Basically it’s a normal digital stage piano, fitted into a specially designed portable foldable stand which looks like an ordinary grand piano. What’s funny (to me) also is its foldable legs design is somewhat similar to how my mini grand piano music box folds its legs. The folded piano part is light, and can fit into a car (wagon). It even has wheels for easy moving.

   

And just like what I have already thought about, for a practical piano keyboard it needs to be capable to do weighted notes. This company reckons it’s technically possible. My feeling is it might have to somehow determine the speed of the movement? Or possibly the volume of the sound touching the table?

I’ll definitely be interested when they have the 88-key weighted notes version ready…

Regardless of the critics on the book and how people not being happy about what David might have written and described, I enjoy it very much. It’s almost like I’ve been visiting Horowitz myself when I’m reading it. Especially when there are things mentioned which I have actually watched or heard, such as the concert in Moscow, and the Last Romantic. I truly feel the presence of Horowitz within all the words in the book.

At the same time, it was a great thing to fill my brain everyday with music and piano materials. In the morning I found out what Scriabin and Chopin were like in those days. Later on I learnt about how Horowitz picked his cadenza for his Mozert concerto No. 23 in A Major. And then read about how aristocratic Rachmaninoff is and the the difficult time he had.

The conversations between Horowitz and David are the kind of conversations that I lack these days. I remember I have done similar things with my last piano teacher, Claudia. Despite the fact that her musical and piano knowledge is at a much higher level than mine, we do have the same level of passion towards the piano. We could talk about and share a lot of things we know, all the time. Those were really great times I had.

I also did feel sympathy for David in a lot of ways. It’s certainly not easy to accompany with someone for a long time. And anyone could imagine it would even be harder with the Horowitzes. And I have to say I appreciate this book and David for sharing his experience with the maestro of the piano.

Next, I guess I’ll get more books on piano, and I’m sure I’d enjoy as much.

And so again I took a lot of photos around the Opera House, both in and out this time. They are here and here.

Now I’ve finally manage to put some new piano wallpapers up in my wallpaper piano section. Feel free to use them, hack them, make them better, whatever.

Also, I’ve added my piano and my playing and so now you can listen to my playing. I’m not saying I played very well. I just want to share them to everyone who likes piano and music.

Project deadlines at work as usual. It was still pretty good time though. And I got 18 cans of Lipton tea for the X’mas kringle thing. And they’re all gone already!

I’ve moved again. Well just the next road down. The move was sort of quick and easy without any significant drama. (And of course, we hired removal people to do it this time. I have to say they’ve done a pretty good job.)

So, just what can you do with an ipaq running Linux? Well, while I was packing all my stuff including computers, I managed to get bpalogin (a Telstra Bigpond cable login client) running on my ipaq. It was easy. I compiled it for strongarm and that’s it. Another thumbs-up for Linux and open source software. So with all my main computers packed and unplgged, I was still able to get online. I took a picture too :P

Click it for larger version

Coding… hadn’t really got time to do much.

I got at least 5 different patches from people all around the world for the gtk2/gkrellm2 port for bfm. I have to apologize for not doing anything with bfm at the moment. Hopefully in a few months time I will be putting together another release.

I was trying to get some sort of chinese inputing on my ipaq and it wasn’t that easy. I hacked xkbd a bit and got to the point so it is showing the changjei keyboard layout. However at that time Xft and Freetype weren’t cooperative enough to work perfectly on the ipaq. I’m pushing this off a bit and will deal with it later :P

I was playing with Evas again and getting my head around with its smart object. I started off with this Evas Staff widget. Hopefully I can write some useful programs using this in the future.

Also, I’ve joined the GPE gang and started working on gpe-irc, an IRC client (obviously), together with a few other developers. I’m mainly dealing with the backend stuff.

Hmm I’ve written a quick perl script to do english-to-engrish translation. If you don’t know what engrish is, visit engrish.com.

Piano… My piano tutor has found a better job, but it’s in Kaohsiung. And so she went back to Taiwan which means I’m now teacher-less :( Still, I’m keeping up with my piano every now and then. I’ll probably look for another tutor a bit later.

A bit of credits here for my piano tutor. Claudia, she’s very good at piano and music. And I guess she understands me a lot too in terms of my knowledge of piano and music. She knows what I’m good at and weak in. She knows what, where and how I’ve been thru piano and music. And so she’s done a very good job in guiding and teaching me. Not to mention we both share the same level of enthusiasm and passion towards piano and music. We can basically just sit there and talk all about piano non-stop.

Yet I have to see if I can find another tutor like that :)

This weekend I actually spent more time on the piano and tv (for world cup) than on my computer. Amazing isn’t it. :P