akrish

Last Wednesday, my dad approached me with an interesting proposition: he thought that we should take advantage of the weekend to hit the ski slopes. I had nothing better to do and I love skiing so I agreed with him and just like that, we went to the ski rental shop, got our blades and embarked on our long drive. The three of us (my friend Vivek came along too) left on Friday and headed to Sacramento where we stayed at our family friends house.

Saturday morning, we all woke up at 6am (earlier than I’ve woken up in a long time) and headed up to the mountains. As Vivek slept in the back of the car, my dad and I were eager to get to Northstar (our intended destination), but ran into a serious snow storm before the Donnor Pass. The weather worsened as we made our way up the mountain and we didn’t have snow chains, so we decided to stop at Boreal. We spent the day there, skiing and enjoying the seriously bi-polar weather (snowy and cold one minuted, and then bright and sunny the next), but the resort was pretty small and we ended up hitting almost all the runs that were our level.

Sunday, the weather was much better so we drove the extra couple of miles to Northstar and skied there for the day. It was a beautiful day, and so Northstar was ridiculously crowded, but we found one lift that oddly stayed empty throughout the day. We got some nice runs in and around 2:30 we shed our ski clothes and made the 4 hour journey back to the Bay.

I haven’t been skiing in a really long time (the lift ticket on my ski pants told me that the last time was February 12, 2006) and I’d forgotten how fun it was. Actually, I’ve started ski-blading (really short ski’s but I still consider it skiing) and I’m really excited to head back which is why I named this article “Tahoe Trip #1″; I hope there will be another one soon. Anyway, I wanted to put up some pictures from the trip, most were taken by my dad but he did a pretty good job.

chairlifts in the snow at Boreal (Day 1)

the sun and the terrain park at Boreal

beautiful weather at northstar looking at East Ridge Run

During this break, I’ve had a pretty hard to keeping myself occupied. I’ve been playing a lot of music and hanging out with my friends a lot, but I haven’t really been in touch with my nerdy programming self apart from this company that I’m working on. At the same time, my brother has been talking about this whole “viral” movement and we’ve been discussing strategies to get your product out to tons of users with minimal effort. One of the obvious solutions is to make a Facebook application which is immediately available to the however-many-million users there are on Facebook and is also easily spreadable via the invitation process. I decided that I too would jump on this all-too-techie bandwagon and make myself a Facebook application.

Over the summer, I was very against the whole Facebook platform movement (you can read about it here) and I’m still not really happy with a lot of things that I’ve heard about Facebook, but I made this app more for entertainment than for anything else. I’m also not very good at using client libraries and api’s and whatnot (I’m really impatient and don’t like to read things) so I figured this would give some practice at working with an api that I definitely needed for the success of my app.

I’ll cut to the chase. You should add this application. Now you may ask: what exactly is it? Well, it’s called Rumor Mill and essentially it’s a way for you to make up, or publicize rumors about your friends. It’ll also keep you up to date with all the latest rumors (real or not) about your friends and let you determine if the rumor is true or not. Once you make this judgment, it’ll show you what other people thought about the rumor. So, why should you add it? Well first of all, what’s the harm? It’s very unobtrusive; it takes no space on your profile page and it remains dormant until someone makes up a rumor about you, when you’ll get a mini-feed notification about aforementioned rumor. Secondly, it’s fun; who doesn’t enjoy make up random stories about your friends and seeing what other people think about them? I think that there’s tons of potential in this application and hope to see the subscriptions skyrocket in the near future.

In reality, I didn’t spend that much time making the application (Sunday and Monday) and I don’t really plan to spend much more fixing it or doing any other Facebook development. I kind of wanted to see what all the commotion about Facebook development was about. I thought I could see how popular it gets (you should add it! and use it!). I also want to switch hosting companies and this other company has a discount (it’s free) if you’re hosting a facebook app on your server.

Anyway that’s my little bit of publicity, add the Rumor Mill!

So I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I had extravagant plans for this holiday break, but I’ve never really made clear what exactly I wanted to do. Saying that break is about half way done, I figured I’m not too late to actually do this. Plus I think it’ll actually inspire me to get to work because I haven’t exactly been as productive as I’d like. Really quickly, what I wanted to do was, build a good back-end for this company that I’m starting with a couple of friends, play a lot of guitar, run a lot, and of course spend time with my high school friends and my family. Of these, I think the things I’ve only actually feel accomplished in the guitar-playing and the socializing aspects. Of course I’m really happy about this and I’m more enthusiastic about music than I think I’ve ever been before, but I do want to get some of my work done.

My brother and I are always talking about how we can never get any work done when we’re at home and I probably should have realized this and not planned so much for the break, but for some reason I thought I’d be a lot more motivated than I actually am. It’s strange because last year I used to come home to finish my problem sets and get all of my serious work done (I had a harder to working in the dorms than at home) but this year it’s exactly the opposite. I find that I’m really productive when I’m at school but am exactly the opposite at home. Granted this state of affairs is better; I probably shouldn’t find it hard to work when I’m at school right?  Be that as it may, I’d like to get a little bit of my work done and it just isn’t happening; there are way to many distractions at home.

Actually I find that I don’t really have the motivation to do anything when I’m home. I pretty much sit around, play guitar, and watch tv (often at the same time). I also sleep a LOT (like 12 hours a day… seriously). I haven’t really been running because I’m waking up too late. I always seem to have plans for lunch or something, and I pretty much wake up just to make it to lunch so there isn’t time to run before that. Running later in the day is almost impossible and I don’t even try anymore. So this break is definitely a break. I’ve completely unwound from the stressed and pressures of finals and will soon begin to prepare myself for another intense semester (probably by sleeping and playing guitar. Go figure).

The one thing I have been doing a lot (that I’m really happy about) is practicing clarinet. I really want to get into wind ensemble next year and that’s really motivating me to prepare my audition. I’m definitely noticing improvement, and incidentally so is my mom who often listens to me practice. I’ve got a couple more weeks to perfect this Concerto I’m working on and I’m pretty confident that I’ll have a successful audition.

So I have two more weeks before school starts and I’m hopeful that I’ll get into a groove with running, working and music now that most of my friends have gone back to school and my parents are back to work.

So I don’t know how many people actually read these music posts but music is a pretty big part of my life. I spend a lot of my time listening to music, playing music, thinking about music, etc. And I kind of want to keep track of what I’m interested in so maybe this is more for me than for any reader. Anyway, Lets move on…

I’ve kinda started to realize that my musical taste is all over the map. Since about middle school, I’ve been a pretty avid rock listener, but now I’m starting to enjoy a lot more instrumental music as well as the latest hits from the ever-so-catchy hip-hop  genre. Of course, I’m still sticking fast to my rock roots, but as I exhaust a lot of the general music there, I’m also experimenting with different sub-genres of rock and finding that I like a lot of them. I think the conclusion here is that I really like a lot of different kinds of music and really enjoy listening to whatever I can get my hands on.

What I listened to in December:

•  Acoustic Alchemy – These guys play some really soothing instrumental stuff that I listened to a lot when I was studying for finals. It also helps that guitar is the emphasis here and I’m learning how to play some of their songs.
• As I Lay Dying – An Ocean Between Us – name is pretty morbid yeah, music is pretty heavy but I really like their guitar riffs. They’re pretty technical and fast which I really like and many of their riffs are really fun to play. I like that they added more singing on this album in relation to the previous ones.
• Atreyu – Lead Sails Paper Anchor – A catchy album, but ultimately it doesn’t really have any flow and direction, I listened to it a bit earlier in the month but I don’t see myself coming back to this album very much. “The Curse” was much better in my opinion.
• Daphne Loves Derby – Good Night, Witness Light – Not as heavy as the previous two (shows some diversity in my tastes maybe) but really catchy and fun to listen too. I’ll probably continue to listen to this album for a couple of months.
• Lovehatehero – White Lies – I recently found out about these guys and from the couple of times that I’ve listened to this album they sound really good. They’re similar to other bands that I enjoy but have very interesting guitar parts that seem to be the focus of their songs.
• Counting Crows – I always enjoy listening to these guys. Actually watched a concert of theirs on tv with my brother which was pretty interesting. Also, my brother, his friends and I played one of the songs (“goodnight elisabeth”) one day, which was fun and has inspired me to play guitar with other people more.

I’ve been playing guitar a lot, but not so much playing songs. I think I’ve gotten to the phase where I can just play around on the guitar and sound decently good, so I’ve been doing that a lot. I also have been doing more technical exercises and playing out of a jazz book that I happen to have. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my electric guitar home for the break so I’ve just been playing a lot of acoustic. I miss my les paul though…

I mentioned this in my previous post, but I started playing my clarinet again. Unlike the last time I did this though, I’ve been diligent in practicing over break and am starting to sound decent again. Now I just need to prepare an audition and hopefully I’ll get into the wind ensemble at school.

until next time then…