Almost half gone
My summer -- the beginning of June to the end of Aug -- is almost half over. I haven't been as busy as I expected, but that's mostly laziness.
I've been practicing violin for a few minutes (less than 20) a day for the past week or two. Most days. I have to admit that I'm not a terribly serious voilinist... I suppose that might change if I played chamber music more often. Maybe I'll try to organize someting in Sep or Oct.
Running has been slow (no pun intended) -- training yourself how to run in a different way is hard. I'm not completely unskilled at changing physical habits; I've had to do this a few times when playing cello or viola. It just takes time, effort, and constant reminders.
The whole "running barefoot" thing only lasted one day, due to my sleep habits. I went to the track of my old high school and ran a few laps -- that was great. However, I'm not (yet) sufficiently non-self-conscious (or certain about the benefits of barefoot running) that I want to do it when anybody else is around. Running at 4am was fine, but after that first time, I was waking up later. Fortunately, I'll still be awake before sunrise for the next week, so hopefully I can go back to this.
Instead of being barefoot, I bought a pair of "aqua shoes". Judging from the name, they're supposed to used for... err, swimming? Walking in the ocean? I don't really know, but the latter sounds right. There's a relatively hard sole, presumably to protect your feet from any sharp rocks underwater. Anyway, the important thing is that they don't have much padding, so it's one step closer to being barefoot. I can still run on my heels while wearing them, but it's more jarring than heel-running. Making a bad habit painful is the best way to change it.
Other than that, I've been throwing myself into a lot of LilyPond work. Too much, in fact; I got a bit burned out. While I have classes or work, "spending all my free time on open source" works out quite well, since I don't have oodles of free time. I got quite a bit done, particularly towards having a new, much easier to understand, website. I'll post a link there in a few days; it'll be a great introduction for everybody who's heard me mention it, but who doesn't actually what I'm talking about.
So right now I'm catching up on other things, such as this blog. I wasted most of yesterday playing a really cheesy old RPG called "Dink Smallwood" (whose sense of humor is completely described by the name). It was open-sourced a few years ago, so I played the GNU FreeDink version.
Yes, it's an official GNU project. The mind boggles.
Anyway, it was nostalgic. I don't recommend playing it unless you spent way too much time playing games like that when you were 10 years old. And even given my nostalgia, I still found myself struggling to finish it. About halfway through, I started looking up material in walkthroughs, about the last 20% of the game was fairly boring.
In defence of the software project, one of the main features is the addition of a game editor, so people can make their own games. I didn't look at any of that user-created content. But really, there's nothing unique about that game in terms of the "final boredom" portion. I honestly can't think of any computer game that I was excited about finishing. Even the venerable Ultima games lose my interest around the 90-95% mark. I think it's the lack of novelty and challenge: by that point, you've seen everything the game can do, your character is powerful enough to defeat any enemy with ease, and you're pretty certain that you know how the story will play out.
Anyway, I think I'll limit myself to 4 hours of LilyPond work each day -- and yes, I'll time myself. But first I'll finished writing another 3-4 blog posts, unpacking from Singapore (I still have two NUS t-shirts in their plastic wrapping, one keychain ornament unaccounted for, and a book unsorted), looking at paperwork for moving continents again, and organizing my files in preparation for a switch to a new laptop.