Ultimate Keychain, redux

So I've had this idea brewing in the back of my mind since last year. I want to make the ultimate keychain. I usually keep my keys in my pocket, but especcially now that I ride my bike and use my pockets more and even use my keys more (kumm and library card) I want to get back to the planning of this thing.
Essentials:
KUMM key
House Key (morris)
House key (st. paul)
Car Key
Library card thing

That sums up what I "need". But this ain't no bare essentials keychain.

Additives:
4 or 8 GB flash drive
2 or 4 GB flash with bootable linux
bottle opener
carabiner for attaching to belt loops
Mp3 player (small)

i know what your thinking. how fucking sweet is that. but in all seriousness, i don't need a mp3 player, and might be able to consolidate the two flash drives into one 8gB that can be bootable or just storage, I mean it's 8 goddamn gigabytes, it should be able to do that.

Starting process is to get a carabiner, since I lack one. then I can start using it on my belt loops and look super trendy. I hate when practical things become trendy and hip so I feel like a dick when I do it out of convenience. I'm a motive anti conformist.

Anyways, I looked at salvation army and they didn't have any I could find, but I'm going there again tomorrow to get shirts for 1.50 and to try and find shelving for kumm. So I'll look again. Quick side note about the shirts: they're usually $3 but on weds its half off things above $1 so they're #1.5. I'm going to get a few and test stencils on them, I want to try out multiple stencils to make one cool design. And add the gangster penguin and hello blacksmith logo as well,just cause they're so awesome. But I've had some ideas for simple stencils.

choo! choo! Back on track.
If anyone reading this has any more amazing ideas for a key chain, let me know. I'm trying to keep it compact and practical, whilst being an outstanding achievement of human engineering, so work with that in mind.

While my guitar gentley weeps (acid)

Today I was writing lyrics in class, I came up with one "good" set of lines:
Our freedom, our privacy, we don't want to feel watched when we goto sleep.
Our vote, our right to see, our voice counts in this police state of need.

And I realized, that's a rap line. At least the way I say it in my head. I think I have been listening to so much doomtree that I write for hip hop beats and spoken word feel. I like that, but that's not me. I like catchy guitar riffs and cheesy alliteration. I like puns and fist pumping. I like quick sudden silence, followed by a release of anticipated tension. But how do I write for that?
That's my goal. It's like no music week, but for a genre. I'm not going to listen to hip hop. I have enough new music that I will be alright, and I realize that I don't listen to TPC enough. Like, crusades is amazing and I need to hear that like once a day. That alone might cure me.

But that's lyrics. I do love P.O.S.'s bass lines and guitar riffs. I would love to write stuff like that, and so I plan on it. I've talked with cdub about it and he would totally do spoken word over some sweet bass lines. So, I plan on doing that too. Cause this summer we will do some acoustic things around and I would lay the line and he could do his stuff. That would be so cool.
Main goal for guitar/bass is to get better. i ordered a new set of strings, three actually, and as soon as they get here, I'm planning on pracicing an hour a day. I think that if I practice scales twice for 15 minutes a day and do some writing/jamming the rest of the time, I'll see improvement in at least a month. And then I can feel good when I get a telecaster and take lessons again.

Just a place for notes

Aside from being a blog, this is also a place for my mental notes, so this will mostly be ideas and shit about music directing. My dad always writes things down, he does is in sloppy handwriting, and I asked him once why he doesn't write neater. He replied that it doesn't matter if he can read it or not, the simple fact that he wrote it down will help commit it to memory and if he sees it, he can remember the memory of writing it and all that it was about.

Anyways:
So today I got over 10 cds in the mail, yay for weekend build up. But I need to start pumping these reviews out or something, it is my job. So I need a way to do it, so far I have a 5 cd changer that I was swapping cds out every once in a while. that way I could get 5 cds in a row without getting up. But that means that it;s the whole cd playing and I'm probably not paying attention. I can also take the boatload of cds to a place with my lappy and listen to one, review it, and do it like that. Or I could try and rip every cd and listen where ever i am with my laptop. I dunno which I want to do. But since Im in greta's room with a pile of cds next to me i guess i'll start ripping them. That way I'll get about 15 cds a week. if each cd takes 7 minutes to copy, thats 105min, an hour and 45 minutes of straight copying Cds. Holy fishsticks. If each Cd is 60 Mb, then thats 900Mbs a week. A gig of music a week.

Tabber

Okay, so, I've had this idea for a long time and never really put full effort into it. But now that I'm in a class re-learning Java, I feel like I might be able to tackle it. The idea is to create a program that can download guitar tabs off the internet, from sites like ultimate-guitar, and store them in an easy to read format on your computer. The inspiration came origanlly from wanting a crapton of tabs on a flash drive so you can always have songs if you forget chords or words. More inspiration came from wanting a way to display tabs on my iPod using the notes function. The recent inspiration has been the lack of internet at my house. So, that's the basic idea. I started planning the project, but I kind of just wanted to get programming, so I figured I would write this and get some ideas down.

I want to get a way to get tabs downloaded off the internet, which come as htm files, to a plain text file with just the tabs. I've looked at this before and have found that there are lines of html code that indicate the beginning and end of the author's text. Basically run the method with the .htm file's name and it outputs a .txt of just the tab.
I was trying to figure out ultimate-guitar's method for saving tabs and found that their basically like this: http://...guitar.com/tabs/f/fugazi/blueprint_tab.htm. In theory, I could download all of Fugazi's tabs in one go if I could read the tab names from the tabs/fugazi_tabs.htm file. But this lead me to thinking that I might be able to create a search method for finding tabs through the program and not manually copying web addresses.

More on this later. I want to write some code.

I lost my calc sylabus and I already bought the coffee here

I am a primary source of my own life, right? We were talking about blogs in my seminar class today and we covered if blogs are usually secondary sources or what. If it's a true log of your life, then yes, it is a primary source. It has it's limits because there is usually bias in everyone's view of their own life. I want things to go one way so my opinion on the matter is going to favor that.
For me, I feel detached enough from everything that sometimes I feel like I am dreaming and don't believe what's happening or has happened. Good times can seem too good to be true and so I have to remind myself that they actually happened. I also have a hard time remembering things. It's like there is a limit on my memory and it is keeping me from achiveing something. It is like my own personal barrier from being better or smarter. I find it doesn't bother me as long as I don't spend too much time on the subject. I wish I had a better memory, but I don't and that's that. I can't tell if I'm ignorant or just actually proud of accepting myself for who I am. What's the difference. It can be easy to see your own limits and hard to have the strength to expand them and make yourself better. I find that it might take too much time and dedication. My Dad is a huge fan of neuro linguistic programming, or NLP. Tony Robbins is a guy who took NLP to a mass market to help people and make some money. I don't doubt that he can help people with their goals and motivations and behavioral changes, but I don't think that sitting in a room listening to him talk is what will do it. My Dad has helped me see just how much power the mind has over the body, but it takes patience, dedication, and faith. I don't think at this point in my life I could change anything too much. And what would I change. In role playing games I have a hard time choosing what skills to level up in. It's like I'm choosing my future and if I mess up, I'm screwed.
If someone gave you the chance to level up one "skill", what would you choose. You could devote it to your memory, your pain tolerance, your focusing skills, your speed, your knowledge of one area, or even how you present yourself. That is no easy choice, and I don't think I've found my largest weakness yet. I know I have weaknesses, at least I think I know what some of them are. I feel detached from things, I have a poor memory, I don't know exactly what I want to do with my life, and I am almost too content. What bothers me most? I dunno. They all have downsides, but none are too bad in my opinion.

Alls I knows is that I'm happy. I am really happy right now. And that's what matters for me. : )

Electronics projects

So I might start a different blog for my projects, but I needed to get a list down somewhere, so:
Bike with battery, LED lights, odometer, and speedometer.
Shower radio with MP3 player in it that is waterproofed
Cd changer stereo with LED deisplay to show artist, album name and track name and other info
Wireless speakers for my room.

edit:
killswitch in c-dubs axe

To the one guy that reads this blog

So, what do I do as a Music Director? My main job is to choose the music that goes into the studio for DJs to play. This is in 3 stages. The first is getting the music, which I get lots of regularly in the mail from distributors. I can also request music from bands or labels if there is belief that it would do well on KUMM and would get airtime. The second step is reviewing the music. This is the most tedious task, I listen to 'almost' every CD that I get. I try out different parts of songs and sample most songs to get a feel of what style/genre the band is and if it is any good. If it's no good, then it goes into a bin that we sell for like a quarter a CD. If I like the sound and think it will do well, I listen to each track and write down recommended tracks, what songs have swear words in them, and what some similar bands are. Then the final step is it going into the studio with the other CD's from that week. Usually it's about 10-15 new CDs a week.
Another main responsibility of mine is to track the plays of the Cd's, I do this by having each track played recorded in a excel spreadsheet, each show has it's own spreadsheet. i combine all these files and then sort and count how many plays each Cd gets. I then sort by number of plays and report the weeks activity on the College Music Journal, CMJ. These charts show distributors what kind of music we play and so they can judge what music to send us in the future.
All in all, it is a sweet job. I get to hear a lot of music, some of which is really good.