Aspiring nerd

Further embracing of my inner nerd: Before digging in to our half day at work yesterday (ANZAC Day), The Lady and I attended the annual alumni (fund-raising) book sale on campus. I picked up six or eight books on obsolete Apple Macs, Apple II/IIe, Mac LC. All a buck or two each, IIRC. Mostly owner's manuals, but one on programming in Apple BASIC -- the only programming language I really know (besides Stata, I suppose). After I Finish My Dissertation (tm) -- and most likely, after we build the new house and I have room to set up all my obsolete computers!!! -- I'll write a program for the Apple II-GS, for ear-training: a random tone generator. It'll generate a random number, then pull a corresponding frequency (in Hertz) from a list, resulting in a note of music; I'll try to find it on the piano, guitar, etc. as quickly as possible. I'll also write an extension that plays an interval, which I'll have also have to pick out on an instrument.

The Lady noticed that I also bought a manual FOR A COMPUTER I DON'T EVEN OWN: "doing graphics and audio with a Commodore 64." I justified it by saying it was a good price (a buck or two), and **someday** I'll probably own one. She's very tolerant. ;)

I also picked up a book on home metal foundry-ing (making wooden sand-filled crates to pour molten lead, etc. into); welding iron gates and grilles; and "Poisonous Critters of Australia" (or some-such). Not that I'll **directly** use any of these... but they're good reference material to have on the shelf.

Plus others. Our total was (IIRC) AU$112, of which about AU$34 was The Lady's. At an average of two bucks a book, that's around forty books for me. In constrast, with the except of two cookbooks and one or two fiction books, The Lady bought old statistics books and textbooks in her field of lecturing.

Oh yeah: Bought a book on the development of the different "families" of musical instruments (e.g. brass; woodwinds; bowed strings); "how to play the oboe"; "how to play the violin"; and a big engineer's dictionary of audio terms (e.g. SPL, dB).

Ayep!


--GG