Wow, so its been a really long time since I posted.  Lets see.. I moved into a new place downtown, I got in an accident on my Suzuki Motorcycle, bought a Honda CBR 600 F4i, had that stolen 3 weeks after buying it, and am now still in the process of dealing with insurance.  My laptop crashed a couple of times, and so did my desktop.  

Anyways.  Life is still pretty crazy for me right now, but I’ve decided to post a couple of videos of me playing piano on my new Yamaha Clavinova CLP-230 on youtube.  Here you go:

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

We’ll see where this goes. Hopefully I will post updates about my Locost build with pictures here, and also other various things.