Random thoughts on a Friday afternoon...

In no particular order...

1. Contrary to popular opinion, the folks at the IRS really *are* a bunch of ill-mannered thugs who attempt to bluff taxpayers into bending over upon demand (nice try, a$$holes).

2. Auto insurance companies are pretty much in the same league as the IRS, except they use their incompetence as their modus operandi, figuring if they ignore/frustrate you long enough, you'll forget they haven't paid your claim.

3. Friday traffic sucks, especially headed eastbound from LA/Pasadena. And I have to play in Glendora tonight. :(

4. It's the time of year again when working dogs shed the heavy undercoat they've been cultivating all winter. I vacuumed yesterday, and the living room already looks like a raccoon exploded in it.

5. Students never read the syllabi and class schedules provided by their well-meaning-but-hopelessly-unrealistic professors each quarter. And while acceptance of this fundamental truth *should* save me a lot of gray hair and gnashing of teeth when I get the e-mails, it never seems to work out that way.

6. A flat indoor surface exerts a substantially stronger gravitational pull on dust particles than on any other object. Conversely, that same surface tends to repel objects containing high concentrations of sugar, alcohol, tomato sauce, or fragile glass.

Did I mention that Friday afternoon traffic sucks?

The calm before the storm...

This has been sort of a light week. Got through Monday-afternoon-hell, got through Tuesday morning, and got all the online assignments wrapped up by Wednesday afternoon. That leaves prep for next week, which I'll probably get going on tomorrow. I should also work ahead a bit, since the next three weeks are going to be packed. Next week: extended office hourse to work with students on term papers. The following two weeks: grading said term papers (12 pages times 110 students... I don't even want to think about it). After that, final exams and project grading. Maybe I'll be able to sleep again sometime in June...

One of the things I'm using the extra time for is to evaluate new strategic management simulation programs. The one I've been using is buggy and, well.... WAY outdated. So much so that I find myself coming up with ways to incorporate its obsolescence into assignments. Given that technology is a cornerstone of strategy, it's kind of embarrassing--but fortunately, I've been given the green light to adopt another if I choose. Yeah, it's a giant hassle to switch, but I'll live. The other thing I'm doing this week is practicing as much as I can. I probably won't have much time for it in the next couple of weeks, so I'm gonna make some hay while there are still weeds to cut. :-)

Speaking of time management, my iPod has turned out to be a valuable tool in that area, since it helps me be productive during the hour-long (each way) commute to work. Things I wouldn't otherwise do as well as I should--like keep up with news--are easier now since I just download the stuff as podcasts and take 'em on the road. With that in mind, here are a few more reviews/recommendations:

Manager Tools - This podcast by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne covers a lot of the things young managers probably wish they knew more about, but were afraid to ask. Great listening material for my survey class.

NPR: Car Talk - Finally, the entire show is available by podcast. Yeahh!

NBC Meet the Press - The entire show, in the form of a videocast. Great way to keep up with current events in idle moments.

Science Friday: Making Science Radioactive - Useful science news, some of which has to do with environment and policy. Good stuff.

BusinessWeek Global Outlook: Keeps me well-informed on, well... global business issues.

Center for Strategic and International Studies: Current events having to do with foreign affairs. Very provacative.

... and in the area of disappointments...

Despair.com Video Podcast - For some reason, the black humor that works well in the despair.com posters doesn't appear to translate well to video. Probably not worth the download time.

Geek Girl TV - Being one myself, I *really* tried to like this. But after two tries, I can't get through a single episode. Sorry.



All are available on iTunes. Enjoy!

Wow... what a week.

There are weeks when you conquer, and others in which you are happy to survive. This turned out to be the latter, but it's Thursday night with a weekend of playing lined up, so all is well. Tomorrow night Chadwick Williams (my R&B group) is playing at the Derby, then Saturday and Sunday I'm playing in the San Diego area with the LAPD Concert Band. That's legit stuff, but it's fun and a good workout for the flute and piccolo chops.

Had a great lesson this morning--went over a couple of uptempo tunes, trying now to apply some of the altered and extended chords I've been working on. It was good to get back to playing tunes--the drills are very useful, but sometimes you just gotta blow. I've also been working a bit on some Bob Mintzer funk etudes--they're challenging, but a lot of fun to play. After getting my tenor worked on and finding a setup that plays well for me I'm starting to get some mojo happening on that horn, so I've been practicing it more these days. It's really cool that all of a sudden, these other things are falling into place so readily. It makes me think the practicing is paying off.

Work is exhausting, but I'm done for the week and in too good a mood to worry much about it. I've been contacted about classes for next quarter, so it would seem that things are going well. If they don't, it won't be for lack of effort on my part...

For now, though, I'm fading fast and need some sleep. Rehearsal tomorrow morning for the shows this weekend... not a bad way to kick 'em off.

:-)

And speaking of changes...

...I just gutted my personal website. I've always hated the outdated debris you find scattered around the 'net, and I was getting to be one of the biggest contributors of said detritus. It's kind of sad in a way--kind of like taking a match to a collection of personal mementos--but now I have a fresh canvas to work with when I'm ready to do it.

For the time being, though, I'm busy with working and creating other stuff. This is "Hell Week: Part I" for me in the sense that my ridiculous Monday-Tuesday schedule gets repeated on Wednesday and Thursday--one of three times this quarter. Yeah, I know that normal people (of which I was one once) have to work *five* days a week in some God-forsaken cubicle, and to that I can only reply that two days on my current schedule kick my ass FAR worse than my 9-to-5 ever did. Between those back-to-back classes on Mondays, getting back to campus Tuesday mornings, and creating podcasts/writing exams and assignments/grading papers/revising my classes for summer, I'm whipped come mid-week. Zzzz....

On other fronts, my very first big band arrangement--an afro-cuban interpretation of Henry Mancini's "Charade," seems to be enough of a success that the Big Bad Jazz band will be performing it next week. w00t! If anyone wants to see its debut, come on out!

Tuesday, May 2nd
Big Bad Jazz Band at the M-Bar Hollywood
Corner of Vine and Fountain, 7:30pm
(I'll be playing bari sax)

Which reminds me, I had a *blast* subbing on Boyd Cannon's big band last week. This group plays every third Thursday at the Border's Books and Music in Thousand Oaks, and my buddy Jennifer Hall recommended me to the leader. I'd heard it was a good band (a rehearsal band for a lot of studio guys, I guess) so I was pretty intimidated--especially since I was to play tenor sax, which isn't my main axe. But my pal Jim Mettler, the bestest instrument repair guy in just about the entire world, did some work on my tenor and it was playing SWEEEET that night--all I had to do was push buttons and blow. Anyhow, Boyd said he'd have me back, so I guess it must have sounded okay. Cool.

Much as I'd like to launch into the diatribe about corporate strategy that I've been mulling over for several days now, I'm gonna hold off for the moment and get to bed. It just occurred to me that I'm functioning on only a few hours' sleep from last night, and I think I've finally reached the stage in my life when no sleep=horriffic cold every time I turn around.

Sucks to be old, I guess. But it's better than the alternative.

A few of my favorite podcasts...

Here's what I keep coming back to...

Deloitte Insights Podcast: A great discussion of corporate strategy from the folks at Deloitte. They had a great session on the Strategy Paradox back last February.

Feast of Fools - Gay Fun Show: I'm not sure how to describe this, except to say that Marc and Fausto are really, really funny, and you don't even have to be gay to appreciate this one.

MAKE Magazine: This is a video podcast, generally concerned with weird things you could make in a weekend. These guys sent a balloon up to near-space to get some pictures. They never recovered it, but it's pretty cool that people try stuff like that.

NOVA Vodcast: A great videocast for science geeks.

NPR Car Talk call of the week: I only wish Click and Clack would make their whole show available by podcast. This is sort of a teaser, but it's worth the download.

NPR Wait, Wait--Don't Tell Me: NPR's hilarious weekly news quiz show. The whole show is podcast, and their guests are great.

Pop!Tech Pop!Cast: This videocast series broadcasts GREAT lectures from really smart people. The April 8th episode featured Thomas Friedman on the subject of the current energy crisis.

The CNN Daily: A well-made videocast that catches me up on daily news highlights.



More to come as I discover them...

I'm such a geek, take XXII...

This time, though, I'm just catching up with the 21st century in the sense that I'm the proud owner of a shiny new video iPod. The 80GB version no less, and boy, is it cool.

I've actually been a bit resistant to the whole iPod/mp3 player movement, mostly because I do the vast majority of my listening to music either in my car or at my desk, and an mp3 player hasn't exactly been the best solution for either. I've used iTunes for quite a while at my desk (I mostly stock it with music from CDs, which has been an ongoing process), and that makes the separate player redundant. In the car, I don't have an mp3 jack, and the quality of the FM transmitters I've tried has been poor enough to turn me off getting a player for that purpose, at least until I get around to fixing the auxiliary input problem--probably, by replacing the car.

What changed everything, as it turns out, was the opportunity to develop a hybrid version of my Principles of Management course this quarter. My plan was to change the class to 50% face-to-face and 50% online delivery, with the goal of keeping people more interested in what can turn out to be some pretty dry material. Since this is an evening class and evening students tend to be especially intolerant of classes that drag on, I decided to replace half the class meetings with a combination of online videos and exercises, and fieldwork. I had a library of videos I was pretty sure I could edit and convert to streaming media, so I pitched the idea to my department chair and she agreed. Cool. Now all I needed to do was figure out how to get the multimedia stuff together.

Enter the analog-to-digital converter (which is an expensive little bugger if you need a Firewire version) and iMovie. It took a little tinkering to get my first very basic conversion done, but I posted the resulting video and was amazed that people were actually able to view it. Over the next couple of weeks they got a little more complicated, with the most recent offering being a series of CEO profiles spliced together from various items in my library using some cool titles and transitions. I also wanted to make this compatible with portable media devices, but I didn't have a test player so I needed to acquire one. Which made it tax-deductible. And the campus bookstore had good prices. Dang.

So... I got the iPod, the usual assortment of necessary accessories, and I've been experimenting. Tranferred my music over in just a few minutes, and tried it out in the car using one of the aforementioned FM transmitters, with predictable results--L.A. has WAY too many radio stations to allow those things to work particularly well. Then I started poking around in areas of iTunes I hadn't explored before... bought a couple episodes of South Park and one of Law and Order, but I realized pretty quickly that downloading TV shows was going to get expensive, and if watching it wasn't a priority at home, why pay even more for the same stuff?

But then, I discovered free podcasts. OMG--a nirvana for nerds.

Took me all of two days to subscribe to at least 35 of these things. And they're GREAT. I've got everything from the BBC morning headlines, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, to Geekgirl, Slate Magazine, NOVA Vodcast, and the Gay Fun Show: Feast of Fools (which is a side-splitting talk show hosted by--you guessed it--two gay guys). It's sorely tempting to suddenly turn this whole blog into a podcast review, but I'll try to limit that to notables. Meanwhile, though, I'm glad I found all this, because my commute to work was slowly driving me insane, and for news and talk, less-than-crystal sound quality is perfectly adequate.

In other news, I'm working a lot and practicing as much as possible. Work is definitely interesting this quarter--especially so because I ended up with three back-to-back classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, which means six straight hours in front of students. That is challenging enough, but the room scheduling also puts me in three different buildings, complete with a trek across campus between them. I think the full impact of the awkward logistics hit me this past week, when I realized I could either drop equipment off in my office before my next class *OR* go to the bathroom, but I couldn't do both. Yikes. Could be that my next geeky purchase ends up being a skateboard.

Music is also relatively busy. Terry is throwing some polytonal stuff my way which is hard to get my brain around, but fun to work on. The flute chops continue to improve, and I got to play at the Hollywood Bowl this past weekend, which allowed me to take the ultra-cool backstage photo shown here. But with work as busy as it is, I haven't had time to do all that much else. Maybe next quarter things will slow down a bit.

And with that, I'd better get back to paper grading. Sigh. But no geek's blog would be complete without some random YouTube crap. Enjoy.

Sniff, sniff...

I'm fighting a bit of a cold today, so 'scuze me while I go get a tissue.

Classes start next week, and I'm now one term over the one-year mark at Cal Poly. This upcoming quarter, my schedule will include overload for the first time, so I'm fully expecting my life to completely suck at the midterm point when the paper grading kicks in. I won't turn my nose up at the extra money, but don't think I'm not gonna be earning it.

Subbed on a friend's big band last night, and we backed up the jazz legend Ernie Andrews. That dude is a MONSTER... nobody sings like him. Toward the end of the evening he got this monologue sort of thing going... kind of a "I've been doing this for sixty years" stroll down memory land, then out of nowhere, he turned on the afterburners and belted out a magnificent line from the bridge to start off the tune "You Are So Beautiful." I was so blown away I barely made my own entrance a few bars later. Very cool.

Speaking of subbing, though (which I've been doing a lot of lately), I'm filling in on a recording session tomorrow so I'd better go have a look at the music. But first... a few upcoming gigs of note:

Tuesday, April 3rd
Big Bad Jazz Band at the M-Bar Hollywood
Corner of Vine and Fountain, 7:30pm
(My regular bari sax gig)

Thursday, April 5th
Evening dance with Clyde Reasinger's Big Band
Joselyn Center, Burbank CA
(I think I'm on alto that night)

Sunday, April 8th
Hollywood Bowl Sunrise Service
LAPD Concert Band
(My flute gig)

Saturday, May 19th
Chadwick Williams Band at Paladino's
(R&B bari sax... whooyah!)

Sunday June 3rd
Big Bad Jazz Band in concert
with special guest, pianist Shelly Berg
Glendale College Auditorium
(bari sax again)

Feel free to e-mail me for details on any of these shows...
-Leanne