Summer Projects

[asterroc]

My current list of Summer Projects. Enumerated for convenience, not priority.

1. Organize photos. My high school photography instructor told me the secret to good photography is to take many photos and only show the best ones. With the advent of digital photography I have perfected the former, but need to work on the latter. My goal is to take the best photos from my anonymyzed Flickr account and upload them into my personally identifiable account (for those of you who know my real name, that Flickr username is first initial last name, no spaces or punctuation).


2. Record singing - I have enjoyed singing since at least 5th grade, which makes it 20 years now. My singing voice is somewhat soft, but I have good relative pitch. I also play guitar though a bit crappily. My goal here is to record guitar and vocals for a few covers (Indigo Girls, Dar Williams, possibly Sarah McLachlan) and one or two of my own, using Garage Band. I will need to get something to plug in my guitar (it's got a jack) to a USB port (kelsin, got anything like this I could borrow, or that you could recommend I buy?). I am not adverse to collaborations.


3. Road trip to Philly - one of the two surviving Galileo telescopes is out of Italy for the first time ever and is on exhibit through Sept 7 at the Franklin Institute. Along with this I may visit nerdcamp.


4. Visit the crater photography exhibit at CLAMPART in NYC; open through July 6.


5. Learn programming


6. Inbox 0 - a lifestyle change in which I treat my email Inbox as a To-Do list, and remove everything I've completed, so that my Inbox stays perpetually close to 0 items.

More items may be added in the future, but generally 3-5 items is a good goal and I achieve 2-3 of them.

Edit: Added programming, I knew I was missing something.

Comments

Yay summer list!

[kelsin.livejournal.com]

A quick note about #5, try to learn Ruby first. Even if you don't have many things that you can do with it right off the bat, it is installed on Mac's (by default now I think) and is a gorgeous language for many reasons.

As far as number 2 there are MANY devices. You can plug right into the Mic port of the mac as well (small radio shack adapter will do the trick) and honestly Apple kind of expects many people to do that. If you're looking to upgrade from that you have tons of options. I personally use a Apogee Duet and love it, but it's very high cost. You can find tons of items in between free and $500 though:

http://pro-audio.musiciansfriend.com/product/Alesis-LineLink-Dual-14-inch-to-USB-Cable-Interface?sku=580882

http://pro-audio.musiciansfriend.com/product/MAudio-Fast-Track-USB-Computer-Recording-Interface?sku=703606

Ask questions any time, did a lot of research on audio interfaces when buying my Macbook and Duet recently.

If you ever want help recording or anything let me know. I'm always looking for recording projects. If you want to collaborate on song writing or a song I'll be happy to provide drums / guitars / vocals / bass etc. If you wanted to come up (or me come there) and record stuff into Logic with my Duet we can do that to. My setup is very portable now and I had some nice Shure SM-81 mics which are great for acoustic guitar. I have garage band and stuff so can easily add stuff to a project you create as well (I'm pretty sure I can even work on a song in Logic and send you back the compatible garage band file). Feel free to shoot me an email with song stuff anytime :) You can probably already tell that I'm blabbing cause I love this stuff.

Enjoy completing your list :) Best of luck!

Re: Yay summer list!

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

On #5, my goal is to learn programming for physics and astronomy. Because of this I am inclined to learn C++, Fortran (no clue what version it's in now), or IDL, because these are what astronomers use. jethereal is going to be working with me on this, and he's inclined towards C++. IDL I think I'd have to pay for unfortunately.

Some of the skills/tasks I want to learn are reading in and writing out tables and images (.fits files usually), procedural programming (if/then/for loops), calling programs that others have written to do math things like SVD and Runga-Kutta (sp?), GUIs so I can display an image and click on the stars and then do something with that input, and of course displaying graphs. I don't really know what "object-oriented programming" means so I have no clue if it'd be useful for these particular tasks.

I tend to learn well from lecture (videos most likely in this case) and okay from text. Got any links or books to recommend?

I'll definitely check those links for the guitar adapter thingit. I think I'm inclined to play around a bit first (like through mid-June) before seeing about collaborations - I'm more self-conscious than I should be about my voice. (I'm less self-conscious about my guitar playing than my voice, though I know rationally that my guitar skills are worse than my vocal skills!) I know nothing about drums or rhythm or any other instruments. I don't often write songs - it's so much easier when I'm down in the dumps, and I haven't been majorly down in years. :)

Re: Yay summer list!

[kelsin.livejournal.com]

Have fun :) I hope to not have to touch C++ again... ever :)