Paul Gilbert played for his Vibrato tour yesterday evening in Gothenburg and I was there :D
Best parts: Thomas Lang's drum solo, Emi's crazy keyboard solos and their cover of Man on the Silver Mountain (not counting Paul just being there, of course)!
My guitar saw quite some action too after that show...
Update(2013-04-24): Just wanted to add: WHOOOO, I saw Paul Gilbert live! \m/ >_< \m/
So Easter passed by and gave me the flu for the first time in 14 years. It's been a long time since my mom forced me to stay in bed...
I bought a Yamaha THR10 recently and that thing has had me playing a lot more than before. Really nice solid state amp for clean-ish sounds, but it's a bit bright and the gain channels are too harsh. Still, better than the 5W tube amp + Zoom g2.1u combo I used before.
I was thinking a lot about the SG clone, but my brother convinced me to buy proper pedals instead. Some of the best advice I have ever been given. I got myself a Strymon El Capistan tape delay simulator, Greenhouse Stonefish chrorus and Hartman Germanium Fuzz. Bit expensive boutique pedals for being my first pedals ever, but they sound amazing. A bit of delay and soft chorus and I can paint soft dreamy landscapes and space scenes like never before, and the Fuzz when I need it to go dirty and grimy. Check youtube for reviews and examples, all I can say is I couldn't be happier. I'm currently looking at the Maxon 9-series for an overdrive pedal and the Barber Tone Press for compression and I hope that should be it for some time, after all I plug it all into a THR :p
I'm doing ok these days, seems like my heart has stopped leaking blood and feelings and I can concentrate on programming and playing the guitar with full passion again. I'm attributing my increased will to be happy to my guitar pedals, they did wonders. So I should get the other two really soon :D
Went to a concert yesterday, my friend's wife played the harmonium in a church, and there were some other musicians playing the church organ, singing and whatnot. I've been to a few of her "shows", but I'm still a bit mesmerized seeing a world so different from my own.
Helped a friend from France with the horror build-story that is Geant4... Going home from work at 20.40, like a Ph.D. student in physics should :p
Update(2013-04-21): Got a Maxon OD9 and Barber Tone Press in the end, good stuff. Maxon sure has a bunch of od/ds-pedals, but the dark OD9 seemed like a good fit to the bright THR10, and the 808 was a tad too tame. The Tone Press seems like a really lovely compressor, I really don't know much about them, but the output is really soft and not as "plonky" as some cheaper compressors are. Those two pedals together made for some fun shredding. My setup is very noisy atm, I need to sort that out before I record anything (I know, I'm a perfectionist, but it _is_ gonna happen).
Oh right, gonna watch Paul Gilbert live at Sticky Fingers tonight! :D Camera ready...
Writing the thesis and finishing off the astrophysics course.
Programming every now and then, terrain texturing now based on Wang-like corner tiles, currently updating the FRM code for models.
Got interested in Gibson SG:s again, pretty little things. Too bad they're so inexpensive, I may waste money on one really soon.
And Fender now has American Standard Strats with lipsticks. *sigh*
Yamaha THR amps look like fun.
Trying to improvise the "solo bits" on "Mary had a little lamb" by SRV, great fun.
Still doing some Japanese, not trivial all on my own, but I'm progressing, slowly.
Not far from mastering Mill's mess with three balls.
I love the IT crowd. Moss would be an amazing friend, Sheldon's an ass.
Been looking at porting the iwlwifi 2230 driver to FreeBSD, wanna use that so bad (so I can wear the BSD horns, lookup at the FreeBSD mall. Btw that is a joke.).
Razer Abyssus is brilliant, light-weight and simple, especially on the Artisan Shiden mid. I thought the edges would hurt, but they hardly do. Lack of side-buttons is not a problem, people who give negative reviews for that on this mouse are idiots (like giving the best orange jam in the world a bad review because it's a bit sweet for potatoes). Tried a bit of CS 1.6 to try it out for real, first time for ages, popped a bunch more headshots than I did back in the day. So a good review from me on that pointer setup.
I feel like I'm flat-lining. It's the only way to keep myself in working condition I guess, 'cause I've figured my issues came to stay, forever.
In any case, I made an entry for March \../ >_< \../
Writing, doing coursework and not much else, must mean I'm close to having my fifth academic degree. In Sweden we have Bachelor, Master, Civilingenjör, Licentiat and Doctor. Working slowly on upgrading the light organ artwork in the Chalmers physics building, need to look up some atmospheric muon shower simulations before I go much further with that. Started with a course in interstellar matter, I had forgotten how amazing space is. Too big for me though, I prefer to dream about it. And the Beta-NMR has been moved out of the way for the HIE-ISOLDE upgrade.
I finally bought protection and a new (expensive!) saddle for my bike, ready to trek the Swedish freeride routes. Can't wait to take it out for a new spin. Should've bought a new saddle for the Juras.
Tuned down my acoustic for some Busted Bicycle and playing around with Foggy Mountain Breakdown on the NCST.
Other than that I have surprisingly little to say. Well, I'm learning a little Japanese almost every day.
Let's hope February will be a tad bit more spectacular, eh?
In some parts of the world, some people are already getting hammered and doing stupid things they'll regret in a couple of hours, while I'm trying to work out a good way to composite my unique terrain textures. And thinking I should probably do something else, other than waiting for my parents to start with dinner so I can have a look and learn for once how they do those delicious oven baked lobsters. Biological diversity.
Anyway, it's been a weird year in many ways, mainly it's been pretty bloody horrible to me. Some things were bound to happen at some point in my life anyway, good to know how badly they can cut you.
Still, besides all the depression and painful self-revelations, I had a lot of good experiences. For example, I have my licentiate degree (halfway Ph.D. here in Sweden), I finally visited my good friend Jonathan in the US and I had a beautiful trip to Japan to meet my relatives and realize I MUST learn the language and, if I can, actually move there. I've also learnt that I have a decent initial impression on people, but I'm too scared of letting people in. I feel sorry for a few people because of that, and I feel really sorry for one person in particular...
The world is a big place and I'm not sure where to go. And what to do there. That's the inevitable and wonderful thing with life I guess, one must accept that, use common sense and try to be happy. Can be bloody difficult, not a good idea for the resolutions.
Never forget, but never dwell, and aim your eyes at the horizon and smile with the sun in your face,
Happy 2013 everybody!
Been traveling about and been "unavailable" for 6 weekends in a row, it's getting ridiculous. I hope next year will be a bit calmer, but I'll be dying from coursework and writing my Ph.D. thesis instead.
The trip to Örebro was real nice, my friend and his wife there are really good people and I enjoyed the stay. I forced them up the "mushroom" water tower, a well-known landmark of Örebro.
I started my travel to Japan early morning on the 1st of December, and after various flight and bus trips, on the afternoon the next day I ended up in Matsue for EMIS 2012, the largest conference I've been to yet. I'm glad I didn't have to hold a presentation there, the lecture hall in Kunibiki-messe is enormous. The poster sessions were nice, I learnt about really exotic ways of polarizing the nuclear spin of things, but they were all at low energies. Lots of technical and overview talks were a nice change from the usual 50/50 theory/experiment conferences I normally attend.
In the evenings, my supervisors and I picked restaurants not on the distributed map of restaurants (we were in Japan, the people there are great and you should avoid the "easy" places), including a shabu-shabu+sukiyaki place and a super-small amazing sushi-place where the chef prepared the pieces right in front of us. There was also a trip to a lighthouse in Izumo and a big shrine, and an evening in the beautiful Vogel park with an amazing buffet and a Kabuki-show. After the conference, I took the train down south, with a panicked 8-min change from a regional train to Shinkanzen in Okoyama, to Hakata station in Fukuoka, where my uncle picked me up and we went to Iizuka where most of my Japanese relatives live. I haven't seen my Japanese relatives for 5 years and their English (and my Japanese) hadn't improved one bit. Immense communication troubles was worth seeing them again though, and since the first evening after my return, I've spent 1+ h every day studying Japanese. I have to learn to speak, listen, read and write, no matter what and if I can find work, I will move there. The food and the people feel so much more like home to me than anything else.
Writing this from the CERN hostel in Geneva, had my talk today on the tilted foils experiment from July. Had to make a 20 min talk fit into a 5 min slot, managed to cut it down to 15 min and make the listeners happy about a slightly saved coffee break.
Working on removing the texture flickering on the FoF terrain, texture-magnification case solved, need to implement FBOs nicely to solve the on-GPU texture-compositing case.
Digging the heavy pure nickel Pyramid strings I put on my guitar, but I'd love to try even thicker strings so that I can let it rip even harder.
And oh, apparently I've had strong social anxiety and a mild form of AS, of which the latter will be dropped and included in the whole range of autism. I've had these since I was a kid (~4-6 years old) which explains a whole lot of things. I'm not gonna change who I am though, I've lived with these conditions all my life and this is the person my family and friends know and appreciate, and I don't feel a need to become "one of the pack" anyway. I just hope it won't be a growing problem.
