Zachary Hartley

Amazingly, it appears that there is no physical store near me which I can purchase Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. I had decided to spend the evening installing and setting it up, but apparently I can’t just go out in buy it around here. Blah.

Unpacking

After cleaning up the boxes and detritus from my new dining room table, I was on a roll cleaning up my apartment. I threw out the rocking chairs boxes from the porch, unpacked the remaining boxes in the bathroom, the box in my room, and unpacked all the boxes of bookes in my office.

I still don’t have a new, larger bookcase that I need for my book collection, so I have several huge stacks against one of the walls. By clearing up that space I was able to create a practice space for my guitar equipment.

I also managed to do some long over-due laundry during all of this and run a full dishwasher. I still have a stack of old clothes on one side of my room, most of it old and too small for me since I gained weight my senior year at High Point. I’ve been holding out on throwing it out or donating it because I still hope to lose the weight so that they fit again, but it’s been so long that I wonder if it is worth holding on for the next couple of years that I’m unlikely to be able to wear it.

I still need to vacuum the apartment. By the time I was ready to it was too late not be rude by creating a ruckus late at night. I wonder if I got so much done today because I had my computer out of commission while running a RAM diagnostic.

Matinees

I saw two matinees this weekend: American Gangster and Into the Wild. I enjoyed both. Both were very visual films and were worth seeing on a theatre screen. The former was a very good drama with great performances by Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Just a great looking, fun viewing experience. The latter was also great. I suppose it was also a drama, though it was really more of a biography. No big names in the main roles, though there were good assisting roles by Vince Vaugh and Virginia Madsen. The interesting thing about Into the Wild is that there wasn’t really a message other than of the experiences of one particular person. Not to say that there wasn’t a point to it, but the plot there wasn’t forced in the sense that a story in many movies has to be forced in order to start, go somewhere, and finish within the time allotted.

Go see both if you can!

The two clowns I live with (my cats) seem to think that the new dining table chairs were purchased specifically for them to lay on, ‘cause ever since I put them together last night they’ve been on them, laying there or sleeping. Bunch of bums.

Bookshelves

It is harder to find bookshelves suitable for paperback books than I imagined. I have a large enough collection of them that using a typical bookcase for them is a waste of space and an eyesore. The typical bookcase has shelves that are too tall and deep. I can’t be the only person who wants to store their paperbacks, but searching on the web hasn’t turned up much of anything. The closest things to what I have in mind have been media cases for DVDs/CDs, but most of them look cheap, flimsy, and ugly.

Guitar

I bought an acoustic guitar a couple of weeks ago and started taking lessons. It has been almost a decade since I last played an instrument. It has been going well so far; I’ve adjusted to reading notes in treble clef fairly well and I’ve developed good muscle memory for reading notes and playing them.

Chords/triads are giving me trouble so far, both reading and getting into position. My instructor has told me that reading them will come with time and will be just like reading single notes. Chords will also come, albeitl, with much practice I’m sure.

Because of my previous exposure to music he’s been getting into a lot of theory so far, in fact, of the 3 half hour lessons I’ve had (though all have gone an hour or more so far) we’ve only played for maybe 20 minutes total. We spend more time going over the relationshiop between scales, chords, and how the guitar is tuned.

My instructor also builds guitars as well, so he took my low-end $180 Ibanez starter guitar and has done a lot to it to make it sound better and play better/easier. I don’t understand all of it, but he adjusted/sanded the nut and bridge, adjusted the string height, and re-strung it with much nicer strings; Thomastik Infeld JS111’s, which are jazz strings that are much lighter than the previous strings and are flat wound instead of round wound, which makes it much much easier to play.

The book I’m using is Modern Method for Guitar: Volumes 1, 2, 3 Complete by William G. Levitt. It’s a very thorough book with a ton of information packed into each page. We’ve only been though the first four or five pages because there’s so much being presented at once. It’s very satisfying learning the theory behind this because I didn’t learn much when I was younger, due to either my instructor not bothering to explain it more than just by mentioning it in passing once or my not caring enough to pay attention.

I hope to be good enough in a year or two to be able to play stuff like Dave Matthews Band and the like. That kind of thing is full of complicated chords and strumming though, so I know its a waaaays off. Something to work towards.

Training Day

I was in training for work all last week at a “boot camp”, of sorts, for the Microsoft MCP and CompTIA Security+ certifications. I managed to go through all of college without any certifications because I knew they were mostly a sham and my feelings about them were confirmed by the courses. No real learning, just memorizing test prep material. Both were a breeze, especially the Security+ because it was like a high-level, executive overview of what I learned at FSU.

Of course, the good side to the training is that the Security+ certificate counts as a year of on-the-job experience to the ISC^2 CISSP folks, which means I got a year closer to qualifying for it by taking a test I’m over-qualified to take :-).

I also watched the movie Training Day last weekend. I wish my training could have been more like that, minus the whole crazy Denzel Washington leaving me to be murdered by a gang part of it ;-).

Why buy the cats toys when all they want to play with is the plastic bag I brought it home in?