Guitars

Well, I've been playing guitar a lot lately, and I just got a new steel-string, so I thought I'd share them with anyone who's interested.



















Above is my newest steel-string acoustic electric guitar. It's a special edition DynaSun Burst 4 channel equalizer. Sounds great, is extremely light (has a plastic back instead of a wooden back), and is louder than I expected with the off-set sound holes. Definitely a good guitar (at a very affordable price) for those, like me, who are mainly hobbyists and not looking to spend 1,799USD on a Cole Clarks FL2AC like Jack Johnson uses.

























The above is actually my first guitar. It's a nylon-string Granada (no idea what model, sorry). It sounds great, and is really easy on the fingers. The neck is a bit wider than would be ideal for songs involving capos, but that's hardly a problem. Quite a bit more expensive than the one above, but it's lasted well (only replaced the strings once, and rather recently at that).







Newest addition (as of September 2010). A Squier Made By Fender SE Special Strat (part of the strat pack). I bought this guitar because I was interested in getting started with an electric and had very little in the way of a budget. This pack (199€) is pretty good for anyone who's starting off. If you plan to play gigs with this, I recommend instead to buy a bullet strat by Squier and a better amp. The guitar itself is pretty decent, but I did have to adjust everything intonation-wise to arrive at a "pretty decent" sound. If you're looking for a really good beginner guitar and don't have much in the way of free cash, go for a Squier bullet pack or this pack.


If, however, you've got a bigger budget, check out a Fender Mexican Strat and a Spider Line-6 amp, for example. Plenty more expensive, but I've heard plenty of good things about both.

I also have a fourth guitar (a Tradition TG550 steel-string), but I have no pictures of it handy (it's in another country). I may update this post with stock photos if I find some good ones. Also, I have to apologize for any issues with the pictures, I used my Milestone to take the shots.

If there are any specific questions you've got, feel free to leave me a comment!

C++

Lately I've been moving my programming focus from Python to C++, simply because I wanted to experience a compiled language, and compare it with the "slower" scripting languages I often use (perl, bash, python, etc.). Slower insofar as they require libraries to be loaded at runtime. My first step was to create a recursive directory traversal function, since I planned on re-writing a "music catalogue" program I wrote in Python (basically a program that compiles a list of songs) in C++. I also want to add functionality, like specifying if you only want a list of artists, albums, etc. And also specify how it is printed out (i.e. comma-separated for "About Me" type forms, or a normal list).

I ran into a bit of a snag getting the recursion working properly at first, but asking in the ArchLinux Forums gave me the advice I needed, and the method works now without a problem. During that time though, another forum member mentioned that recursion is best avoided (with which I wholeheartedly agree), and who has prompted me now to look into re-writing my method as an iterative method instead of a recursive one. However, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the changes I'd need to create an iterative directory traversal function from the method I've already written. If anyone feels like taking a shot at explaining the differences I'd need to make in my recursive function to make it iterative to me, feel free to leave me a comment. Or, if you'd like to see the code I've written, I've paste-binned it here. If you re-write it into an iterative function, I'd be grateful if you posted a link to it here, in order to spur my thinking processes along.

Besides that, I haven't been up to all too much. Mainly organizing my life. Once I finish the music catalogue program, I'll probably post it up here. Also, I plan to update my blog more regularly once things have settled down here a bit.