Long time since I have last posted a blog. The main reason is because I bought an iPad.
I have always been into stuff like ebook readers and liked the idea of being able to browse the net whenever you liked. The main thing that held me back was the plans for the mobile Internet.
However when I actually researched the data plans, I found that it was really cheap for Internet access. Vodafone Australia seems to offer a prepaid charge as you go option of 1gb for $15au that will last a month. Also if you recharge the credit before the end of the month the remaining unused data allowance is carried onto the next month of usage.
So I have been enjoying taking the iPad everywhere I go and it has replaced my old 2gb iPod nano as my main mp3 player. However it doesn’t seem to be the ideal platform for blogging. It seems there are only a couple of apps available to do blogging with, and the safari browser can’t display the rich text view on wordpress so I’d have to type in HTML which simply is too difficult on the onscreen keyboard. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been almost a year since my Japan trip, but since I’ve managed to find some time, I’ve decided to continue the posts.
The plan for the day was to meet up with my dad’s friend to fly over Osaka in a small plane. One of his old work collegues is a pilot and pilots a plane every so often as a hobby. We all met up at Tenouji station in Osaka, and my dad’s friend’s collegue guided us to Yao Airport.
Yao Airport is a relatively small airport located in the country side of Osaka. It is a bit of a walk away from the train station, but the scenery around the airport was quite nice.
Over the weekend, I spent some time recording some videos of my piano practice on the new piano. These videos have some of the older songs I recorded before, but I also recorded some new songs too. I also included an intro bit of the “You” song from the Higurashi anime.
I’m happier with the composition session this time. It still needs a lot of work, but i’m starting to make it sound a bit more decent. I still don’t know how to put in the black keys, but I guess that will come in time. Perhaps when I learn more about playing in different keys.
This morning, my new piano (Yamaha T121) arrived safely on time at around 9:30am. The piano fortunately fit in the area that I made some room for it. The piano was transported by 2 staff from Sound Centre and it only took them about 10 minutes to move the piano into the place I had prepared. It was certainly much faster then I had anticipated. When peeking at the contents of the truck, when my piano was being unloaded, there were several upright pianos as well as a grand piano in there.
When I tested out the piano, it was actually louder than I had imagined but was still fine. Although I am glad that I didn’t buy a piano with a larger cabinet, otherwise, It would be far too loud.
After finishing work for the day, I spent the rest of my time playing the piano for most of the day. The sound quality is most definitely a lot better than my digital piano’s sound. Because of the loudness of the piano, I doubt I’d be able to practice too late at night, so I’ll have to resort to using my digital piano for night practice. My parents also are quite impressed with the new piano.
Anyways, I am really happy with the piano and plan to keep up with my piano practice.
I went to the Australian Piano Fair at the Perth convention center this weekend as I heard of it from some piano related email subscription.
Recently I’ve been rather dissatisfied with the fake piano sound that my digital pianos use, so I have been quite tempted with the prospect of buying a real piano. The main problems I had with the digital pianos were that I wasn’t able to appreciate the songs I was playing as the sounds didn’t sound right (e.g. chords when playing blues songs) and I was not able to play on my teacher’s piano without having to spend a bit of time at the beginning getting used to the difference in the key action.
Anyways, since I have a holiday planned later in the year, I figured it wasn’t such a good idea to go to the piano fair, but I wanted to try playing on various brands and types of pianos (like the expensive grand pianos), so I ended up going.
Last week, I uploaded some videos of myself practicing piano. I still can’t play anime or game songs yet, so I decided to play some of the songs that I liked the most from the Simply Music piano method that I’m learning. I haven’t uploaded all of the songs I can play yet, so I plan to set aside some time to record and upload the remaining songs.
I actually was recording myself play the piano at about midnight till 1am, so I was actually a bit tired but overall was quite happy with my performance. I did however feel intimidated by the camera. On the other hand, it actually helped me identify which songs I need to work on more as I ended up making some mistakes on some songs I thought I could play easily.
It’s been a while since I took some photos of my room and yet another Otaku room related competition by Danny Choo has gotten me into action to take more photos and even film a tour of my room.
Also some big news from the last Otaku room competition about a year ago, although I didn’t win it, my room was actually selected to be published in a book called Otacool. Please check it out!
Tim’s Otaku room tour in both English and Japanese:
Tim’s Otaku room tour English only ver:
The following photos are taken for Otacool 3, which I hope I can get my room in it as well.
Name: Timothy Koh
Age: 26
Country of residence: Western Australia
Main machine spec and OS: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40Ghz 2GB RAM running Windows 7 64 bit.
Job title: Software Engineer
Web: http://timkoh.info and http://timkoh.info/jp
Any messages: My room needs to be 4 times bigger.
It’s been a while since I last posted. Lately I’ve been fairly occupied with work as well as some new hobbies that have been taking up quite a bit of my free time. One of those hobbies is music. A while back, I mentioned that I was self-teaching myself the piano and guitar. Well although for a while I kinda neglected it, I have started to concentrate on it recently by starting piano lessons with the goal of becoming able to play anime and video game songs like you often see people play on youtube. So far I’ve taken lessons for 6 months now and am quite enjoying it.
It took a while to find a teacher for piano. There were suprisingly quite a few teachers a reasonable distance away from me, although it seems that most of them didn’t do hours after work or during weekends which made it very difficult for me to find a teacher. Fortunately out of recommendation from another teacher, I managed to find a teacher who lives close by and could do lessons on weekends or in the evening. It seemed that all of the teachers close to where I live all teach based on a piano method called Simply Music.
A quick google of this piano method didn’t really bring up much information, but from reading up on it on the website and from a few Youtube videos, it looked like it was some new breakthrough piano method that seemed to promise that you’d be playing songs with both hands from your first lesson.
Of course I was skeptical about it, but given that I finally found a piano teacher, I decided to give it a go and was quite impressed with it. It seems that the piano method teaches you songs by using patterns to help you remember the songs, and gets you playing from both hands as advertised. The reading music process is delayed until later on in the Simply Music program and emphasis is put on technique built up from playing the songs in the playlist.
I attended my local anime event “Waicon”, and had the most fun I had for quite a while. The event was held over a weekend and had many stalls selling anime goods and art work as well as hosting many interesting seminars, competitions and mini events such as the popular cosplay competition.
This year was particularly special as there was a special event where Eminence, a symphony orchestra from Sydney that specializes in performing Anime and game music, was invited to play at the event. As I’ve been interested in learning music lately, this was a great opportunity to check out professionals playing music from anime and games that I liked.
The orchestra is particularly famous as they performed and recorded the soundtracks for popular movies in Japan such as the upcoming Disappearance of Haruhi movie sound track as well as music for a number of video games.
In addition, Japanese composer Mitsuda Yasunori who is particularly famous for his compositions for Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross also attended the event.
The first day at Waicon started waiting in queue to enter the event area. My friend and I bought the pre-sale tickets to enter, which ended up being a mistake, as it seemed that most of the attendees did the same, so there was in fact a larger queue than expected in the preorder ticket queue than there was for those that purchased the tickets on the day.
Ack! I guess I should of arrived earlier. orz
Anyways, I was waited in the queue with my friend, and we eventually got our entry tags to get in.
This is my dollfie dream doll that I bought in Japan in August 2009.
I still don’t know much about dollfies, but quite like them. I used a wig from Parabox, a store in Radio Kaikai of Akihabara, and also the limited edition cat-ear maid outfit from the series Fortune Arterial that I bought at Azone International in Osaka.
