Getting Stuff Done Music

 Japan, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Getting Stuff Done Music
Sep 272013
 

Who hasn’t seen the Lifehacker article about coffee shop background noise being good for productivity yet? Just about everyone has, or so it seems, anyway.

In that vein, I have been looking for some background noise to have going so that I would stay awake and productive without having to drink 8 cups of coffee.

I found a website called SoundDrown where you can listen to a recorded coffee shop loop over and over. It was okay, but not quite interesting enough for me.

I’m still looking for something suitably interesting. For now, I’m going to stick with Music For Programming, but I’ve listened to their mixes so many times I’ve lost count. They are awesome “Getting Stuff Done” mixes, though.

If I fire up International Departures, I’ll just stop working all together.

Miku’s Coming…

I got notified by Tenso yesterday that my Vocaloid 3 bundle has shown up at their offices. Great.

I had to provide proof of my US address, and that turned out to be a slight pain in the neck, because I forgot that my passport doesn’t have my address on it. That’s what I get for doing this stuff at 6 a.m. with no coffee in me yet.

I heard back from them at around midnight telling me that I needed to send something better, and I sent them a scan of my driver’s license. I just heard back this morning that everything is A-OK, so I’m looking forward to getting my stuff from them sometime next week.

The fees from Tenso are surprisingly low. The total cost of everything is 1990 yen, and that’s pretty cheap for getting something express mailed from Japan. That includes about 980 yen in handling fees, but to be fair, if I asked a friend to send stuff on for me, I would buy that friend a beer, anyway, and I doubt that that friend could get such a good deal on shipping.

If the package arrives in good shape, I’ll probably start using them more often, because Amazon is crazy expensive for shipping. Also, I can buy used books if I have them shipped inside Japan and save more money that way.

Building a New Computer

Finally, my old computer is dying a horrible, slow death from overheating too much. I keep getting BSODs due to overheating, and I have finally reached the “Screw it” point where I picked out some parts for a new rig. This time I’m going for an SSD main hard drive to run Win7 and all of my programs from, an Intel i7-4770 CPU, 16GB of RAM (for now), and a nice white Corsair case. For the mobo, I’m going with one of the ASUS TUF motherboards, to see how it does with dust, and an Arctic CPU cooler.

My old case was a ThermalTake LanParty, and as a mATX form factor case, it was great for small gaming rigs that could be really portable. But as a small form factor case, taking it apart and putting it back together was murder on my fingers. Also, graphics cards, HDDs, and PSUs all had to fit together like a puzzle, and the cabling would always get in the way.

And of course having all the parts on top of each other killed the airflow and heat dissipation. I’m kind of surprised it lasted as long as it did.

I’ll have to put it all together this weekend and get it up and running.

Eyes on Fire

 News  Comments Off on Eyes on Fire
Sep 262013
 

Two words you never want to hear from your eye doctor: viral conjuntivitis.

Trust me on this.

Imagine your eyes are on fire, and, in order to put out the fire, you decide to pour a beach full of sand on them. Now they are hot and gritty. Hmm. It needs something else. How about rinsing it all off with alcohol and gasoline, so now they sting, too? Might as rub some itching powder around your eyes, and just light the whole mess on fire.

That’s what this week has been like. Not really fun.

Interestingly, it’s almost 2 years to the day that I had just about the same thing happen while I was in Tokyo. The drugs there worked a little faster. The medicine I got works, but not nearly fast enough for my liking.

To be fair, the burning and gritty sensation is going away, but they still randomly itch like hell.

Anyway, my eye trouble has kept me away from the computer. As they’re getting better, I’m able to do more work, but I have to take frequent breaks.

I have a cold mask that works wonders. I should have bought two, so I could keep one cold while I use another, but this is good enough.

Raleigh Greek Festival

 Food  Comments Off on Raleigh Greek Festival
Sep 222013
 

My SO and I went to the Raleigh Greek Festival for dinner last night. The music was a bit on the loud side, but it had a great party atmosphere, and of course the food was amazing.

I’m glad we finally got to go. I’ve been wanting to go to this festival for a number of years, but I could never get my schedule to align with it, or I would find out too late to plan anything. I’m also glad she wanted to go, too, because going to Raleigh is a bit of a drive for us.

The pastitsio was awesome, so was the spanikopita. That was some of the best spanikopita I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a lot. The lamb skewers were good, too.

Our plan was simple: buy a bit of everything, and take it all home for leftovers the next day.

We also tried some of the desserts, too: the donuts were really good (covered in honey, cinnamon, and a little brown sugar), and the galactaburos was good, too. (I really wanted to cover that in dark chocolate, though.)

There was a baklava sundae that we also tried. It was a bit on the sweet side for me. Okay, it was nuclear sweet.

It didn’t cost a whole lot more than going out to a nice restaurant, and we got two days’ worth of food out of it, so it’s a win-win kind of thing.

Miku 3.0 Bundle

 Japan, Japanese Language, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Miku 3.0 Bundle
Sep 192013
 

Crypton Future Media, who makes the popular Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, announced an English version earlier this year, and also announced a bundle of the English version with new versions of the older voice banks for an upgrade price for those who own previous versions.

Since I own the older voice banks, I was intrigued. I haven’t given up on my grammar music project yet, even if it is on the shelf for now.

The deal is that if you owned and registered both previous editions, you could get the bundle for ~$150 US.

The bundle comes with a special edition of PreSonus’ Studio One DAW, so it gets a new user in the door of using a DAW. It also comes with Crypton’s new VST, Piapro Studio, that will handle its Vocaloid voice banks inside of any DAW that can use VSTs.

The only downside to Piapro Studio is that for now it only handles Crypton’s voice banks, and that’s minor. You could always create a track with Miku or any other Crypton voice bank, then output it in VSQX format to the Yamaha editor, then change the voice to the voice bank you need to use, and export it out as a stem.

I wanted to get the Yamaha Vocaloid VST plugin for Cubase, but this makes things easier, and saves me another $100 or so. It also comes with some extra VST plugins.

All in all, it’s a great deal, and for beginners, it’s great starter package.

Getting It…

There’s a catch of sorts. You have to have a Japanese address to get the upgrade bundle at this price.

To be fair, they have a US distributor, and that’s where a this restriction comes from. But the US distributor isn’t selling the bundle at this time. I don’t know when they’re going to sell it. Right now, the cost of the English bank from the US company is as much as the cost of the whole bundle from Crypton.

After some talking with customer support, I got myself a Japanese address at Tenso, who will gladly ship it for me. I set up an account with them, and voila! I have an address in Japan now.

There is another caveat: I won’t get support from the US distributor. I’ll have to get support from Japan. I am totally okay with that, because the Japanese customer support has been great.

Now I just have to wait for the software to be released on the 26th or so, and I’ll get it a few days later. Can’t wait.

Anki Assault / Piano Practice

 Education, Japanese Language, Music, Technology  Comments Off on Anki Assault / Piano Practice
Sep 102013
 

In order to get ready for both the N1 and the A+ exams, I’m going all out on Anki for the next few weeks. I’ve just finished setting up a bunch of workbook practice sheets for Anki, thanks to e.Typist. It lets me OCR stuff and get it into Anki relatively painlessly.

For A+ material, if the book I bought is in PDF format, it’s easy to just copy/paste the text into Anki. But if it’s a Kindle book, then I have to use something like Greenshot, which take a photo of the page, OCRs it, and adds it to the clipboard. Then I just have to paste it into Anki.

Really, it would be a lot easier if these publishers just gave us text files. I paid for the book. It’s not like I’m going to give away the contents. I just want to turn it into flashcards I can use.

Also, I finally upgraded to Anki 2.0. I’ve been putting that off forever, but it’s finally time to bite the bullet. The transition took a couple of days to get ironed out completely, but now I don’t even notice the differences. The differences are there, and the workflow is pretty different, but things I used to complain about don’t seem like such a big deal to me anymore. As long as it’s fast, that’s all I care about.

Oh, Piano Class started tonight. That was a lot of fun. The Piano Lit class afterwards was interesting, too. I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to piano music. My background is in marching bands, concert bands, and jazz bands. So I don’t know much about classical piano music. But it’s interesting.

Music School

 Education, Music, Technology, Travel  Comments Off on Music School
Sep 032013
 

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is starting something new this fall, a Community Music School for people like me who live nearby and want to polish our musical skills in a relaxed setting. It sounds really interesting to me, because as I’ve said before, I need to work on my music composition skills. I also need to work on my piano/keyboarding skills, because that’s the fastest way to enter music into my DAW of choice, Reason.

I spoke with the teachers at an event on Sunday, August 25th, and they both seemed like really nice people who were not only passionate about what they do, but highly experienced. So signing up was a no-brainer for me.

Composition starts this Saturday, Group Piano starts next Tuesday. I’m looking forward to it.

Also, I’m starting to go into full gear mode for the N1, which is coming up in less than three months. (OMG!) I’m also looking at getting my A+ certification, because it’s an easy way to show people I know what I’m doing when it comes to computers. I may get Network+ and Security+ later on, but for now A+ will be plenty.

The only thing I’m worried about is cramming for A+ will mess up my N1 prep. But I want to have the A+ certification before I go to Boston again. (Yeah, I’m going again.)

This fall is going to be crazy.

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