Music Practice Suggestions

Cleaning up the desk and found some notes from Lark Camp 2008? Thanks to Mark Bell for these thoughts about practicing. He is talking about practicing the doumbek but it applies to just about any mind/body activity that requires learning.

• in front of a mirror
• relax
• when you get tense stop and do something else
• repeat the same stroke continuously; e.g. fill a measure with the stoke and play 40 measures
• clear sound with tone (volume is least important)
• let gravity do the work
• minimal effort, be lazy

Go for sound clarity, quality and tone (with out volume). People will be able to hear what you are playing. People will want to listen to you (not tell you to go away.) People will ask you to play with them.

Mindful mindless eating

Thanksgiving 2010 and all the podcast are talking about food, over eating and turkeys. We cooked our turkey last weekend and finished it off last night, gooood.

The SciAm podcast turned me on to Dr. Brian Wansink's work, research into why and how we eat (watch the videos.)

His research shows that serving food at the table, family style, boosts overeating, while folks who fill their plates at the stove eat less.

He has developed a bunch of products to aid in mindful mindless eating, www.mindlessproducts.com. Smaller sizes and nicer presentation.

I've reserved a copy of his book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think from the library and will be listening to the abridge audio version as well.

Title Fight

Title Fight by Matt "Mad Dog" Wallace and Scott "The FDO" Sigler is one exciting ride. Mixed martial arts / gladiator / boxing / honorable warrior / Samaria audio novella.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys "guy's night out", grip you crouch in sympathy, want to look away pussy-boy fiction.

[Click to view poster.]

The book is much better than this video promo. Set in the Sigler universe timeline between the "The Rookie" and "The Starter" one does not need to have ready any other Sigler story to understand this fight genre tough guy story.

Download it from PodioBooks.com today.

Changing Education Paradigms

You will want to watch this lecture/animation in HD in full screen mode.

Many people see this and say "When is someone going fix this?" I say do it yourself, change yourself, be the change you wish the see in the world.

How? If you need to ask or want some help my friend James Bach has a great book that you can use as a catalyst. I blogged about this subject after James published The Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar (website/videos). Read excerpts on Google Books. Here's a quote from Chapter 2.

A buccaneer-scholar is anyone whose love of learning is not muzzled, yoked, or shackled by any institution or authority; whose mind is driven to wander and find its own voice and place in the world.

Test Case Design: Absence of evidence vs evidence of absence

Testing for the "absence of something" could be as simple as looking to see if that something is there. However, just because you do not see/find something doesn't mean that it is not there. Furthermore, just because it is not there does not mean that the proceedure to remove something, or prevent something from being there, is working.

Test Case Design

I just got burned by a test case that gave a false positive when it was executed. The verification step was to look for the existance of a secret string in the post-processed log files. I looked in the post-processed logs and and didn't find any evidence of the string thus the test passed.

But, there was a defect and not all log files were instrumented correctly so in a few cases the secret strings were not actually get stripped out of the post-processed logs.

A better test design would be to locate examples of each type of secret string in the raw log files. Then verify that each of these were stripped out by the post-processing. In other words, prove that there is something to be removed before believing that it was removed (and not just missing in the first place.)

Important Documents 4 when UR ! Dead, yet

There are five legal documents that will make a difficult situation manageable when you are not dead yet but your loved ones might be better off if you were.

1. Power of Attorney (POA)
2. Health Care Proxy
3. Living Will
4. Last Will and Testament
5. HIPAA Release

If you have all of these documents up to day in a safe place and copies in an accessible place then relax and smile, you are a very very good and considerate ancestor. But if you haven't gotten around to this yet shame on you.

When I told my mother I was moving out after high school she sent me to a lawyer and an insurance agent. Thus I have had a Last Will and Testament and a life insurance policy to cover my burial ever since I was 19, I love you mama. These other docs are mostly TBD. Please ask me if I have completed this task as a gentle reminder that I really do want to check that off my list of things to do before I die. (Note to self, create a list of things to do before I die. [sic])

See Money Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for a Richer Life podcast #195 for a 10 minute lecture on this subject.