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About this June 26, 2007 image . . .
( as of December 25. 2007 site update )
( August 7, 2007 notes by Carl Helmers updated December 23, 2007)
I captured this image looking diagonally across our home's "family" [AKA "piano"] room perched on a utility platform ladder temporarily placed just in front of our wide screen LCD TV across from our viewing couch. My Dakota Jackson Tri-centennial Steinway piano is in the center of this image (#3/300 limited production "art case" piano - see http://www.steinway.com/steinway/limited_edition/biography.shtml ). The piano is under our second floor balcony that overlooks the room. I practice classical (currently several pieces by Beethoven, Schuman, Chopin) and ragtime (one or two Joplin "classics") every day with the ultimate goal of memorizing each of the several pieces I practice over and over and over.
On the wall at right above our Dakota Jackson Heraldic coffee table are several framed images taken from one of my favorite BYTE magazine covers. The largest framed image is the final pastel artwork for the March 1979 issue's cover created by my artist friend Robert Tinney [ see http://www.tinney.net/bio.htm ] to tie into an article about implementing an RSA encryption program. This BYTE cover illustration is entitled "Through The Trap Door". The cover shows a block of plain text data falling through a symbolic trap door of the encryption algorithm to become the jumbled "cipher text" that is securely passed through a data communication link. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA#History for info on the RSA algorithm. With varying levels of security based on key length, this algorithm provides most if not all the practical financial privacy in this millennium's extensive WWW commerce.
The smaller framed image under it at right is Robert's colored magazine sized final rough sketch for the March 1979 BYTE magazine cover, an image he conceived after I explained the cryptography concepts involved. The small framed image at the bottom left is the actual cover of that issue of the magazine, taken from one of my copies. An intact March 1979 BYTE issue leaning against the wall on the table under the three frames completes the set of images of from this BYTE cover seen here.
2007/12/23 note: Today, I updated www.helmers.com as follows: I added a major section about my major workshop project of 2007: the Mobile Work Table that I now use as a major tool, conceived in September 2006, intensely CAD designed starting in April 2007, and actually built from late May through November 2007.
2007/12/23 CH piano projects: On the theme of my entry picture on this page of my site, from August through November 2007 I spent many hours memorizing two delightful (but simple enough for my novice skill levels) Chopin waltzes from my copy of the G. Henle Verlag Chopin Walzer URTEXT book:
KK IVb Nr.11 [#17 in Henle, pp 92-93]
KK IVa Nr. 13 [#14 in Henle, pp 82-83.]
In addition to playing these two from memory every day, I play Chopin Opus posth. 70 Nr. 2 [#12b in Henle, pp 76-79] at least once every day from the music. This is my current memorization project for the start of 2008.
I also play my long memorized one page Robert Schumann Opus 68 #10 [Frohlicher Landman... AKA "The Jolly Farmer"] from memory once day...