JeffTougas.com

What do these things have in common?

I want to learn the piano music for all of them! This is mostly for my own future reference.  I will post up some videos once I’ve gotten good at some of these.  Also, I’m getting much better at Comptine d’un autre ete l’apres.

In The Hall of the Mountain King, by Edvard Grieg, a Norwegian composer who lived in the last half of the 19th century:

Dungeon song from the video game Zelda:

Yann Tiersen is the French composer who did the music for Amelie (including Comptine d’un autre ete l’apres), and he’s probably my favorite composer overall so far. Here is another song of his that I want to learn, Rue Des Cascades:

And finally, the movie, “The Corpse Bride” has a couple of cool piano compositions in it that I would like to learn:

and

Yes yes, I’m still alive. Sorry for the long time with no posts. I’ve been very busy over the last few weeks.

Timing belt on a 1990 Acura Legend gone wrong
Firstly, I had quite the misadventure while working on my girlfriend’s new car. You see, this particular Acura had 118,000 miles on it, and had no record of the timing belt ever being replaced. Seeing as the timing belt is supposed to be replaced every 90k miles, I figured I’d better go ahead and put a new one on for her (and I’d be doing it myself, since the labor for this particular job is usually around $600 or so).

Anyways, everything was going just peachy until I got impatient and cross-threaded a bolt which was to hold the thermostat in place. The bolt’s head snapped off, and I nearly lost my own head due to frustration. I ended up having to remove the thermostat housing, which required removing the intake manifold, which required removing about 53249238283432 different coolant and vacuum hoses. Seriously. I think that car has about 30 coolant hoses and 50 or so vacuum hoses.

3 (or so) weeks and many new parts later, I finally had the car back together. And yes, I did get to drive her around everywhere during that time. Le sigh.

Kettlebells are awesome!
Now, for a slightly lighter topic. A couple weeks ago, I decided to order a kettlebell from dragondoor.com. Wow, this brutish blog of metal is really pretty cool and addictive! I’ve only been working out with it for about a week, but I can already tell a difference and its probably the most fun workout I’ve ever done.

Planar graphs and misc
Finally, the most important explanation for my lack of posting: School. I’ve got tons of studying and homework to do, and only about 3 weeks left of class. I have two math tests on Thursday, both of which I’m still not very well prepared for. I’m learning about graph theory right now for one of the two classes (combinatorics).

-Jeff

I found this wonderful piano sheet music site the other day, and just thought I’d post it here to share with you. This blog is where I got the sheet music for Comptine d’un autre: http://my-piano.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

I posted an animated film with this song in it a couple days ago.. I’ve been hard at work trying to learn it.  Here is the result:

Well, its been a while since I’ve updated on my Locost build.  First, I will post some text from my locostusa.com log:

Posted Jan 25th, 2008:

“Today I bought a donor car, finally. Its a 1991 Miata with 250k miles on it. 100k miles on the engine. What’s really cool about it, is it has a Jackson racing supercharger on it, and full exhaust from the headers back. Of course, I don’t care about the exhaust other than its worth some coin.. I paid $2500 for the, but I think I ought to be able to recoup most of that, especially if I sell the supercharger. 

Now that I actually have everything I need, I will try to post a bunch of pics this weekend of the garage, the donor car, and the steel.”

What I’ve done since then…

Not much, unfortunately.  There was actually a lot more work after pulling the engine and drivetrain to fully disassemble the car.  After I pulled the engine/drivetrain/suspension, I moved the car out into the driveway on moving dollies, where it sat for about a month.  BAD IDEA!  When I went to move the thing back in, I discovered that it was completely and thoroughly infested with ants and a few other kinds of insects.  Ugh!  I spend a couple weekends spraying bug spray all over the thing after I pulled it back in the garage.  I also made sure there were constantly pools of bug killer liquid surrounding the four jackstands, sort of like a moat, so that no insects would escape the miata with their life.

Well, now the bugs are all dead, and the thing is almost entirely disassembled, except for some A/C components and the rear bumper (I didn’t have the courage to remove it at the time, for fear that there were still some ear wigs living inside, but they’re probably dead now).  I’ve yet to sell any of the parts on craigslist, including the shell itself!  Ugh.  Space is definitely one thing I don’t have right now.

In other news.. I built a.. build.. table.

I was originally planning on building it with steel, but then I realized how much cheaper wood is.  It actually took me two tries to build the thing to my satisfaction (the first one was done with mails, and imprecisely; this one is very square and held together with screws), but now I have a table that should be able to hold at least 1000 lbs (and is on wheels to boot!).

Please forgive my photos linking you to flickr right now.. I’ll try and resolve that soon so that you don’t have to keep going to an external site.

So.  You have a piano sitting in your dining room that never gets played.  You have a bed that’s tucked away in storage.  You have a car that you need to sell.  You wish desperately that you could easily sell these items without paying someone to display your ad somewhere, but you don’t know what to do!

Paging Mr. Craig on isle 4, Mr. Craig on isle 4, please

Craig’s list, that is.  Craig is a man from San Francisco who decided to make a very simple and free website, called craigslist.org, to allow people in his same town to easily buy and sell just about anything, back in 1995.  Initially, the service was only available for San Francisco (the Bay Area, specifically); however, it has grown to almost every major city in the U.S. nowadays.  The beauty of the service is that it is localized, i.e. the ads you see will be posted by people within a 50 mile radius (give or take) of you, so you can go look at the item before buying.  No more sending money on the internet and then wondering whether your item will actually show up!  Conversely, if you’re selling something, its much nicer to deal with local buyers, rather than to have to worry about shipping something.

Right about now, you’re probably thinking that you don’t know anything about computers, and aren’t comfortable with selling things on the internet, even if it is craigslist.  Wrong!  A few weeks ago, I showed my slightly computer-challenged mother (no offense Mom!) how to post an ad on craigslist.  She was selling a canoe.  Within only 5 hours, the thing had sold!  Oh man, was she hooked!  Since that time, my mom has sold or helped friends sell nearly a dozen things through craigslist!

Good for her, but I’m not your mom, genius.  How are you going to teach me?

I thought you’d never ask.  For your viewing pleasure, I have created a video which goes through all of the steps required to post something on craigslist.  This is just the first in a series of videos I plan on creating about craigslist.. Video #1 is all you really need to post something on craigslist, while the future videos will be tutorials on how to make your ads look nicer, and have more and bigger pictures on them.  

Hope you enjoy! Please leave comments if you think this video rocks, or if you think it sucks, and you want me to do it differently somehow.

This song is from the movie Amélie, which is itself quite a beautiful film. This is my new focus on the piano.. Hopefully I’ll film myself playing this sometime soon.

I’ve just recently become infatuated with Flickr, in combination with my iPhone. Specifically, there is a third party app called iFlickr that makes uploading pictures from your iPhone a snap (pun intended). For people with a non-jailbroken iPhone, sending a picture to Flickr involves taking a picture, and then emailing it to your Flickr email address. With iFlickr, however, you have a customized Camera application, where upon taking a photo you get the option to “Send to Flickr”. Once you tap this button, within a few moments your picture will be displayed on your Flickr site.

By your powers combined..

Now, combine this coolness with the awesomeness that is WordPress, and a neat little plugin for it made by tantannoodles, and you get something that makes posting pictures on ones blog so streamlined that you may need some aviators goggles. Observe:

And that’s it!  All you have to do is click on one of your pictures, and it becomes one with your masterful writing.  As you can see, this plugin makes the addition of photos to your blog posts a piece of cake. I’m enthralled by it.

I had to write this for a computer science ethics class. I didn’t really put much time into it, and perhaps at some point I’ll revise it.. but upon rereading it I thought it was pretty good. Here it is for your enjoyment.

Well, I finally have my very own build log. Almost a year ago, I became interested in lotus 7 replicas. I’m not even really sure what happened to make me interested in such a car, but I’ve been researching and considering building one for a few months now.

Over Christmas, I got a couple of books I was asking for. The two that mattered the most were: How to Build a Cheap Sports Car, and Build your own Sports Car: On a Budget. Also, I’ve done a lot of research and reading on the http://locostusa.com forums.

Anyways, after reading through those two books, and also buying a Lincoln Electric Pro-Mig 140, I made up my mind that I was going to get started on building a locost. My plan was to build my chassis based on the “book” frame, and to use a Mazda Miata as a donor vehicle.

I want to use a Miata for a few reasons:

• Used Miatas with over 100k miles can be procured for fairly cheap (under $3k easily)
• Miatas are very reliable and cheap to maintain. Engines frequently last over 250k miles
• Lots of locost builders have used a Miata donor before me, so I will have lots of “expert” knowledge to tap into
• Miatas come with double wishbone suspension on all four corners, and since I want to do independent rear suspension, this is perfect!
• I’ve driven Miatas before and I love the responsive feel of the engine. Its got an awesome torque curve that is very fun to play with.

Anywho, I’ll post some pictures of my garage and when I construct my “build table”.