It’s been wild ten days, but now I’m home for the summer. I’ve been in Portugal, actually, with the Lehigh University Choir, and we’ve been touring around Lisbon and the greater Lisbon area performing in various churches and palaces. Needless to say, it was an incredible experience! Although I didn’t write a journal like I did last time I went touring Europe in 2006, I did document the trip with over 1700 photos. Expect to see those photos appear sometime in the near future – or at least the good ones!

To my choirmates, awesome trip. We showed Portugal what good choral music sounds like! I hope the next tour is just as good, if not better. Now I think I’ll put my feet up and relax for the summer – at least until I get a job, finish up the new Lehigh Choir website, and fix up ZU and add some nice new content to the place. (Seriously, there’s cool stuff coming to ZU!)

Tah tah!

That about wraps it up for freshman year of college. Over the next two weeks I’ll be taking my final exams, and then it’s off to Portugal with the University Choir. I can’t believe summer came so fast! Of course, the Venti project is now entirely finished… it’s not going to become a real business (unless somebody would like to invest – I would love to keep the business going), and classes have ceased until the Fall semester.

That said, I’ll have time now to focus on cooler things, like bringing more features and events to Zelda Universe, as well as redesigning this damned blog!

It’s been a while since my last post, and boy have I been busy – finals rushing toward me, projects about, specifically for IBE Freshman Workshop. If you didn’t read the post below this, Venti is the name of the team I’m on. Myself and three other students have formed a mock company and created a aesthetic prototype of our product. Today, we are releasing a full poster of information about Venti – the culmination of all of our research. Please look at the poster! It’s one of the nicer projects I’ve done to date – I’ll be making a matching keynote for our group to present to an audience of mock investors on April 23rd.

The style is taken directly from the Venti website, enhanced and updated. The Venti website will be receiving a similar update with information and graphics from the poster, as well as a link to the poster. Make sure to check the Venti website soon for the update, because it’s going to be massive! This poster has provided excellent material to build off from – especially for our group’s presentation.

By the way, thank you everyone for sending me emails about Hide and Seek. Its just a huge pleasure to learn that so many collegiate groups are interested in using my transcription, and I encourage you all to learn it and record it!

In addition, to those of you emailing me about the Maple Story Soundtrack, I will be updating the tracks this weekend with new tags to get rid of and sort the unknown tracks. However, once I do this the soundtrack will no longer be updated – I’m through with that thing. I really should be focusing on updating my portfolio and redesigning this site (especially after seeing my friend Kyle Wynen‘s new blog).

He knows how to lighten the mood. My other teaches are interesting, but he’s downright funny. If only I knew his name. I should get on that.

“The two hardest courses you’ll ever take are Freshman English and Freshman Calculus. Freshman English because if you don’t right well, then people will make fun of you behind your back, and nobody wants that, you have to learn to be a good writer, know your grammar and all that.

“And Freshman Calculus, well, I had a student once who went off and got a job working for some big company, General Motors or General Electric, something like that. When they hire people, if the person got an A in Freshman Calculus, they let them name their salary. Great deal, right? Sounds pretty good!

“He named his George.”

Priceless, right? I love learning Calc from this guy, even if I don’t understand it all yet. More practice, more work, and I’ll have everything down. Exams aren’t far off – next week, in fact!

Keep going »

Calculus happened, as did so many other courses. Economics was for sure a bore, but we didn’t really do anything – so I suppose it has grounds to be a bore for now. Physics the same, though it seems I’m incredibly rusty and prone to getting questions incorrect as always. I’m sure I’ll get back into the swing of things, althogh I’m ashamed at some of the basic stuff I’m getting wrong. Perhaps it means I have a bad foundation. That makes this a good time to build up the foundation.

Calculus is about the infinitely small and large; thus my calculus professor saw fit to tell a story. In calculus, you can calculate the area of a three-dimensional solid with the use of integrals. You do this by chopping up the 3D solid into infinitely small “slices”.

“You can find the volume of a cube easy,” my professor said. “But what about irregular solids? Here, I’ll draw one.” He sticks his chalk on the board, and as he draws this curious shape, he speaks:

“So, this is a pretty irregular solid. Yes… a loaf of bread. Now, you sell bread by volume. So in order to sell bread, bakers used to dunk their loaves of bread into buckets of water and measure the water that was displaced. Naturally the bread got pretty soggy – that’s why European bread has such thick crust, to prevent it from getting soggy.

But then a man came along, by the name of Newton, and invented integral calculus. And what do we do to calculate the area of something? We chop it up into slices. And thus, sliced bread was invented.”

We all laughed.

I sit under the stars as I write this, comfortably in a chair beneath a tree, watching students pass me by in the sidewalk lights’ glow. There is a beautiful cobblestone walkway just ten feet away from me, and a magnificent engineering facility some two hundred feet behind, but you wouldn’t know it from looking, because it looks more like a castle. I suppose if Archimedes had to discover that the volume of a solid is equal to the amount of liquid it displaces, such a building would be the appropriate place to do so. I read here, I write here. I check out some of the many cute girls here (I’ve abandoned my quest to garner a girlfriend in one week, which is up tomorrow, in favor of exploring all of my options, to which there are many).

And still not a single sign of a party. I wonder where they all could be… because that would be how I’d meet someone, if I did. That, or look for a photography club. By the way, I’m working on a new short story… I’ll probably have it finished rather soon. Especially since my favorite month of the year is just around the corner.

Alright, so the first day of college was incredible – yes, it really was. I know I’m at home here at Lehigh. Everyone is nice, everyone seems to have the same goal in mind: to become a more intelligent person than you were when you arrived. And it seems like we’re already accomplishing that, but I’ll see how far it goes before some start breaking away from the fun and learning and run off to do less productive things. By the end of the day a lot of the students in my dorm seemed very interesting in running off to one of the many first-day parties off-campus to get drunk. Naturally, none of them had any connections in order to get off-campus, so their drinking fest seemed more like a childish dream than anything. And Lehigh is really cracking down on alcohol this year; they’re dreaming if they think they won’t get caught.

I do now have my schedule, though! Mty week isn’t as busy as I though – but I suspect there will be a lot of long-term assignments to take up my time. I never have to get up early, never earlier than 8am, which is a relief. Most of the time I don’t have to be awake until 9 or 10am, and there are hour breaks between my classes for lunch. Usually I’m out by 1pm, but Mondays and Fridays I have classes until 4pm due to my IBE Seminar and my Physics Lab courses.

There’s a LOT of enthusiasm here at a Lehigh, and I’m glad to be a part of it. Everyone’s really excited – not just in my dorm but all around. The choral department is especially friendly, and I know I’m going to fit right in as I did at Ridge. Dr. Sametz, or simply Doc (like we call possibly EVERY person on earth with their doctorate), is a wonderful man who I hope will fill Retz’s quite large shoes as a choral director. He was very impressed with my audition, and actually extended the audition to fuss around with me. There were four parts to the audition, but it seemed like he kind of just made stuff up as he wanted to. First, I sang the solo piece I brought – he played it INCREDIBLY fast… and INCREDIBLY slow at times. I was wondering where his sense of tempo was, and was hoping he didn’t think it was me being nervous and straying from the beats, because I was in no way nervous! After that, some range tests, after which his eyes lit up – he was pretty amazed at my range, which stemmed from the lower bass scales to the high Tenor I scales. I’d say I have a good three octave range, perhaps more.

Either way, he noticed that my higher notes were recently developed. After he asked how long ago I was able to sing high like that, I told him it was a development that began in the last year as I learned to control my voice better.

Then it was chord analysis. He played a chord of three notes, and asked me to identify the top note by singing it back. He Also asked me to sing the bottom note. But I transcribe music, so I’m really very adept at this skill of picking out notes from chords – he noticed, and started trying to mess with me. He played four-note chords. He played chords that didn’t make any harmonic sense – they sounded ridiculous. And when I got them all correct, he did something I don’t think he did for anyone else: Asked me to identify the middle note. Again, piece of cake. I did finally mess up on one by accidentally singing the bottom note, but I got the middle note a second later.

Sight reading was very easy. In fact, I was pretty sure I had even sang the piece before, but it could have been a similar classical piece. Either way, once it was all said and done he looked at me, laughed and smiled and said, “Yeah, you’re cool. You’re done here, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

And now I’m in the University Choir! (And soon the all-men’s Glee Club!) I’ll be off from now until Sunday at an alternate orientation – the Choral Retreat. It’s a choir boot camp… just like AMA. Woohoo!

After dark came the carnival, which I really only found fun because they had DDR. I swear, after yesterday I have legs of steel. I’m gonna be fit and skinny after my Lehigh adventure for sure. ;)