#58, Do You Remember Where You Were?

I Must Be Dreaming, or Maybe Not!, East Oahu, Hawaii, October ‘07, artistic view, click to enlarge.

I am looking right now at The Girl From Ipanema music sheet. Written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes, still looks very fresh, and the English words are also very familiar. Should I go any deeper into this classic? No doubt, I am going to go through all notes, one by one as I always do, at least twice. Then we can decide if that is enough, or I might play some portions later on the piano. The sheet music is for the vocal, guitar, and piano. You never know if you are looking at the original, or if somebody transcribed that piece just for these instruments. The difference could be quite pronounced and I definitely prefer the original to the transcribed version. But sometimes you have to take what’s available, and the second option may be everything that you can lay your eyes on. “Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking, and when she passes I smile, but she doesn’t see.” the words go. Quite nice, even with a small error, but forget about that for a moment, and enjoy the beach scene.

Now we are changing to a different subject. It is another day, already after a good dinner, unfortunately again with too many calories. Will have to walk a bit more to burn all those unnecessary calories. Actually this has been more and more of a challenge recently. As a young guy, I used to weigh more or less the same amount over many years. But now, things are more difficult to control. The weight keeps piling on with ease, and removing it becomes more and more difficult. Things taste too good, and the physical activity level is no doubt lower than it used to be. The higher crankiness factor settles in. It is good that no lower mental activity is evident, at least can still watch iJustine videos and understand, I think. Well, I have to go back to those several-hour long hiking trips in the mountains, with plenty of swimming hours, followed by many miles of biking. Less seconds and draft beers and more leg miles, and no ice cream either! OK, enough of whining!

If you did not fall asleep while I was mumbling, let us go back to this morning. Did you see software called grader mentioned on http://twitter.grader.com? It lets you evaluate your standings among other twitter users on a scale 0-100. I started not long time ago, and accumulated only a relatively small number of tweets and followers. Therefore my standings cannot be very high as you might expect. But Kevin Rose’s or Leo Laporte’s numbers are probably approaching 100. Try it for yourself if you are on twitter. If not, open an account, and start to tweet today.

An evening is upon us, time to check emails, news, tweets, own websites, and finish this blog entry. An extra long weekend is coming; it is always pleasantly anticipated.

This is also the day when Bloomberg News almost published Steve Jobs’ obituary. Actually it did happen inadvertently or so we are told. I wonder who else’s obituaries are already prepared and only waiting for the XXXX to be replaced with actual dates? Sometimes faster is not necessarily better. Unless the whole point behind this exercise is still unknown to us! “You told us the iPhone worked, we thought you died!”

MP3 music: http://002e972.netsolhost.com/ .