Peering my own pressure

I just caved in as usual to the glorious bounty of Amazon's used CD store thingy. I have a wishlist about twenty miles long, and after a bit of a browsing sesh with those illusively outfading thirty second snippets I'm always suckered into buying a new (but used) CD. The average price seems to be about six bucks, low enough to not be much more than a negligible little peck on my credit card.

Today I got got by the Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony. I heard the end on NPR, back a bit ago, and it reminded me of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 2, with it's mechaniqueness. It's a bit cheeky coz I know my mum n stepdad are getting me some CD's for xmas (since that's all I asked for. aside from subscriptions to MAKE and CRAFT), buuuut I'm not going to open them until then, and that's four weeks away..... sooo, that's probably alright... See how I sneakily alleviate my guilt?

Today seems to be a music-inciting-guilt kinda trip. I also snuck off for an hour during "churning away in lab" time and went to the Shostakovich section in the music library, to read about his symphony 15. The book I was grabbed by most by the end claimed that the structure of the last movement is structurally almost identical to the 13th String Quartet. I dunno how much I agree with that. I think it's way more like the last movement of the 2nd Cello Concerto. In fact, the whole symphony seems to have lots in common with both the CC's, which is interesting since originally the 2nd was going to be a symphony.

I wish I could understand musical scores properly.

Another geeky Linux post

Here's a trick I learned today when writing Bash scripts in Linux, when I had to work out how to deal with spaces in filenames when running a for loop.

Normally, to do some operation on every file in a directory I'd use a loop like this:

for file in $(ls -1 --color=no *.mp3);
do
rm $file;
done

(which would delete every file in the directory in a ridiculously roundabout fashion)

But... this time I had filenames with spaces in them, which means that the rm command would be seeing something like:

rm filename with spaces.dat

and so tries to delete "filename", "with", and "spaces.dat" which don't exist. The first thing I tried doing to avoid this was to quote the $file variable, to preserve the spaces:

rm "$file";

But that didn't work! After poking around a bit I discovered that the problem is with the "for" statement: it assigns each word in the argument to the variable not each line, as I wanted it to. This can be fixed by using while and read instead of for:

ls -1 --color=no | while read file;
do
rm $file;
done

Works like a very charming old charm!

Private Eyes - An instant surveillance rewards program

Companies should pay people to wear surveillance equipment.

A few days ago I saw a bunch of mentions all spattered over the internet about this story: they're mounting video cameras on police in London to record people doing naughty breaking the law type stuff. Everybody is whinging on and on about the intrusion of privacy, as usual. What I haven't seen anybody mention is how this is could be privatized to entice everybody to surveil (yeah it's a word) everything all the time, voluntarily.

1. Some corporation like Microsoft, or Sony, or whoever we are supposed to hate the moment, sells cheap wearable cameras with GPS trackers built in.
   
2. These constantly stream data to a control center with loads of screens and beeping noises in it.
   
3. When a crime is reported the police pay for access the video streams taken in the general vicinity and time of the incident.
   
4. If they use your stream to convict somebody then you get a reward.
5. We'll call it Private Eyes, because it's cute and it'll make everyone feel like they are a detective.
   

The company also gets to sell all of the market research data it collects by videoing everybody's entire lives, plus it makes people go into dangerous areas in the hopes of capturing a crime, which makes the areas less dangerous. Plus plus people are more afraid to go out and mug people anywhere in case they are being videoed doing it. Everybody wins, sort of, except for that whole privacy issue.

If anybody does this they should give me ten brazillian dollars for thinking of it.

Petting and/or eating piglets.

I really like piglets. At the Farm Park that I and lg. visited over thanksgiving, they had a whole mess (yes, that's the precise technical collective-noun type term) of them, which I spent a smattering of time petting. They remind me of little sausages, and they have really nice rubbery little snouts. They are my favorite version of animal currently. Not pigs, just piglets. When they get too big they are cuter as pork chops...


...which maybe seems like kind of a mean jump, but I think it's good to be close to the animal which you use for meat. I reckon it would good for meat eaters (like me) to experience the slaughtering of the animals they consume. It seems as though this would be a difficult experience, but enlightening, probably.

People (including myself) don't appreciate the fact they are eating a previously living being not nearly enough. I'm not religious, but this is a good reason for saying a form of grace before eating. Not whispering some overused and underfelt words to some god or another, but spending two quiet minutes considering everything that went into producing the food you are about to eat. The labor, the time, and most importantly, the life.

I wish I could act more like I think... alright, New Weeks Resolution: I'll try to remember my agnostic gracing. Thank you, little piglets from the farm.

Montparnasse

Back from an exciting three or four day sojourn off down Ohio way, today. There were breakwaters and piglets and owl sanctuaries with foxes. The injury I got from tumbling down the stairs outside by my apartment swished into a lovely big old black and blue bruise which twangs on my ribs like a barking dog when I don't do right by it.

This development forced me to sleep on my right side for the last three (or four) nights which - unexpectedly - makes it easier for me to sleep. I think I have too much freedom to roll around on a normal night, in my normal bed. When I'm camping, or on another's couch and everything is folds and jags, the lack of available options makes it easier to stay still and drop off.

This time it gave me vivid dreams, two nights ago I woke up with the story of Montparnasse still in my head:

Although people think Montparnasse was named after Mount Parnassus, he was in fact a forgotten nobleman who lived a few hundred years ago in France. Count Montparnasse lived in a ponderingly wide stone tower, with drops like wells slicing the center, through which the wind would rush. The tower was old, but mostly solid. He lived there with his wife and daughter, and enough money from his ancestry to support themselves comfortably, but not enough to repair the holes in the tower. He spent his time thinking, and was a respected philosopher.

He noticed how we tend to forget certain things, how we can't remember dreams later in the day, when they were so crisp. How our sensations and histories of everything around us are necessarily and completely subjective. Then, he decided that we have barely any control over how our our perceptions are changed within us. How are heads and hearts hide things from ourselves, and how we don't even realize that it is happening.

He reasoned that our heads altered our reality to make it easier for us to deal with and to process, and that if we were faced with some dreadful, endless, psychological trauma then our brains could mask it and make it into something which seemed pleasant, so that we could carry on. Then he thought: if we can't tell when we are obscuring reality, and if recurring, hopeless situations could appear as something which seemed the opposite - how do we know that it's not happening to us right now? What if the pleasures I think I am experiencing are, in fact, painful? What if my soul is rewriting my agony into pleasurable, passable, situations?

And that drove him insane... he became convinced that the joy he got from his wife and child was nothing more than his own lies to himself, an illusion - and withdrew from them. He wandered the rooms of the tower, and eventually though himself into the well-shaft piercing the tower.

I woke up with that in my head two nights ago. My dad and mum would like it I think... they're psychologists.

Miles and melodies

This year I am going to my first real proper Americany type thanksgiving celebration. I'm being dragged off to Ohio to spend a few days at my gf's house. It's gonna be a five hour drive or so, which wouldn't be so bad except that yesterday I tragically and dramatically slipped on the steps outside my house, cushioning the impact with my lower back. Now I have a proud, shining, dirty great big patch of black and blue nestled nicely by my spine. Bloody icy steps. I'm gonna timidly clutch and claw at the handrail for the rest of the winter like a nervous lobster.

It's funny how such short a drive five hours sounds to my Americanized ears nowadays. Back in England that seemed like forever and ever and ever amen. But magically, being in the States shrinks it down to pretty much something you can pop out and do over your lunchbreak. I remember being totally struck without inspiration of things to do while traveling the tiny three hour pootle between Sheffield and London. Part of it is the different distance standards that spreadly spread America enjoys itself with. And maybe it's partly because I'm turning into an old man, and time is stealthily contracting while I'm not looking.

When we were kids, the six week long summer holidays seemed to last on for forever. Now six weeks flashes by like scenery outside the windscreen. Once you experience almost 30,000 three hour periods they don't seem so long anymore. Oh what a dramatic little thing I am this morning!

* * * * *

I found this rather wicked little music comprehension test on a Gizmodo link this morning. It plays pairs of melodic snippets and you have to decide whether they are identical. It's actually a proper research project rather then one of those "which kind of desktop accessory are you??!!!1!!" type quizzes so prolific on the internets. You can actually see the Gaussian distribution of results with an SD and mean quoted. I got 88.9% which means that, as was suspected, I am awesome.

My two point five year journey into classical music

Since it's only been about two and a half years since I really started understanding and falling in love with classical music, I want to try and remember the route that I took between pieces and composers that spoke to me, and hopefully keep track of how my tastes change in the future. EDIT: After writing a first draft of this post I'm amazed at how much I can remember. This is great, I'd love to know the paths other people took.

The first piece I really "got" was the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto 2. This was on a CD I picked up at the age of 19 or so because I could remember enjoying the Carnival of the Animals on a cassette as a kid. I had it on in the background and suddenly the melody leaped out at me. Looking back that was probably one of the most culturally significant moments my life so far... I can still remember being on my computer in my poorly heated shoebox of a dorm room when it happened.

After that I quickly bought a set of all five piano concertos, and fell in love with 1 and then 4. I tried Rachmaninoff around this time, as everybody raved about him, specifically his piano concertos 2 and 3 - but never really got into them. The melodies were great but there was too much overblown romantic lushness for me to handle.

Then I tried Liszt's piano concertos. I liked them well enough, but not nearly to the startling degree as the Saint-Saens. I was starting to get disillusioned at this point as nothing had grabbed at my insides like the Saint-Saens had. I thought it might be a one off. I also tried Tchaikovsky and Brahms, but didn't get them either. Still too romantically dense and overlush for me.

Then I tried Prokofiev's piano concertos. Wow. Much better.

I lapped up the piano concertos 2 and 3, particularly the former. It gave me chills. The other three concertos were good - not as good as 2 and 3 - but I liked them far better than the other pieces I had tried since S-S.

At this point I decided that I wasn't too fond of the very romantic pieces, and so tried Mendelssohn, who I discovered was a more conservative romantic. I heard his piano trios first, which was the first piece of chamber music I liked. Then I got the Hebrides overture and symphonies 3 and 4, all of which got to me.

This turned me onto symphonies instead of just being a piano concerto , and I asked for a Prokofiev symphony set for christmas. I liked the 1st, and the 5th, but not as much as I had hoped. They didn't satisfy me on as deep as a level as my other favorites.

Then I caught the haunting percussion ending of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto 2 on NPR, and on the strength of that bought it, with the 1st. It was amazing. This became my favorite piece of music - and still is, a year and a half later. I must have listened to it several hundred times. Naturally I got on a Shostakovich kick - I heard the 8th Quartet and bought the set of them. It took me a while to be comfortable with the string quartet form, but I got very into the 8th, 12th, 13th, and 15th. It must have been at this point that I stopped finding very stringy pieces difficult to listen to.

Around this time I started listening to the Prokofiev symphonies again, and discovered that I liked the 6th, 7th and 2nd. Particularly the 2nd. I got a Shostakovich symphony cycle for christmas, and slowly got into the 9th, 11th, 5th, 10th, 13th, 15th, and 7th - in that chronological order. Recently I've been listening to Berg and Schnittke as well.

And that pretty much brings me up to date...

Seven ways to get into classical music

Up until two and half years ago I didn't listen to classical music. Sure, I owned some Mozart and Bach, and thought it was pleasant background music, but it didn't speak to me like my favorite albums did. During my first year of grad school I was listening to Saint Saens' piano concerto 2 - and suddenly it jumped out and grabbed me, and made sense! At least a little bit...

Now I listen almost exclusively to classical - I still very much enjoy my late 90's Ninja Tune CD's, in fact I reckon that listening to electronic dance stuff actually prepped me for classical - but that's another story. Anyway, to aid others in an exploration of styles and to feel all cultural, here are some suggestions for picking up classical after living in the pop world:

1. Listen to a piece at least six or seven times before deciding whether you like it. It will take this long before you start to hear recognizable melodies. This is very different from most popular songs which you can usually "get" at the first listen.


2. Some instruments can intially sound very harsh. It took me about a year and a half before I could stand listening to anything with too much violining. You'll start to feel better about them the more you listen.


3. Don't get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff going on - try and focus on one melodic line at a time. Non-classical songs tend to use one melody with harmonization. Classical pieces delight in having two or more melodies twisting and turning around each other. Once you have heard a piece enough you will be able to hear these melodic lines as distinct entities, and also in sneaky combination.
   


4. Understand the structure of a piece a bit. Initially it will sound as if the piece wanders around doing a bunch of different things before ending. In fact there is almost always a strict underlying structure.
   


1. Sonata Form (usually the first movement) - Several minutes at the beginning and the end of the piece are very similar, and each consist of two different sections. The middle consists of the themes intertwining and changing.
2. Trio form (Often the second or third movement of a piece) - Again, the beginning and end are similar, but there is usually just one block of melody. The middle is a contrasting block.
3. Rondo form (often the fourth movement) - There will be one block of music which comes up again and again. In between each iteration there are a variety of different blocks.


5. "Classical" is actually a bunch of different styles, which sound very different once you have listened to them a bit. If you consistently dislike one era then there is probably some other period you will love. Personally (and everybody else will have different opinions) I would break it down (today, I'd choose something else tomorrow) as follows:


1. Baroque - Bach, Vivaldi
2. Classical - Mozart, Haydn
3. Early Romantic - Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn
4. Late Romantic - Brahms, Liszt, Chopin, Dvorak
5. Ultra Romantic - Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky
6. Atonal - Berg, Schoenberg, Webern
7. Modern-ish - Faure, Vaughn Williams
8. Modern Russian - Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bartok, Stravinsky
9. Very Modern - Adams, Schnittke

If you try something from each of these periods you will be getting something in a different style each time.


6. Try different forms of music - I'd recommend starting with symphonies (where the whole orchestra is playing) or concertos (where the orchestra sort of duels with a single instrument: a piano, violin or cello usually). At the other end of the spectrum are sonatas (which have similar forms to symphonies but are for one instrument and piano only) and in between is chamber music (for small groups of instruments). There are also vocal pieces but these can hard to listen to at first.


7. You don't need to spend lots of money on to get a decent performance. Pretty much any CD by NAXOS will be a good recording for less than ten dollars. A bad performance might ruin your impression of a composer for years. Deutsche Grammophon (or DG to them in the know) is almost always fantastic but a bit more pricey. Still, I was surprised how cheap classical was when I started listening.
   

I think the absolute key thing is to listen to a piece all the way through a bunch of times before giving up, that was probably the number one difference for me, and was what really caused me to switch. Good luck!!

Good sources for free sewing patterns

Since I bought my first sewing machine a few weeks back previously (a Brother XL2230 for $99 on Amazon) I've been scouting around the web to find as many free ideas as possible. This is cause I am a stingy bastard at the moment and wish to have a positive net worth before I leave grad school instead of the minus somethingty thousand I am on at the moment. Anyway, it's slightly tricky to find decent resources but the following seem good and aren't just lists of links to other sites. these really have original, good, content.

Allfreecrafts
SavvySeams
Husqvarna Viking Patterns

Actually, it really seems that with everybody and their mother and grandfather and grandfathers dog on the internet there seems to be more and more links to lists of links, and not enough actual, quality content. I remember reading someone claiming that was going to be the next big revolution online, and I'm starting to believe it... maybe I'll get my thoughts together enough to actually create a coherent, independent (actual, quality, content) post about it.

My two favourite internet memes of the fortnight

I'm extremely partial to these two. The first is the broccoli dog which saunters onto every Fark thread at the moment. The dog kind of looks great to begin with as it has that lazy-eye thing going on which looks like indignation. Then, he's sitting on a chair at the table apparently sitting down to a nice family meal the broccoli and text cap it off beautifully. This is a near perfect meme. 10/10.



The "Im in ur [noun] [verbing] you [plural noun]z" is good as well. It's a good editable in the style of the ORLY Owls. But it can't beat Do Not Want/Broccoli Dog. The sausage thingy next to the cat is nice but it looks a bit too malicious for my liking. 8/10.

Making movies of plots using gnuplot and mencoder

I had to give a presentation last week in which I wanted to show a curve fit at different times during an experiment. Basically I had a two sets of data points for each 2 second interval over 1000 seconds. One of the sets was raw data, and the other was a curve fit to the peak of the raw points. I decided to try and animate the curves by combing a bunch of JPG images into an MPG file, so that I could embed it in PowerPoint.

Note: All of this is done using Linux.

I used gnuplot to produce graphs of each of these data points, but instead of displaying them on the screen, saved them to an svg file:

set terminal svg
set output "calc.svg"
set xlabel "Piezo height (nm)"
set ylabel "Correlation"
set title "calc"
set xrange [ 2400 : 3000 ]
set yrange [ 0.9 : 1 ]
unset key
plot 'calc-raw.dat', 'calc-fit.dat'

The first line tells it to write SVG's, the second gives the filename. The next five lines are graph formatting options and are pretty self explanatory. The next turns off the key on the graph. The last line plots both of the datasets, the raw data and the fit data, on the same plot.

Now, instead of just having one point with data saved as calc-raw.dat and calc-fit.dat, I actually had a whole directory full called 0001-raw.dat, 0003-raw.dat, etc. Each filename corresponded to the time at which the data was taken. To produce an SVG of each of these I used a saved the commands above to a file called "plotcmds" and used the following bash script:

for file in $(ls -1 --color=none *fit.dat);
do
number=$(basename $file -fit.dat);
sed s/calc/$number/g < plotcmds | gnuplot;
convert $number.svg $number.jpg
done;

The first line loops through each of the files in the directory assiging each filename in turn to the variable "file" (getting the names by running ls with the options -1 for one file per line, and with color off as this adds hidden characters which confuses sed) Then the variable "number" is assigned the number part of the filename, by stripping off the end with the basename command. Then the file plotcmds is fed into the command sed, which replaces every instance of "calc" with the value in the variable "number", and this is then given to gnuplot.Afterwards, the file is converted to a JPG.

After running this command I have a bunch of JPG's, called 0001.jpg, 0003.jpg, etc. To convert these to a movie I ran mencoder from the mplayer package:

mencoder mf://*jpg -mf fps=10:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2 -oac copy -o output.mpg

Which joins every JPG in the directory into a 10 frame per second, mpeg4 video. It worked great and looked nice and pro-like.

Making mint infused vodka

I finally got around to (after vaguely poking around at methods for ages) making my own liquor that wasn't beer. Homebrewing seems like too much space and cost, but I always wanted to make my own liqueur. At the end of the gardening season I had a whole plantload of peppermint leaves left over so I set out to infuse some peppermint something. It turned out to be really ridiculously straightforward:

1. Get a whole big old bottle of Vodka from the store. I chose the cheapes bottle I could that didn't look like something from NEP era Russia: 1.5 Liters of Gordon's.
2. Get a whole big old load of mint sprigs. I used about as much as I could fit in both my cupped hands.
3. Shove the mint leaves into an old empty Vodka bottle (or empty out the one with the Vodka in, but hang on to the Vodka for a bit)
4. Pour the Vodka back into the bottle with the mint leaves in. Cap it.
5. Keep it in a dark place for about a week, shake it up 2-3 times a day to get the flavors to mingle.
6. Taste it every couple of days (optional but fun) to see how it's coming along
7. Remove the leaves
8. Let it sit for a few more weeks to "age" (I dunno if this really is necessary but people seem to think it's a good idea and it makes me feel like a professional with a closet full of one bottle of aging booze)
9. If you want to make a true liqueur rather than a flavored Vodka (the former is good for sipping, but you can do tasty shots and make tasty cocktails with the latter) then mix it with some sugar syrup:

• Mix equal parts sugar and water, heat gently until sugar dissolves
• Dilute Vodka with syrup until it's the desired sugariness

That's it! the mechanism is the same as when making tea. The mint oil is leached out into the surrounding liquid during the infusion period, flavoring the mixture.

I suspect that home infusion is gonna be a bit of a maybe minorish craze in the next couple of years, although it seems like it might be hard to market products towards this. Maybe someone could start selling a Vodka labeled as something like "Neutral Infusion Spirits" so that people would think it was essential. They could claim that it was particularly flavorless and impurity free.

Incidentally, you can apply the same principles to pretty much any flavorful substance you could care to stick in a bottle. There is a very good site for schnapps recipes here.

World records are retarded

When I was a little young whippersnapper running around the streets of London I used to *love* world records. There was a Guinness World of Records museum type dealie at the Trocadero center which addled little brain enjoyed greatly. How innocent and unjaded I was. And stupid.

Alright yes yes, Olympic records are cool, they can stay, but what the hell is all this crap? There is now an international record breaking day?? Who decided that??? I'm so sick of people doing something retarded in an even MORE retarded way than people previously managed, and then becoming all slightly famous in a mentioned-briefly-in-the-newspaper kind of way. HINT: There's probably a reason nobody did it before. Because it's a huge pointless waste of time for you and me when I have to read about it:

• "Australian weather presenter Grant Denyer pulled on 18 pairs of underpants in 60 seconds"
• "New Zealander Keith Kolver broke the speed record for 'zorbing' - rolling downhill in a giant balloon."
• "In South Africa aspirants were hoping to break Cyprus' world record for a chain of 114,782 bras strung together."
• "In New York, Jackie Bibby crammed 10 live western diamondback rattlesnakes in his mouth."
• "In Canada scores of Michael Jackson fans were re-enacting Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video."

Wow. Amazing. Lets [verb] the [superlative] [noun(s)] ever. Is anybody aware that you can think of pretty much infinity different ways to come up with something nobody has done before? Here are some world records I can do in the next five minutes right here at my desk:

• Raise and lower a wooden duck while mumbling "compost hunter" under my breath more times than anyone ever.
• Hold my breath while reading page 97 of Forbes magazine for the longest time ever contemplated by humanity or any aliens.
  
• With both hands at the same time draw the symbol that looks the most like the letter B but kind of like a camel ever in the entire history of the universe.
• Imagine more people called Tom Hodges-Muckling than anyone ever previously.

Now if I don't get mentioned on international news broadcasts and get some medals and shit I'm going to be well pissed, because I'm pretty sure I just set four world records. Bet you can't prove I'm wrong.

Ultra-quick salmon noodles in peanut chili sauce

This is one of my favorite meals at the moment. It's cheap, tasty, reasonably healthy and takes about ten minutes from start to finish. Perfect for a quick lunch or dinner on a school day.

• One serving of noodles - I'm pretty partial to wholewheat fettuccine for texture and fiber
• 1.5 tsp (ish) of Sambal Olek - an Indonesian chili sauce you can get from good supermarkets or Asian stores.
• 1.5 tsp (ish) of crunchy natural peanut butter
• 1 tsp (ish) of soy sauce
• 1 frozen salmon fillet - available in large packs in the freezer section of the supermarket, you could also use cooked chicken, shrimp, etc.

Start the noodles boiling. After a few minutes stick the salmon on a plate, cover with some wax paper to stop greasy explosions, and microwave for three minutes. Turn it over, and microwave a minute more. Basically it just needs to not be translucent any more. When it's done flake it up with a fork and test the noodles - they should be done by now. Drain them, and mix in the salmon and the three other ingredients (soy sauce, Sambal, and peanut butter) over a warm heat.

That's it! I like to have it over the top of a plate of salad leaves.

In which I sew a pillowcase

I just sewed my first real serious item of stuff. Last week, after rapidly becoming acquainted with my shiny new Brother XL2230, I stitched up a Halloween costume. Buuut... that was basically just a bag that didn't need to last longer than one evening. This evening I made a chocolate brown pillowcase. Awesome.

After peering around for free patterns (which there isn't much of on the net incidentally) I pieced together some instructions by perusing pages at thriftyfun and craftfabriclinks, and adapting it out myself. In retrospect it's pretty piss easy. I did the following:

1. Measured my priorly existing pillowcases as a guide - I found the width was 18" and the length was 28"
2. I added an inch onto the width for seam allowance, and 4" + 1" = 5" for a hem on the length (in retrospect I'd add a couple more inches for a slightly larger hem) to give a total size of 33" by 18"
3. I doubled the width coz, yanno, pillows have a front and back...
4. ...to give a total fabric size of 33"x38"

5. I folded it in half (so that the two A's meet) and stitched it together along the seam marked A - all the way along the bottom and up one side. I used a zigzag stitch.
6. Then I heated up my iron and ironed down along the line marked B (so that it is folded down on what is currently the outside, but will be the inside of the pillow - commonly known as the WRONG side in patterns) and stitched it down with a straight seam.
7. I then folded down another four inches along the line marked C, again over the WRONG side, so that there will be four inches of hem on the inside of the pillow. I sewed it down with a straight stitch about a quarter inch lower than the last seam.
8. I turned it inside out and TADA! It actually worked!
   

I also came across the following, rather pretty cool looking sewing pattern site: savvyseams. It's in the trendy young project runway inspired vein, rather than the old grizzly grandma one.