Opera Mint

I used to be sleeping with my guitar when I was a teenager. But it was a long, long ago. I hadn't played a guitar for a few decades until a few days ago.
Orianthi came to play for free at Best Buy at Union Square in New York, which is just a few blocks away from my apartment. I went there with my two sons and wife. I saw her playing the guitar at a small corner of the electronic shop. She just blasted the entire shop with her guitar. She is real. She is not a fake guitarist who just copies the same and old catchy lines. And she was so humble in front of customers in the shop, who just waled by without knowing that such a guitarist would perform for free.



Well I cannot stop my internal urge to play the guitar any more. I know I have no bloody time because my office job requires 24/7 attention and it totally sucks. But I decided to buy a guitar for myself for a simple reason; my 10 year-old son started to having interest in music and guitar. Yeah, it's time for a boy to get into this business. I was 13 years old when I got my first guitar as a Christmas present from my dad. It's time to do the same for my son, and I want to do better; I can give just an initial guidance on how to play the guitar to my son. I learned to play the guitar all by myself, which is not bad now looking back, but of course it could have been more efficient if there had been any help.

Just to save money I checked eBay to find a guitar. I'm not a beginner but not precisely an experienced guitarist any more as I forgot almost everything about it. I suspect I would easily remember again if I start touching the guitar, though. So my choice of guitar should be something between a very economical starter guitar and a intermediate guitar. Simply put, I tried to find a relatively cheap but decent guitar.

I chose Paul Reed Smith, but not the regular line, which costs a few thousand dollars. They have economical version, which they call SE (which I think is abbreviation of 'Student Edition'). My choice is PRS SE Singlecut. This choice might have been unconsciously affected by the fact that I was playing a Les Paul a few decades ago.

After several failure of bidding, I won a new PRS SE Singlecut with US$ 495, which is not a big bargain, but still a little bit cheaper than a regular price, which is around $ 600.

Only a few days after the bidding, I received it and touched it. It is a great guitar. I was honestly surprised to see such high quality with this price. Although I haven't played it with a decent amplifier yet, I can hear good sustained sound with no amplifier when I play it. I suspect that this could be well used for professional purpose.

Next I have to choose a guitar for my son.


If you are interested in PRS SE, you can see below.

Last weekend Linux Mint 8 "Helena" was released. It is based on, of course, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Linux Mint uses a lot of mint color, of course. Linux Mint is very much sensitive to "good-lookingness", which I think is good. Who wants to use an ugly looking computer? Linux Mint is also very much aware of "easiness" of using a computer. It needs least care after installation, which is good for a beginner of Linux as I am.

It's been so hectic; moving from one country to another is always a tough job. After having spent 3 weeks in a hotel room with my wife and two kids, I finally moved in an apartment. It will take some time till we really settle down, but it's good to fix one place to live in, at least for some time. So, Long Goodbyes to Copenhagen !

I installed Linux Mint 7 Gloria on the 8GB DataTraveler Generation 2 (G2) - it's just a USB memory... Installation was quick, and I tried to start the newly installed Gloria from the USB. The beautiful boot menu appeared, and then a message appeared saying "cannot find the disc"... After a bit of search, I found that there is a probelm with grub menu; UUID was not specified, but instead it shows that root=sdd1. The HD fixed to the computer is usually given a name sda, and any other media such as external HD, USB memory, SD card etc. could be sdb, sdc, sdd, etc... I want to use this USB stick memory, on which I installed Linux Mint 7 Gloria, on any port at any computer, it has to be recognized independently of the environment where I installed it. In this case, it happened that the USB was given sdd, which is useless if I use it on another port, or on another computer. My understanding is that any media is given a unique indentification, which UUID. If UUID is specified as the boot disc in the grub menu, the computer can find it. Now the fist thing to do is to find UUID of this USB memory. The below page was very useful; How to find your UUID’s for devices in Ubuntu (and other Debian based distros) I opened Terminal and entered as below;

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid 

They I got something like this; The light blue color parts show the UUIDs. In this screen shot, since I know that sdb1 is the partition where the root of Gloria on USB exists and sdb 2 is swap, I can know that the UUID of this USB memory is efd4289a-4df3-4f79-a20a-242645f926c9. Next thing to do is to revise the grub menu of Gloria on the USB. In Terminal I entered;

sudo gedit /media/boot/grub/menu.lst 

It is not /boot/grub/menu.lst, because what I want to open is not the grub menu of this OS that I'm using now, but of the USB stuck into this computer. How the path appears depending on the system. I got this then; Now UUID of the USB is specified. I closed all, and booted the USB. Gloria started up beautifully! m

Some time ago I too joined Second Life as many people do, and I did absolutely nothing there as many people did. I read a lot about business success stories in Second Life (I have no means to verify them, though), I have never thought about somebody playing the piano in Second Life. Ekeynox wrote; In April 2009, I began "touring" in Second Life, a 3D virtual world where you can, among a lot of different activities, attend live music events. My name there is Fenders Rhode. During three weeks, I played a few sets in different venues, where I met really nice people. Some of them suggested that I put my music online, so I did it, giving it the form of this album. On (virtual) stage, I play improvisations, either solo piano or using electric keyboards and looping myself, adding drums. Here is a selection of my solo piano pieces. As I just played what I had in mind at the moment, I hope you will forgive the lack of finition and structure in the music. These pieces were played in Nederpoort, Aquastar Lounge, U21Global Auditorium, Hummingbird Cafe and Nitida Ridge. Big thanks to the organizers who invited me: Kytherean Thespian, Shellie Boucher, Keko Heckroth, Leira Vaughan, Amy Ferguson and Bree Birke. His piano reminds me of many familar melody lines particularly in Keith Jarrett of The Köln Concert or Debussy. This album instantly became one of my favorites to ease the absurd stress created in real life...