Jay’s Journal

“Scales” Now Posted

~ February 26th, 2008 ~

I’ve been working off and on for a few weeks on a little programming project (in Python) and it’s finally ready for public consumption. As many of my friends and anyone who reads the incredibly occasional postings on my site is aware, I’ve been studying guitar and music theory for several months. During that time I’ve found zillions of guitar and music websites with a wealth of music theory and fretboard knowledge out there. They vary in type and quality (and number of advertisements per square inch of screen!), but even with all the ones out there I felt like there still wasn’t one that had quite what I was looking for, so I created my own small program that for now is simply called “scales”.

The idea was twofold: 1) teach myself various bits of scale theory by implementing it as a program and therefore being forced to algorithmically understand the relationships between notes and scales. 2) Make something exceedingly simple that I could use as a learning and improvisation tool for understanding music and referencing theory material. To that end I created scales. The scales program is just a list of key signatures - selecting a key by clicking on it displays a whole table of information about that key:

C Major Scale Example Image

As you can see it’s extremely simply laid out, which was intentional since the purpose is to be able to use this as a quick reference. Consequently I also avoided things like tablature and chord charts, since those are available at many other sites and what I really wanted was a plain old table to show me the notes of the scales and allow quick reference with things like triads, pentatonics, and relative major/minor keys. Anyway, I hope you all find this useful, and if you do (or you have any further suggestions for improvement, please feel free to contact me!

-Jay

Busy Couple

~ January 3rd, 2008 ~

Somebody get these people a TV… PA Couple Has First Baby of the New Year - Again.

Best. Lawyer. Name. Ever.

~ December 1st, 2007 ~

It took a while before I was convinced this wasn’t a joke, but you have to admit, this has got to be the greatest lawyer name ever.

-Jay

FIXED: Mouse Lag on Thinkpad R31 with Ubuntu

~ November 18th, 2007 ~

Random technical note, but it was hard enough to find that I felt it worth posting to in the journal for other googlers to stumble across and hopefully save some time. A friend of mine has a relatively new Lenovo Thinkpad R61 and was having severe mouse lag under Ubuntu (actually, Kubuntu) Gutsy Gibbon with kernel 2.6.22-14. It took both of us some serious googling before I finally ran across a mailing list post discussing a similar problem with some Thinkpad R31 and other model laptops. According to the post I found, the problem is caused by a conflict within a multi-plexing controller, and it can be resolved by passing the “i8042.nomux=1″ option on the kernel line in grub’s menu.1st. Hopefully that saves a little time for someone else out there.

-Jay

BBC Reminds You No Matter How Bad Your Day Was…

~ October 26th, 2007 ~

Today’s installment of “no matter how bad your day was - it wasn’t this bad” brought to you by the BBC.