Today, many of us geeks celebrate Pi Day, because π = 3.1415926535897932384626433… is such an important number in math and science. I have to confess that I have never celebrated Pi Day, but it was just last year that I found out there was a movement against celebrating Pi Day, and advocating the celebration of Tau Day instead, where the special constant (which a community has chosen to be denoted by the Greek letter “tau”, τ) is 2π, which is 6.283…. Upon examining the evidence briefly, I had immediately agreed that indeed, we should not be celebrating Pi Day, and that therefore, today is simply Half-Tau Day.

If this is getting much too geeky for you, feel free to ignore the rest of this blog post. Otherwise, bear with me!

Yesterday, after four days of not even touching my (modern) flute and having spent the time having fun with my Baroque flute instead, I felt the urge to return to the modern flute.

I still have not regained the inclination to continue working on the orchestra music I still have to improve a lot on in the coming week, but I rediscovered the joy of simply playing my instrument.

This is my first blog post in over a week. I’ve been very busy, and therefore have had to recently say “no” to blogging while saying “yes” to many other activities.

Another thing I’ve said “no” to in the past three days has been playing the (modern) flute. In my last blog post I was worried about flute burnout and injury.

Here’s a flute status update.

Yesterday, I attended yet another rehearsal of the Carnegie Mellon All-University Orchestra.

I did this while feeling burned out and injured.

Yesterday, there was snow in Pittsburgh (almost all melted today, of course).

Abby and I had originally planned to be going on a Meetup hike at Ohiopyle, carpooling with John, but on Friday we bailed out because of the weather forecast. We’ve done that hike a couple of times before, and will certainly do it again when it’s repeated in warmer weather anyway.

Snow, however little there is of it, always makes me want to eat sambar. I love Indian food, and for some reason, I especially like sambar. Once every month or two, I crave going to Coriander India Grill in Squirrel Hill, just a couple of blocks from where we live, to eat sambar and other good stuff. We’ve been to Coriander Grill several times, on different days and for lunch and dinner. There has been inconsistency, but I have reason to believe that lunch buffet on Saturday is a good time to go to Coriander.

So the three of us went to Coriander for lunch.

Recently I encountered on a blog that I follow, Expert Enough, the question, “When Can You Call Yourself An Expert?” There have been some interesting comments on the blog. Here is my own thinking on the subject.

Lately I’ve been having to say “No” a lot to events and activities that appeal to me, in order to make room for “Yes”. Time and energy are finite for us every day and every week, and our desires are inexhaustible.

Last year, I wrote a post about how I use my time. A lot has changed since then, with various rebalancings.

It was exactly one month ago, January 22, when I joined the Carnegie Mellon All-University Orchestra.

Another week has gone by, and what I thought might be a day of reckoning has come and gone, and I am still playing the flute in the CMU AUO and have not dropped out!

Here is a sample of the hardest music from Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story” that I’m still struggling to play correctly, cleanly, and in tempo:

It is not very visible from my photos, but I have a huge number of pencil markings on my copy of the score.

The story as of now:

Tonight the Pittsburgh Java Users Group (PittJUG[http://franklinchen.com/blog/categories/pittjug/]) had another meeting at the Pittsburgh Technology Council. Matthew McCullough of GitHub gave a talk “Get Going with Git on Java Projects”.

I arrived early and couldn’t help admiring the view outside before entering the building as there was still daylight. Here are the Birmingham Bridge and the Monongahela River:

I had a good time tonight.

A month ago I reported on how Abby and I had our first experience of French traditional dance. On Saturday, we went again to Skibo Gym at Carnegie Mellon University for another fun session of French dancing from 4:00 to 7:00 PM.

We had a great time again, and afterwards joined the instructors and some other people in having dinner at Gullifty’s.