Mmmm...yummy. First midterm of my UCSB career. Topic: Shostakovich. Length: 1hr. 15 min. Status with the ladies: They all still want me. What can I say? I'm a chick magnet...a babe conductor...a logarithm...for the ladies. The test was OK. Quite fair though there seemed to be a lot material to cover beforehand. Though now, in retrospect, it wasn't so bad at all. It's not like the teacher asked me how the manuscript of the as of yet unfinished seventh symphony was packaged when it almost got lost on the train from Moscow to Kubiyshev (to which I would have said "Cloth!"). Overcompensation and worrying the heck out of oneself can be a good thing though. You think you're going to fail. You go in and fail. And then you get your grade back, and hey! what do you know! You didn't fail! I mean, a D- is NOT failing.

So armed with a couple of tracking numbers, I can now say I've got an IBM Thinkpad T40 coming my way. Specs for the nerds out there:

• 1.3 Gig Pentium-M
  
• 30 GB ATA-100 hard drive (4200RPM)
  
• 512 MB RAM
  
• 32MB ATI Radeon 7500
  
• 14.1" Screen (1024x768)
  
• DVD/CD-RW combo drive
  
• Bluetooth
  
• No wireless (yet). Gonna upgrade me some Wi-Fi at some point.
  
• 1" thick, 4.5 pounds (travel weight) light, appx 5 hrs battery life
  
• Some light to light up a keyboard when it's dark, and a magnesium alloy casing
  

Oh, and I also got meself a nice Port Replicator II to go along with the 'pooter, so I won't have to plug in/disconnect a mouse, AC adapter cord, ethernet cord, keyboard, stereo connection, S-video connection, printer cable, and god knows what else every time I go to school with the 'pooter, which is, as of now, almost every day.

So now that the midterm is over with, I've still got to do a transformational network graph, and get familiar with 15 music-related periodicals. oof. And I'm supposed to have a costume for Halloween? Maybe I'll just show up half naked. That'll scare people. On second thought, disgust might be a better word.

I really got to get around to actually making a website, instead of half a blog...will see what I can do about that perhaps this weekend. Javascript calls me.

Oh, speaking of JScript, and in order to satisfy my programming urges (EASY programming urges), I think I should make a nice Pitch-Class Set analyzer. A PCset is an abstract (integer-based) way of looking at musical pitches in the western 12-note chromatic scale. Order is discarded and octave equivalency holds so that an A waaaaaaaaaaaaay up on the piano is the same as a low A farted out by a tuba. So let's say you have a major chord: C-E-G. That's 0-4-7. Makes sense, right? C=0, C#=1, and so on. The weird part is abstracting out these sets into prime forms, which are a "normalized" version unordered version of these notes. So C-E-G is actually (037) (which is the same thing as a C minor chord). You can see this if you take a look at the intervallic content of C-E-G: rather than having a major and a minor third, a minor chord is just a minor and major third. So it's just a major chord in reverse. Which means that 0-4-7 = 0-3-7. In any case, certain types of post-tonal [read:second viennese school] music lends itself well to PCset analysis. The problem with generating the data (we haven't even gotten to the analytical part yet) is getting everything into prime form. You get used to it but it still takes a while to think Bb=10, and D#=3 and G=7 so we have 3-7-10, which reduces down to a prime form of 0-3-7, which is set 3-11, in Forte nomenclature. Thinking of doing a JScript based set calculator that generates, given a set, pertinent information. Like Z-equivalents, interval vectors, inclusion relations, inversion/retrograde/retrogade inversion forms, M relations, and so on and so forth. It's going to take a while to code in all the set names and everything but lord knows I'll probably be using it again at one time or another so why not. Maybe leave it for posterity too.

OK, time to rest a bit and be lazy (not too much though). I think it's well deserved after a midterm, don't you? Of course you do.