Bye For Now

It’s already my last day of this Spring semester! I’m sad because I love my STA job :(, but I’m also very excited to start my internship. I will (tentatively, but very hopefully) be back, so this is just a see you later!

For seniors who will be graduating after this summer, I might or might not have a chance to say good bye to you, but I know you will do very well in whatever you chose to do! I wish you the best of luck, and congratulations on making it through college. It’s been a pleasure working with you.

Thank you Suloni, Valerie, and Maddy for all the support, and the STA team for always being so kind and cheerful <3. I’ll miss you guys a lot. I’ll keep you updated on my San Francisco stories. Maybe I’ll smoke some meat @Abriella *eyes*.

What’s Thuy’s gbye without a classical piece, so here’s Liszt piano transcription of Schubert’s Schwanengesang (Swan Song) number 5, Abschied (Farewell) played by pianist Valentina Lisitsa. I’ll see you guys in a few months, take care <3.

The Beethoven Sonata I Learned this Semester

It’s been a while since I blog, so I wanted to talk a little bit about classical music here. This semester I learned Beethoven Sonata Op. 2 No. 1 (also known as Beethoven Sonata No. 1) in F Minor, Movement I. This marks my first time learning Beethoven after a long while (my last Beethoven piece was the Sonata No. 5, Movement I). I’ve been playing a lot of pieces of other styles (lots of Romantic, Mozart, Bach), so it’s refreshing to play a Beethoven.

I think it’ll be fun to share a little bit of my learning process, so here’s a snapshot of my annotated sheet music of this Sonata. I try to write down everything Yunzhi said, so it’s sometimes so funny because the annotations are all over the places. For example, at the tempo, I wrote Practice: 70 at some point, then crossed it out the week after when we increased the tempo to 96, then 100, and then 110 for the final tempo.

The challenges for me when learning this piece are:

1. Triplets (the trill-like triplet signature of this piece). Trills are always so difficult for me T.T, and I’ve gotten much better, but still. In the end, I changed the fingerings for the trills and also practice it very loudly with staccato (as suggested by Yunzhi). And also I realized that keeping my wrist low and relax my fingers is the way to go. I think I get too nervous with trills, so that’s why I’m always very tense playing it.
2. Making the piece sounds “dramatic.” Drama and intensity is a common characteristic found in many Beethoven pieces, and certainly in many of his Piano Sonatas (e.g. the famous Appasionata, Tempest, Pathetique, Moonlight, etc.).
3. Practicing with a metronome. I had to practice controlling my pulse for the piece well before increasing the tempo and add some rubato / accelerando.

I’ll be making a recording of me playing some time this weekend / next week (so I might post it later if it’s good enough LOL). But for now, please enjoy this rendition here by pianist Lewis. The timestamp for the first movement is 14:55-19:20. I especially like this interpretation because it is slower than other interpretations, but very lyrical and personal.

Texas Beyond History: In the Environment

I’ve been working on TBH with Jake for the new Exhibit, Radiocarbon. Most of the work is pretty straight forward, because the site is mainly static, so Jake and I have just been putting the text and images into the HTML.

One interesting thing I’d say is that I figured out how to include mathematical equations in HTML using a JavaScript library called MathJax. All I had to do is to include the script and I can type LaTex (thank you my Algo class for teaching me how to use this tool) in HTML.

Battle Casts (after a long while)

It’s been a while since I worked on Battle Casts (the last time was last semester?). The client reached out recently and so I think the project is being picked up again. There’s not much for me to do since the site shell is ready, and the client can take over the text / image input portion. All I need to do is to create a new template page for the 3D model.

The client said they’ll get back to me with the design for this template on Monday, so I’ll be updating this then.

Longhorn Open Ed Tech GitHub Page

I’ve been working with Chris to redesign the GitHub landing page for Longhorn Open Ed Tech. Here’s how the original page looked like.

I made some some Figma mockups to draft out the changes I’d like to make. Here’s the first version.

Chris and Maddy really like it, Chris’ only main concern with this one is that the GitHub icon doesn’t read well as a link to the Project Page. He gave me some suggestions, so here are two more iterations.

Chris likes the one with the icon + text link the most (which was also my preferred one), so we went with it. The HTML and CSS are pretty simple so it didn’t take me too long to put them together. Here’s how the final site looked like locally for me. I also made the pull request so I’m just waiting for Chris to approve the merge before the changes are up live.

WP Documentation Briefing

Athena recently joined the WP Documentation team, so yesterday we had a meeting to catch her up on what we’ve been working on. Here are some screenshots of what we’ve discussed.

Athena was already able to make some great progress on the documentation, so I think we’ll finish this documentation soon! :).