I've been repeatedly frustrated by weakness in my fourth and fifth fingers on both of my hands, for piano as well as guitar. I came up with this exercise yesterday to work on exactly that symmetrically in a scalar context. Foolishly, I didn't just take out Hanon to see what he had to say on the subject, but I'm fairly confident that my writing in 23/16 time protects me from having blatantly ripped him off. That said, it's basically a symmetrical Hanon exercise in an asymmetric meter. Someone might find it useful.

Computers are changing.

This is not new. It's been a literal constant since the beginning of computers. What prompts me to write this is that one particular aspect of personal computing, one that has been an integral part of it for as long as I've been alive, is soon to be ushered into the shadows. With the advent of iOS, Lion, and now the iCloud, Apple seems posed to bring us to a new era of computing, where the machines can actually be understood by the average consumer, and where those of us who are particularly knowledgeable in the field become of less and less value. (continues on next...)

Aha, content! Posted under Transcriptions now are two jazz solos I transcribed at the Crane School of Music a few years ago. Realizing the need for some level of copyright declaration (also for fun), I came up with a site name to "publish" under. "Cardinal Neuron" as a name should be interpreted as "Primary Brain Cell;" though the ease of translation to "Bird Brain" is not entirely unintentional. After all, those first two transcriptions involve guys named Fowler and Chick.

After a few-years-long hiatus of not having any legit Internet presence outside of Facebook (and largely due to a remarkable Super Bowl-related promo from the wonderful people at DreamHost), I recently decided I would reintroduce myself to the world wide web for the dual purposes of professional development and sharing things I create with the world. The former, because it's just generally not a bad idea; the latter, because when I spend 10+ hours on a project, I'm probably not the only person in the world who'd find it interesting. Sharing is nice.

For now it's going to be kind of desolate, but hopefully before long I'll have some interesting content published.