Triplets and Fingering

On a side note, I beat One by Metallica on GH finally.
All I have is left now is the finale -
the battle against the devil playing Devil Went Down to Georgia.
It's both the most entertaining battle and most difficult (he's cheating scum.)

Anyway...
Today I worked on playing better, faster, etc. - It's hard work.
I got my chord progression encyclopedia out and played through the front.
I may get serious and do a harder chunk in a bit.

The latest work is toughening and improving my fingers.
I have been using my index+middle+ring to play triplets on three strings, and I'm trying to get faster at doing that. I'm mixed it up, throwing random patterns in - I even tried doing four strings with three fingers.

Also, lately I've noticed my clumsiness on the G string when barring chords. I'm not getting down to it. I need to strengthen my index finger, or at least improve my technique.

I have played through songs I know a fair bit, and I can play faster than before - so there's definitely some improvement going on.

Having Fun Again ! Pomp-Tuition!

Today I did something in Photoshop.... something FUN!
I usually get impatient and annoyed - I was getting a little impatient with this one, but I'm done.
I'm glad to be back in the PS department.
It's called Pomp-Tuition.
It's from a tutorial I did off a PS-Roadmap link. I like the process - though I messed up the lighting at the end. I need to go back and see if I can fix it, maybe do it again better.

It taught that if you play with Layer Styles and get a neat one, you can copy+paste it on several different things. It was all actual characters that were rotated and placed. Most of the layers were text layers. It's not a fancy font - just something plain, blown up large, with layer styles of inner shadow, outer glow, and bevel/emboss.

The font was Georgia, by the way... and the streaks/ribbons were done simply with the pen tool.

I liked it! I hope to do something much better next time around.

iKnow it's Getting Old... Animals!

Today I did more at iKnow.
They waste my time with ones I've got to 100%.
My overall progress is only up to 87%. It's trickling by 2 percentages still, it seems.

Some of the (not very) interesting ones I stumbled over today were:

次 - tsugi - next
消す - kesu - to turn/switch off
The homophone,
速い/早い - hayai - fast/early
My ryhming conundrum :
病気 - byouki - illness
飛行機 - hikouki - airplane
(silly, I know - but I need to staighten these out.)

One of my random notes I made was
猿 - saru - monkey
Lol... monkey...
Hey, I just realized - I know a few animals...

猫 - neko - cat
犬 - inu - dog
鳥 - tori - bird
猿 - saru - monkey
牛 - ushi - cow
きりん(kirin) - giraffe
馬 - uma - horse
and a few I looked up:
蛇 - hebi - snake
熊 - kuma - bear
動物 - doubutsu - animal

If I missed one you'd care to know, look it up easy here.

Receiving the Eagle Scout Award

Today I spent every waking moment dealing with my Eagle Court of Honor.
I had things to write out, I had to iron all of the uniform, there was the actual occasion that evening, and that night I spent dealing with concerns abt... Eliza. Her boyfriend broke up with her - not like we didn't see it coming.

I gave an acceptance speech thingy - it went well, supposedly. I ended up directing it toward the younger scouts and the cub scouts that were there. I gave my two-cents about why Scouting is important and why they should never give up, I think.

That evening I saw Sarah there at church. We spoke for a bit - Everyone was dressed up - it was kind of amusing. Aside a personal fiasco involving her I won't mention, nothing significant happened. But needless to say, clearly the assertion that she's just been busy is true. My freak-out mode officially ended yesterday...

Uh... by the way, for those who wonder, Sarah is my girlfriend, or at least was at one point (complicated i know), and Eliza's my best friend - she lives like 7 hours away these days... but we keep in touch still. She's moving to Utah around the time I go back to BYU-I, so we might hang out every now and then more in the future.


Anyways...
I listen to music from Guitar Hero that I put on my iPod more than I thought I would. I skip lame bonus tracks, but considering the GH songs constitute 88 out of a little over 400 songs I have, I would hear them randomly often.
It's part of getting exercise - I listen to it when I go running.

This is one of my "big news" posts - there aren't very many occasions where I deviate almost completely. But with Eliza's breakup, my Sarah, and my Eagle Scout award thing tonight, there are always things to be blabbing about.
I'll shutup for now.
Peace.