Anotherblog

Magic Tournament

Walking to work
I haven’t walked to work in a while, so I gave it a go this morning. Enjoyable, as usual, though once again I got several blisters. I listened to a lot of new music: Ev’s new Crop Circles album (just superb), a sampler of Lindsay Buckingham courtesy of Jon (which I liked a lot: a bit like Simon & Garfunkel or Elliot Smith), and the Styx symphony which was RUINED BY FUCKING TRAFFIC. Though I have to admit some culpability in that one.

Magic Tournament
Today was the first day of our Magic: The Gathering tournament, and I played against Andrew K. and won 2-0. I was pretty lucky, I think.

We had the draft yesterday. I started drafting white creatures and equipment (we were drafting Mirrodin only) in the first pack, and got a couple of good picks. I also started drafting green when I was handed a fairly late One Dozen Eyes.

With the second pack, though, the people to my left were obviously drafting white as well, because I wasn’t getting much, so I started drafting more artifacts and combat tricks. My first pick, though, was a happy one: Empyrial Armour. Super-sweet. Then I got a bonesplitter and an isochron scepter, and was very happy indeed. Good white creatures, some mediocre artifact creatures, and scepter abusiveness. In the last pack I concentrated on black, almost by default because it wasn’t being drafted much, and got some fairly decent creatures and removal. I made up a white-black-green equipment-based deck, and later cut back the green component so it was mostly white-black.

Andrew K. had drafted red and white, and had some fairly formidable cards of his own: spikeshot goblin, isochron scepter, loxidan war-hammer, and lots of those red two-casting-cost direct damage spells, perfect for imprinting on the scepter.

Both my games were fairly lucky. I had Alter’s Light when he brought out the warhammer; I’d imprinted terror on my own scepter to kill his white flier and the spikeshot goblin. Even so, he’d done me a ton of damage before I started hitting him with an empyrially armoured flyer and won. Very close, very tense.

The second game was just as close. I started the game with the scepter and Raise the Alarm in my hand, and the Leonin Abunas: I knew he had a lot of artifact destruction, so I played the Abunas first. I didn’t even need the scepter this time though, despite his scepter imprinted with Razor Barrier - I got the empyrial armour onto a flyer and killed him in three turns.

The deciding difference between the decks (besides that he didn’t draw much of his plentiful creature and artifact destruction) was that I had a whole bunch of flyers and he didn’t. We had a third game for fun; I couldn’t answer the warhammer except by exchanging creatures, and my flying armoured dude didn’t get through fast enough.

I went in very confident of my deck: in retrospect, I was lucky enough to get good draws. One interesting feature of the draft is that there is guaranteed not to be more than two of a given card, because of the way we put the packs together (two full sets of commons, randomly and separately shuffled and assigned into booster packs, the same for the uncommons for as many as we had, and a common set of as many rares as we could dig up). So by drafting both terrors, I know that I won’t have to face any myself.

Booster Tournament

Booster Tournament
We held the Magic: The Gathering booster draft segment of our six-person booster tournament at lunch time today. It was really good fun - we each opened a booster of cards (actually, we made up our own boosters using our existing Mirrodin cards), chose one card, and passed it to the left. And so on, until all the cards had been drafted. We did that for three boosters, passing to the right for the second draft and left again for the third. We had one minute to choose each of the first six cards from each booster, and thirty seconds for the others.

I think I got a pretty good deck, but we shall see over the next couple of days, when we actually play the matches. I donated a couple of cards as prizes: a beta Sinkhole, an unlimited Word Of Command, and a Maze of Ith. They’re all pretty valuable, but I wasn’t using them and I figured it’d raise the tension levels even further.

Writing
I’m still keeping up the writing, though I don’t have the buffer I once did. I got excited all over again about some of the plot elements coming up, especially when I realised I could make them much better thanks to some plot elements that had evolved naturally. We’re entering the last 48 hours of the timeline of the novel, a countdown to destruction (as you do) from which only the cunning shall survive! Maybe. If they’re, like, cunning and stuff.

Anyway, I’ve cracked 111k words.

Harvest Moon
I bought Harvest Moon for the Gameboy Advance the other day, having heard good things about it. And it’s fun, a real time-filler in those many moments in which I’m not doing terribly much and it’s that or coin-rolling or card-flipping or guitar-chord-practicing or Hiragana-writing or morse-code-tapping or just good old twitching. I’ve never been able to relate to people who could just sit still.

Bloody coughing
I think I may have had classical music spoiled for me forever, he said dramatically. Anna and I went to the Opera House on Saturday night to hear Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and Kancheli’s Styx. I’m a big fan of Shostakovich (actually, I like a lot of the Russian composers: Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Borodin, Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov) based mostly on his “The Gadfly”. The Leningrad Symphony has had a big rap: it was written and performed during World War 2 when Leningrad was under siege from the Nazis. The performance in Leningrad itself was piped out of the concert hall to all around the city, including sections under Nazi control. So, big emotional history behind the piece.

But in the first half was a piece I hadn’t heard of, a modern symphonic work (with choir) written especially for Yuri Bashmet, who performed the solo Viola. It was terrific; powerful and delicate and with an enormous dynamic range and it would have been one of those sublime moments in live performances for me if it HADN’T BEEN FOR ALL THAT FUCKING COUGHING.

It started right from the beginning, and because the Styx is so ethereal in places, we could hear every single cough in the completely-full concert hall. This was a lot of coughing. Roughly every three seconds or so, somebody would let one off. There was a woman three rows ahead of us who couldn’t stop coughing at one point, and had to leave. She had a big coughing fit outside - we could still hear her - and then came back in. The person directly in front of us was popping cough lollies like popcorn, which would have been OK except for the crackling sound of the packet. Maddening. Utterly maddening.

I ended up buying a copy of the “Styx” because it was such a lovely piece and deserved better listening conditions. Many others had the same idea. It sold out shortly after I got my copy, and I had headed straight for the booth on coming out.

Anyway, the coughing continued throughout Shostakovich’s work, which was strangely a bit of a letdown despite all the history behind it. I had already spent my emotion wishing death on the various coughers, and marvelling at how good the “Styx” piece sounded anyway.

More guitar theory

More Guitar Theory
Going back to basics a little, here are the spacings for a major scale:

All major scales have these spacings between notes.

Here’s that listing of the modes I did last week, but in a proper diagram this time:

It’s the same tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone sequence, but starting from the second note for the Dorian (tone-semitone-tone-tone-tone-semitone-tone) and the third note for the Phrygian, and so on.

Pentatonic Scale
When I started learning electric guitar, my tutor had me start with the pentatonic scale:

Here’s what it looks on the fretboard of a guitar:

I’ve not seen this done before, so I thought it might be interesting to work out the pentatonic modes:

The Dorian and Mixolydian pentatonic modes consist entirely of notes in the major scale, so I could safely play the second or fifth pentatonic shapes against the root note of a major chord.

One thing that has struck me as interesting in the past, is that each mode of the major scale allows you to play a couple of pentatonic modes within it. For example, if you happen to be playing shape p4 on the major scale, you can happily play shape 2, 4 or 5 from the pentatonic scale (although strictly speaking, the 4 shape starts a semitone out). The same is true of all the shapes on the major scale - there are three pentatonic shapes that fit within them.

I was trying to work out how this works, and this is what I’ve worked out. You can take the pentatonic shape and combine it with itself shifted forward one whole tone, and you’ll get the full major scale:

And the same if you shift it back one tone, which corresponds to the second pentatonic mode, a semitone out.

…which, I think, demonstrates that every mode consists of three pentatonic modes, one of which is offset one semitone to the right. Hopefully.

Guitar

Guitar

I thought I’d better come up with a picture to describe what I’m talking about with this guitar theory stuff, so here it is:

The horizontal lines are the strings, the vertical lines are the fret board, and the dots are all the notes on the C Major scale (assuming the left-hand side is the end of the fret board). But really, the whole thing repeats ad infinitum to the left and the right as far as theory is concerned.

I’ve put down the notes for the C Major scale - the number 1 along the bottom corresponds to the C (and the Ionian mode). The Dorian mode just means starting playing from the 2, the Phrygian mode from the 3, and so on. In other words, all the modes exist on this basic pattern here. If you learn this big pattern, you can play any of the modes.

You can play the scale without moving up and down the fretboard too much by moving up and down the strings instead, as I’ve shown in these two diagrams:

As you can see, there are five separate convenient positions in which you can play scales without moving up and down the fret board. I’ve been practicing this a bit, using the drum machine to do scales. It’s quite relaxing and fun: the faster you want to play, the more you have to relax. I have a real tendency to press hard on the fretboard, and I’m feel like I’m getting over it now.

Recently, I’ve been learning other tricks for getting around this shape quickly:

That’s a pretty simple shape. If I ever find myself playing the middle bit - the block of four notes in a square - then I immediately know all the notes four frets to the left and four frets to the right in that block. That’s pretty cool, but even better is that this pattern is on other pairs of strings too. In fact, the only pair of strings that doesn’t have this pattern is the G & B string pair (that’s the second and third down).

So I’ve been practicing this a bit lately too: finding this pattern, and going up and down the fret board from there - it’s helping me learn this rather big, complicated mess of guitar theory…

Firefly

Firefly
I forgot to post this one earlier in the week. Jon & Kate came over last Friday evening and we did Karaoke - Anna and Kate sang duets using Singstar while Jon and I retreated to the computer room and sang Spit songs. It’s not that Anna or Kate are bad singers - they’re both quite good, and very, very enthusiastic - it’s just that the songs on Singstar are, well, urgle.

Anyway, we eventually got through that lot, and watched two episodes of Firefly. I’m happy to say, these episodes (Out of Gas, and one in which they break into a hospital) are really excellent, a true return to form after a run of distinctly mediocre episodes. Finally! The Mal we signed up for!

Roborally
Played roborally at lunchtime today, six-player mayhem through three flags on a single board. We ended the game after one and a bit hours, with only one player having reached the second flag. Six players is lethal.

Spit

Spit
I added “Cornetto Girl” to the list of Spit songs on Mperia. Our list of song reviews still stands at one: if any of you fine people feel like writing some comments - good or bad - about the songs there, I’m sure the current comment would feel much less lonely.

Writing
So, Dave, how’s the writing going? Hm?

I struggled through to 109k last night. Current final target is looking like it’ll be 130-140k, which means I’ll finish the first draft some time in August. Then I’ll work on Lotus (and, hopefully, Black Forest) until November, at which point the next Nanowrimo will kick in and kill me.

The fine art of iPod repair

The fine art of iPod repair
I fixed my iPod this evening. I’ve been having problems with the sound for several months now, requiring me to press the earphones against the side of the iPod when I was playing it in order to get full audio - if I didn’t, the sound was either muffled, or entirely absent.

The problem seemed very likely to be cracked solder, since the headphone jack port was wobbly within the case, but when I took the iPod to the Apple store, they wouldn’t even look at it: they said they didn’t do repairs and that I’d be better off buying a new one.

Tempting, very tempting, but I am allegedly an electrical engineer, so I figured I really ought to have a go at the sucker myself. And tonight, when wiggling the headphones didn’t improve the sound at all, I figured it was time.

I was wary of pulling the case off, but after a quick scan of Apple slashdot articles, I found someone mentioning that it was quite simple and nondestructive (though I couldn’t make the guitar-pick solution work). So, with a bit of prising on the left side with a couple of mini screwdrivers, I got the cover off.

The insides are pretty neatly organised. I detached the battery and unplugged it, and wedged the hard drive (which was covered in a blue rubber sleeve - nice touch!) out of the way, turned the soldering iron up high, and had at it. There was a metal protective case over the headphone jack and firewire ports, but it only had two spots of solder holding it in place - once those were gone, it was easy to bend the case backwards and get at the headphone connectors.

As luck would have it, the problem was very simple: the headphone jack port had broken away from the circuit board, but it hadn’t taken any of the tracks with it. Eight spots of solder later, it was sitting quite firmly in place. I soldered the cover back on, then reconnected the battery: success! It worked just fine, and the sound is as good as new. The case clipped back on with the greatest of ease, and that was that. I didn’t even damage the case, at least compared with the hammering the thing has taken over the years anyway.

Tonight, I feel that my Electrical Engineering degree has been Used. Even though it was just a simple soldering job.

Lord of the Rings Symphony

Lord of the Rings Symphony
Anna and I saw the Lord of the Rings Symphony, directed by Howard Shore and featuring Katie Noonan, on Saturday night. I enjoyed it a bunch, but felt that it died a bit in the second half (the first half was Fellowship, and the second half raced through Two Towers and Return of the King), and the fact that there were six movements meant that by the end of it, we were all clapped out. A couple of people stood for the ovation, but as soon as Howard Shore and Katie Noonan left the stage, it petered out, and after an embarassed second or so, the house lights came on.

Games day
Kyla & David and Iain & Llyn came over on Sunday for a games day. We played Apples to Apples, Deadwood (my first time playing: it was quite fun but all the dice rolling was a bit tedious), Starships of Catan (interesting and could be very addictive, but I’ve sworn off buying games for the moment) and a warm down game of Zendo, for which the koan rules were “one or more large pyramids”, “at least two small or one medium pyramid”, and “exactly one vertical pyramid”. As warm down games go, Zendo has the strong disadvantage of requiring thinking, but the advantage that you can build little sculptures out of coloured plastic pyramids. It was a lot of fun, and we ate so much I’m still feeling bloated now.

Guitar
Lots of practice over the weekend: I’ve been concentrating on the Dorian, Phrygian, and Aeolian modes with the first and fourth positions: six separate scales, but the 4th position Dorian is the same as the 1st position Aeolian, and the 4th position Aeolian is the same as the 1st position Phrygian, so it’s really only four.

As it happens, the fourth position is what you get when you play the first position, but transpose all the notes up one string. So if I want to switch from playing in A minor to playing in D minor, I could start in the first position on the fifth fret (which has a base note of A) and then move to the first position on the tenth fret - a big move - or, since the D is one string up from the A on the fifth fret, I could just change to the fourth position.

So, just knowing the three modes in the first and fourth positions means that I can play any of the minor scales without having to move up and down the fretboard very much. It’s neat.

Terry Jones and The Guardian

Terry Jones and The Guardian
I read an excellent article by Terry Jones a while ago in The Guardian, and was recently reminded of it by David Carroll linking a more recent article. I was curious to see just how many articles Mr. Jones has done - as it turns out, it’s a lot.

I couldn’t find anywhere on The Guardian that listed all his articles, though doubtless it’s somewhere obvious. Here are links to all of them I could find, anyway.

I remain, sir, Haggard of the Hindu Kush
Spare our blushes and put a sack on it (Rather prescient)
OK, George, make with the friendly bombs (satire = max)
A fox isn’t a chicken. Is it?
If you want a free vote, ask nicely
The audacious courage of Mr Blair
I’m losing patience with my neighbours, Mr Bush (satire = max++)
Powell speaks with forked tongue
Could Tony Blair look at the internet now, please?
Mr Bush goes for the kill
Poor Tony Blair wakes up
Mr Blair’s dark days
Why look in the crystal ball?
‘If fish can feel pain, then maybe Iraqi children can, too’
Alastair, God and the Devil
Why Tony went to war
The Middle Ages of reason
Tony really must try harder
Invade Iraq? It’s a no brainer
The war of the words
This week
This won’t hurt much

Machiavelli

Machiavelli
I’ve often heard the quote from Machiavelli “It is better to be feared than loved”, and found it to be rather disgustingly cynical, but I’d never heard the coda before, until now: “It is worst of all to be hated.”

Which makes the quote a lot more interesting, and prompts thoughts of a card game, which I shall tentatively call “The Peasants Are Revolting!”. Gouging the peasants raises their hatred, but they won’t act until the hatred exceeds the fear. You can also directly reduce the hatred by being nice to them - but that won’t get you the highest score. Laffs aplenty!