Tag: Jack Swift

End of August

Finally, it’s getting colder out at night.  A month ago I needed to have the AC on in order to sleep – it’s much easier for me to when it’s colder out.  Now it’s comfortable, and not too humid.

I guess I might as well throw out a few random things here.  First of all, for his entry in the Buffalo 48 Hour Film Project this year, my brother has won the award for best use of prop.  The prop is a head of cabbage, and the genre is mockumentary.  (Check out their site for details.)  Four of the six currently active members of Jack Swift (myself included) recorded a five-song sound track on Saturday the 15th of August for the film (which was due the 16th).  Here is the film, titled Cabbage in Common:

It was quite a time.  They may have one in your area, check it out.

Here is an interesting picture I took a little while ago, but never uploaded.  It’s the moon in Endicott, NY.  I was having trouble sleeping, so I grabbed the camera:

Endicott Moon

So let’s see, what else…  Well, last fall I talked about my light flicker circuit, and how I would put up something resembling a schematic.  And then I never did.  Well I’ve been thinking about it again, and now I will try to get something going.  It’s a little convoluted, but it’s not a terribly complex thing and I think people would get a kick out of it.  I would also like to make a PCB layout for it too, and clean it up.  But schematic first.

Well, that’s it for now.  It’s the last day of August (right now there are 15 minutes left), and while we’ve still got a few weeks of summer left fall is on the horizon.  So until next time, whenever that is, have fun.

A Little Scripting

I just completed the 5th gig night in a row with Jack Swift.  If you haven’t, go check out the blog.  I haven’t posted there in a while, but the other guys have and there are pics.  Recordings too.

In the mean time I was playing with Perl a little this past week, and have something that may be of interest to some who would like a nice way to let a user know about how long a script has been slept.  I wanted to write a function that would basically provide a counter that updated every second (not hard to do at all), without actually creating a newline and thus adding to clutter in the terminal (that had me scratching my head).  So, after some Googline, here it is:

sub sleep_progress {
$|++;
my $i;
for ($i = 1; $i <= $_[0]; $i++){
print “Slept $i out of $_[0] seconds\r”;
sleep(1);
}
print “\n”;
}

So, then just call the function like this: sleep_progress(30), replacing 30 with some other number of seconds or a variable containin a number of seconds.  Whatever.  They key is the \r in the print function, which moves the cursor back to the beginning of the line, so that it can overwrite the line.  However, I couldn’t get this to work that way; nothing would display at all.  The $|++; part actually makes it work the way we want.

Touring

I haven’t mentioned this much here, as for a while I had this crazy notion of separating parts of my online life so as to not give away too many details.  Well, I’m not sure there’s much use in that anymore, as the benefits of mentioning some things are seeming to outweigh the negatives.  So, I will mention this now, and even post a permanent link on this site eventually.

I am a bass player, and as well as the school Jazz bands I am a member of a group called the Jack Swift Band.  We play a mixture of Folk, Rock, Jazz, and Blues, with a little bit of a lot of other things thrown in.  It’s fun, and we’ve been doing it for a few years.  Well, we’ve decided to go on tour in June, and I’ll post here with updates and pictures when I can.

Music is a great stress reliever for me, especially here at a tech school.  We’re starting to get a bit of a following, which is great.  If you’re in the Rochester NY area, check us out sometime.