New Project: Memorize 150 composers in chronological order, along with their birthdates

So now that I'm done with school, I've picked up a new hobby: memorizing stuff. My latest project involves building a list of composers. I'll document and explain how it works and my progress here. You're welcome to join in! It's a great way to learn a bunch of mnemonic techniques at once.

So!

This project takes advantage of 3 mnemonic techniques as well as spaced repetition to get it all into my head. As you'll see, the hard part isn't really memorizing all this data, it's converting it ahead of time into a storable format: pictures and stories.

To memorize names, I will be converting each name into an image. Chopin -> Shopping bag, Mozart -> moats, etc. The images must be as vivid as possible (a paper shopping bag from Trader Joe's, for example)

To memorize dates, I'll be using the Major system (insert wikipedia link here) which converts numbers into consonants. I've been practicing this for a few weeks and now it's coming pretty naturally. For Mozart (1756-1791), I convert 56 into L + Sh, and 91 into B + T. So leash is 56 and bat is 91. So now I link the name to the dates and I get a couple of castles with Moats filled with a bunch of Leashed Bats.

Now to make my chronological list, I'm going to use the method of loci, one of the oldest mnemonic techniques. I need to design a mental journey with 150 stops. I'm going to do this with the help of a camera, and I think I'll be taking the trip from my bed to the conservatory. If I don't get enough loci, I may leave the conservatory and go to the other building on Singerstrasse, and if THAT's not enough, I may go to Stephansdom. But I found 50 locations just on the way from my bed to the front door, so I might be fine. I've never made one this big, so we'll see how it goes. The method of loci involves placing image markers along the route you've picked. So my first location is my bed, my first composer is Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179). Because so many composers have the same birth years, I'm going to link the location to the date first, then to any composers during that date. Hildegard is alone for this date, so it's a little simpler. Birth Year: 1098: S P F - so we'll go for high SPF sunscreen. I'm in bed, I wake up and grab my high SPF sunscreen. Name: hildegard -> hilt guard (top part of sword handle). I take the sunscreen and smear it on my hilt guard. Death Date: (My main goal is to do birthdates and names, but we'll do a death date here for fun) 1179 - th g p - The Gap - in my substory about my Hilt Guard, I grab my well-oiled Hilt Guard into The Gap and slay the well-attired staff.

Last step, review and decoding. I need to practice going through my route (1-5 would be Bed, nightstand, robe holder on wall, chair with clothes in front of bed, bedroom door), I need to practice the initial hooks (Bed - high SPF sunscreen), each substory (bed - spf - hilt guard - the gap) and decoding back to useful data (#1 - 1098 - Hildegard von Bingen - 1179). I'll do this in my favorite memory tool, Anki, which will quiz me at regular, manageable intervals and figure out how easy or difficult each part is and adjust accordingly. Given that I have a week off, I might get the major body of the work done (150 coded stories like the sunscreen hilt guard one) this week, plug it into Anki, and get that into my head within a month or so. Once that framework is there, I'll be able to add to it without much trouble (if I want to add some facts about Hildegard, I can put them in at The Gap)

Wee!

As I go, I'm going to make an excel file with the data I'm memorizing and the stories it codes into. Here's where you can join in; feel free to grab the file and make your own changes. While I'm going to be publishing a slideshow of my 150 stop journey, if you want to do this too, you'll probably want to make your own journey (though you're welcome to take the same journey, just start from your own bed, not mine!)

Bob Telekom: How not to handle a billing mistake - a disaster story

Apologies for the forever without updates; maybe I'll start this up again someday. For now, here's a customer service nightmare from our cell phone provider that I'm hoping will show up on google searches for Bob Telekom in Austria.

I've been a Bob customer for about 1 year now. They screwed up my request to keep my old phone numbers (AND my wife's request, actually), their pay-for-service policy is kind of irritating, I've noticed some billing glitches whereby I was charged €12 or so over the summer when I should have been charged €0, but overall, I was getting decent phone service for a good price.

Three weeks ago, I called Bob at their €1,09/minute service line to request data service for myself and my wife. The service representative seemed more or less fine, and the call was over in 3 minutes or so. I enabled data on both of our phones, and October began swimmingly.

Two weeks ago, my wife gets an SMS: "Warning! Your Bob bill is €91!" My wife calls me, panicked. She made a call or two in Germany, but nothing longer than a minute or two. I look up her account online and see the €91 bill and I don't see data service enabled on that phone. I call bob service and explain the situation, and my concern that perhaps data wasn't in fact enabled on her phone when I requested it to be. The service representative told me that he could see nothing of the sort on his side, and that sometimes these glitches happen but they fix themselves rapidly and I probably won't even see it on my bill at the end of the month. If I do, I can just call and those costs will be removed immediately. I asked about the data service and he said that it was enabled and it must be a glitch on the website that's telling me it's not.

The following day, my wife gets an SMS: "Warning! Your bob bill is €162!" I call bob service immediately. The lady there explains that she's being charged €150 for data usage and there's no data service on the phone. She enables data service so that the phone won't keep accruing costs and suggests I send bob a letter asap about the situation.

An hour later, my wife gets an SMS: "Your bob bill is now €164 and we are locking your phone for security reasons". She can no longer text or call out. Two WEEKS later, I have called nearly every day and been told nearly 5 times that a manager would get in touch with me to discuss the situation (2 weeks, no manager). The bill is now €0, but the phone is still locked. I have been told that the phone would start working in: 'A week ago', 'A few hours', and 'A month or so'. I finally told them to send me a NÜV Bestätigung so I can change to a new phone provider (BTW, Drei has some EXCELLENT offers going on right now!), and was told that I can't get one because her phone is locked. When I explained that her phone being locked for the last 2 weeks was the whole reason I'm switching providers, the lady asked if I couldn't just wait 3-4 weeks longer for the phone to get unlocked so I could switch without losing my old phone number. When I asked for the costs of this more or less useless service call to be refunded, she said that I've been calling the bob service line too many times in the past few weeks and that she wouldn't be willing to refund that call. Maybe I could discuss that with the manager that would (ha!) call me.

We're switching to Drei today. They're offering slightly better prices than bob, they have stores where you can talk to customer service representatives without paying €1,09/minute, and where ridiculous customer service disasters like this one surely couldn't possibly be this bad. Also you can use your phone in Italy, Great Britain and a few other countries as if it were a local phone (no roaming fees). Wish us luck.

Well we sure haven't updated THIS in a long time! I guess noteworthy is that Gabe is now a tenor (flavor of tenor to be determined in time), Melanie just did a lovely job with Pierrot Lunaire at the Musikverein, and we're both going to be learning French this summer at Mills college in Northern California. Oh yes, and Melanie's website has been launched. Melanie Henley Heyn www.MelanieHenleyHeyn.com That's all for now!