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	Welcome To My Home... February 3, 2003 Enter the Contestants It's that time again. Time to abandon my family, friends, and cats in favor of higher education. Time to get back into a daily routine. To finally sit my butt back down and update my website. And probably time to shovel the snow off my website since the temperature's been in the mid-eighties over here for the last couple weeks. But most significantly, it is time now, with the commencement of classes, to meet my teachers. Today's schedule put me in history, political science, and film music. My history teacher made a viable first impression. This is, supposedly, the first class he's ever taught. He made that very clear to us through his nice little introductory speech. Then he handed out some index cards to all of us for a quaint little first-day activity. The idea was that each of us would write our name on the card, our high school, and a 'dead person' who we found interesting. He then collected all the cards and went through them one-by-one giving an encyclopedia style synopses of every chosen historical person. This guy knew the birth and death dates of people whom I had never even heard of. In fact, there were only three names that he couldn't identify. One of them turned out, upon closer inspection, to be the name of a high school. Another was a classmate's aunt. One miss out of about thirty isn't a bad track record. Now let me go back for a second. He told us that this was his first class ever - and I certainly don't think he would make something like that up. I really don't see why anyone would want to. The thing is, he talked to us as if he'd been teaching all his life. He'd use phrases like 'in the past,' or 'this has been,' 'used to,' and 'usually.' The activity, he says, 'is always a bit of fun.' He's reading through the historical names on the cards when he comes to a name he doesn't recognize. 'Usually I at least recognize all the names, even if I don't know much about the person.' 'I have never needed help on more than one or two of them before.' It's not that I don't believe this is his very first class. I'm a trusting person. It just raises some questions, that's all. I mean, did he use to hand out index cards and do this at parties? 'Hey guys! Gather round, I want to show you something neat!' I'll bet he was life of the dorms. After history comes political science. I mention that my political science teacher is African American only so you might have some chance of placing his accent, since I cannot. I'm not sure where, exactly, he's from, since he failed to introduce himself (Seriously - teachers out there - this is a big thing for us students. Tell us who you are!). Nor do I recognize the accent - but that's no surprise since I have a hard time placing any accent. As of now, I have a difficult time understanding him, as he seems to randomly omit certain consonants from every word. It makes it sound like everything he says is abbreviated four times over. But I should get used to that in time. As for his teaching, I have very little to go on right now. He (very slowly) read through the (very vague) syllubus, took role, and dismissed us. The one interesting thing worth noting is his grading system. At the end of the semester, each student can choose for himself whether he wants his exam scores to count for 25%, 50%, or 75% of his final grade. I'm not sure how impactful this can truly end up being, but it's certainly an interesting idea. Lastly, I head over the the recital hall for film music. In short, I will love this class. The professor, himself, seems to be a very cool guy. He has actually performed in recording orchestras for movie scores (although I don't recall him mentioning which instrument). Also, as it turns out, he wrote the textbook we're using (and apparently, the only text book on film music available). He says he hopes somebody else will write a textbook on film music because he thinks it's 'embarassing' to use your own textbook. I think it's cool. I know that to the seasoned college goer, this might be pretty trivial, but just coming out of high school, this is still a big deal to me. My professor is a teacher, musician, and writer. He's extremely knowledgable on the topic, and he genuinely seems to want to raise our interests in the topic, rather than, say, destroy it like another music professor I can think of. From what he went over on the syllabus (he hasn't printed us copies, yet) the course looks like it'll be awesome. We're supposed to have two guest speakers over the semester. One, he said, is a TV score composer, and another, "a well known film composer." Comments February 3, 2003 Did Ya Miss Me? I'm back with some goodies. Art. You might want to poke around in the art section for a while. I've added a whole slew of new stuff. Or, more accurately, I've added one new thing and a whole bunch of older stuff - but it's new if you haven't seen it!). And since I love my tablet so much, you might be seeing a bit more in the future. (A request: If you are using a Mac, email me and let me know whether or not you can see the art 'jpg' pictures. There seems to be a problem in at least one case.) Fun 'n Folly. There should be a new version of the Fun 'n Folly homepage popping up sometime. But since that hasn't happened yet, I thought I'd post it here temporarily. That also means that if you don't like it, I can still make minor (or significant) changes to it. This one should be a whole lot easier to change and update in the future (which is why I redesigned it). The design looks simple enough, but I actually ran into some problems while coding it and needed to resort to some less eloquent solutions. Dave Barry. He's got a blog. Google. I found a useful tip for finding mp3's (and other specific file types) with google. Search for "index apache mp3" along with the term you're searching for. That'll bring up the index page for every site that has an mp3 file. (Or mpg, or jpg, or whatever - it doesn't have to be mp3). Whatever search terms you enter after that will narrow it even further. Google just got better. Music. Here's an interesting, logical, and well-researched essay concerning mp3's and file sharing. The Cell. I was flipping through channels the other day and got caught up in a SWAT team manuever that kept me watching for a couple minutes. When I saw the guy they were after and realized what I was watching, I was as shocked as the SWAT guys were. How on Earth can you edit The Cell for TV? Just the plot summary is almost grounds for an R rating. And I thought The Rock was the most questionable thing I'd ever see on network television. It might've been interesting to see how they cut it down. I didn't, of course. Granted, I liked the movie the first time in that it was different, disturbingly artistic, and held nothing back, but it's certainly not something I'll ever watch again - edited or not. I'm not even sure if I'd watch it a first time if I could go back and make that choice again. February 3, 2003 Just to let you know I have had a chance to look through my film music text book. It's awesome. This is the kind of book that, if priced within the price range of normal books, I would consider buying on my own. It's got interviews with a whole bunch of composers, composer bio's, information on how films are scored, and a whole load of other interesting stuff. February 3, 2003 Back again... Well, it's about time you updated your site... all of us got kinda antsy over here waiting for an update. Anyway, the new fun'n'folly site looks good. I actually checked it earlier yesterday to see if anything exciting had happened to it and was sadly dissappointed. But hey, it looks good and loads decently fast : ) Now, I know you're REALLY excited about your film class and all...but I really don't think I'm so interested as to go out and order your textbook from Amazon.com right away. Thanks anyway though, it's the thought that counts ; ) -Victor February 3, 2003 You should meet my professor, then I've only known him for a day, and I've already bought his book. =) I just thought it was cool that it's available through Amazon. February 4, 2003 I might... However, at a low used price of $27.00, that's a steal! I might just get it... -Victor		Quick Links - Fun 'n Folly - Juggling Club - RF Haunt - RF Gallery News/Updates HOME - Latest Post ARCHIVE - Full Archive <- PREV | NEXT -> 2/3 - Enter the Contestants 1/12 - Excitement 1/8 - Fashionably Late 12/17 - Finally 12/15 - One of the Above 12/12 - The Most Wonderful Time 12/10 - It's Jazz! Get It? 12/7 - The Shocking Truth 12/5 - A Forgotten Art 12/2 - Been One Week Previous 10 shown Read More... 8/6/02 - First Post HOME - Latest Post ARCHIVE - Full Archive
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