The Blog of a Trumpet Player

From Comic Con:

http://www.bzpower.c...&...t&p=6989016

Arpy... please use your staff contacts to make a monocle-smile emote.

:monoclesmile:

Anybody here like Pat Metheny?

http://news.ninemsn.....aspx?id=665847

Also, 7 years here!

A little late, but...

Pants on tha ground!
Pants on tha ground!
Lookin like a fool with ya pants on the ground!
With tha gold in your mouth,
Hat turned sideways, pants hit the ground
Call yourself a cool cat, looking like a fool
Walkin, talkin,
With ya pants on the ground!

I'm been so bogged down with school and other activities that I've had no time to log on here. Now that everything's settling down I figured I'd check in...

I spent the last 5 weekends (from Thanksgiving to Christmas) playing with the Metrolink Toy Train band. Each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we rode the train to 3-5 different train stations throughout Southern California and played for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people. The songs we played were pretty generic, but fun nevertheless. I was the trumpet soloist on one piece. There's a recording of us on a video hosting site, but the sound quality is pretty bad. If you want to check it out, just Google "2009 Holiday Toy Express Montebello" and you'll find us.

And... Bionicle's ending. I think it's a good time for Lego to end it. I had lost interest in the storyline and the Stars sets are a nice way to cap the whole thing off. My sister got me the Gresh Star set for Christmas. I also got 2 jazz CDs, a sweater, and the book "Hidato." It's a book of number puzzles similar to sudoku. I've been playing a ton of Japanese math puzzles recently. They're pretty addicting. I've also been doing Nonograms.

Over Christmas break, I brought an old trombone home from my high school. I spent a day washing it out, cleaning it up, buying the cheapest trombone mouthpiece I could find, and now I'm learning trombone. I bought the mouthpiece for $18 at a local music store. It was one of those Asian rip-off mouthpieces with no brand name. I love Bach mouthpieces for my trumpet, but trombone Bach mouthpieces cost around $80, which was way out of my range. So I ended up buying a "Trombon/Euphomum Mouthpiece." Yes, they misspelled "trombone" AND "euphonium." Still, it works fine and is perfect for me as a beginning player.

My marching band didn't do a Christmas concert this year because we had to train a lot of new freshmen how to march, which took longer than normal, and by the time we had finished our marching season, we only had one week of school left and that wasn't enough time to learn Christmas music. So I got together a small ensemble of 7 other instrumentalists and 3 percussionists and we played "Sleigh Ride" at the choir's Christmas concert. It's an overplayed song, but it's fun. Hopefully I can get a recording of us posted on Facebook or some other site.

The other Christmas concert I did was the jazz band Christmas concert. It was probably the best concert I've given at my high school... there was so much energy in the room. At one point a bunch of people got up and just started dancing in the aisles. It was great.

And... there's a lot of other interesting stuff that I've been doing, and there are several funny stories relating to these concerts but I'm too lazy to type it all out now.

It is September 14, 2009. I am bored, Chopin's The Awakening is weighing heavily on my tired soul, along with unfinished homework for my slew of other AP classes. It is dark outside, and raining. And so, without further ado, or knowing if it is legal to do so, I officially declare myself the king of BZPower.com.

Thanks to everyone for the encouranging remarks about my last MOC. Incence'n'Peppermints recently left a nice comment in my profile and got me thinking about doing another one.  So here is the new MICRO one along with the original for comparison. It was pretty difficult to capture all the details while transferring the original design to micro-scale. But eventually I figured it out.

Click for the topic.

Click.

If anyone watched Conan O'Brien tonight... the people who were wearing the "COCO" shirts sitting in the front row are some of my friends. They were the ones who got the murderer's Neil Diamond jacket.

5 minutes later we had chopped onions.

This evening, I was at a Barnes & Noble. When I went to the cashier, he asked me if I had any special coupons. I told him I have my Borders Rewards card. He responded, with a straight face, "This isn't Borders."

What makes it even worse? I was buying the book "1001 Dumbest Things Ever Said."

As per Omi's suggestion, I am posting this here. It will be interesting to see who replies to this. Personally, I'm expecting more blog people to read/comment on it, but we'll see.

- - - - -

I have been thinking about this idea for some time. Please carefully read and consider this post.

Instead of locking them, the staff should leave some of the topics that would normally be closed in favor of a poll open to encourage discussion.

Before you get ahead of me, I am NOT suggesting that all topics in GD that have less than 10 possible answers should be left open. Topics like this should indeed be closed. Those kinds of topics that ask simple questions really are best as polls.

Polls are good because they give a visual representation of how the choices break down; it's easier to see how popular one option is compared to another. And polls automatically calculate the percentage of members that voted for each choice. That kind of data is useful when you're dealing with those types of straightforward questions.

However, topics such as this provide plenty of opportunity for meaningful discussion. Look at the variety of replies in the topic; they aren't yes or no answers, there are many different viewpoints that can't really be captured in a poll.

Sure, you can water any question down by phrasing it in a way that creates "Yes" or "No" answers, but that's not always the best choice.

If you look at the poll that was made for that topic, the discussion has been stifled and the number of replies have been reduced. That's because the "Voting Booth mentality" is to click on a topic, vote, and maybe write a short answer. Leaving topics that have discussion potential in GD open would encourage in-depth discussion.

Also, when there is an important topic or a particularly interesting question, it also attracts more attention in GD than it would in the Voting Booth.

Word to the GD staff: Please consider leaving a few potential poll-topics open to promote discussion: it doesn't hurt to leave one open now and then!

Word to the regular members: Is each topic with less than 10 theoretical answers always better as a poll? No. Please remember this and use your judgment decide whether the question really would be better in the form of a normal topic before suggesting that the topic starter PM a member on the poll-making team.

To summarize:

1. Some topics should be locked in favor of a poll.
2. HOWEVER, leaving some of these topics open encourages discussion. Remember, BZPower: BIONICLE News, Reference, and Discussion.

And before you tell me that all suggestions for the site should be PMed to Black Six - this isn't just a suggestion. I want to open it up for discussion and hear what other members have to say about it.

I look forward to hearing the views of both staff members and normal members.

Bring it to Glendale! Sounds like everyone who went had a great time... wish I could have been there. Maybe another year.

- - -

On a different note, a funny thing happened to my cousins and I today, I'll write about it when I've got more time.

I have a jar on my desk that I dump all my loose change into every day. Well, about once a year it gets too full, and I dump it out and roll the coins to take to the bank. Anyhow, as I was doing this today, I came across a buffalo nickel:



I asked my mom about it, and she said that they were rare when she was a kid, so it's unusual that I would find one. I'm not sure where it came from, but it's interesting to see that these are still in circulation.

I bet it's not worth much more than its face value, but it's still a cool thing to have.

Discuss.

How come when you go to a restaurant, the menu can't merely say, "cheeseburger?" They have to get wordy and fancy. I say, go along with them. When you order your food, use their language. Look your waiter in the eye and say, "I'll have the succulent, fresh-ground, government-inspected, choice, all-beef, six-ounce patty on your own award-winning sesame-seed bun, topped with a generous slice of Wisconsin's finest Grade-A cheddar cheese made from only premium milk and poured from large, galvanized steel cans, having originally been extracted from a big, fat, smelly champion blue-ribbon cow with a brain disease."

It's not about post count, it's about making your posts count toward your post count.

I have several relatives who travel a lot in their work. When they go to different countries, I sometimes request that they bring me back a coin or two. This is where I will list the different countries I have currency from:

Armenia
Australia
Austria
Bahamas
Belgium
Canada
Cayman Islands
Colombia
Croatia
Denmark
Egypt
Europe (Euros)
Fiji
France
Germany
Guatemala
Holland
Hong Kong
Indonesia
Israel
Italy
India
Japan
Jordan
Kenya
Luxembourg
Malaysia
Mexico
Nepal
New Caledonia
Philippines
Poland
Samoa
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Africa
Spain
Thailand
United Arab Emerits
USA
Vanuatu

-Sidorak-

Was uneventful for me. I am not a playa.

However, my sister brought home those little hearts with cute messages written on them that taste like chalk. (Incidentally, I discovered that they can actually be used as chalk in 5th grade.) They reminded me of the time my friend and I took a box of them, dumped all the hearts out, wrote nasty messages on all of them in red pen, put them all back in, and gave them to a girl we didn't like.

-Sidorak-

21. What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?

22. If you spin an oriental man in a circle 3 times, does he become disoriented?

23. Is there another word for synonym?

24. What if there were no hypothetical questions?

25. Is a vegetarian permitted to eat animal crackers?

26. Why is it called a "near miss" when two cars almost hit each other? A collision is a near miss!

27. Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone will clean them?

28. If the "black box" flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn't the whole airplane made out of that stuff?

29. Why is there an expiration date on sour cream?

30. If a parsley farmer is sued, can they garnish his wages?