Music for Change, Infiniminer, and Notepad++ Transparency
May 27th, 2009 by Metroid48Bit of a long title, right? Anyway, on Saturday I attended the second annual Music for Change concert. Music for Change is held for Free the Children, aiming to raise funds to help children living in poverty through education. It is also supported by my school HTS, or Holy Trinity School. I never attended the 2008 concert so I wasn’t sure what to expect of this years, so it was much to my surprise how good the performances were! The night started with opening speeches from the MC, Andrew Ascenzo, and Jacqueline Mok. Immediately after were speeches from Marc and Craig Kielburger, the people who started FTC back when they were only twelve. It’s something to hear Craig speak, as it’s extremely powerful - as far as I’m concerned he is the best speaker I’ve ever heard. Why? Because he is really passionate about what he’s saying - there’s no comparison, even to presidential speeches from Barrack Obama.
After the opening speakers the music got started. Literally everything was if not the best at least enjoyable to listen to! In particular performances by Louise Kent, Andrew Ascenzo, and Molly Johnson stood out. Louise performed a single song, Some Days, which was uplifting and convinced me to buy her album (a rare thing as I usually only buy songs individually). Andrew was a part of the Victor Cheng jazz trio - I didn’t expect a particularily memorable piece as jazz is not one of my favourite genres, but the songs here had the amazing quality of constantly moving between classical and jazz genres, along with a great piano accompaniment. Finally, Molly Johnson brought the night to a close with some jazz tunes but more importantly plenty of character - the way most events should end. I fully expect a 2010 Music for Change and will gladly attend.
While it’s a lot less important or amazing, I do have a few other topics I’ve been waiting to post about. First is a small Windows game called Infiniminer, made by Zachtronics Industries. It’s available for free and while the servers seem to have quieted down the past few days I still recommend everyone gives it a try. I’ve been making a lot of changes and submitting them to my Git branch; this being the first time I’ve used Git, I’ve found it very useful but not at all user friendly. Anyway, Infiniminer is a 3D mining game whereby a couple teams compete to try to dig down, retrieve loot, and return to the surface. there are four classes specializing in digging, building, exploring, and just blowing stuff up. More interesting than the main game is the sandbox mode, whereby you have unlimited resources and can build hold underground cities and roads and such. I once saw a server that had the entire underground carved out (the server was set to have no lava, which is a very dangerous problem otherwise) so that they could have mid-air walkways and flying temples - crazy stuff. While the game has its rough edges, which I’ve slowly tried to fix with my repository (seriously, it’s got a lot of fixes and features that improve gameplay), I still say that everyone should give it a try, especially if you have any LAN parties or similar events.
The final comment I want to make is something that has struck me as odd for a while - in Windows 7 the Notepad++ find window doesn’t close properly and instead obscures the window, half-transparent and unresponsive. For anyone else having this problem, I just found a solution by this blog post; just disable transparency or set it to “always on”! I didn’t even know Notepad++ had the ability to make the find window transparent when it uses focus! Excellent fix.
