On Friday, we did a concert at St Francis Xavier School in Cross Plains. The kids loved it and so did we! Our ears are still ringing from their appreciation. Their parish hall had to be one of the prettiest (and best-sounding!) rooms we've ever been in! It was loads of fun.
Slightly different note...we're redoing our website. We've got so much stuff on it, that it's getting kind of cramped. Here's a sneak preview:
We wish all you Oremus fans a very merry, blessed Christmas, and a Happy New Year 2008!
Chris and Tom -- Oremus
Posted on Tuesday, December 25, 2007 at 10:30:40 PM
Userbars! (General)
Apparently the newest rage is to put 'userbars' in your forum signatures. Well, Oremus is proud to present Oremus userbars!
To use them, just copy / paste this code into your forum (or email) sig:
For the Oremus userbar,
For the Song of Benedict userbar,
Posted on Saturday, November 24, 2007 at 12:04:51 PM
School - Part II (General)
Hey everybody.
Chris asked me to write a little something about what I do at school. So here goes...
Right now I'm a junior at UW-Madison, studying Computer Science and Math. I really like programming, solving problems with computers, etc. That's why I'm studying Math and Computer Science.
This semester I'm taking a bunch of different classes:
Operating Systems: we're learning about the gory details of what an operating system must do and how it does it. Very interesting stuff, just it can be complicated. One of my latest (and most difficult/interesting) projects in this class was to write a multithreaded web server -- lots of fun! What's a thread?
Digital System Fundamentals: basically all about how computers and other (less complicated) circuits are made out of transistors. Again, complicated, but interesting.
Intro to Probability: this is my math course. It covers everything from how to calculate the probability that a 5-card poker hand will be a full house (useful!), to finding the expected value of an infinite probability space using indefinite integrals.
Animal Biology: all about life. Starting from cells and protein structures, up to organs and their functions, up to environments, interactions between species, ecology, evolution, etc. Pretty interesting, and that's coming from someone who doesn't really like biology. (I must have a good teacher.)
English and American Literature, pre-1914: analyzing literature. We're reading Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, several poems of the Romantic period, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and , Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (no, we're not getting to that before Halloween...), Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and several of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries.
That's a reasonable load, it keeps me quite busy!
When I'm not busy with school, I try to find time to edit and upload homilies and talks for the downtown Catholic parishes web site, Isthmus Catholic, play footbag with Chris, do some programming, web design, etc., or just hang out and relax a bit!
Posted on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 05:01:33 PM
School - Part I (General)
So school is underway. But what exactly does Oremus do during the school year? Unfortunately, neither one of us is a music major, so we don't get to do that...
This is Part I, or what Chris does (or is doing) at school. Tom will write Part II.
My personal page says that I study mechanical engineering. I'm a senior. I'll be graduating in May (good riddance to bad rubbish :D).
Probably the coolest thing that I'm doing right now is a two-semester senior design class. We are building an underwater exercise bike. I know that sounds a little crazy, but there's good reason behind it.
We're making this bike for a physical therapist who works with Multiple Sclerosis patients. Without getting into a lot of technical details, it turns out that it's really good for MS patients to exercise, but they also tend to overheat more than most people. If you make them do their exercise underwater, it keeps them cooler. And about 99.99999% of people love being in the water to start with.
if you google the Schwinn Airdyne, or if you already know about it, we're basically making that, except for use in a 4-foot-deep pool. Instead of the big fan on the front, it will have two knobs that control how hard it is to pedal. When all is done, MS patients should be able to use it, and apparently there are also some athletes who are interested in it for training.
After school, I work at a local radio station doing production work. It's a lot of fun. I also help out at the campus Catholic center. They have these praise-and-worship meetings on Thursday nights and they've been wanting to record them. Guess who gets to do that? We just started last week, so it's still at the gearing-up-and-problem-solving stage.
When we're completely sick of school, Tom and I have come up with a new way of unwinding: hacky sack (aka footbag). We've had about ten footbags lying around since high school, but we never used them that much. Well, we've started. And we're getting kind of ok at it!
For those who are not familiar with hacky sack, the idea is to kick this little knitted bag of PVC pellets (bigger than a golf-ball, smaller than a tennis-ball) around among a bunch of people. No hands, no self starts. You have to pass it to someone else to start a hack. Don't hog the bag. First one to drop it is a rotten egg. First to a bazillion wins.
After that, pretty much anything goes. You can kick the bag, knee it, catch it between your chin and your neck, head it, bounce it off your chest, or any other trick you can think of. Just don't use your hands, don't show off too much, and keep the bag moving.
When you first start, 1) it's frustrating and 2) it REALLY hurts the next couple days. You use muscles that you didn't think you owned. But if you stick with it (as with any good thing), you get pretty good pretty fast, and have a lot of fun while you're at it!
Posted on Saturday, October 13, 2007 at 10:16:25 PM
Whew! (Events)
Well, we finally got done with a three-week run of concerts. Lots of fun, but lots of work. This year's big new hits were a new song and blue Oremus helium baloons! We've got tons of photos of concerts to process, so keep checking back. After that, it's time to crash!
Posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 at 09:13:21 AM
How to record (Audio)
Tom and I are recording a new song. We spent all day in the studio (let's just pretend that it's a real studio). Don't let anyone tell you that recording a song is easy. But anyhow, it kind of brought back some memories. We started with two tape decks (as in cassette tapes) and a Radio Shack mic. We're now at the point where I think it's fair to say that we have a full blown recording setup. I thought I'd post a link to some stuff I wrote a while ago about how to do audio for cheap. If you're an audio geek, you'll love it. If not, I'll try to post something non-geeky soon...
Posted on Thursday, August 02, 2007 at 09:57:52 PM
Diocesan Family Picnic (Events)
Well we just performed at the Diocesan Family Picnic. It was a really hot day. Sunny and hot. It's always hard to tell from behind a microphone, but I think that people had a lot of fun. I got to practice my Irish accent with a kilt-bedecked Brian Kelly. Tom tried not to participate, but I eventually managed to rope him into playing a little Irish jig. We also performed a brand new song, called the Song of Benedict. We just came up with it about a week ago.
OK, so I guess I'm not a big drinker or something, but I'd never heard of hammerschlagen. Apparently the object of this (German, I guess) drinking game is to hammer nails using the pointy end of a hammer. the Irishmen there called it something like Martin O'Grady. It wasn't that, though, because that's a restaurant in Madison. Well, people were playing hammerschlagen without the beer, and something called throwing the caber. Basically, it involved picking up something like a telephone pole by its end and throwing it as far as possible, as long as it does at least half of a flip along the way. Lots of people joined in. Lots of fun.
The picnic wrapped up with a talk by Bishop Morlino. He talked about the three most important women in his life: Mom, Granny and Mary. Good talk. It'll probably be on Relevant Radio soon. It'll probably also be on the Diocesan website, madisondiocese.org.
Tons of fun all around. I got a pretty good sunburn, and we lost count of how much water we drank to keep hydrated in the heat, but like I said, tons of fun!
Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at 05:26:55 PM
new blog (General)
Hey, everyone, this is Chris. Tom just made up this blog page for the site. It'll probably evolve with time. For now, though, Tom and I will just post stuff that we think you'd be interested in. Any questions or comments, please email either one of us!
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