The lesser mabinogion

What’s wrong with this picture?

To: Stuart Herring <stuart.herring@xxxxxx.xx>
Subject: Some Stuff.

Hi Stewart,

Some random stuff...

Regards,
A Moron

or even better – this!

To: Stuart Herring <stuart.herring@xxxxxx.xx>
Subject: Re: Some Stuff

Hi Stewart,

Yes I'm still a moron and I refuse to accept that you know how to spell your
name better than I do.
The fact that your email address is spelt with a "u" didn't tip me off, and
neither will the fact that you sign your name with a "u".

Regards,
Willfully Blind Moron.

> ------ Original Message -------
> From: Stuart Herring <stuart.herring@xxxxxx.xx>
> To: A Moron
> Subject: Re: Some Stuff
>
> Hi Moron,
>
> Did it occur to you that if you have to spell my name with a "u" for your
> email to reach me,  that maybe you should spell it with a "u" when you
> address me too?
>
> Regards,
> Stuart.

OK, so maybe that conversation never actually took place, but it may as well have.
It constantly amazes me how many people at work will type my name correctly to enter my email address, but will then spell it wrong when addressing me.
Even that wouldn’t bother me so much, if it weren’t for the fact that they stubbornly refuse to correct their mistake, even after a long email exchange, in which, I’ve signed every one of my replies with “Stuart”. I can almost see them at the other end with their fingers in their ears going “LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU”.

The particularly mystifying thing about this, is why people think that my name would be “Stewart” in the first place. “Stuart” is by far the most common spelling of the name as a first name. If you were going to pick a spelling to stubbornly use in the face of all evidence, then “Stuart” should be the one you would pick.

It seems like a fairly petty thing to be bothered about, but it does bother me. My name is Stuart, and it is no more “Stewart” than it is “Bob”, and if you can’t be bothered addressing someone with their correct name (or at least a name you know they don’t mind being addressed by), then don’t bother addressing them at all.

Speaking of names…apparently I have a namesake in Newcastle, England.
I checked my mail a couple of days ago, only to see an email from “Stuart Herring” with the subject “I’m Stuart Herring too”.
That was kind of amusing in itself, but on top of that, it seems that he’s a musician too. He’d been googling his (my) name just to see what came up (as everyone does at some point), and of course found me – (probably via the Cumulo-Nimbus site actually, as before this post the name “Stuart Herring” never actually appears on this site, despite being the domain name.). On discovering that I was also a musician, he figured he’d say hi, and jokingly put forth the suggestion that maybe all Stuart Herrings are musically inclined.
I don’t know if they are, but it’d be kind of nice to think so.

Things have been pretty grim on the music front lately.
Between work and general apathy, it’s been hard to find much in the way of time to work on musical stuff, and when I do, it doesn’t take long for me to run out of ideas.
Assuming I had any in the first place…

I purchased a subscription to the Guitar Port online service the other day – Mostly because this month they have some lessons involving Iron Maiden riffs, but also because it always seemed like a rather good idea.
One of the problems with my guitar playing, is that I simply don’t know how to play anything I didn’t write myself. I never really used to think that was a problem – as I’m only really interested in writing my own music anyway, but on thinking about it lately, it has occurred to me that it’s actually fairly important.
The trouble with doing as I have done so far, and not bothering to learn to play other people’s music, is that it means that the only real source of inspiration for my own music, is my music. I fiddle around a bit, and come up with a riff or pattern of some sort that I like, and then I stick to it, and use it in everything I write. Without infinite time in which to randomly experiment to inject new ideas, I pretty much guarantee that my creativity will wither and die from its own incestuousness.
I’ve had this principle illustrated to me in the reverse a couple of times now – Some time last year I bought a guitar magazine that had Guns ‘n Roses’s version of Knocking of Heaven’s Door in it. Learning to play the first 10 notes of one of the solos did more for my own soloing than pretty much anything else I’ve done since first picking up the guitar.
Another case is the Iron Maiden lessons I mentioned earlier. In that case, it’s not quite as direct. Rather than instantly giving me new ideas I could use in my own music, they gave me some new riffs to practice. The significance of that, is that when I come up with a riff or a chord sequence, or whatever for my own music, it’s usually something that comes pretty naturally – something that is fairly easy for me to play. That makes perfect sense, as when writing via improvisation, you can’t possibly write something you can’t play ;)
So that means that when I practice, my repertoire of stuff to work on, consists almost entirely of things that aren’t any sort of challenge. That’s hardly a recipe for improvement.
The addition of someone else’s riffs to practice gives me patters that are unfamiliar to my fingers, and should mean that the practice is far more productive. The eventual result of that of course, is that when I’m fiddling around and trying to come up with new stuff, that there’ll be a whole range of extra patterns and shapes that feel natural to me, which in turn will allow me to inject something fresh into my music.

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to figure that out. My Sax teacher pretty much told me that more than 10 years ago – and most of the work he set for me was transcribing and learning other people’s solos.
I guess I thought it was enough to listen to a lot of music. That helps too, but actually trying to play it yourself takes you from being aware of what’s possible, to actually how to achieve it.

It’s Saturday night, and I’m sitting here, poking listlessly at web sites I’m not really interested in, trying to work up the motivation to get up and go to bed.
My life is fun.

…but from cleaning this time!

Inspection tomorrow, so tonight I was mopping floors, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom and toilet (fun) and sweeping leaves….
Now my back hurts…

It also managed to rain pretty much every single weekend from the moment I got notice of the inspection, so I haven’t been able to mow the lawn, but it hasn’t really grown all that much since last time anyway.
I still find it odd that I used to have to mow the lawn weekly in NZ (and sometimes it could probably have done with twice a week), but I can get away without touching it for more than six months here (though in Spring through to early summer it could probably do with at least monthly).

In other happenings, things are settling down a bit at work again now, which is a relief.
I managed to nearly get myself in trouble on Monday though, due to a rather poor judgement call. Someone sent me an email that annoyed me, so I wrote a rather inflamatry reply. I actually do that fairly often when people bug me – but usually once I’ve written it, my common sense and general unwillingness to offend causes me to either delete it unsent, or edit it back in to the realms of politeness. That didn’t happen this time, and there were quite a few people CCd on it.
In response, I received a rather pointed email from the victim’s manager requesting that I never send an email like that to one of his staff again.
Lesson learnt.

I think I’ve been doing too much reading lately.
I spent 17 hours reading yesterday – from 10am till 3am. Which was after reading till 3am the previous night as well.
It’s kind of hard to believe just how painful effectively doing nothing all day is ;)