DaveWells.us

In the sum­mer of 2009, I started swim­ming again fairly seri­ously for the first time since high school. I’d swum on and off dur­ing the rest of col­lege and grad school, but never more than two or three days a week, and usu­ally just mak­ing up work­outs as I went. I returned to the pool in earnest last year to train for the Devil’s Chal­lenge Triathlon, which I did as a relay with Veron­ica and our friend Patrick. But after the Triathlon was over, I decided to keep swim­ming. I had occa­sion­ally been get­ting work­outs from my friend Fritz, who runs the Mas­ters swim team at UW, and I started doing them more reg­u­larly. I also soon found a swim buddy in April, an art ed. major who’d been doing the same work­outs as me at roughly the same time. It’s amaz­ing how much harder you can work with a friend to push you!

At the begin­ning of 2010, I decided to start keep­ing track of my swim work­outs. To do so, I’ve been using Ugomo, a very use­ful web-based work­out log with some social media fea­tures. Ugomo lets you track work­outs and your weight, set goals, and visu­al­ize your work­out data in var­i­ous ways. If you’re a run­ner or cyclist, it also lets you map rides/runs and store your reg­u­lar routes. You can also see what other peo­ple are doing and com­ment on their work­outs, although in my expe­ri­ence this doesn’t hap­pen much on the site.

I set a goal of 365 miles over the course of the year, which I knew was a pretty ambi­tious mark. I started out pretty well, swim­ming five or six days a week; I was even ahead of my goal pace by the end of Feb­ru­ary. But lit­tle things like fin­ish­ing my dis­ser­ta­tion; giv­ing two recitals; trips to Seat­tle (twice), Maine, and Britain; and mov­ing across the coun­try really cut into my pool time. Luck­ily, I now have access to the won­der­ful out­door pool at the Uni­ver­sity of the Pacific, and I’ve been able to make up some of my lost ground. I didn’t make it any­where close to my orig­i­nal goal, but I did man­age to swim 208 1/4 miles this year — roughly the dis­tance from the White House to 30 Rock­e­feller Plaza in NYC (as the crow flies). Thanks to Ugomo, I also know that I spent a total of 5 days, 8 hours, and 27 min­utes in one pool or another.

Even at my fastest in the last year, I was still a ways off my best times from high school, which was the last time I swam com­pet­i­tively. Then again, I haven’t tested myself in an actual meet sit­u­a­tion recently. I hope to up my total dis­tance dur­ing 2011, and maybe I’ll also find a Mas­ters meet or two in which to par­tic­i­pate. But, even if I am past my swim­ming prime, I’m still in bet­ter shape than I’ve been in years. Plus I think think that swim­ming, more so than other forms of exer­cise, gives me lung capac­ity and breath con­trol train­ing that ben­e­fits me as a wood­wind player (per­haps more on that in a future post). I’ve had my last swim for this year already, but I look for­ward to start­ing anew in January.

Dur­ing the sum­mer between my two years at FSU, I paid a visit to Mis­sion San Luis in Tal­la­has­see. The site is owned by the State of Florida, and is home to recon­struc­tions of some of the Apalachee and Span­ish build­ings that stood on the site in the 17^th cen­tury. You can read more about it in my orig­i­nal post or at the offi­cial web­site.

Dur­ing my visit, I was puz­zled by a dia­gram painted on an inte­rior wall of the fri­ary. Var­i­ous peo­ple quickly informed me that it’s a Guidon­ian hand — an early musi­cal teach­ing device that I’d some­how missed in my music his­tory classes. In addi­tion to ask­ing about the dia­gram here, evi­dently I also sent a ques­tion to some­one at the mis­sion via e-mail.

I say “evi­dently,” because I don’t recall send­ing such a query. But, yes­ter­day, I received the fol­low­ing mes­sage:

Dave,
The hand on the wall of the fri­ary (con­vento) is called the Guidon­ian hand. Start­ing around the 11^th cen­tury, monks pointed to the knuck­les and fin­ger­tips to indi­cate pitches to be sung. This range of notes on the Hand is also called the gamut. Gen­er­ally, Catholic choirs in small areas were made up of young boys. The hand helped them learn chants for the mass, but it was used mostly for the first two years. After that, staff nota­tion was learned. Hope this helps!

Yes­ter­day. I vis­ited the mis­sion in June 2005.

Com­i­cally, the sender’s sig­na­ture con­tained a link to a cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey. I’d take the sur­vey, but I’m not sure whether it would be more appro­pri­ate to give high marks for “Respond­ing to all mes­sages… even­tu­ally” or “Clean­ing up after one’s lazy predecessor.”

This past week­end, Veron­ica and I went to the Wis­con­sin State Fair in Mil­wau­kee. The fair­grounds are very close to where her fam­ily lives, so she’d been to the fair in many pre­vi­ous years. But, this was my first expe­ri­ence with this — or indeed any — state fair. We spent a few hours at the fair on Sat­ur­day after­noon and man­aged to eat our­selves silly. The pic­ture at right is only the tip of the iceberg.

Three of the main things that one asso­ciates with fairs are rides, ani­mals, and food. We largely skipped the first cat­e­gory, although we did take the sky­car from one side of the grounds to the other. That offered a pretty good view of about half the grounds from above, but it’s rather tame as rides go. It’s only thrilling if one is scared of heights, and I can’t imag­ine that there are too many acro­pho­bic adren­a­line junkies in the world.

We didn’t watch any of the actual ani­mal com­pe­ti­tions, although we did ven­ture into the rab­bit and poul­try barn. Sadly, there weren’t actu­ally any rab­bits, but there were all sorts of inter­est­ing fowl. The bulk of the ani­mals on dis­play were chick­ens or related species. There were chick­ens big and small, portly and lean, fluffy and svelte. Some had gor­geous multi-colored plumage, and oth­ers had very impres­sive combs. I took a few pic­tures, but failed to make note of the names of any of the breeds.

The one real ani­mal event we took in was one not asso­ci­ated with the actual live­stock judg­ing — the pig races. Not actual con­tests, the pig races are staged five times daily by the out­fit that owns all of the rac­ing ani­mals. The win­ner of each race wins only a hand­ful of Chee­tos and a t-shirt for a mem­ber of the crowd. The races aren’t solely for swine — each set of races includes reg­u­lar pigs, Viet­namese pot-bellied pigs, goats, and ducks.
The var­i­ous rac­ing ani­mals were fun to watch, but I was almost more amused by the race announcer. He was try­ing very hard to make a his southern-drawling light tenor into a gritty movie trailer voice-over bass. Despite his best efforts, it ended up sound­ing like a bad, slightly effem­i­nate, occa­sion­ally hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing impres­sion of Jimmy Stew­art. He also felt the need to end almost every state­ment with “right here at Hog­way Speedway.”

In our one after­noon at the fair, we ate an absurd quan­tity of food, most of it pure junk. We started out with a corn dog, then went for roasted corn on the cob (coated in melted but­ter, of course). We were given free snack sticks at the pig races — sadly they were beef, not pork. From there, we went to the Cream Puff Par­lor and snagged one of the tra­di­tional dough-and-whipped-cream treats along with a Blue Rib­bon Brownie. We’re hold­ing these two in the pic­ture at the top of this post. After not quite fin­ish­ing those, we hopped the Sky­car to the other side of the grounds. There, we stopped by the Herb Kohl milk stand, which sells 25¢ cups of fla­vored milk in your choice of straw­berry, choco­late, cherry vanilla, root beer, or mocha. We vis­ited the poul­try barn, then headed to the Wis­con­sin Prod­ucts Pavil­ion. There, we got a grilled cheese sand­wich. Our final food pur­chase was a s’more on a stick — more on that later.
At an event such as a fair, at which peo­ple are likely to walk around while they eat, portable foods are the way to go. But, what to do with some­thing like grilled meat or a sticky caramel apple. Why, put it on a stick, of course! While this makes sense for some things, the prac­tice of putting foods on sticks has moved past util­ity into pure nov­elty. The state fair web­site includes a page of food facts, on which they claim that more than 40 foods on sticks are sold at the fair. I think that they’re fudg­ing the num­bers a bit, count­ing chicken shish-kabobs sep­a­rately from beef shish-kabobs and so on, but there are still quite a few. I made it my mis­sion to find and pho­to­graph as many foods on sticks (or at least signs depict­ing such comestibles) as pos­si­ble. I man­aged to doc­u­ment eleven, although I didn’t bother with some of the more com­mon exam­ples like ice cream bars and kabobs.
Here, for your view­ing plea­sure, are pic­tures of foods on sticks:

Caramel on a Stick	Corn Dog on a Stick	Rice Krispie Treats on Sticks
Fruit on Sticks	Cheese on a Stick	Cheesecake/Bananas on Sticks
Pork Chop on a Stick	Caramel Apples on Sticks	Marsh­mal­lows on Sticks
	S’more on a Stick	&nbsp

Of these, we only tried the corn dog and the s’more. The corn dog was pretty good — it actu­ally tasted like fresh corn­bread. The s’more, on the other hand, was disgusting.

The pri­mary cri­te­ria for whether a food can (or should) be put on a stick is whether it has suf­fi­cient struc­tural integrity to suc­cess­fully adhere to the stick through­out the eat­ing process. The s’more on a stick failed this test mis­er­ably. In a stan­dard camp­fire s’more, the rigid gra­ham crack­ers pro­vide a strong plat­form for the gooey marsh­mal­low and melty choco­late. No so in the stick ver­sion. The core of the thing was all melty marsh­mal­low goo, hardly the sort of thing that will hold fast to a stick. A thin layer of choco­late cov­ered the marsh­mal­low, and a soft gra­ham cracker bread­ing (kind of like the corn­bread on a corn dog) enclosed the whole thing. The gra­ham bread­ing tasted bad, the choco­late was low-quality, and even the marsh­mal­low fill­ing (how hard is it to screw up the taste of marsh­mal­lows?) was hor­rid. The thing started to fall apart even before the first bite, and I was obliged to fin­ish the thing with my fin­gers. But hey, now I can say I’ve tried a s’more on a stick. Yay.
Check out the gallery to see more pic­tures of food and fowl from the fair.

No mat­ter what you may think of me, you can’t tell me that I need to get my head exam­ined; I just had it done.

This after­noon, I went to the UW hos­pi­tal to par­tic­i­pate in a study of adult and ado­les­cent brains under stress. First, I pro­vided what would be the first of four saliva sam­ples. These sam­ples will be tested for lev­els of cor­ti­sol, which is known as the “stress hor­mone.” Next, I was put into a mock MRI scan­ner to give me an idea of what the actual test would be like. Once in the scan­ner, I was shown a series of math prob­lems on a screen. Using a hand-held sig­nal­ing device, I selected the answer to each ques­tion. The ques­tions were divided into three groups — untimed, timed, and answers pro­vided. Once this prac­tice ses­sion was done, I gave a sec­ond saliva sam­ple and headed into the real MRI room.
A heart rate mon­i­tor was clipped to my fin­ger, a res­pi­ra­tion belt was vel­croed around my chest, I put in a pair of earplugs, and I was loaded into the real scan­ner. First, a series of struc­tural images were taken with me just lying there doing noth­ing. Then they put me through three series of math prob­lems, each accom­pa­nied by func­tional imag­ing. Between the first and sec­ond sets of prob­lems, I got out for a few min­utes and pro­vided another saliva sam­ple.
After the first set, the test admin­is­tra­tor told me that I was slower than the aver­age of pre­vi­ous test sub­jects. I sus­pected that this was bogus infor­ma­tion. Dur­ing the timed prob­lems in the sec­ond round, some of the ques­tions had very short time lim­its. I did a quick test, and some were so short that I couldn’t even cycle through all the pos­si­ble answers (I had two but­tons — one to advance the selec­tor through the dig­its 0–9, and one to sub­mit an answer). But, the clincher came after the sec­ond set of prob­lems. She told me that my accu­racy rate wasn’t high enough and that if I didn’t improve in the next test, my data would be unus­able, and imag­ing time is very expen­sive, yadda yadda yadda. At that point, I knew she was just attempt­ing to induce stress. Many of the timed prob­lems in the last set had ridicu­lously short time lim­its, to the point that I was unable to even read the entire math prob­lem before run­ning out of time.
After the tests were over, I was told that my per­for­mance was fine (which I already knew). Appar­ently dur­ing the ‘prac­tice ses­sion,’ data was col­lected on how long it took me to answer the prob­lems. That data was used to set the time lim­its dur­ing the real test, with the sec­ond and third sets of prob­lems set at lim­its below my aver­age response time. I hope that even through I guessed what they were up to, I pro­vided some good data. It was an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence, and I got $50 out of it in addi­tion to the cool pic­tures of my brain above.

A few nights ago, my good friends Trevor and Lena (from Ten­nessee) came to visit me. They’d spent a few days in Tomah, Wis­con­sin vis­it­ing Trevor’s fam­ily, and stopped here for a night on their way to Chicago. I was in class most of the day, so they wan­dered around State Street for awhile until I was done. We met up, hung out in a cof­fee shop for a lit­tle while, then headed back to my apart­ment to wait for Veron­ica to get out of class. Once Veron­ica was done, we all headed to Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry, one of our favorite eating/drinking spots. Chelle, the flutist in my quin­tet, joined us there for din­ner, too.

The main rea­son for going to Dotty’s was because it’s one of the few places in town where you can get a boot. I’ve men­tioned the boot before, but here’s a brief recap: 2 liters of beer in a boot-shaped glass which can’t touch the table until it’s empty. The next to last per­son to drink from the boot buys the next one, so there’s some strat­egy involved. Any­way, Lena was the big win­ner of our one and only boot for the evening.

Trevor and Lena spent the night at my place, although I only had floor space and a bunch of sheets and blan­kets to offer. Unfor­tu­nately, I was very busy the next day. So, we only got in a quick lunch and a quick tour of the stu­dent union before they took off for Chicago. It was great to see them, even for just a short while, though.
So who’s going to come visit next? My carpet’s really comfy, I promise…

I just ran across this lit­tle bit of my pho­to­shop­pery that I’d for­got­ten about:

Click for a larger (and much higher qual­ity) version

There’s a story behind this. Last sum­mer, Brian Charles of Charles Dou­ble Reed Com­pany posted a chal­lenge on his blog:

A chal­lenge to tech-centric dou­blereedists… PIMP MY REED
Pimp my reed? Don’t know what this refers to? — TV show, Pimp My Ride. A bunch of folks spend time and tal­ent on tak­ing an old beater car and turn­ing it into a hot rod. Why not reeds?
Sub­mit your best pho­to­shop effort enti­tled PIMP MY REED. The win­ner (by our choice) will win a pile of cool stuff. We’re not sure what yet — but we promise it will be cool.

It was the sum­mer, I was bored, and I was intrigued by the offer of a pile of cool stuff. So, I sub­mit­ted my entry.
I was the only one who sub­mit­ted some­thing via the blog, and I think per­haps the only one who sub­mit­ted any­thing at all. Yes, I know. This is just fur­ther proof that I’m a huge nerd. After a cou­ple of days, Mr. Charles posted the fol­low­ing:

Come on down and add your pimped reed to the mas­sive num­ber of entries (thanks Dave). You can be #2, if you act quickly. Dave is about to win, Folks.…

But appar­ently the (extremely) low num­ber of sub­mis­sions ren­dered the offer of “a pile of cool stuff” null and void, because I never received a thing. Oh, well.

Almost two years ago, I wrote about an odd object my dad had mailed to me. I first posted pic­tures and solicited guesses as to what the bizarre con­trap­tion might be. My uncle Dave was the only one to guess cor­rectly (well, I think he was actu­ally answer­ing rather than guess­ing) — it was an egg cuber. Yes, a device to squish hard-boiled eggs into cubes. No, I’m still not sure exactly why this is desir­able.
In any case, my for­mer roomie Sean made a video of him­self, our third roomie Nathan, and me test­ing out the egg cuber. He posted it on his blog and later uploaded it to Google Video. I’d sort of for­got­ten that he’d put it on Google until this semes­ter. One of my stu­dents approached me before class one day and told me about a weird video he’d seen online. Sure enough, it was our egg cuber video, and he’d rec­og­nized me in it. So, I checked out the video again and to my sur­prise, it had been viewed more than 28,000 times. A cou­ple of weeks later, I did some pok­ing around, and dis­cov­ered that our video had been linked from the Make: Blog, a pop­u­lar geeky do-it-yourself site.
The video now has been seen more than 37,000 times, and is climb­ing fast. On Christ­mas Eve alone, it had over 1,500 views. Geez, had I known this many peo­ple would see it, I would have put my con­tacts in, tried to sound more intel­li­gent, etc. Oh, well. In any case, here’s the video again:

Update: Tack on another 3,700 views on Grouper.com, thanks to some­one call­ing them­selves “Baby­Panda” who reposted the video there. Link
Update 2: Meta­cafe gives us another 1000 views or so. Link

This is long over­due — I’ve been fight­ing with my photo gallery soft­ware, and finally con­vinced it to let me upload pho­tos again. Any­way, here’s a quick list of some of the cool things I’ve dis­cov­ered at UW or in Madison.

The Lakes
Down­town Madi­son sits between two lakes — Monona and Men­dota. The cam­pus of UW stretches for a few miles along the south­ern shore of Lake Men­dota. The stu­dent union has a large ter­race on which you can sit, drink beer, and look out at the lake. There are a cou­ple of stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions that take advan­tage of the lakes, the largest of which being the UW Hoofers Sail­ing Club. They have over 100 boats that mem­bers (once cer­ti­fied on a par­tic­u­lar class of boats) can take out when­ever the boathouse is open. I’m still debat­ing join­ing the club — I don’t know that I’d have enough time to sail to make it worthwhile.

The University’s Use of Tech­nol­ogy
UW is a very tech-savvy place (not sur­pris­ing, since it fig­ured promi­nently in the early his­tory of the inter­net). WiFi is avail­able most places on cam­pus — includ­ing on the afore­men­tioned union ter­race. Stu­dents are pro­vided with a bevy of online tools, includ­ing the stan­dards like e-mail and web­space, but also less-common things like shell access, Web­DAV accounts, and a university-wide calendar/appointment appli­ca­tion. The stu­dents in the the class I’m a TA for — Music 101: The Musi­cal Expe­ri­ence — didn’t have to buy any CDs; all of their lis­ten­ing assign­ments are avail­able online. One of the coolest things (although they don’t have it work­ing quite right yet) is that record­ings of our orches­tra rehearsals are avail­able as a pod­cast through iTunes. I’m much more likely to lis­ten to the record­ings in that for­mat that I am to go sit in the library and lis­ten to a reserve CD of the same thing.

The Onion. In Print. Every Week. Gratis.
UW-Madison is the birth­place of The Onion. Although they’ve since moved their oper­a­tions to New York, they still pub­lish a Madi­son edi­tion, which is avail­able free of charge around the city. The avail­abil­ity on cam­pus is espe­cially good. Thurs­day morn­ings are my favorite day to warm up, because on my way from my office (on the fifth floor) down to the prac­tice rooms (first floor), I can stop by the sec­ond floor and pick up the new issue of The Onion to read while play­ing my scales. Speak­ing of papers, UW-Madison also has not one but two daily stu­dent news­pa­pers. I’ve read each of them a few times, but haven’t really taken the time to fig­ure out which one I like better.

The Cheese Aisle at Woodman’s
Woodman’s is a small chain of gro­cery stores in Wis­con­sin and north­ern Illi­nois. There’s one just a cou­pld of miles from my apart­ment, and it’s pos­i­tively huge. Think Sam’s Club, but only gro­ceries. They have a great selec­tion of every­thing, and good prices. My favorite part of the store, though, is the cheese aisle. They have more kinds of cheese than I’ve ever seen in one place, and large quan­ti­ties of all of it. There are blocks, slices, and curds. There’s ched­dar, jack, colby, swiss, havarti, feta, bleu, emmen­taler, farmer’s, brie, jarls­berg, moz­zarella, pro­volone, asi­ago, parme­sean, muen­ster, ricotta, gouda, etc., etc., etc. It’s a bona fide fro­mage fancier’s fan­tasy.
These are just a few of the high­lights (and the things for which I cur­rently have illus­tra­tions). As I take more pic­tures and dis­cover more about Madi­son, I’ll assem­ble some sim­i­lar posts.

Good News: I received my diploma in the mail today. Now I feel like I can really say that I have my Mas­ters degree.
Bad News: I just took a sec­ond look at my diploma, and real­ized that it has Jeb Bush’s sig­na­ture on it. Damn.

A cou­ple of days ago I got a call from Marc Val­lon, the bas­soon pro­fes­sor at UW-Madison. He was call­ing to offer me a fel­low­ship attached to a posi­tion as a research project assis­tant. The project in ques­tion is the pub­li­ca­tion of fac­sim­i­les of Anto­nio Vivaldi’s 36 bas­soon con­certi. Marc has been con­tracted by Fuzeau, a French music pub­lisher, to pre­pare a performer’s pref­ace for each con­certo. The idea is to pub­lish 12 vol­umes, each con­tain­ing 3 con­certi. The project will also involve per­for­mances of some of the con­certi — some by Marc, and some by me and other stu­dents. The fel­low­ship is a Bolz Fel­low­ship, and gives me tuition, health insur­ance, and a pretty good stipend. So, I’ll be going to the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin at Madi­son to start my DMA stud­ies in the fall. I’m very excited about all this — UW-Madison was my top choice, and this Vivaldi project is very intrigu­ing. I guess I’ll have to start stock­ing up on my cold-weather clothing.