tension forces of the muscle that pulls the finger closed.

I'll probably send Davie in for COA at Windworks when they have an open slot.

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So that was yesterday. What about today?

Well, I paid good money for 120 min of getting beaten up in a controlled manner to remove the pain that has been plaguing me for the whole month (I went for a 2-hour massage).

My left shoulder was shot (my posterior deltoid was messed up), and my lumbar triangle was giving me random-ass pains (probable erector spinae strain, with possible strain in one of the deeper gluteus muscles). The masseuse beat the shit knots out of my muscles, with greater focus on the shoulders, but with good enough focus on the back muscles and lumbar triangle that after the session, I only had the ``good'' sore with no remnants of the original pain.

And anyone who claims that they can go through a massage sleeping... is probably lying or have told the masseuse to go easy on them.

For me, massages have always been an uncompromising assault on the knots in my muscles through skilled application of force and pressure. That kind of force application does not cause damage to me in any way, but it does trigger a sensory overload that is either ``sour'' or ``pain'', where the ``pain'' here isn't the kind you get from banging a body part on a hard object, but the kind of resistant pain a bundle of highly tensioned relaxed muscles pushes against the force that is meant to forcefully relax them. I am actively awake and completely aware of what is going on, controlling my breathing to go with whatever the masseuse is currently working on, to ensure that the misfiring sensation of ``sour'' and ``pain'' from my nerves do not weaken my resolve in allowing the tensed relaxed muscles to be treated.

And then I had a nap or two in between, with some diet-defying choice of food to reward myself for no good reason.

In the meanwhile though, I am totally not addicted to shapez 2. Definitely not. Here's a screenshot of the ``Operator Level'', a sort of long-term measurement of the staged cumulative production of various milestone shapes.

See? Totally not addicted. I absolutely did not set up my factories, and then kept the game running in the background to amass the numbers needed. I also did not rework some of the larger space-platform machines I designed to improve the production efficiency to ensure that I could fully stack up the space belts to deliver the full 180×12/min rate of shapes.

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With all that, part two of pain is also done.

Part three is coming up soon, and hopefully I also have good news for that when the time comes.

Meanwhile, that's all I have for now. Till the next update.

Part One of Pain: Done

And that's part one of pain mostly done---there's still one more thing that technically happens right smack in the first of the next month, but the build up to it is close enough proximity to this month that it might as well be a part of it; hence the ``mostly done'' qualifier.

The thing about technology demonstrations, is that everyone expects things to run smooth. That is normally the case, especially when one controls all the inputs to the said technology demonstration.

But what happens if a critical component is dependent on a reluctant contributor whose technical chops are not completely under one's control?

Well, there are two ways to play it.

1. Be strict and demand code reviews before we even bother with integration; or
2. Be lenient and just integrate what is provided.

On hindsight, I should have played the bully card harder---I don't mind dying on my sword [proverbially] if it is my team that cocks up, but I mind a bit when I'm doing so because of a third party whose stuff we are integrating who cocked up network resource programmming 101.

The onus is still on me though---I take full responsibility for not instituting the first of the two options which led to the technology demonstration failures. Thankfully, that issue could be worked around with some tight timing of restarting the components and getting the crowd worked up to interact with the demo, so I didn't actually die completely (still lost some reputation, but at this point in my life, considering that I have no intention in climbing the corporate ladder, I don't give too much a shit).

All in all, the technology demonstration was a qualified success---the overall vibes was positive despite the initial failure.

Being a manager is hard---everything that one does and decides are exercises of balances. On the one hand, one wants to ensure absolute control in order to bring the variances down to improve quality, and on the other hand, there is a need to let people make mistakes to learn from to better build up their capabilities, be it team members [whom I'm more willing to ``tank damage'' for] or even third party contributors. The need to balance between these two is mostly the reason that I am driven crazy more than half the time.

The temptation to take everything into one's hands is always strong, but it is important to realise that by doing so, it defeats the purpose of building a team in the first place. The reason we put a team together, is to leverage on the extra brains & hands to achieve greater parallelism, thus allowing the total effort in work-days to be fitted into a much shorter effective calendar-day count. Pulling everything back to oneself does nothing to allow projects to be delivered faster, and in the worst case, can cause bigger issues in general due to the increased cognitive load required to deal with the nitty-gritty [that the team members should be able to handle] while still maintaining a view of the big picture [that only the manager/leader can do].

I think that is the biggest lesson to learn when transiting from being an individual contributor into a manager/leader.

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shapez 2 has been my new diversion from the vagaries of pain. It all started with this video from one of my favourite YouTubers:

Now, Josh's a mad man who captures the same kind of energy as Zisteau (he's more a Twitch streamer these days than a YouTube video maker, while having his Twitch streams archived here). I love games like Factorio, but what I like about them aren't the survival aspects(!), but on the factory aspect. And shapez 2 scratches that itch.

Of course, the first thing I did was to look for the original shapez. I could have bought the Steam version as part of the pack, or I could buy from GoG.com which was at 90% discount. And so I was pushing through last week while spending some time here and there on shapez after hours to chill out, even as I was drilling the music that was for the upcoming performance with the King's Flute Choir on 2024-09-01 on Davie.

Now that I'm mostly done with the major upgrades in shapez, it was time to start on shapez 2, and start on it I did.

It is definitely as fun as Josh made it in his video---having come from shapez, there are quite a few quality of life improvements that I enjoyed. The 3D-render of the game space took a little getting used to (shapez was laid out on a 2D-grid similar to Factorio), but that was not a problem. The key difference between shapez and shapez 2 lies in a few new ``meta'' levels of building. All things in shapez are single units of machinery, be it extractor, or belt, or stacker. shapez 2 has all the stuff in shapez, but has space platforms, which are like their own self-contained modules that are made up of the shapez elements, as well as layers, which brings extra expressivity even at the shapez component level through effectively doubling and then tripling the original 2D grid space.

Oh, and it's really colourful and cool.

Pillars of Eternity is currently seeing my party in the city, which is a slow part of the game; I do go back to it every now and then. I've since completed The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures some time back, and am likely to start on its sequel, The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve soon.

And I suppose that's about it for now. Till the next update.

Soreness

Ah man... played the tenor part at my first church service with Davie, and I am absolutely sore. The soreness isn't from having to lug Davie and the bass clarinet stand that doubles up as my bass flute stand from home to church with a busted up left forearm while still carrying my usual gig backpack of Aurelia and Stella, as well as my own music stand.

The soreness is from the unfamiliarity of reading the bass clef for the tenor part and translating it to playing on Davie.

Let's face it. As a whole flutes are an entitled bunch the way saxophonists are---no matter how high or how low an instrument we are playing, we expect it to be transposed so that we can play it a la ``instrument key''. This means that notes that would really be in the bass clef when considered in concert pitch will be rewritten into the treble clef just so that it can be read and performed. This is true even in consort playing.

This is unlike the poor recorder player (and the !@#$% nonsense picked up by those who wanted write dizi music in staff notation) who is doomed to stare at the parts in concert pitch, and figure out how to play. This isn't too bad for the gang of `C'-recorders (Garklein, Soprano, Tenor, Great Bass, and Sub-great Bass), but is absolutely horrid for the `F'-recorders (Sopranino, Alto, Bass, Contrabass, and Sub-contrabass).

For the hymns, I could transcribe it off hand in LilyPond, but apart from the the obvious effort, I just think that I should develop the ability to transpose from any commonly seen clef right there in my head.

And thus came today's little experiment. I don't know why, but I picked a day where two thirds of the hymns had four to five flats in their key signature (A♭=major, and D♭-major), with only on that has a single sharp (G-major). That probably added to the soreness.

Well, that's that.

I don't really have much else I want to talk about for now, so till the next update.

The One About the 盐酥鸡

August: here we go!

I hate being right on things. So, remember this recent post on hero worship? Well, as if on cue, we have this little bit of news on Lizzo. Now, being sued doesn't imply guilt (that's for the courts to decide), but usually people do not sue another person unless there is some perception of grievance.

``MT, why are you picking on Lizzo?''

I'm not. She just happened to be a recent example. She's a media darling, with many from Flute Forum actively idolising her outright as a hero.

She's alright as a flute person. But it's okay to just appreciate it without going into hero worship.

But on to different things.

August is a month that promises lots of things. First up is an engineered long weekend starting from National Day. Then after that, actual courses/training on Manager 101.

Am I excited? ``Trepid'' might be a better word. It's definitely going to be a start of some rather harrowing work, what with my first annual appraisal exercise for the six under my charge. But it is something that needs to be done, and the we are doing important work; projects that need to be moved forward to ensure that we help with SIN city's future.

It is unfortunate [for me] that I'm just the most senior engineer among the group, and is therefore de facto manager/leader.

Work stuff aside, TGCO is likely to see its first performance in a long while. We're not as big as we were, possibly even smaller than our smallest so far as some of the married members start having children, so this performance is going to be a good morale booster.

I'm also starting to get the hang of the hymns that we are playing for worship service, and am slowly making my way to being a more regular player in the ensemble on Aurelia. I did mention to the coordinator of the possibility of bringing out Davie (my vertical bass flute) to play the tenor parts with the cellist whenever he may be available, and it would seem that it was likely to be in November.

The only caveat is that I need to brush up my ability to read the bass clef. I'm getting much better at it now, having to ``count'' only every time the pitch skips larger than a fourth or so. But that can be a rather interesting skill to develop.

There's also a pasar malam that is running along the street, and I am getting severely addicted to the 盐酥鸡 from one of the stalls. It's deep-fried chicken bits in light batter, dusted with sour plum powder, and paprika(?) powder.

Apart from that... I suppose there isn't anything else to talk about for the moment. And so, till the next time.

Projects for Minecraft and Other Diversions

You know, I was thinking that I had done almost all that I could in Minecraft.

Then I realised that I had not fought the Wither. The set up for this fight is quite onerous---the component materials that are used to summon it are rare, and after getting those components, there is also a need to prepare the arena a la Terraria (another game that I love but could not find the energy to complete) before a truly epic boss fight that is many times worse than that of the Ender Dragon for the sole reason that the Wither destroys terrain like a madman.

The outcome of all that is the Nether Star, a component for end-game super tool known as Beacons. It is also a great way enable much massive builds in survival mode too.

Maybe I'll target towards that and building a fishing hut as my next projects in Minecraft.

In other news, I've sent Aurelia to WW for the COA. Davie had the two trill key pads replaced, but his case suffered a zipper damage when I was too excited and forgot to move the zipper all the way past the corners before lifting the box open.

🤦‍♂️

I also got me some palm key risers for my alto and tenor saxophones, though none of them are made of any of the materials that I have linked to in the URL---those were just samples of what I was talking about for the confused.

``Wait MT, you play saxophones?''

``Always have.''

No, seriously. I've always played saxophones. My first saxophone was a soprano saxophone, and I slowly branched from that to the alto, and now to the tenor; and I upgraded them from junk-tier to decent tier. It's like my tertiary/quarternary instrument of proficiency too.

I don't play it as much because I don't have that much direct use of it in Chinese Orchestra settings as compared to say the 笛子 or the concert flute. But I like jamming out on it ever so often---it has that kind of panache that the concert flute cannot match, and is a little more street-friendly compared to the repertoire that I'm used to for 笛子.

The palm key risers are useful because of the way I hold the alto/tenor saxophones: I keep them on my right side. This means that the palm keys that are operated by the left hand (that kick in when we play high notes) will require me to have a much deeper dorsal flexion. That is uncomfortable. The palm key risers give an additional 5 mm of material so that I don't have to dorsal flex that much to get at them---a much more ergonomical feel.

Nothing to do with size of hands, just comfort.

And I think that's about it. I've completed 37/50 ways to die, leaving 13 more. The end to this year's instalment of NaNoWriMo is close, and I would really be happy for it to be over, not because of desperation, but because all things that have a beginning, ought to have an end.

Till the next update.

Like She Was New!

What an eventful day.

The Dell on-site engineer came down to replace the fan and heatsink assembly, and I learnt a few things.

1. Dust was the true killer;
2. The heat pipes ran keyboard side up, in total inversion from most other systems, explaining the finger frying;
3. The fans were really integrated with the heat sinks;
4. The replacement of this assembly was as good as having a repaste job;
5. Most of the upper half of the flat-laying part of Eileen-II are just vents, so air blowing through all of them has no risk of clogging the way old laptops were; and
6. Daughter boards everywhere despite the motherboard being more complicated than I had ever seen.

The dust was of a very uniform fineness that looked awfully like the kind of concrete dust one would see from a construction site, and not the kind of skin-dust that is the more normal.

Armed with the new knowledge and assurance from the on-site engineer, I now have a better way of preventing all that weird frictional vibration thing from fans that were dust-imbalanced.

The difference was pretty dramatic, before and after the assembly change. I am getting 40--46× multipliers even on full load with the PROCHOT limit of 83°C that I had set. The idle temperature is now roughly 40°C at an ambient temperature of about 27°C, which is about 4--7°C lower than before.

There was little throttling when I was running Minecraft at 32 chunk rendering distance (just for fun), and the lag spikes that I was seeing before even with Iris Shaders (on 12 chunks rendering) was much lower.

It's like Eileen-II was brand new all over again. And now, to monitor things before I confirm the closure of the ticket.

------

I also managed to set up a servicing date next week for Aurelia, my artisan-quality concert flute. She's doing well, just that she has missed her annual Clean, Oil, and Adjust (COA) session. I was tempted to bring S.O.S. and maybe Azumi down too, but I just wanted to keep it simple. Those two (and maybe Picc) can go for their COA next year instead.

I might need to bring Davie down for a look-see by Sean though... one of the pads looked like its bladder had ripped. Still need to arrange a date with him for that.

If you are bloody confused, do not be afraid.

I can't believe that Aurelia is already 2 years old, and that Azumi has been with me for more than a decade. Time does seem to fly along.

------

I'm thinking I might want to go for some sushi tomorrow for late lunch/early dinner; I've been craving for sushi for a while, so it might be time to satisfy that craving.

NaNoWriMo has been going well; I've already busted the 25k milestone, and have ``only'' written 23/50 ways to die. It's very cathartic despite its macabre nature; it really puts things into perspective.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Ironically, I am in the middle of replaying Cthulhu Saves the World, which does not need the higher powered computational powers that the refreshed heat sink+fan assembly provides.

Till the next update.