A midsummer’s update

So thought I’d just do an update since I haven’t posted any videos in ages. My schedule for the past few months has been pretty routine. In short, it’s sort of part-time work with part-time school. I use the term “part-time” loosely, because sometimes my weekly work hours sometimes totals to be something close to the number of hours a full-time employee would be doing. It’s weird being both a student and an employee at the same time because I constantly find myself in a dilemma when deciding which one takes priority. And this is especially tricky since the one course that I am taking is pretty much all group work. Heh.

The SFU Chamber Orchestra is still going strong this summer, which is something new, since we usually take a hiatus and make our return in the Fall. This summer, we’re playing a variety of pieces including:

• Concerto Grosso No. 10 in b minor, by Vivaldi
• Memory of the Wind ~Legend of the Eternal Wind~, by Nobuo Uematsu, re-arranged by Tsuyoshi Sekito, and re-rearranged by Me!
• One Summer's Day, by Joe Hisashi

Most of our repertoire requires substantial substitution by other instruments, since our ensemble is a bit smaller than it is usually. My arrangement of Memory of the Wind ~Legend of the Eternal Wind~ was composed strictly for our current ensemble, so there were some interesting challenges to overcome and redistribution of soloists to make things work. Our set-up is roughly like this:

• 2 flutes
• 2 clarinets
• 1 horn
• 1 piano
• 6 violins
• 1 cello

For example, a solo line that was originally for trumpet was given to the clarinets in the arrangement, or something like that. We will be premiering this work and the concerto at the end of July in an out-doors talent show run by the university. Stay tuned!

Belated New Year’s resolution and an anecdote

For those of you who follow my blog, you may recall me mentioning that I was going to blog more often. Well seeing that my last post is a month apart and that my even earlier posts were a year a part, I’d say I am making some progress ... right?

Anyway, I started working in January as a web developer for a new specialized web-application development company. Having been a full-time university student for so long, it is certainly refreshing to not have to worry about exams and letter grades.

I have been learning how to port static HTML into a WordPress template at work. Doing so has inspired me to perhaps do the same with Audiomuse. You may or may not know this, but Audiomuse currently is based on static HTML pages (and CSS of course) that I edit by hand, which is probably why I am so tardy in uploading my PDF scores. After a few days worth of working with WordPress, I have learned that if you are familiar with: HTML, CSS, PHP, and a bit of server knowledge, then WordPress is a breeze. Basically, everything is based on PHP templates, variables, and functions, many of which are already pre-defined.

Actually, there is another reason why I had not thought of porting Audiomuse to WordPress earlier, and it is sort of silly on my part. So my website is actually hosted by a friend of a friend whom I am not too familiar with. I had met him once at a friend's birthday party and he asked if I would do some web design for him in return for free hosting. So I agreed. Being the worst at time management (I have learned that freelancing as a student doesn’t work for me) I didn't get very far with the design and had to abandon the project at the end. So I thought I'd let my host know that I'll look for another host, but he said he didn’t mind. So to this day, my website is still being hosted by the same guy. I should probably get to know him some time.

Anyway, at one point, I had actually thought of using at least PHP templates so that I wouldn’t have to update several copies of the header, sidebar, and footer. So I tried that, but for some reason, the PHP wouldn’t parse. It might have been an encoding error on my part. (I only found out that text files had different encodings years later!) So I simply assumed my host didn't have PHP installed. And I felt kind of embarrassed to approach him about this because I hadn’ contacted him in months.

So many years later (actually a few days ago) I decide to test out my luck with PHP again, being inspired at work, and uploaded some PHP file with the code

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

at the top. And what do you know. The phpinfo file parses and I get a listing of all the fields. So he does have PHP installed. (Or maybe it was installed at a later time.)

So in a nutshell, I will be trying to install WordPress over the next few days. I am still quite a n00b with servers and stuff, so hopefully it works out!