Second Audition

It's not over yet!  The band leader called yesterday, and they are struggling to decide between the three keyboard players they auditioned.  So, he had a few more questions to ask that might help them make a decision.  I don't think I've been eliminated yet as I stated my ability to sing, play other instruments, and willingness to play all different kinds of music.  It appears my biggest weakness may be my lack of equipment (though they were impressed by my ability to get multiple simultaneous instruments out of my one good keyboard), but I can fix that—I'm really looking for an excuse to get a new keyboard.  He said it may result in a second audition tonight and will let me know today.  It would've been nice if I had practiced a bit more last night (really I should say 'this week'), but I was distracted by the Rose Bowl.  And when I wasn't distracted by that, instead of practicing I was programming the keyboard instead.

One handicap of my keyboard is that the display doesn't work.  That means that I have to hook it up to my computer if I need to do anything more than change instrument sounds.  Last week I was able to program it for all of the audition songs, but found myself a little frustrated with the computer program I used to program it with.  So, of course, I've taken on the task of writing my own program to interface with the keyboard.  And I'm doing it in a pretty ridiculous programming language—Microsoft Excel VBA.  Why?  Well I can actually put things together pretty quickly in Excel, a lot of that has to do with the GUI which many of us are very familiar with.  You'd be surprised what Excel can do.  This for instance, is something I wrote that started out as an Excel spreadsheet.  It has since been converted to Java.  I'm not sure that was the correct choice though.  If you are bored, see if you can figure out what the hell it is and is supposed to do.