Piano

I've stopped learning how to play the piano.

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to really read sheet music. It's not motivating enough to simply follow this book. The book jumps too fast. I also don't know if I'm doing things right. I learnt that I was a note or two off for a few songs. It sounded weird but I didn't know.

With no direction, I feel a little messed up.

I'm considering hiring a tutor.

I need to also play more songs that I enjoy listening to. I can usually tell if a song is off. But if it's a song I know then I'll definitely know it's screwed up. It's also more motivating to do that than to just play scales. Scales are boring.

Everyone tells me that scales are the natural beginner's way to learn how to play a piano. That that's all that I need to know. But I fucking can't force myself to just play scales. I didn't buy a piano to learn how to play scales. I wanted to play songs. I can't *just* do scales. I need to play simple songs that compliment them.

I feel as though nothing is working for me.

R.I.P. Grandma

The funeral was last week Wednesday. Well, the ceremony was. The burial was on Thursday. I never forgave my parents for not telling me that my grandfather had passed away when I was in school. They considered school to be more important but I hated them for it.

She didn't leave this Earth in peace though. I know that. She attempted to kill herself a few times in the hospital. She was also living with my aunt who hated her company. She moved back voluntarily to help pay her (my aunt) bills during her messy divorce. Not to mention my uncle (not the previous wife's husband) was spending all his time taking away her life savings before she passes away. He took her money to bail out his son.

I'm honestly a bit tired of going through this drama repeatedly in my head. I wish it was easier than this. I can remember a time when family was simple. That was before I landed in Canada. My concept of family only consisted of my mother, father, and brother.

After we emigrated from England ... my parents were too busy and my grandmother took care of me a lot. Sadly, I could never truly communicate with her. I tried my best but my Cantonese or Vietnamese was almost non-existent. I still loved my grandmother. No matter how broken my Cantonese may have seemed. She still took care of us. Cooked for us. Looked after us. She even took care of the next wave of children who came by.

As a secular humanist, I don't believe in an afterlife. I also don't believe that she's looking out for me somewhere. But I would hope to live my life in a way that would make her proud. Which means, I'm going to have to be a better son to my mother. And a better family member to look out for the rest of those kids. 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

So I'm trying to automate the deployment process for any Microsoft Dynamics CRM customizations that we perform.

Thus far, I've learnt the following things:

1. WCF does NOT play nicely with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
   
2. Apparently people rely on an external tool to register assemblies
3. There are two types of customizations. UI changes which annoyingly enough are called 'Customizations' and the second being assemblies deployed via 2.

Now, CRM to me is like SharePoint. It's an ASP.NET site that has all these extras that are loaded onto it. Since it's closed source, you need to be able to go around it. In order to automate deployment, we require a few funny tricks to be able to do it properly.

So far, I've narrowed it down to two steps. I need to run this PluginRegistration tool with two xml files to load in the CRM Customizations. Then I need to run my own custom application to load in and publish xml customizations.

Great, so how do I deploy it?

When I wrote my custom sharepoint package I wrote my own batch files that loaded and packaged everything into a cab file. They were pretty complex ... they didn't just run makecab. They also used scripting to do some automated things as well.

For this one, I'm thinking of using the SetUp Project for Visual Studio. I haven't done much of it yet. However, there are a few things that I see that I like already. I can output the results of any project into the project and it gets packaged. I also see that screens are nicely setup for me.

What don't I like about it?  It feels eerily restrictive. Each UI form has a set number of textboxes and radiobuttons that I can set their visibility. Their forms are dictated only by properties. I can only seem to add a certain number of forms. There's no designer for them. I can only enter code through CustomActions as well. I'm unsure how to do exception handling and for a silly little MSI app. But anyways, I'll need to run executables ... I'll need to run a lot of other things ... Just to see if this all works out. I'm wondering if it'd just be better for me to write my own .exe file to execute.