Saturday, July 31, 2004
It must be significant...
Paige came over this afternoon for a hypnotherapy session, to see if there's some psychological cause for the lingering problems I'm having with my voice post-acid-reflux. Unfortunately all my subconscious could do was laugh hysterically and suggest that I "try waffles". So tomorrow morning I'm going down to Denny's for a waffle breakfast before Patrick gets here. What the hell.
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Paige came over this afternoon for a hypnotherapy session, to see if there's some psychological cause for the lingering problems I'm having with my voice post-acid-reflux. Unfortunately all my subconscious could do was laugh hysterically and suggest that I "try waffles". So tomorrow morning I'm going down to Denny's for a waffle breakfast before Patrick gets here. What the hell.
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It's been a mixed week. At work, my laptop has finally disintegrated to the point where they're willing to replace it, but that could take a month so in the meantime I'm having to fly up to MSP next week with a generic loaner. It doesn't have any of my apps or bookmarks on it, but at least it won't go to Blue Screen of Death in the middle of a web meeting. That always looks professional.
I got the solar pump in the backyard pond working - sort of. It's still got no kind of lift. These fountain kits are toys more than serious solar and not very reliable in the long run.
Finished another Stardust arrangement, started on a second. After the long hard struggle through Climb, I thought I'd take a rest by working up something simpler, like Rosa Fe. That went pretty quickly; I didn't change the trio much from the concert version other than to tweak the tenor line, and add some strategic violin on the verses. I've started on Keepers and the Kindlers March and have the basic SATB down for the chorus and first verse.
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I got the solar pump in the backyard pond working - sort of. It's still got no kind of lift. These fountain kits are toys more than serious solar and not very reliable in the long run.
Finished another Stardust arrangement, started on a second. After the long hard struggle through Climb, I thought I'd take a rest by working up something simpler, like Rosa Fe. That went pretty quickly; I didn't change the trio much from the concert version other than to tweak the tenor line, and add some strategic violin on the verses. I've started on Keepers and the Kindlers March and have the basic SATB down for the chorus and first verse.
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Monday, July 26, 2004
The ever-perspicacious Arizona Republic made this sub-headline observation about the Democratic convention: "Convention finds common cause : beat Bush in Nov." Well, thank goodness they've put a rest to all that bickering about whether they want to win the election or not.
In an effort to reverse the rather negative turn this blog's taken lately, I'd like to propose a game for anyone who actually bothers to read it. Use the Comments to add your attempts.
There's a word game called "first and last" where you put together the titles of two movies, books, etc. where the last word of one is the same as the first word of the other. For example, Gone With the Wind Beneath My Wings. My version of the game isn't as strict as that - just combine two titles for comic effect. Here are a few I came up with:
The Two Fawlty Towers
12 Angy Men and a Baby
Oh Brother, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
2 comments
In an effort to reverse the rather negative turn this blog's taken lately, I'd like to propose a game for anyone who actually bothers to read it. Use the Comments to add your attempts.
There's a word game called "first and last" where you put together the titles of two movies, books, etc. where the last word of one is the same as the first word of the other. For example, Gone With the Wind Beneath My Wings. My version of the game isn't as strict as that - just combine two titles for comic effect. Here are a few I came up with:
The Two Fawlty Towers
12 Angy Men and a Baby
Oh Brother, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
2 comments
Sunday, July 25, 2004
My otolaryngologist says my vocal chords are completely healed, but I struggled and choked my way through another crappy set at Fidd's last night. What the fuck good is it to confine myself to a strict diet that takes all the joy out of eating, when my voice still goes to hell whenever I step up on a stage? And now my GP has moved me to Protonix since the Nexium was giving me a rash. It's so enjoyable to hit middle age and watch your body disintegrate around you.
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Thursday, July 22, 2004
B- B- B- Bird bird bird, bird is the word....
No rolling blackouts yet, although the distaster recovery team is taking the threat seriously enough to distribute a plan to all employees, including the cryptic instruction that upon official notification that blackouts are scheduled, we're to turn off all computers we're not working on. At least Arizona doesn't have the troubles they're having in New York.
Larry came over yesterday evening to talk about the design of the Stardust County package.
I'm still a little stunned; I had a fairly modest idea of making an Enhanced CD with a libretto included as a file. Larry ran with this and came up with a major multimedia experience that makes me think he's been thinking about this for awhile. It's very exciting and I really think it will add to the package. (He found his cell phone - in the pocket of a pair of pants he was pulling out of the dryer. Amazingly, it still works.)
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No rolling blackouts yet, although the distaster recovery team is taking the threat seriously enough to distribute a plan to all employees, including the cryptic instruction that upon official notification that blackouts are scheduled, we're to turn off all computers we're not working on. At least Arizona doesn't have the troubles they're having in New York.
Larry came over yesterday evening to talk about the design of the Stardust County package.
I'm still a little stunned; I had a fairly modest idea of making an Enhanced CD with a libretto included as a file. Larry ran with this and came up with a major multimedia experience that makes me think he's been thinking about this for awhile. It's very exciting and I really think it will add to the package. (He found his cell phone - in the pocket of a pair of pants he was pulling out of the dryer. Amazingly, it still works.)
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Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Oh yeah, there was another fire at a substation in NW Phoenix early this morning, taking out yet another transformer and pretty much guaranteeing rolling blackouts for that part of the Valley Real Soon Now.
So I guess something happened today after all. But not to me. Yet.
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So I guess something happened today after all. But not to me. Yet.
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Nothing much happened today. Nobody peed on anything. That I know of.
Larry was sick today, so we postponed our meeting to tomorrow.
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Larry was sick today, so we postponed our meeting to tomorrow.
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Monday, July 19, 2004
I want to be twisted, utterly twisted, twisted like those triplets of Belleville...
What a way to start the week. First I discover as I'm heading out the door that Peaseblossom peed on the sheet music I left on the floor by the piano. Then I get to work and realize that in the morning's excitement I forgot my heart meds. Then at lunch, the cafeteria has no vegetarian soups, and all the Boca burgers are gone by the time I get there. And so on. The one bright spot in my day was Larry's call this morning. His cell phone has gone AWOL, which is why I haven't been able to get ahold of him. We'll be going over some ideas for the CD package layout tomorrow.
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What a way to start the week. First I discover as I'm heading out the door that Peaseblossom peed on the sheet music I left on the floor by the piano. Then I get to work and realize that in the morning's excitement I forgot my heart meds. Then at lunch, the cafeteria has no vegetarian soups, and all the Boca burgers are gone by the time I get there. And so on. The one bright spot in my day was Larry's call this morning. His cell phone has gone AWOL, which is why I haven't been able to get ahold of him. We'll be going over some ideas for the CD package layout tomorrow.
2 comments
Friday, July 16, 2004
The piano part for Climb is not coming together. I can vaguely hear it in my head, but everything I put down on the staves is wrong wrong wrong. Meanwhile, the ghost of my composition prof, Dr. Edwin LaBounty, is standing at my elbow, saying "Use the whole piano!" One of my great regrets is I never got back in touch with him before he died to let him know that his teaching had had a lasting and meaningful effect on my life, and that I was still persuing music even though the grad school thing didn't work out. He'd encouraged me to move on someplace other than WWU for my graduate work, a college where I could get a PhD in music if I decided to take it that far. Trouble is, I never again had a prof who would say to me "I don't understand what you're trying to do with this piece, but keep working on it." So now I'm sitting here telling his ghost "It's not a bloody piano concerto!" The ghost is unimpressed.
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Thursday, July 15, 2004
The word of the month for July is Skunkupine!
Cheese, I log into Blogger today, and suddenly I have all these text formatting options that weren't there before.
I managed to get over to Pure Fitness after work today for a short but much-needed set of pulldowns to counteract this keyboard slouch I've been noticing lately. I really need to find a way to fit in at least one workout a week - doing the elliptical trainer at home isn't enough. The problem is, I work a 9-hour day (longer, if I take time off for lunch), but have to wait 3 hours after dinner before I can go to bed. Add an hour's workout, plus travel time, and I'm pushing 11:00 to midnight, a recipie for fatigue mid-week. Going home for dinner firest, then driving back to the gym would be a waste of time and gas. The third alternative is if I eat dinner between work and the gym, at someplace in the area like Veggie Fun. That could work.
Local elections are coming up soon, and the campaign posters are propagating like flies in the empty lots and on the security fences of abandoned gas stations. In Scottsdale today someone had written LOTUS-EATER on one poster - that's ten style points above drawing a mustache on the candidate's photo! Over here in Mesa, surprisingly few candidates are running on the fecundity platform this race; only one, in fact - that's Congressman Flake, posing with his large, identically-dressed family. Previous races here in Mormontown have been rife with absurdities like the would-be treasurer who listed "16 grandchildren" among her qualifications. I don't know how that's relevant to the treasurer job one way or another, but it would certainly be a non-asset for any Family Planning position!
This from the New Zealand Herald: Microsoft, Disney, and some other big players have caved in to common sense and begun work on new technologies that will allow customers to make personal Fair Use copies of copyrighted works, such as downloading to an IPOD, while still protecting the owner's copyright. This will bring copyright protection technologies in line with the legal definition.
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Cheese, I log into Blogger today, and suddenly I have all these text formatting options that weren't there before.
I managed to get over to Pure Fitness after work today for a short but much-needed set of pulldowns to counteract this keyboard slouch I've been noticing lately. I really need to find a way to fit in at least one workout a week - doing the elliptical trainer at home isn't enough. The problem is, I work a 9-hour day (longer, if I take time off for lunch), but have to wait 3 hours after dinner before I can go to bed. Add an hour's workout, plus travel time, and I'm pushing 11:00 to midnight, a recipie for fatigue mid-week. Going home for dinner firest, then driving back to the gym would be a waste of time and gas. The third alternative is if I eat dinner between work and the gym, at someplace in the area like Veggie Fun. That could work.
Local elections are coming up soon, and the campaign posters are propagating like flies in the empty lots and on the security fences of abandoned gas stations. In Scottsdale today someone had written LOTUS-EATER on one poster - that's ten style points above drawing a mustache on the candidate's photo! Over here in Mesa, surprisingly few candidates are running on the fecundity platform this race; only one, in fact - that's Congressman Flake, posing with his large, identically-dressed family. Previous races here in Mormontown have been rife with absurdities like the would-be treasurer who listed "16 grandchildren" among her qualifications. I don't know how that's relevant to the treasurer job one way or another, but it would certainly be a non-asset for any Family Planning position!
This from the New Zealand Herald: Microsoft, Disney, and some other big players have caved in to common sense and begun work on new technologies that will allow customers to make personal Fair Use copies of copyrighted works, such as downloading to an IPOD, while still protecting the owner's copyright. This will bring copyright protection technologies in line with the legal definition.
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Mootocracy n. Government by the irrelevant.
The UK's Register has an insightful article concerning Warner Bros. & New Line's attempt to shut down all websites whose domain names include the word "shire".
Bet you didn't know that yesterday was The Computer Ate My Vote Day. Also, in a recent article that I can't dig up right now, a major manufacturer of e-voting machines has submitted its code for formal certifcation. I don't remember the certifying body, but it ought to be NIST. In my opinion, e-voting machines should be Common Critera evaluated to at least EAL 4. The DoD has recently stated that all its ISes should be EAL 6; our votes, the basis of our democracy, deserve some verified level of protection.
I've been continuing on work on the new Stardust County arrangements after a brief post-con breather. I'm working on Climb, which is turning out to be the most complex arrangement in the suite. Now that The Conductor is taking over The Flight of the 10:45 Express, I've been moving a lot of the ideas in the old arrangement for that song into Climb, such as the trading off of voices on the verse and the psuedo-round on the chorus. It's a good thing; I'd always felt that the story peaked too early with the big ensemble on 10:45 Express and kind of lost steam on Climb, which should be the climax.
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The UK's Register has an insightful article concerning Warner Bros. & New Line's attempt to shut down all websites whose domain names include the word "shire".
Bet you didn't know that yesterday was The Computer Ate My Vote Day. Also, in a recent article that I can't dig up right now, a major manufacturer of e-voting machines has submitted its code for formal certifcation. I don't remember the certifying body, but it ought to be NIST. In my opinion, e-voting machines should be Common Critera evaluated to at least EAL 4. The DoD has recently stated that all its ISes should be EAL 6; our votes, the basis of our democracy, deserve some verified level of protection.
I've been continuing on work on the new Stardust County arrangements after a brief post-con breather. I'm working on Climb, which is turning out to be the most complex arrangement in the suite. Now that The Conductor is taking over The Flight of the 10:45 Express, I've been moving a lot of the ideas in the old arrangement for that song into Climb, such as the trading off of voices on the verse and the psuedo-round on the chorus. It's a good thing; I'd always felt that the story peaked too early with the big ensemble on 10:45 Express and kind of lost steam on Climb, which should be the climax.
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Monday, July 12, 2004
Yesterday I got the cooking bug, and made a big dinner: wild mushroom couscous, Morroccan potato stew with tumeric, and flor de mayo beans with herbs, yum! The couscous was from a mix; the other two come from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian cookbook, except the bean recipie originally called for black-eyed peas. Disappointed there was no dessert section in this book, I pulled out my Millenium cookbook and found a stack of sorbet recipies. Next weekend, maybe?
This evening there was a great wind on the drive home, clouds of dust and glowering yellow clouds. Then the sky spat on us just enough to drive the humidity up. I'm still trying to hang on with the swamp because of the power situation, but I think it's going to have to go over to the heat pump tonight.
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This evening there was a great wind on the drive home, clouds of dust and glowering yellow clouds. Then the sky spat on us just enough to drive the humidity up. I'm still trying to hang on with the swamp because of the power situation, but I think it's going to have to go over to the heat pump tonight.
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Saturday, July 10, 2004
I guess we're not going to have rolling blackouts today, since it's 2:00 and there's nada on the AZ Republic's website. I've got my UPS hooked back up, just in case. A fire on July 4 knocked out a substation in Sun City, cutting the Valley's power supply by almost a quarter, and it'll be until next summer before they get it operating at full capacity. Apparently you can't just drive down to Home Depot and pop couple of these transformers in the back of your SUV. So the evergy conservation tips are everywhere; people are drying clothes on the line, stores have half their lights turned off, and manufacturing plants are switching to night shifts so they're not pulling power in peak hours. It's too bad it takes something this dramatic to get people thinking about electric power as a finite resource.
Thursday before the con Jeff & I got together to do some ahead planning for the Stardust County CD. With all the prep that needs to be done, plus his other projects, I'll probably be going out to Nevada City late in the fall to lay down the basic guitar, piano, and vocal tracks. Between now and then I'm setting up the scratch tracks, some of them using Sibelius' ability to take a written score and pump out a MIDI file. Probably around February we should be ready to start bringing the rest of the cast in. As to that, I'm very pleased to announce that Blake Hodgetts has agreed to take on the part of the Sheriff, so now the cast is almost complete...
I've been making brief forays into the back yard today to yank a few weeds and quickly retreat to the shade. It's hotter than hell out there, but I can't stand to look at that old dead stuff anymore.
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Thursday before the con Jeff & I got together to do some ahead planning for the Stardust County CD. With all the prep that needs to be done, plus his other projects, I'll probably be going out to Nevada City late in the fall to lay down the basic guitar, piano, and vocal tracks. Between now and then I'm setting up the scratch tracks, some of them using Sibelius' ability to take a written score and pump out a MIDI file. Probably around February we should be ready to start bringing the rest of the cast in. As to that, I'm very pleased to announce that Blake Hodgetts has agreed to take on the part of the Sheriff, so now the cast is almost complete...
I've been making brief forays into the back yard today to yank a few weeds and quickly retreat to the shade. It's hotter than hell out there, but I can't stand to look at that old dead stuff anymore.
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My high school social studies teacher had a theory about the function of a third party in the context of the American predominantly two-party system, since its cnadidate can't realistically expect to win. His thesis was that the third party permitted the introduction of ideas into the political discourse that would not otherwise make it to the surface within the long-established parties, due either to intra-party beauracracy or the us-vs-them mindset of binary politics; not only the introduction of these ideas, but a deomonstration of public support for them that the major parties would be foolish to ignore.
The Dems apparently are infamiliar with this theory; instead they've attempted to win back the hearts of disaffected Arizona progressives by removing the Green candidate from the official presidential ballot this fall. How sweet, and yet ineffective. So far as I know write-in candidates are still legal. Those voters who really support Nader will simply write his name in, and those who want merely to express a None of the Above vote will exercise the time-honored Arizona tradition of voting Libertarian.
Me? I'm just pissed that any party assumes they own my vote.
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The Dems apparently are infamiliar with this theory; instead they've attempted to win back the hearts of disaffected Arizona progressives by removing the Green candidate from the official presidential ballot this fall. How sweet, and yet ineffective. So far as I know write-in candidates are still legal. Those voters who really support Nader will simply write his name in, and those who want merely to express a None of the Above vote will exercise the time-honored Arizona tradition of voting Libertarian.
Me? I'm just pissed that any party assumes they own my vote.
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Friday, July 09, 2004
I'm really feeling wiped this evening. Despite the short work week, we seem to have crammed a full week's work into the remaining four days. Of course all hell breaks loose when half the team, including the Project Lead, are off vacation. This after months of indecision from the Prime: suddenly all issues have to be resolved in 30 days.
Westercon left me wondering if a convention can be too filk-friendly - at least at the end of each day's marathon concert run. Perhaps shorter time-slots are in order when you've got that many artists, so the audience can get a good sampling of everyone and still participate in other activities, like eating. I did really enjoy hearing all the Northwest filkers again, and for the first time. Esp. since I don't get out to the major cons too often. My con-hopping's likely to be limited in the near future as well due to a couple recent smacks to the wallet, combined with a looming sense of dread as I start to scope out the costs for the Stardust County CD...
The Wigwam Resort was kinda pricey but I have to admit that the grounds and rooms were nice, something that might do for an in-town getaway when I'm feeling rich again. On Sunday night they had cool fireworks (I think it was actually downtown Litchfield Park, visible from the resort), accompanied by patriotic music, except... the 1812 Overture?! Isn't that a few years off?
I'm rambling incoherently, and ought to get some sleep...
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Westercon left me wondering if a convention can be too filk-friendly - at least at the end of each day's marathon concert run. Perhaps shorter time-slots are in order when you've got that many artists, so the audience can get a good sampling of everyone and still participate in other activities, like eating. I did really enjoy hearing all the Northwest filkers again, and for the first time. Esp. since I don't get out to the major cons too often. My con-hopping's likely to be limited in the near future as well due to a couple recent smacks to the wallet, combined with a looming sense of dread as I start to scope out the costs for the Stardust County CD...
The Wigwam Resort was kinda pricey but I have to admit that the grounds and rooms were nice, something that might do for an in-town getaway when I'm feeling rich again. On Sunday night they had cool fireworks (I think it was actually downtown Litchfield Park, visible from the resort), accompanied by patriotic music, except... the 1812 Overture?! Isn't that a few years off?
I'm rambling incoherently, and ought to get some sleep...
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Tuesday, July 06, 2004
I should probably post a bit about Westercon while it's still fresh in my mind, but it's after 10:00 and I've spent the evening dragging furniture back into the computer room and ran over my toe with the hand truck while transporting a file cabinet that weighs more than I do, so I don't feel quite up to it tonight.
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