old music

I love rock music (can I get a wit-ness). I've loved rock music for a long time, at least relative to how long I've been alive.

My tastes have changed over the years, sometimes favoring much heavier rock, sometimes more artsy, musician-oriented rock, sometimes more electronic, hip-hop flavored rock.

Recently, I've started to listen to some stuff that I was into in like, middle school. For the most part, I still like most of it. However, there are quite a few moments where I think, "Um, did I really used to listen to this that much?"

Any of those moments for you lately?

dueling guitars

One of the coolest, but most difficult and annoying things about playing in a band is playing with multiple guitar players.

Playing by yourself (i.e. power trio) has its own challenges with filling out the sound, but at least no one steps on each others shoes.

Playing in a power trio + a keyboard player is little different. I think it's easier in terms of staying out of the others way - a keyboard/piano rarely ever sounds similar to a guitar, so doubling up on parts actually ends up sounding better, rather than boring.

Bring an acoustic guitar to our power trio (still four people). Again, an acoustic guitar tends to fill out the sound a bit, but strumming styles can start to fight each other.

Add a rhythm guitar/lead guitar combination, and then the two guitar players have to really work together to make a song arrangement work. They can play the exact same thing, but if that's the case, why have two guitar players? The parts need to be separate, distinct, and complementary to each other in order to make the song arrangement as natural and full as possible. Its tough work, especially if there is a lot of gray area in the rhythm/lead separation.

All that being said, when everyone is playing what complements everyone else, things sound better than any other situation. The band sounds full, the music sounds great, and both guitar player have the ability to more clearly pick out their own playing on a recording or in a live mix.

One of my favorite examples of a band that does this perfectly is Third Day, particularly on the album Conspiracy No. 5. Most of the songs on that album feature Brad Avery and Mark Lee playing electric, dirty guitar, and every moment they play together, they stay out of each other's way, complement how the other is playing, and even the stereo mix of the album adds to keeping the two guitar parts separately. The songs are so complete, that learning one of the guitar parts hardly comes close to making it sound good; you need someone playing the other part so that it will be faithful to the original! Check it out, if you haven't, if only for the guitar work.

death and diamonds

As a child, I had very little experience with death. My parents are both first children of first children, so most of the older people (grandparents, etc.) are still alive in my family; that is to say that my family is pretty young for most part. I remember going to my last great-grandfather's funeral, as well as his wife's (my great-grandmother's) funeral a few years later.

I never really thought this was odd until I started to learn ages of some of my friends parents and grandparents and realized that my parents and grandparents are comparatively young; perhaps as coming from a mostly military background, the men in my family had stable careers earlier, more conducive to a family.

My first real experience with death was over the last summer, when one of my best and closest friends committed suicide. It affected me in ways I myself probably do not know. To know that he will never send me another email and that no call I give him will ever be answered is such a blow to me even now. Remembering all the times that I shared with him, the experiences and conversations that will never be repeated but in my own mind, it brings me to tears. He inspired me to play better, treat other people better, enjoy life more, and show bravery more. He changed my life in ways that I never told him, and knowing that fact, as well as the permanence of his absence from this world, is simply...words fail me.

I've met many people since coming of age who've had the horrible experience of fighting cancer, a few having battled it multiple times. Meeting them and hearing their stories of coming closer to the thought of their own death than any of the rest of us. As many of them have told me, it opened their eyes to the important things in life. I sometimes wonder if I know the important things, or if it takes coming close to your own death to make you see the light.

I salute those of you who have fought and survived, no, just fought. I deeply respect each of you and I pray for comfort for those of you who have lost ones, and I pray health and peace of mind to those of you who have survived the fight.

I dedicate this post to you all, and also to James Warren. James, your flame in this world will never be extinguished as long as I draw breath. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

chinese food

My roommates decided to go run some errands and picked up some Chinese food for lunch for the apartment.

Never will you find a cheaper, better value food with bearable taste. $5 for more food than I should have eaten by myself. Chinese food is almost always cheap, almost always in MEGA sized portions, and almost always easy to reheat and enjoy later.

I won't exactly say that Chinese is my favorite by far, but I am fascinated by Asian cuisine. I had my first experience with Thai food a couple of weeks ago, and it was quite enjoyable. I am fascinated with the flavors, the style of cooking, everything.

My only problem with Chinese and other Asian delicacies is that apparently, we don't have the real thing here in the States. My roommate always tells me that American Chinese food is fake and no one cooks that way in China. My roommate being Chinese, I think I should take the opportunity to try to get him to teach me how to cook "authentic" Chinese food.

battlestar galactica

Tonight. It's finally here!

Short blog this evening, because the greatest program ever to be televised begins the final episodes this evening.

If you don't watch Battlestar Galactica, you should. If you've never heard of Battlestar Galactica, you should seriously consider a psychiatric evaluation. I'm not talking about the old hokey Battlestar Galactica, I mean the new one with hot chicks, amazing plot, great and memorable characters. I don't care if you like science fiction; my girlfriend (a self-proclaimed hater of science fiction) introduced me to Battlestar as her favorite show.

I got into it after watching ten minutes of the first episode. I watched Seasons 1 & 2 on DVD, then started watching in real time for Season 3 and the first half of season 4.

The final episodes of Season 4 begin tonight. Tonight. The Cylons are gonna have their day tonight! The humans are gonna get their way tonight!

I'm so excited I quite literally get shaky just sitting here thinking about it. The last episode (previously aired) is on as I type, and the next, unaired episode starts in 40 minutes! The beginning of the end!

Is anyone else as excited as me, for anything on T.V. this spring?

babies 'r' us

I think any dude who works at Babies 'r' Us could be rolling in the ladies.

I was thinking this as I was with the girlfriend picking up a gift for a baby shower.

"But, Mike," you make be thinking, "only pregnant chicks shop there, and, uh, they're mostly not available, so, I think you're crazy."

So not true.

The majority of people entering that store are single ladies coming in to get gifts for their friends who are having babies. Single, relatively attractive ladies (as the gf noticed this evening, not me). These single ladies are going in to get things for friends, and they are feeling particularly motherly, my guess, and would probably be particularly vulnerable to the masculine wiles of a clever, suave, single young man working at the joint.

Just a thought. If you're a single dude, I highly suggest putting in an application.

amusing words

This post finds its genesis in making a comment on a friend's blog.

I go to make a comment, and as usual, I have to look at a weirdly warped image of some made up word, decipher its contents, and type the word into a box to verify that I am indeed a human being. The word was something like "luorpleld". I'm sitting in the middle of the cafeteria at school, and I laugh hilariously at this word. I then blush in embarrassment as many people stare at me with looks of "whoa, that guy's got issues".

I go through phases where I love words. Every once and a while, I'll come across a word, usually one more commonly used, and I'll get stuck on analyzing it. It will start to sound strange after a bit, then I start to wonder why such an awkward meeting of sounds every became a word that people used every day. I wouldn't call myself a logophile; I'm really just a strange person with too much time on my hands a majority of the time I'm writing something.

I think I would like to start making up definitions for these words that appear on comments and then begin using them in my everyday speech. I may even start a separate blog to document these words, or just the ones I find extremely amusing.

allergies and new tv shows

Spring is my favorite and least favorite time of the year.

It is my least favorite because allergy season begins. I didn't have allergies before I moved to the South, but ever since I lived in South Carolina and here in Virginia, I have enjoyed my sinuses clogging, my eyes itching, and various fluids seeping out of my nostrils during the Spring season. Usually, my perpetual state of congestion results in a nasty summer cold that plagues me for months, but I have avoided becoming sick for the past couple of years. I promise to you here and now that this year will be no different!

I love the spring, however, because of new seasons of my favorite television shows! The new season of Lost, that hopefully will not suck like last year, will begin. I am hopeful that things will turn out to be better this season, as last season was a sore disappointment. I am excited about Heroes, more House, American Idol, and What Not to Wear.

The one I am most excited about is the final season of the greatest show on television: Battlestar Galactica. I just (today) purchased the first half of season 4 of Battlestar Galactica, complete with character booklet, the season opener (Razor), and the official Starbuck dog tags. I may or may not have enough time to do a marathon viewing of all the episodes before the new season starts, but regardless, this season promises to be the best way to spend Friday night!

What shows are you looking forward to?

schedules and web development

Lest I go back on my new posting schedule, a new post is in order. I'm attempting, along with my blogging accountability partner and brother by blood, Tim, to adhere to a strict schedule of posting Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and once on the weekend. Eventually I'd like to move to every day like some of my esteemed colleagues, Rob Shep and B Mills, but I think small steps are necessary.

I have a fascination with web design; it's one of my periodic projects that will come and probably go. For the fast few months I have been working on developing and maintaining my own website, as I figured any self-respecting computer science major ought to have his own self-coded-from-scratch website, which is finally coming to fruition. While I won't do this for a living, and there are thousands, if not millions, more sites on the Internet to which my site can't light a candle, I find a certain fulfillment from learning how to code HTML, PHP, JavaScript, and CSS on my own, and using them to develop something creative and informative about myself. Of course, certain people close to me were contacted for consultation on color, layout, and ease of reading (mostly a certain girlfriend of mine - hey, she does this at work and they pay her for it so I might as well trust her judgement).

In case you haven't had a chance to look at my site, I highly suggest you take a look around. Now that I'm satisfied with my layout and design (for now), I will focus more on adding new content. I'm not quite sure at the moment what I would like to add besides reference material for my guitar pupils and information for potential employers and people curious about me. Of course, the number one rule of web development is that content is the reason people come to your site and stay, so I'm thinking very hard about how to generate a bit more traffic on my site by including some meaningful content. Whether it be music reviews, a showcase of my hobbies (guitar, music, photography), or just random links that I find funny or useful.

Any suggestions on content?

barns, iPods, and convenience

Today was one of the great days where I get to relax on a Sunday. Don't get me wrong, I love playing at WEC. However, the days where I get to wake up on my own, eat when I feel hungry, not stress about playing well and memorizing music, and go to the 6:00 service at the Yoder Barn (no plug intended) are super cool to say the least.

I'm really enjoying having an iPod. I received an iPod Classic from my parents for Christmas, and it's been a long time coming. Not that I have been waiting on them, I've just had much better things to spend my scarce cash on - all the junk like food, textbooks, you know, all the not really that important stuff. I have an inordinate amount of music (also a drain on the petty cash), most of which I do listen to. You could probably call me an iTunes junkie, as I've been using it to organize my music for years now. So naturally, I should have bought myself an iPod years ago.

I am loving that I have all my music with me all the time now. I can say, "Hey, I have this song I really want you to hear!", then pull it up and listen to it, whereas before I mostly had to wait until I could get to my laptop and pull up the song there, or burn it to a CD so the person in question could hear it. So much more convenient now!

Convenience is a wonderful thing. As an engineering major, I've discovered a lot of things in the engineering discipline are about convenience. I mean, one could argue that all technology ever developed is for someone or another's convenience, but even in the process of engineering, you do things for convenience. You assume certain parameters are negligible to simplify calculations, you reuse pre-derived formulas once they've been learned, and you even ignore some effects altogether. It's kind of scary to me, actually, to think about the number of shortcuts we take in class, but almost scarier to think about what would happen when one of those "negligible parameters" actually had an effect - things are super complicated! For the sake of convenience, no, of sanity, we have to streamline the effects to things that show the global behavior of things, and then verify through experiment whether our shortcut worked.

If you sit and think about the number of people that you come into contact with in your lifetime and the choices they make, all the weather patterns and universal orbits and changes, the world is such an infinitely complex thing. It's literally mind-boggling for me to even to try to conceive it. To know someone is in control is where my ultimate convenience lies.

I misspelled the word "convenience" the first time I typed it ever time it is used in this post. No lie. Curse you "I before E", you've failed me for the last time.

accountability partners and christmas decorations

Anyone reading will notice the . . . absence of posts. This is partially due to a lack of enthusiasm to blogging, but mostly due to the business of final exams and then the ecstasy of being done with finals and being on Christmas holiday from school. I would like to dig in my feet a bit deeper and really commit to keeping up with this.

In other "due to's":

Due to the sparse postings on the page at the time, I have decided that the only way to commit to a consistent schedule of blogging will be to have a blogging accountability partner. My brother, Tim, has graciously agreed to fill this position. So, for the next few weeks, we are going to try to form a more routine schedule of blogging together.

It's been really great having Tim home for the holidays, participating in all the traditions my family has developed over the years. The most important, and probably most fun of all, is decorating the Christmas tree with ornaments. There are so many stories that come out for each and every ornament; some of them funny, some of them heart - warming, some of them stupid inside jokes that never fail to send the whole family rolling on the floor.

I do have some favorites. One is an ornament in the form of a man on a bike, which must be placed on the tree whilst humming the theme from E.T. Another is the Millenium Falcon, which plugs into a light socket and then features lights itself. My mother has a number of Precious Moments ornaments that my father has given her: one for every Christmas they've been married. There are a number of woven candy canes, and the goal of their placement is to subtly remove all of them so as to be the one who places each and every one of them; kind of a fun game to play.

I absolutely had to wait for Tim to get home to do this with my family, he is a vital part of the humor of the traditions. I know that we won't celebrate every Christmas together as the years go on, but I'd like to enjoy as many as possible. Of course, this decorative delay meant that we couldn't decorate the tree until about a week before Christmas. By the time Christmas came and went, it seemed that it hadn't been around for hardly any time at all. I now believe, as a result, that the tree and Christmas decorations will remain up well into the New Year. I have no problem with this, I love Christmas!