bollywood thrill

classes began. i was hoping i'd be posting more but this shuttling back and forth between westchester and the city sucks. i either have to fix my ibook* or buy a powerbook. anyhow... where to begin? so my first class- Java programming for music systems or something like that- the teacher didn't show. one of the graduate assistants improvised for maybe 20 minutes and showed us what he did for the class- basically a webpage that will make bleeps and squeaks randomly. very practical. so not having the professor show up to my 1st class and being led by some GAs was a bit disheartening at least.

so that ended and we then had the big survey class that every master's in music technology student has to take- Digital Audio Processing. This course basically covers as many concepts as possible in the digital audio realm (which is quite vast) and will eventually lead to a thesis-like project. One of the graduate assistants did his work on cochlear implants, which really interests me. All the first year master's students in my program are in the class- i think there are about 35 of us. Pretty small program. The professor's a very intelligent and well-spoken guy. We did introductions in the class and it really made me appreciate the diversity of people in our program. Many many music geeks of all ilk (ilk?)- some studio owners, some avant garde electronic music producers, some married old people, some guy who apparently made scores for Nickelodeon shows (i want to be his friend), and an Indian woman who was in the software industry but really liked Bollywood movies so she wants to get into scoring them.

Shit, it's 2:03am. I'll have to fill y'all in on my music theory and aural comprehension class soon but they seem like they'll be very interesting and I'm quite intimidated by them because i'm in that class with a bunch of music major underclassmen who seem to know it all already. The biggest shell shock of this whole experience so far is the feeling of having something excellent expected of me. I mean, I've spent the past 4 years being told exactly what's expected of me (not bloody much) and I seemed to do pretty damn well at that with minimum effort... but this grad school thing, the nature of the assignments is kind of a sliding scale. I could do my DAP homework in 5 minutes and do it decently and correctly... but in the first handout our teacher gave for that class, he said that 'fulfilling the requirements will result in a satisfactory grade of a C'. A *C*! I can't get that in my master's program that I so valiantly left my life behind to pursue! ...Have I become a grade-grubber? Because I feel like for the next two years there will always be the pressure of doing just a little more on everything to make things that much better. But ya know, maybe that isn't the worst thing that could happen to me.

The brooklyn apartment quest is also moving along nicely. More soon. Now sleep. Ug.

oh, before i sleep: this picture (yes, photoshopped) is brilliant and horrible. but mostly brilliant.

'night


*my 2-year old trusty ibook developed a bit of a problem- the backlight for the screen goes off if the screen is open to the wrong angle, which makes working on it very awkward. being the overzealous geek that i am, i figured out what the problem was- apparently it's very common- ordered the replacement part, and tried to open the ibook up. problem is that i stripped two of the screws on it and now it's mostly screwless and the screen still hasn't been fixed. i heard all i can really do now is use a dremel tool to remove the heads from the screws. i really really really covet a 15" powerbook but i also really really really don't have the money. but since when have i cared about that?