Friday, 28th of June, 2002
They seem to have lifted the block on the FTP port here at Grace College - so I will be able to update my journal entries - for now. We'll see if it stays this way. I had to work around an interesting barrier in the MSIE 5.0 and it's interaction with the MS Proxy Server 3.0 (which they just installed here) - when I log in FTP, it doesn't take special characters in passwords - so those of us who are smart enough to have them in our accounts can't use them. The proxy server here at Grace College also isn't letting port 22 SSH connections go through either, it seems, so I can't change my password. Argh! Well at least this is something as opposed to nothing.
Thursday, 27th of June, 2002
Monday, 24th of June, 2002
Sunday, 23rd of June, 2002
As for the living conditions here, it's pretty nice. The guys stay on the top floor of the main building where all the meals are served and all the practice rooms and studios are. The tradeoff is that background music from the practice rooms percolate up to our rooms, but it is worth the convenience. The girls are in a separate building and have to walk to just about everywhere. Meals are catered, so it's not even dormitory-style, but rather, so far, it's not a bad buffet style meal. People here are from all over the world! A quick survey of the guys reveals people from the east coast to the west, Central America, Brazil, and Australia. There are probably people from all over among the girls too; there are four times as many of them as us.
Thursday, 20th of June, 2002
Tuesday, 18th of June, 2002
Monday, 17th of June, 2002
Sunday, 16th of June, 2002
Friday, 14th of June, 2002
Overall, it was a great trip. We got to see lots of cool stuff, play for some cool venues, and spend lots of time with each other. We were a small enough group that we were like one big happy family the whole time, playing Outburst together, sitting at one long table at restaurants, squeezing onto minibusses and elevators. It was great.
Thursday, 13th of June, 2002
With the rain, we decided to just take the day kind of easy, so we hung out and swam a little when the rain lifted a tad. We had dinner at Portner's in Old Town Alexandria, followed by a ghost tour. The tour was cool, showing lots of the history of the Old Town, and I found the old fountain with a canon in the middle of it to be quite interesting.
Back at the hotel, there was some more Catch Phrase playing before we retired to our rooms for the night.
Wednesday, 12th of June, 2002
The rest of the afternoon was devoted to try to see some of the Smithsonian Museums. During a short walk through the Sculpture Gardens, I found Flanagen's "Thinker on a Rock"! That's that weird black statue of a bunny that we have a replica of outside of Malincrockt Centre at Washington University in St. Louis! It was definitely a surprise.
Four of us made the trip down to the Air and Space Museum, and saw primiarily space things. I was blown away by all the original things they have, like the Command Module of Apollo 11, the Explorer I backup satellite, an unused working lunar lander, and Glenn's spacesuit. It was really cool, not like any other space musem. There wasn't much time to go through the Air part of the museum. The 3-story gift shop there was also insanely big.
The whole group met at the American History Museum, so we had a few minutes to spare there too, and so I got to see one cool exhibit of pianos. They had some old pianos, a weird 19th century one with 5 pedals, one producing a bassoon sound, another percussion. To represent the 21st century, Yamaha donated a crazy modern Disklavier with a transparent split-lid that raised to two different levels, and to help with playing a touchscreen LCD with a DVD drive to display sheet music. Woah.
After the Smithsonian museums started closing at 17:00, we went over the Kennedy Centre's Millenium Stage since it was featuring some youth string musicians. Two good quartets were playing, and the second one was totally awesome. They played Shostakovich's 8th Quartet, which was really interesting. I know Shostakovich is kinda known for sharing themes between pieces, and the blatant one was the 3rd movement, which repeated a lot of one of the themes of the 1st Cello Concerto. The first movement of the quartet sounded vaguely like the 5th Symphony's first movement.
After the concert, we went back the hotel, ordered pizza, and played Outburst and stuff.
Tuesday, 11th of June, 2002
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Thomas Jefferson
It bugged me at first that Jefferson implies that human morals will change over time ("new truths discovered") and become more "enlightened", and that laws should reflect changes in morality. Surely this isn't what Jefferson thought? Well another quote on the walls shows what he means:
"We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men."
So according to Jefferson, there are some truths that are "self evident" and cannot change, because our Creator has created us this way. So, I'm still not sure what Jefferson means when he says "new truths discovered". Maybe I'll come back to that thought later.
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We visited a lot of other memorials too, such as the FDR memorial with lots of cool waterfalls, and both the Vietnam and Korean War memorials.
After all that, we went to Boling Air Force Base to meet with the Air Force Strolling Strings. Unfortunately, they weren't able to hear us play as planned but we got to sit in on one of their rehearsals and ask them questions at the end. There were a lot of familiar faces from the Minneapolis regional strolling strings conference they hosted. During the rehearsal they played stuff we know like Hoe Down, and we got to hear their version of Memory, which is definitely cool since most of their music is arranged in-house. It was cool, it finally struck me again that the members of the Air Force Strolling Strings tend to have music degrees and their full-time job with the Air Force is music. Many seem to have also trained at the American Catholic University, which is at Washington, DC.
After the visit with the AF Strolling Strings, we went to the Holocaust Museum, since it opened late on summer Tuesdays and Thursdays. The architecture for the building was really cool, as they used lots of industrial-looking components to create an atmosphere similar to that of concentration camps. It was quite a big museum, and very extensive, covering many aspects of the events before, during, and after the Holocaust.
We tried to catch an Air Force Band concert on the west side of the Capitol building, but we got there too late. We still had fun though, and we played silly things like frisbee and duck-duck-goose on the Capital lawn. After we had enough of that we rode the Metro back to the hotel.
Monday, 10th of June, 2002
I set out with the Ladue Strolling Strings early this morning for a week-long tour of Washington, DC.
Upon arriving, we went to Arlington Cemetary first, and saw the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Kennedys' graves, and Iowa Jima. It was very meaningful to me to see and honour those who gave their lives to wars. Many selflessly gave their lives to war, mostly towards the good purpose of war, which is a temporary suffering endured to avoid a longer and worse hardship in the future.
After Arlington we checked into the hotel, swam in the pool, and had a rehearsal.
Thursday, 6th of June, 2002
Wednesday, 5th of June, 2002
Tuesday, 4th of June, 2002
Monday, 3rd of June, 2002
Sunday, 2nd of June, 2002
The Audi RS6 definitely went through obsessive design. First of all, like the Ferrari F60, it has 8-piston front brakes. Next, they put the battery in the back with the spare wheel to distribute weight. Reminds me of the theory that Porsche 911s come with two batteries for that same reason. The Tiptronic, as much as I hate it, is also obsessive. It actually senses lateral acceleration, so that it doesn't upshift when making hard corners, maintaining best possible traction around the corner. Winter wheels and tyres also come with the car, and the tyre pressure monitoring system works with them too. The Dynamic Ride Control is not your usual computerized control system. It's done by hydraulics and pressure chambers. Oil lines and valves between them constantly change the damping force on each wheel.