It was cold and rainy (which means it was wet and cloudy, too! Sorry, inside joke with my dad...) today and all I've gotta say is it's about freakin' time! It's been extraordinarily warm around here recently, especially for this time of year. We even cut short a marketing class because it was so warm in the classroom that no one could concentrate. I was about ready to tell my audio teacher that I was gonna desert Maine and go down to Full Sail (an audio school down in Florida) where it would be cooler. But hopefully the government will put the weather experiments to rest and the temperature will stay in a more seasonable range.

Now my computer won't even download Biko. I thought I might be able to trick him by downloading it instead of ripping it, but he's not even falling for that. They've gotta stop making computers with minds of their own. Or at least without musical preferences. Sheesh.

Not much to tell about history. We talked some more about wars and it was mentioned that our take-home-essay part of the midterm will be given out later this week and will be due roughly two weeks from then, at which point we'll have the in-class portion of the midterm. Shouldn't be too hard.

Audio was, as usual, far more interesting. First found out that I did, in fact, ace that quiz that I thought I aced, which tells me that studying for three hours really is worth it. Next we found out that we won't be having class this Friday because of a power beyond my audio teacher's control (and I got the feeling, though he didn't specifically say it, that that "power" was his wife). He apologized for it, but I think I was the only one who was actually disappointed. Although, in a way I'm kinda glad because I'm leaving to go camping with my parents on Friday and not having audio class means that I can leave earlier and get there before 7 or 8 pm. Which is a good thing. So I can forgive him this once, but if he does it again I might have to... umm... give myself a quiz and analyze lyrics by myself. Wait... I do the second half of that anyway. Oh well.

Anyway, after that information we listened to our mixes. Then we got to witness first hand what it's like to use pink noise to EQ a set of speakers to give as close as possible to a flat frequency response. It was all set up to do that already, but someone had messed with the graphic EQ which then had to be re-set. (Upon being asked if he had any suspects for the crime, my audio teacher replied that he did but couldn't tell us where he hid the bodies.) Pink noise is a rather annoying sound that is remarkably akin to static. After that, we got to "hear" a sine wave at 15 Hertz ("hear" in quotations because 15 Hz is actually below our hearing range and what you actually hear is the sound being aliased back at a higher, audible frequency). Then we heard a sine wave at 20 Hz (the lowest we can hear) and 20,000 Hz (the highest). And after that we got our assignment, which is to take a different song (we've mixed the same song for the past couple weeks) and do another mix-down, this time using external effects processors, since so far we've only used the internal ones.

And since I've run out of things to say, I'm gonna go off on something completely irrelevant. I just got an email from my dad with a bunch of trivia facts in it and some of them begged to be commented on so I thought I'd comment on them:

Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.
Makes you wonder why there aren't more female audio engineers. We should rule the mixing console! Maybe that's something to put on a resume: "Special Qualifications: I can hear better than you because I am a woman."

It is impossible to lick your elbow.
I think something more worth wondering about here is, who in their right mind would try to lick their elbow in the first place? Talk about trivia. I find it more amazing that someone actually thought to try to lick their elbow than the fact that it can't be done.

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
What nutjob took the time to figure that one out? At least it makes more sense than the whole elbow licking thing, but seriously, people... I want the kind of free time that these people have on their hands. And I think they can afford to give some of it to me because they obviuosly have too much.

"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
Actually, that's not true. See, a complete sentence requires two things: a subject and a verb. By that definition it would appear that that statement is correct. However, there is an exception. When you use an imperative verb, such as "Go", the subject, "You", is understood and therefore not necessary. Ergo, "Go." is a complete sentence, technically speaking, and last time I checked was considered such. And "Go." is shorter, by a character and a space, than "I am." So there.