Wednesday, June 30, 2004
The new wood laminate floor is in the computer room - hoorah! It looks really nice - I chose a distressed wood finish, one with a lot of light and dark contrast in the grain. It took 6-1/2 hours for the installers to grind the cement foundation down to deal with the huge subsidence crack on this side of the house. (The salesman didn't even put this on his work order to the sub, despite my instistence that I had experience with getting work done on the same crack in the spare room, and it wasn't trivial.) So, the room looks great, but moving the furniture, computer, etc. back in there is going to have to wait until after Westercon...
Jeff & Maya are in town, having just arrived on their raod trip via Sedona. I'm getting together with Jeff tomorrow evening to talk some Serious Planning for the Stardust County CD.
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Jeff & Maya are in town, having just arrived on their raod trip via Sedona. I'm getting together with Jeff tomorrow evening to talk some Serious Planning for the Stardust County CD.
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004
I was going to head up for Europa's concert and CD-release party at Fidd's on Sunday, but I wound up and Pete & Donna's pool party instead, demonstrating my snorkeling technique for Sierra's edification. I have to re-read that section of my Open Water textbook - I had to blow air out of my lungs to reduce my bouyancey enough to stop floating to the surface, and that doesn't sound like the best method when you're not carrying a tank of air with you.
...At work, a pair of mourning doves have built a nest inbetween the pigeon-prongs on the ledge just outside the reflective window overlooking the cafeteria patio. Everyone's been making special trips to the back hall to look at the mother and her chicks, inches away on the other side of the glass. Less than two weeks since they hatched, and today, nearly full-grown, the two of them were perched in a pine tree a few yards away! No wonder doves don't put a lot of effort into building their nests.
Everyone who sent me links to your blog, I promise I will get them on this page sometime after I get the computer back into the computer room and out of its current non-OSHA-compliant configuration. They're installing the floor tomorrow, huzzah!
1 comments
...At work, a pair of mourning doves have built a nest inbetween the pigeon-prongs on the ledge just outside the reflective window overlooking the cafeteria patio. Everyone's been making special trips to the back hall to look at the mother and her chicks, inches away on the other side of the glass. Less than two weeks since they hatched, and today, nearly full-grown, the two of them were perched in a pine tree a few yards away! No wonder doves don't put a lot of effort into building their nests.
Everyone who sent me links to your blog, I promise I will get them on this page sometime after I get the computer back into the computer room and out of its current non-OSHA-compliant configuration. They're installing the floor tomorrow, huzzah!
1 comments
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Reading in the Dark
In Waking Life, one of the characters repeats the truism that there are two things you can't do in a dream: read, and switch the lights out. I don't know about the latter; I've never really been concerned with light sources in my dreams - however, up until a few nights ago I've had the stereotypical inability to read.
In this dream I was renting a seaside cottage, and there was a harmonium (or some kind of keyboard that I called a harmonium) with sheet music on it, which I sat down and started playing without any difficulty. I distinctly remember looking at the notes and making the correlation between them and what my hands should be doing. (The piece itself wasn't particularly earth-shattering - some garbled recollection of English Country Garden, I think.)
Reading/writing music is an entirely different animal than reading/writing text based on spoken language. While both can be said to convey ideas, they do so in fundamentally different ways. In natural language writing, a symbol or collection of symbols represents a word, and a word has a meaning. In alphabetic systems, the reader usually doesn't work out the sound of the word from the letters, except for the first time s/he encounters it. A relatively small subset of punctuation gives the reader an approximate idea of how it might be read aloud.
Musical notation - the Western kind; I'm not familiar with other forms, but expect they'd withstand the same argument - is an algoritm for a musician or group of musicians to re-create a musical performance. It describes the how - pitch, duration, articulation, volume - to a degree that would be not only annoying but useless in a novel. Very few people can pick up an orchestral score and just read it - I supsect those who can are simply running the algorithm on a virtual orchestra in their heads. The unplayed score converys no meaning. This must have something to do with why I can read music in my sleep.
Rashofolk
If anyone actually reads this blog, and is wondering what's going on with the spam-bourne rumor I ranted about yesterday: Carron has sort of confirmed it, and a board member has kind of denied it, so now I have three contradictory versions of what's going on in this tempest in a coffeehouse.
0 comments
In Waking Life, one of the characters repeats the truism that there are two things you can't do in a dream: read, and switch the lights out. I don't know about the latter; I've never really been concerned with light sources in my dreams - however, up until a few nights ago I've had the stereotypical inability to read.
In this dream I was renting a seaside cottage, and there was a harmonium (or some kind of keyboard that I called a harmonium) with sheet music on it, which I sat down and started playing without any difficulty. I distinctly remember looking at the notes and making the correlation between them and what my hands should be doing. (The piece itself wasn't particularly earth-shattering - some garbled recollection of English Country Garden, I think.)
Reading/writing music is an entirely different animal than reading/writing text based on spoken language. While both can be said to convey ideas, they do so in fundamentally different ways. In natural language writing, a symbol or collection of symbols represents a word, and a word has a meaning. In alphabetic systems, the reader usually doesn't work out the sound of the word from the letters, except for the first time s/he encounters it. A relatively small subset of punctuation gives the reader an approximate idea of how it might be read aloud.
Musical notation - the Western kind; I'm not familiar with other forms, but expect they'd withstand the same argument - is an algoritm for a musician or group of musicians to re-create a musical performance. It describes the how - pitch, duration, articulation, volume - to a degree that would be not only annoying but useless in a novel. Very few people can pick up an orchestral score and just read it - I supsect those who can are simply running the algorithm on a virtual orchestra in their heads. The unplayed score converys no meaning. This must have something to do with why I can read music in my sleep.
Rashofolk
If anyone actually reads this blog, and is wondering what's going on with the spam-bourne rumor I ranted about yesterday: Carron has sort of confirmed it, and a board member has kind of denied it, so now I have three contradictory versions of what's going on in this tempest in a coffeehouse.
0 comments
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Paint it black
There's a rumor going around that Carron Cruse's recent departure from the Fiddler's Dream governing board was due to other board members wanting to paint the interior of Fidd's black. I know this because I've received several identically-worded emails on the topic, which subsequently everyone and their cow have forwarded on with increasingly lurid subject lines to their entire address book, leaving the Arizona folk community adrift in a warm, juicy blanket of spam. In not one of these messages does the sender hint that they got this information from Carron, or asked her whether it was true. In fact, another board member has gone on record denying the rumor.
So what is this rant leading up to? If you're still concerned about the remodelling going on at Fidd's, by all means go to their board meeting on Sunday.
BUT DON"T FREAKING SPAM ME ABOUT IT!
Remember kids, e-mail is a force so powerful it can only be used for good or evil. Choose wisely.
2 comments
There's a rumor going around that Carron Cruse's recent departure from the Fiddler's Dream governing board was due to other board members wanting to paint the interior of Fidd's black. I know this because I've received several identically-worded emails on the topic, which subsequently everyone and their cow have forwarded on with increasingly lurid subject lines to their entire address book, leaving the Arizona folk community adrift in a warm, juicy blanket of spam. In not one of these messages does the sender hint that they got this information from Carron, or asked her whether it was true. In fact, another board member has gone on record denying the rumor.
So what is this rant leading up to? If you're still concerned about the remodelling going on at Fidd's, by all means go to their board meeting on Sunday.
BUT DON"T FREAKING SPAM ME ABOUT IT!
Remember kids, e-mail is a force so powerful it can only be used for good or evil. Choose wisely.
2 comments
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
So here I am, jammed into the spare room along with two romms' worth of furniture and boxes, sharing a chair with a lamp and just barely able to see the monitor, with the phone line stretching prevariously across the room (and my two cats taking turns attacking each other through the rattan screen). Why? Because the new flooring for the computer room got damaged in transit, and they won't be able to install it until next Wednesday at the eariest. I hope to the Holy ones it comes in before Westercon!
Ray Bradbury, whose fiction I adore, is according to news reports very offended about Michael Moore "stealing" the title of his book Farenheit 451. For crying out loud. First of all, titles can't be copyrighted, so it's moot from a legal standpoint. But more importantly, the title of Moore's film is abviously a play on Bradbury's book, which has been mentioned in every review or news blurb I've seen for the film. I'm willing to bet that it's generated renewed interest, and consequently sales. OTOH, maybe Bradbury is offended by the film itself, and doesn't want his name mentioned in the same breath. Could be.
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Ray Bradbury, whose fiction I adore, is according to news reports very offended about Michael Moore "stealing" the title of his book Farenheit 451. For crying out loud. First of all, titles can't be copyrighted, so it's moot from a legal standpoint. But more importantly, the title of Moore's film is abviously a play on Bradbury's book, which has been mentioned in every review or news blurb I've seen for the film. I'm willing to bet that it's generated renewed interest, and consequently sales. OTOH, maybe Bradbury is offended by the film itself, and doesn't want his name mentioned in the same breath. Could be.
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Sunday, June 20, 2004
I'm going to be offline for awhile, myabe all week; I'm moving the computer & desk into the spare room today so I don't have to putz with it on a weeknight.
I just now realized why I have a peeping-tom hummingbird - don't know why I didn't figure it out earlier. He likes to sit on a branch of the mesquite tree right outside the bathroom window, looking in through the screen. Of course, this is the window that I have constantly open when I'm running the swamp, so he's got a nice cool breeze in the afternoons.
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I just now realized why I have a peeping-tom hummingbird - don't know why I didn't figure it out earlier. He likes to sit on a branch of the mesquite tree right outside the bathroom window, looking in through the screen. Of course, this is the window that I have constantly open when I'm running the swamp, so he's got a nice cool breeze in the afternoons.
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Saturday, June 19, 2004
Poo. Vegacon's been cancelled. Well, I had a suspicion things were headed that way.
I just came in from mucking out the backyard "pond". The solar pump's been out of commission for several weeks. I went looking for a replacement - oddly, since this is Arizona, I haven't seen solar panel & pump kits sold locally at all. What's more, most of the catalogs that used to sell the kit I have don't sell solar kits at all anymore, except as part of fountain package - let alone try to buy the pump without the panel. I finally found a place online that sold pumps separately, it arrived speedily, and when I unpacked it this morning - the connector's wrong. Apparently my panel is an older style that the new pumps aren't compatible with.
In the meantime, my old pump started working again. I suspect a wiring problem.
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I just came in from mucking out the backyard "pond". The solar pump's been out of commission for several weeks. I went looking for a replacement - oddly, since this is Arizona, I haven't seen solar panel & pump kits sold locally at all. What's more, most of the catalogs that used to sell the kit I have don't sell solar kits at all anymore, except as part of fountain package - let alone try to buy the pump without the panel. I finally found a place online that sold pumps separately, it arrived speedily, and when I unpacked it this morning - the connector's wrong. Apparently my panel is an older style that the new pumps aren't compatible with.
In the meantime, my old pump started working again. I suspect a wiring problem.
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Friday, June 18, 2004
As the Cassettes Go Rolling Along
The new floor for the computer room is coming in Wednesday, which means I've got to get everything moved out of here, including the computer. It also means clearing out the closet where amongst other things I store all my product, and therein lies the rub. See, when I produced my first two albums, CDs were just beginning to become popular. In fact, when Anchored to the Wind came out the only other person releasing filk on CD was Leonard Zubkoff, on his spanking-new Dandelion Digital label. So I ordered my pressings half-CD and half-cassette. As a consequence, today I have huge cartons of unsaleable cassettes taking up space in my closet. I'm tempted to throw them on eBay as a lot and see if I get any bids. Or maybe I could find some gallery space, and set them up as an installation...
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The new floor for the computer room is coming in Wednesday, which means I've got to get everything moved out of here, including the computer. It also means clearing out the closet where amongst other things I store all my product, and therein lies the rub. See, when I produced my first two albums, CDs were just beginning to become popular. In fact, when Anchored to the Wind came out the only other person releasing filk on CD was Leonard Zubkoff, on his spanking-new Dandelion Digital label. So I ordered my pressings half-CD and half-cassette. As a consequence, today I have huge cartons of unsaleable cassettes taking up space in my closet. I'm tempted to throw them on eBay as a lot and see if I get any bids. Or maybe I could find some gallery space, and set them up as an installation...
0 comments
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
I've bought a phone about a month ago that has talking caller ID. It's great, because if I'm in the middle of something when the phone rings I don't have to jump up, run into the next room and peer at a tiny screen to know whether I should pick up or not - by that time I've already been interrupted, so the point is really moot. The caller ID's voice is loud enough to be heard at the other end of the house, and it does a pretty good job with my friends' names. Where it tends to stumble is on business names - the other day Alpine Lending called and I swear the phone announced it as "All Things Lesbian". Say, isn't that a new show on NPR?
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Tuesday, June 15, 2004
I went in to see Dr. Heiland yesterday; he said that my vocal chords are fine now, and if I'm still having problems it's because I need to drink more water. I swear today's health professionals are in a secret conspiracy with the manufacturers of toilet paper. He seemed more concerned that the sinus infection I'd had last time was gone, and then advised me to suspend using the Nasonex this summer when the daytime high gets over 110 degrees. Well, that's one way to find out if it's pollen that I'm allergic to, or the Brown Cloud.
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Saturday, June 12, 2004
Got back from my first "real" dive a few days ago and it certainly was a learning experience! Among the things I learned:
1. Being properly weighted makes a world of difference
2. I need something stronger than Dramamine to deal with choppy boat rides to the dive site
3. San Carlos is not a hotbed of cultural life
It was a real treat after Lake Pleasant to dive where there was visibility, sea life, and relatively warm water (though I'll probably need to get a skin - the shorty wasn't quite enought at that latitude). My favorites were the vivid purple angelfish at San Pedro Island. On the boat ride out we had three dolphins riding the bow. I missed out on most of the sea lion action at S.P., which is known as a rookery, but one did come by the group I was with to find out why we were blowing bubbles.
........
I'm slowly moving stuff out of the computer room to prep for reflooring week after next. This morning I emptied the bookcase - a whole lot of books from college, obsolete manuals, software that I used once or twice. Same thing with shifting all the floppies I've accumulated over the years. Sounds like time for a purge.
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1. Being properly weighted makes a world of difference
2. I need something stronger than Dramamine to deal with choppy boat rides to the dive site
3. San Carlos is not a hotbed of cultural life
It was a real treat after Lake Pleasant to dive where there was visibility, sea life, and relatively warm water (though I'll probably need to get a skin - the shorty wasn't quite enought at that latitude). My favorites were the vivid purple angelfish at San Pedro Island. On the boat ride out we had three dolphins riding the bow. I missed out on most of the sea lion action at S.P., which is known as a rookery, but one did come by the group I was with to find out why we were blowing bubbles.
........
I'm slowly moving stuff out of the computer room to prep for reflooring week after next. This morning I emptied the bookcase - a whole lot of books from college, obsolete manuals, software that I used once or twice. Same thing with shifting all the floppies I've accumulated over the years. Sounds like time for a purge.
1 comments
Friday, June 04, 2004
I've had several foreign releases out from Netflix recently. One of them was Man with the Movie Camera made in the USSR in 1929. Being a silent film and a sort of Soviet Koyaanisqatsi, there were only a few placards at the beginning of the film that needed subtitling. Well and good.
After that came Solaris, the 1972 Russain-language version, and a movie definitely for those who thought the pace of Kubrick's 2001 was far too frenetic. Slavic languages generally don't seem to translate comfortably into English, whether it's a movie, a book, or an opera - no matter how good the translation, there are always passages that are either stilted or just leave you saying "whunh?" For example, in Solaris, in the middle of an argument Kris Kelvin says "When you don't have any arms or legs, call us and we'll come empty your chamberpot." (Knowing the context doesn't help.)
Right now I have disk one of the Cowboy Bebop series out. I've been itching to see these in Japanese with subtitles, as opposed to the English-dubbed version on the Cartoon Network. Oddly, one of the characters' tradmark phrases is rendered as "Shucks howdy!" in the dubbed version, when in the subtitled version he's very clearly saying "Amigo!" Surely the average English-speaking viewer could handle that much Spanish!
...Heading off to Mexico this weekend to do some diving... in warm water... with decent visibility...
2 comments
After that came Solaris, the 1972 Russain-language version, and a movie definitely for those who thought the pace of Kubrick's 2001 was far too frenetic. Slavic languages generally don't seem to translate comfortably into English, whether it's a movie, a book, or an opera - no matter how good the translation, there are always passages that are either stilted or just leave you saying "whunh?" For example, in Solaris, in the middle of an argument Kris Kelvin says "When you don't have any arms or legs, call us and we'll come empty your chamberpot." (Knowing the context doesn't help.)
Right now I have disk one of the Cowboy Bebop series out. I've been itching to see these in Japanese with subtitles, as opposed to the English-dubbed version on the Cartoon Network. Oddly, one of the characters' tradmark phrases is rendered as "Shucks howdy!" in the dubbed version, when in the subtitled version he's very clearly saying "Amigo!" Surely the average English-speaking viewer could handle that much Spanish!
...Heading off to Mexico this weekend to do some diving... in warm water... with decent visibility...
2 comments
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
I realized today how lucky I've been with the blooming of the easter lily caacti so far this season. They produce a huge, brilliantly-colored blossom, that blooms in the morning and closes in the afternoon, never to open again. One of the new plantings in the front yard bloomed today, and I missed all but the very first phase because I was at work. The bud was such a vibrant magenta; it must have been spectacular when fully opened.
Over the weekend I updated my main webpage, Stardust County, mostly by removing outdated stuff like the guestbook no-one's posted in over two years, and updating my performance schedule. I also overhauled my personal page and added a link to some photos from my trip to New Zealand. Hmm, and this page could use some updating too...
2 comments
Over the weekend I updated my main webpage, Stardust County, mostly by removing outdated stuff like the guestbook no-one's posted in over two years, and updating my performance schedule. I also overhauled my personal page and added a link to some photos from my trip to New Zealand. Hmm, and this page could use some updating too...
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