Mao and the art of piano hacking

A few days ago, I played the game of 'Mao' for the first time in my life. Quite fun. Of course, this had to be the day before the daytrip, so I quite expertly almost failed to wake up the next day, for the daytrip. Oh well.

As I've already blogged before, the daytrip went quite well—except for the sunburn. But I'll manage.

After that daytrip, we went to a sauna. Seeing all kinds of people get naked is some experience that I won't forget easily; especially not given what followed. The sauna was in a building that also had a central living area. That area happened to be having a piano. Being someone who loves to play the piano—even if I suck at it—I couldn't resist to try it out. Now although the sound was nice, there were some issues. For starters, the right pedal didn't work. So we removed the covers, and quickly found out that one of the screws holding the right pedal wasn't there anymore, whereas the other evidently wasn't strong enough to hold it all by itself.

Seen that the middle pedal was simply gone, we just used the one remaining screw of that pedal and used it to screw the right pedal into place.

One bug down.

Two to go.

With the right pedal put into place, we started playing it. It quickly became evident that the second F didn't make any sound, unless you played it very silently; this was because the hammer was too loose and never hit its snares. However, by applying a piece of wood I'd found outside in a (very) ugly hack, I was able to make sure the hammer would hit its snares. It played quite nicely then.

Two bugs down.

One to go.

Unfortunately, the final bug was that the piano hadn't been tuned right. We had to tag that one help, wontfix. Not that it mattered much.

Naked and dressed people alike soon started playing the piano. We sung a little bit. It was quite fun.

Today, then, I played Mao again, for the second time ever, and got to introduce a new rule. One which was called a 'good rule' by Ian Jackson—given his reputation in this game, a compliment I'm quite proud of.

But it's 4:10 now. Off to bed. Bye.