Lost in London

         I decided to take a walk on Monday, I had intended to go grocery shopping but the grocery store was closed...Thanksgiving, duh.  So instead I went for a walk through a forest with a bunch of trails in it near my place to clear my head after a couple hours of studying.  And I got lost.  This wasn't entirely unintentional though as getting lost can be fun, I took a few random turns and got myself turned around.  I ended up coming out on the complete opposite side of the forest from where I started.  It took me about an hour walking along the street to make it back to my place, but I found a couple churches on my way that I'll be checking out the next two Sundays.  Along the way I took a few pictures of parts I thought looked cool.

And here is where I eventually exited the forest

        While I was lost I was just listening to all the sounds created by the forest around me.  It struck me how amazing our ears and brains are.  There are literally millions of sounds happening all at once in a forest, every single leaf makes a sound as the wind moves it.  It made a blanket of sound above me but I could still make out all the different low and high sounds, I could also hear a bird chirping and be able tell exactly where it came from without looking.  It's pretty amazing to me how our ears are able to process millions of different vibrations in the air and translate into something we can unconsciously understand perfectly.

        School is still going really well for me, I'm taking in a ton of information every day but I feel pretty confident I am keeping up and learning it all.  It is a pretty ridiculous amount of stuff I'm learning though...for example I have to learn what absolutely everything is on this diagram.

       That diagram is the signal flow diagram for one single strip (one vertical line of knobs on the left side) on this mixing console.  Signal flow is just where the information starts, where it ends up, and what it hits along the way.

         I also have to learn about 50 microphones (their names and all their specs) just by looking at them.  One of which is this one, which is a fairly special microphone.  This is a Neumann U87 and was made in West Berlin, which should tell you about how old it is.  It is regarded as one of the best microphones every made to record voice with.  This microphone is worth about $3,000.