Practice

I think it's time to start practicing guitar again. I've pretty much abandoned serious practicing since I realized I'll never have the patience to become half as fast as Yngwie or Steve or John or even Jimmy, who's the best even if he wasn't the fastest. But practicing seems to be correlated with improvement. Time to investigate that correlation.

Moonwalking practice is going pretty well, or so claims the wall-length mirror on the wall-length wall in my student's house. My student claims otherwise but I think I see the gliding coming through. I wish I could set a 5 second time delay on the mirror so I could see myself from my student's intertial frame of reference. Mirror scientists, you know what to do.

I've been suffering from a cold the last few days, though suffering is a wild exaggeration. More like perpetually inconvenienced. Meaning my nose opens its floodgates during the day to prevent bihandular typing, seals the doors with a vacuum seal at night to prevent shnobular breathing and my throat houses an evil little perpetual tickling machine which the laws of physics have yet to assuage. The only thing that's been out of the ordinary with this cold is that this time I'm being a good boy and taking some medicine. I have no idea what the medicine is; it was sent over by Yuan Yuan's mom, all I know is that it's blue. I also know that I haven't turned blue yet myself, though I've yet to inquire whether that's a good or bad sign. I'm also taking the usual anti-cold concoction prescribed by Professor Karlsson on the Roof: copious amounts of candy and faulty thermometers.

Home Schooling

I started this book today that's supposed to teach me jazz guitar technique in 20 weeks - rougly 4-5 months. The stated practice regimen was a meager 50 minutes/day so I thought "why not?" Nuh uh. The right answer was "yeah, right! (accompanied by a sarcastic cocking of the left eyebrow)."

Unfortunately this 50 minutes/day claim was another case of false advertising. If you can complete the daily assignments in this book in 50 minutes, you are way beyond needing the book in the first place. No matter. I'm not letting some stupid book, that's not even a real book (it's a pdf), beat me in one sitting. I will give up tomorrow at the earliest.

Came across a couple of funny quotes while surfing GNX3 forums:

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." – Brian W. Kernighan

and

"Failure is not an option -- it comes bundled with Windows." - Unknown Smartass

Today, I made the true claim that there are more good actors and actresses. Unfortunately, I not only made it, but voiced it. I was in the car by myself, miles from home, thinking I was safe. No sooner than I uttered the fateful words "women suck," Mom materialized and began exercising her Constitutional right to feminism. I was treated to an interminable lecture on Women in Film starting with 1903's The Great Train Robbery.

Dad is calling me to do pushups. I've been obliging him lately. I hope this is what they mean when they say you should give back to your parents for all those years and dollars they spent raising you and teaching you to be grateful.