Jacob's Blog

River Flows in You – Yiruma

jacobdsee — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:58:41 +0000

I recently recorded my rendition of River Flows in You by Yiruma on piano. More recently then that, someone heard me play it and asked for the sheet music. I essentially get my starting point for most music from either watching someone else play the song or getting the first page of music for free from musicnotes.com and figuring out the rest from there. Musicnotes has River Flows in You in their catalog, but I prefer free to the $5 something they charge just for one song. Thus, I learned it myself.

The damper pedal kind of threw me off so it isn’t in the sheets anywhere. Just know that it’s pressed for most of the song.

Sorry if the sheets are sloppy or not notated correctly. If you can’t tell already, I’m not so much into sheets myself, more so by ear.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SHEETS [PDF]

CLICK HERE FOR THE MP3 OF WHAT IT SHOULD SOUND LIKE

Yiruma’s original composition:

Dog for Adoption

jacobdsee — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 03:16:06 +0000

[Update: The adoption has already taken place.]

Snikers is my dog. We aren’t able to take care of him as much as we should due to unforseen circumstances. He is 10lbs, and about seven years old. He isn’t a perfect dog, but he’s been pretty good. We’re talking with pet rescue programs, and they are looking for a home as well, but I just thought I’d put this page up for info and pictues. This is for the Anchorage, Alaska area only.

If you know of a good home, please post a comment below. Thanks.

Adventures with Call of Duty 4 on Windows 7

jacobdsee — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:35:47 +0000

[This was written when I was testing Windows 7 Beta, even before the release candidate was released. Call of Duty 4 works perfectly with RTM versions of Windows 7.]

I greatly enjoy the Windows 7 experience over the Windows Vista one. In my opinion, it’s faster and more stable then Vista ever was. Considering I hadn’t encountered any compatibility problems before, I decided to download Steam and try out Call of Duty 4. This is where the failing begins. Single player mode was the first thing I tried out, and I couldn’t see why everybody liked the game so much. Graphics were horrible. I could see huge triangular textures on everything. Finally coming to the conclusion that something was wrong somewhere along the line, and that it was supposed to look better, I researched farther. After downloading a graphics card update from Nvidia, this particular problem resolved, and I could now play CoD4 single player perfectly well on Windows 7.

Muliplayer, however, is something that I have yet to resolve. The actual game itself works, but PunkBuster (required on most servers) randomly kicks me off after a few minutes with an unknown API call error. After searching online, I found that it was a problem with the PnkBstrB service not working correctly in Windows 7, and that all I needed to do to fix it was enable “Allow this service to interact with the desktop” in the service properties. PunkBuster, being the pain that it is, randomly refreshes its services, so the option to allow desktop interaction does not stay checked. I’ve tried compatibility mode, running this program as an administrator (for both PnkBstrB.exe and Call of Duty itself), running the tool found at http://www.hdougie.co.uk/windows-7/tool-to-fix-punkbuster-problems-on-windows-7/#more-33, and writing my own script to automatically recheck the box when it becomes unchecked. None of them worked, however my own script did manage to extend the length of gameplay from about thirty seconds to about five minutes. After that, it either doesn’t check the box fast enough and PunkBuster kicks before it has a chance to, or PunkBuster actually detects the script interacting with it’s service and kicks with a “Disallowed Program” error. Finally giving up on Windows 7, I booted back into Vista and was quickly greeted by my old friend, Mr. BSoD. The only way I’ve gotten it to work is to run it in a virtual machine under Windows 7, and that is way too slow even on my somewhat speedy machine (Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM). Any suggestions?