Andru.net

The Fray Is An Okay Band

2007-11-19T23:19:00.001-08:00

... and a lot of people really like their song "Look After You." I made an attempt at duplicating the song and swapping out the lyrics for my own. I told a story of love and longing at odds with career obligations, a story of rampant consumerism and poor working conditions, with a vocal finale so intense and full of raw emotion that it left the poor sweet girl I played it for speechless.

Actually, I did a bad job and nobody else is going to ever hear the result.

Instead, please enjoy this tiny fragment of "Winner Takes it All" by ABBA.

Fingers Hurting

2007-10-17T01:47:00.000-07:00

The skin on either side of my fingernails on my left hand is red and sore from playing chords all evening. I just picked up this handy book here. It's a bunch of classic songs transposed into the key of C with simplified melodies and chord shorthand like "C/E," "G7" etc. The supersimplified music is easy to read and lets me make (I'm assuming?) short work of memorizing the song so I can concentrate on not sounding like a dork. Mission failed, as you can hear here or by clicking the useless thingamabob below. It's a LIVE RECORDING of me giving the song one last shot before hitting the sack. No fraud here, unlike the Canon thing I posted earlier, which was pieced together measure by measure.

I don't know anything about music

2007-10-11T23:48:00.000-07:00

... because Dany, the Bulgarian piano teacher from my childhood in Laos, only managed to convince me I hated the piano. She would grab my hands and tell me to build my muskles, and yell at me when I missed notes... ahhhh it was horrible, and as a result I shied away from the piano until I borrowed Taylor's keyboard a while ago.

But now I have this book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Theory. After reading some junk in there, I have corrected many of the gross errors in my understanding of reading music (I blame Dani), and now I finally know what a "minor sixth" is. I feel I could chortle and guffaw with music nerds in a convincing manner for a few minutes if the situation demanded it. Anyway, I had to give Taylor his keyboard back, but I realized I missed it a lot, so I got one of my own, and tonight in about two hours (waiting for Edwin to get home so we could watch the latest episode of the Office) put together my crap version of Pachelbel's classic from scratch, from (spotty) memory. Download the extremely short, crappy mp3 here or click the thingamajig below.

A Game of Mob Warfare

2007-09-27T00:53:00.000-07:00

The game is called Family Business, and it's a lot of fun. It's fun enough to cause a bunch of Pixar people with no social lives to stay late at work (they would normally never, ever stay late at work, no) and play a few rounds while having some delicious Zachary's Pizza. The game's even more fun when there's a delightful double-dappled dachshund chewing on peanut butter in the background...

Making Music n Stuff

2007-09-17T00:21:00.001-07:00

I recently enjoyed brief infamy at work as I released a short musical parody of our software. Borrowing my coworker's keyboard for a couple of days was a lot of fun, and its presence in my room cast an odd sort of credibility over the place. Anyway, here's the instrumental version. I would post the version with lyrics but I don't want to press my luck distributing company secrets in parody form. It sounds a little like elevator music to me, but I think it's a good start considering it's my first whack at home musicmaking.

2008 Edition Early Arrival

2007-09-10T01:02:00.000-07:00

Usually I don't get around to doing maintenance on this site until December of each year. But presently I find myself with some spare time! This update replaces my janky old photo system, which I wrote mostly while sitting on my ex-girlfriend's parents' couch, with a less janky link to Flickr, a great photo hosting service. You can always browse my flickr photos, but they are all faithfully reproduced here in the style I've grown comfortable with.
On a related note, Flickr is not just a photo hosting site, but a community site as well. It makes it especially easy to stay abreast of the scandals in your friends' social lives by providing contact lists and glimpses at their streams of photos. Take for example (of an easy to find photo, not a scandal) this excellent picture of me that my coworker snapped at Zeitgeist in SF one night.

This sudden revitalization of my previously ignored Flickr account came about because I got a spiffy new camera, and now feel somewhat obligated to the world to post my excellent photographs, lest they be lost to mankind forever. Speaking of "spiffy," "spiffy" is the tag I attach to any photo I post that looks halfway decent. And one of the new features of the fabulous 2008 edition of andru.net is the ability to shortcut to my tagged photos by using an address like "photos.andru.net/spiffy," which is all that's required to find all my photos that are tagged with the word "spiffy." It'll work for any other tag as well. For now you'll have to look at flickr to actually see the tags, to know what to search for! "me," "pixar," and "ella" might be fruitful tags to try.

Two Hours in Line for a Nintendo Wii

2007-01-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

I'm back in my warm bed after spending around two hours waiting in line at Target in Albany, CA for a Nintendo Wii. When I showed up at 6am or so, there were already groups of kids there who had camped out overnight (with very serious-looking sleeping bags). Around 7am my roommate Edwin showed up and went to the back of the line. The nice Target fellow handing out Wii tickets (to avoid pandemonium when the store opened) ran out of them with two people left to go until he'd have reached Edwin. Hehe.

My other roommate Junyi promised to reimburse whoever wound up buying a Wii, since Edwin sprang for the TV and I volunteered my old desktop for tivo service.

So cold....!

Long Overdue Photo Update

2007-01-09T01:01:00.000-08:00

I just posted some new photos in the 2009A Rose St and Halloween 2006 galleries. I'm still behind and have more Christmas and New Year photos to post. Whee! Until then.

Andru.net rejggered for 2007

2006-12-30T21:17:00.000-08:00

It's become sort of an annual tradition for me to rejigger this website during Christmas vacation every year. And hey, since this is 2007, this website is now ten years old! And... times like these I wish I'd made annual screenshots. Yep. An anniversary slideshow right now would be pretty cool, but oh well...