Music

At some time or other I have known a little bit about recorder, flute, accordion, classical guitar, piano, saxophone. Right now I mostly sing (bass) in whatever choir around me seems to care about the sort of music I care about.

• Free Music? See below, but by popular demand I am re-releasing a small—the best—portion of the material from the Free Music site. All I have is Ein Deutsches Requiem by Johannes Brahms.
• Free Music! RIAA-content-free. Share and enjoy! This site is my pet project, and it may well be the biggest repository of free, legal classical music in the world, although a few other people have been making great strides at catching up.

  Update: There is no longer a sysadmin at the lab that was hosting this. The server is broken and no-one has fixed it. I’m not sure when the site will come back up. Check back here for more information.

• Variations: U of Indiana’s experimental score server.
• Naxos—the music label that isn’t evil. They have just about their whole catalog available for download (albeit at low quality)…
• Space Opera! David Bass turned Star Wars into an opera, and some shameless friends led by Justin Werfel made our own recording. I played Darth Vader, of course.
• Bach.
• Shostakovich.
• Gramophone magazine’s CD reviews. Catalog information, tracks, reviews, more info than I need, so you can have some.
• I sing in the shower. I used to be a member of the MIT Concert Choir. Now I sing with CU’s University Singers, but we don’t seem to have a web page.
• MP3 quality comparison. Depends on your playback system, but even computer speakers can be interesting.
• MC Hawking. This belongs somewhere, but under “music”? Sure, why not?

Tango

I got here through an interest in the music of Astor Piazzolla.

• Nick and Tara: Natural Tango
• CU Club Tango
• Tango Colorado
• Radio Tango. Direct link to the stream.
• Tango Argentino de Tejas Excellent source of information. From Texas, yet! Sink me!

Weiqi, Go, Baduk, 圍棋, 围棋, 囲碁, 바둑

I’m about 10 kyu—a strong beginner. I can often beat GnuGo in an even game, but I think I’m becoming overspecialised, since human players give me more trouble.

• Learn to play! The Interactive Way to Go is a superb tutorial.
• The American Go Association has more goodies.
• Occasionally I play on the Kiseido Go Server as fugue137.

Karate: ムース流 唐手術

I study an unusual style of karate: Moose-style Kung Fu. No, really! Well, no, not really. It’s Koryu Uchinadi Kenpo-jutsu, the latest product of ongoing historical research from the International Ryukyu Karate Research Society.

合気道—Actually, my sensei moved away, but I find myself slightly addicted to this stuff. Tango almost fills the gap, but not quite, so now I am doing a little aikido.

Telemark Skiing

Everything I know, I learned from this book (actually, from the first and second editions mainly). Another great resource is Telemark Tips.

Backcountry… wow! Whoever thought of that is brilliant! Most important things:

• Vast quantities of snow safety information at CSAC. Also, contributors get great discounts on all kinds of avy gear, and they have a cool dead-telemarker-with-lurk logo.
• I took my Avalanche Level 1 course through Eldora Volunteer Ski Patrol. Their course was excellent, and was by far the least expensive option within thousands of miles.

Cycling

This has fissioned into its own page.

Photography

The Gallery

It is high time I learned somewhat of the visual arts. To that end I am trying to keep an eye out for pretty crap. Constructive criticism, advice, and feedback would be most welcome! Incidentally, for equipment (and the assurance that it doesn’t matter) you can scarcely do better than Ken Rockwell.