Wanderings.

This morning I had breakfast with Mom and Dad. It’s a Haynes family tradition on Saturdays, that we go to Le Madeleine’s in the Rice Village and have breakfast. This time I had just come back from Denver and will most likely not be going back up for the project I’ve been working on.

I just got my results back last week from National Geographic’s Genographic project, which I highly recommend for reading at http://www.genographic.com. It includes an atlas of the human journey, and lots of other cool stuff to read that gave me a sense of connection to humans and history. Best evidence suggests that there is a ‘Mitochondrial Eve‘ who lived about 200,000 years ago, and an ‘Y-Chromosomal Adam‘ who lived about 50,000 years ago who we can trace as humanity’s most recent common ancestors.

At any rate, you can pay about $100 for a kit which the project will send you in the mail. You take two cheek swab samples and send them back. You may test either your mitochondrial DNA or your Y chromosome for deep ancestrial lineage. That’s probably the topic of another post, but suffice it to say we had fun talking about heridity, geneology and genetics at breakfast before coming back to parents’ house.

I installed their “new” wireless router which I bought them on ebay because it’s just a better router than what they had and because now they’ll have a wireless router which I can use anywhere in the house. yay. :-)

So once that was done, and after we finished talking about other things of interest, I got vmware working to my satisfaction under linux. I got my laptop back and was pleased to find that sound worked. :-) This means I can use my work laptop image in linux and experience no significant difference (knock-on-wood) from using it natively, and I’ll have the added bonus of a

The load is reaonable… I tried opening a test project and compiling it. The loading actually took the most resources and didn’t take too much time, and the compiling hardly took anything at all. I couldn’t take my screenshot fast enough to get the shot before the proc went back down.

Bottom line is. I feel productive and happy and flowing in the Csikszentmihalyi sense of the word flow.

Yay! Now I’m going to go clean up the disaster area which is my desk at home, and attack taxes. Somewhere in there I’m going to work out, but I’m not feeling the whole planning thing right now.

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The piano is about halfway done! It’s been restrung, and a small crack that wasn’t noticed before has been repaired in the soundboard. The soundboard is actually the thin piece of wood and doesn’t take any of the tension from the strings, but is responsible for resonating and putting the sound out to the air where we can hear it. (Tension is taken up by different mechanisms in the piano, and can be up to 20 tons in modern grands. Mine is an upright, but it is taller than most, so will have more tension on it than a shorter upright.)

Next is getting the action right on the keys and continuing to bring the piano gradually up to pitch.

My piano skipped a generation. It was given to my Grandmother (Father’s Mother), Athleen (Frasier) Haynes by her father Jack Frasier probably in the 1920′s. It was made in 1898 which makes it a late American Victorian piano. I’m really looking forward to playing it.

David Geiger is working on it presently and will have it ready sometime this month. I am really looking forward to playing it. When I get it back it will have been restrung, had the hammers replaced, new felts, new keytops, new dampers, and it will have been regulated and had the action adjusted.