Contact
- Email: crantila@fedoraproject.org
- IRC: crantila in #fedora-summer-coding, #fedora-docs (etc.) between about 19:00 and 06:00 UTC
- Location: Mississauga, Canada
- Timezone: North American Eastern Time Zone
- GPG Key: 95A99F15
About Me
I am a university student who studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Canada. I study music history and music theory, and have taken a few courses in computer science.
Experiences with Music
My musical beginnings were relatively late, with piano lessons starting at age 7. After several years of lessons, the problem of practising came to bite me: I took a leave of absence from the instrument. When it came time to choose what kind of music to study in middle school (grade 6), I fell in love at once with the brass instruments, and ended up with a tuba. Through the following seven years, I played in the school bands. Starting in about grade 10, I began to take music more seriously, joining a youth orchestra and wind ensemble, and studying theory and history outside of school. I arrived at university with the intention to become a composer, but eventually realized that - regardless of whether they sounded pleasant - my compositions were primarily a means by which to explore the sounds created by other composers.
Now entering my fifth and final year of undergraduate studies, I intend to graduate with a double specialization in both Theory and History, continuing to graduate studies in England or North America. My interests focus on Western orchestral music of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, including such composers as Bruckner, Mahler, and Sibelius. My scholarly work (as much as is possible with undergraduate studies) tries to explain the aspects of this music that are appealing to both expert and non-expert listeners alike.
My quest for musical understanding has yet to even realize what questions should be asked, never mind their answers. Moreover, while the questions and answers may exist somewhere, I have yet to find them.
Experiences with Linux
I have been using Linux on and off since 2002 (at the age of 14), when I started with Mandrake 8.2. With the advent of the aluminum Apple iMac, I took a break from Linux, but found OS X to be unfulfilling. My return in August 2009 was accompanied by building myself a new PC, and preceded by months of research both in hardware and software. Although I tried many different operating systems (including a legal Windows 7 beta version, several variants of BSD, and all the major and some obscure Linux distributions), Fedora Linux kept surfacing as my platform of choice. The four-F focus really shows, and my favourite aspects of this include the adherence to standards, the non-favouritism of desktop environments (always a concern for KDE users), and the willingness to do upstream development work.
Fedora Summer Coding
I am taking part in Summer Coding 2010 program. Much of my work is temporarily being stored here, although the Trac website will become the official repository.