June 11th, 2004 Black Boy

Black boy

This month’s review

At the end of last month, watched Jamie and Nova’s recital. So greatly played! And happy to meet with so many ex-CU classmates afterwards.

Last wednesday was the Chinese music ensemble concert. I accompanied Vikki to play Joshua Chan’s “飛燕翱翔” (Vikki - erhu, me- piano), Joshua was not very satisfied, as we are not very familiar and often get wrong with rhythm. He was also not satisfy with the overall acoustics, erhaps my accompaniment was too compicate and covered erhu parts too..

Played also in the concert was Alfred’s 維港夜曲. Played very flowingly. Yu Siu Wah said jokingly that it is “Koo Ka Fai + Debussy” style. I played erhu part in it and found it difficult to get the intonation right, especially for high pitch with accidentals. That is indeed a great difficulty for chinese instruments to adjust to western orchestral way. I must take up my erhu again and practise more on intonation.

四合如意 and 絲竹新韻 are quite difficult pieces for erhu players too. It’s lucky that I do not need to take up solo parts.

My work 未圓驚夢 is played again by Ricky and Jason, using my re-written five-line score version. Although there had been few rehearsals, the result seemed to sound even better than last time. Joshua and An foreigner praised it. However, I do think it is a “tui” piece, it is just ornamented upward scales and downward scale, like going up hills and down hills. Yu siu wah said the Zheng accompaniment is not written very effective, that’s very true too. Although I thought this piece is very traditional, MS thought it is more like music in “New” china.

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After the chinese ensemble concert, many ppl got to have a late dinner. I and MS then took KCR + MTR to 調景嶺. Last train for crossing harbour has gone. So I took taxi to cross harbour and planned to switch to bus afterwards, but I lost my wallet on taxi. I had got absolutely NO money. I begged pedestrians walked by for $5, failed twice time, finally met a good-hearted young man who gave me $10. After home, called HSBC to cut the credit card, and using the HK police website (!) to report lost property.

On the next day, I reported to taxi centres about the lost, and also phoned to immigration department, transport department to ask about reissue of cards. Here’s a summary of what I lost:

Blue plastic wallet ($20)
ID card ($395 for reissue)
Credit Card / ATM card
Driving license ($110 for reissue)
CU staff card ($50 for reissue)
CU photocopy card ($30)
Public Library card
Octopus Card ($150 for a new one)
1 concert ticket ($100)
Maxim coupon ($100)

Total: >= $950

Losing cards are much more expensive and clumpsy than losing money…

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I sold my Dell notebook in Yahoo! auction for $1200, but later someone bid it for $1500…

I sold Creative soundblaster live! value sound card in Yahoo auction for $100

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After installing windows 2000, I haven’t installed Norton Virus yet. And my computer got infected from internet immediately!! I found that there are so many unknown programs try to pass through the firewall program, and the computer often halt for one or two seconds when IE is in use, the hard-disk is often loading, and the computer is extremely slow. Originally I thought it is the problem of the new harddisk, but it isn’t.

This virus is very dangerous, it doesn’t allowed me to update virus definition, or even enter Symantec or any antivirus homepage! And another virus spreads through the windows update program. Microsoft Windows is totally shit.. so many bugs that allows intruders to attack!
I finally get a copy of live update from tucows.com, and wiped it out. I’m so tired of the process of scanning, turn to safe mode, deleting the infected files and registers. That wasted me another morning.

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Asked Yin for paying me to watch S.I.U. concert on thursday. 瑤族舞曲 was blended with Summer time very smoothly! Yin said it is called “瑤summer”, i.e. “夭心er”, haha, a crazingly funny mixture. Many great new arrangements / new pieces, the last piece with scat singing was excellent, though very much like a jazz standard piece. My piece Fantasy was played once again, this time they have input more improvisations and played it with a much better shape. The piano improvisations by Ken Chan was amazing. He added so many new chords but suits perfectly well into the original harmonic scheme. Met JJ, VT, IC, STC and PC.

Before the concert, I enjoyed eating $10 fishball noodles in Sai Wan Ho and then have a walk in the park on the seashore. I laid on a chair and have a deep thought. Rejected to go for concerts on friday. I was tired and feeling uunwell.

MS is now in shanghai.
Frei aber einsam.