Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Bikram Yoga Session after months of inactivity

These last few months have not been good for my Bikram practice. I've probably made it in less than 10 times in the last three months. Between getting sick for a while, going to Barcelona, and the warmth of the bed vs. the cold of the street at 5AM, it has started to seem like less and less of a good idea to go to Bikram. Which is a shame. I really like the studio where I go (http://www.bikramphiladelphia.com). I've gotten to be friends with the owner there, Joel. And I feel better when I do it. So I'm going to try and get in more for the next week or two and see what comes of it.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Perl program to calculate major triad chord progressions

I've been playing guitar for 31 years (good lord I'm old). But I only recently got interested in learning the theory behind chord progressions. I wrote this simple piece of code to calculate major triad chord progressions in all of the keys. I suppose it could be extended easily to create minor chord progressions as well.




use strict;

sub chord_progression
{
# The parameter is the index of the root note in the @notes array
my $i = shift;
my @notes = ('C', 'C#/Db', 'D', 'D#/Eb', 'E', 'F', 'F#/Gb',
'G', 'G#/Ab', 'A', 'A#/Bb', 'B');
my @intervals = (0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12);

# Create a scale based on the intervals in a major scale
my @scale = map {$notes[($i + $intervals[$_]) % 12]} (0..7);

# Create triads. Increment each note within the scale.
# All notes in the chord progression fall within the
# major scale.
my ($root, $third, $fifth) = (0, 2, 4);
my @name = ('Maj', 'min', 'min', 'Maj', 'Maj', 'min', 'Dim', 'Maj');
for (0..7) {
printf "%6s %3s: %6s, %6s, %6sn",
$scale[$root], $name[$_], $scale[$root],
$scale[$third], $scale[$fifth];
$root++;
$third++;
$fifth++;
$root %= 7;
$third %= 7;
$fifth %= 7;
}
print "n";
}

# Call the subroutine for each note in the scale
for (0..11)
{
chord_progression($_);
}


This produces output like this for the 12 root notes:



C Maj: C, E, G
D min: D, F, A
E min: E, G, B
F Maj: F, A, C
G Maj: G, B, D
A min: A, C, E
B Dim: B, D, F
C Maj: C, E, G
----------------------------------
C#/Db Maj: C#/Db, F, G#/Ab
D#/Eb min: D#/Eb, F#/Gb, A#, Bb
F min: F, G#/Ab, C
F#/Gb Maj: F#/Gb, A#, Bb, C#/Db
G#/Ab Maj: G#/Ab, C, D#/Eb
A#, Bb min: A#, Bb, C#/Db, F
C Dim: C, D#/Eb, F#/Gb
C#/Db Maj: C#/Db, F, G#/Ab
...

Thursday, January 18, 2007

18:51 - Center City

I went for a quick run today, bundled up as it has gotten very cold. I just looped around center city and watched the people. It started snowing just a little after I stopped-- a pity, I've always loved running in the snow.

Monday, January 15, 2007

12 years

I celebrated 12 years today. Not much to say about that, another little miracle in a long series of little miracles.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Back from Rome and Barcelona.

We're back from Spain now. We were in Barcelona from 30-Dec-06 - 14-Jan-07. We stayed with our friends Beatriz and Ricardo, who are kind of like Daniel's surrogate grandparents.

When we landed in the Madrid Airport, we saw the damage from the ETA bombing. Folks, it was a lot worse than the US news made it out to be. The news here in the US said that it was a minor bombing with about 15 people treated for ear injuries. In reality, an entire four story parking lot was completely demolished, and two people were killed. I was taking photos of the broken glass all across the front of the airport when Sonia told me to look at the parking lot across the street. It was unbelievable. There was even a slight crater where the parking lot was before. For days afterwards the rescue workers dug to find the bodies of two innocent Equadorian immigrants who could not get out of the parking lot when it was evacuated.

ETA are a bunch of gillipollas. How does killing a couple of innocent immigrants forward their cause? The one thing I am sure of is that if there ever were an independent Euskera, I certainly wouldn't want that bunch of bloodthirsty clowns to be in charge of it. I doubt that the Basque people want that either.

Sonia and I were able to go to Rome for a weekend and leave Daniel with Ricardo and Beatriz. Rome was great. We took about 200 photos (at http://picasaweb.google.com/sontida). It was impossible to take a bad photo in Rome.

We're glad to be home, but are already planning our next trip.