Jacob A. Rau » AFK miscellanea http://jacobarau.com The personal blog of Jacob A. Rau Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:20:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 On music… http://jacobarau.com/2010/05/on-music/ http://jacobarau.com/2010/05/on-music/#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 18:14:20 +0000 Jacob A. Rau http://jacobarau.com/?p=142 I am currently listening to Utada Hikaru’s album titled “Ultra Blue”. The whole reason I bought it is for the song “Passion”, a.k.a. “Sanctuary” (Passion is the Japanese version, whereas Sanctuary is the English version). If you like the music from Kingdom Hearts (“Simple and Clean” is in the first one; skip 45 seconds in if you don’t appreciate the beauty of this opening) I would definitely recommend the rest of Utada’s collection. Disappointingly, it appears that “Simple and Clean” is not available as a download; looks like you’ll need to purchase the $15 imported CD (Amazon link) if you want a legitimate copy.

Speaking of Kingdom Hearts, I found a bunch of Kingdom Hearts sheet music on SquareSound.com. A few of them are in Sibelius format, which is a bit annoying, but I definitely intend to practice up at least a couple of these songs. There are these and many more available; take Google for a spin if you are interested.

]]> http://jacobarau.com/2010/05/on-music/feed/ 0 The stuff of summer… http://jacobarau.com/2009/04/the-stuff-of-summer/ http://jacobarau.com/2009/04/the-stuff-of-summer/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:57:27 +0000 Jacob A. Rau http://jacobarau.com/?p=90 Each summer thus far, I have wandered all summer long and never made any progress on any leads I’ve had, programming-wise or otherwise. I hope to change that this summer.

So I’m making a list.

  • Geocache. It is a fun sport, even with a crappy GPS. Some people would argue that it is more fun with a crappy GPS… There’s a lot of caches around Ludington, and the area is beautiful!
  • Migrate my site to Frihost–”Free Reliable Internet Hosting”. The deal there is that I stay active on their forums to keep my hosting account. I’m kind of torn right now; whether or not I migrate depends on the results of the next point.
  • Figure out traffic shaping on my router at home. Right now, this site is hosted out of my parents’ basement. As such, I’ve got a pretty tight upload speed cap on my server so as to keep from disturbing their network. If I use QoS to ensure that the parents get highest priority, I can use as much traffic as I want, greatly increasing the speed of this site. I really, really don’t want to pay for a host.
  • Muck about with music-making programs. I have messed with Fruity Loops, but I found it so resource-intensive that it would not run on my 1.66 GHz dual-core laptop. Now, I know that my specs aren’t that impressive. But I also know that programs like Impulse Tracker ran on 486-class systems. Therefore, something is severely brain-dead with FL. Besides, who wants a proprietary program to do what open source could do better?
  • Sink my teeth into gnome-power-manager. I would like to participate in Google’s Summer of Code but I haven’t had any experience with any of the projects they host. I see many improvements that can be made in gnome-power-manager, so I am going to work on that and try for SoC next year.
  • Go to Indiana Robotics Invitational. Hopefully with Susan. I will post pictures if I get to go.
  • Finish Copper Bots’ website. That’s the team from Calumet I’m helping out. They need a website; right now it’s only a plain-vanilla WordPress blog.
  • LEGO Camp with Truck Town. It has been epic every year that I’ve done it, and I am excited to help with it again.

I’m sure there’s more, and I will add to this list as things happen. This summer should be amazing!

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