The Mandelbear's Musings

09:09 am - Done yesterday (20091209 We)

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A pretty good day, I guess. Just above neutral. Some good fast walking around the Stanford Shopping Center, though I didn't find the kind of shoulder bag I've been looking for. Toccano has a nice one, but it has no organizer compartment. Eagle Creek has two: one's about an inch too small, and the other's a couple of inches too big. I know where that leads. And both EC bags are rather expensive. Who knows? I might end up learning how to sew.

I also went in to Macy's and bought a Cuisinart burr coffeegrinder for about $60 with tax. Colleen will keep the old blade grinder for spices. No large French presses in evidence, though.

And we had gorgeousgary for the evening, out from DC on a business trip. I sang the two Bears and Inherit the Earth.

Oh, yeah: links -- Droid trumps iPhone for Time Gadget of the Year | Electronista -- how about that?

Current Mood: okay

10:10 pm - Quick update from Loscon

Just a very quick note from Loscon. We arrived safely; my concert was this evening at 5:30. Set list: Riverheart, Inherit the Earth, the two Bears, Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of, and QV. I recorded it; that will be up eventually, but not until after I get back to a reasonably fast computer with gigabit access to my fileserver.

07:49 am - I've been Kaneffed!

Now that he finally has it posted, allow me to present Monkey Brains [lyrics here], which Bob commissioned Kathy Mar to spring on me at ConChord. Yes, of course I like it!

08:08 am - Done yesterweek (20091022-28)

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Eeep!! A week is way too long to be playing catch-up. I haven't fallen behind on my reading, so my pants aren't bankrupt; I wonder what item of clothing corresponds to posting. Shirt, maybe.

I think that if you want the details, you'll have to slog through the notes. (Ugh!)

Most of the week was, of course, taken up by OVFF, which was wonderful even if I didn't win a Pegasus -- there are people I only see once or twice a year, and I did a lot of catching up. I even met a few new people. I only sang a handful of songs. That's ok.

MEW's concert was magical, with a stage full of backup musicians. Wow. And it was especially good to hear Duane Elms in concert after all the years he's been away from filk.

The netbook worked out OK; I only felt a need for more battery life a couple of times. The biggest problem was not having set up synchronization via git before I left. Next time.

I didn't end up paying up as much attention to my emotions as I intended to, but I don't think I noticed much anxiety interacting with people. The major insight is that most, if not all, of my problems in that area are due to low self-esteem, not social anxiety. It's not that I expect to be rejected; I expect to be ignored. Or perhaps that I set things up so that I'm more likely to be ignored, because that's easier to handle than rejection. Yeah. That.

I have a really hard time imagining that somebody might prefer talking to me to whatever they're doing at the moment.

The next week is likely to be busy. My boss cornered me late yesterday afternoon and said something like "You know that server project you've been working on that's due to be finished at the end of December? How about getting a simplified version going by the end of next week?" Right. Oddly enough, that's going to be pretty easy. But still...

08:05 pm - Signal boost: Filk_Friendly

My friend pocketnaomi had a dream of a friendly society (read mutual-aid society, co-op, mutual benefit society) -- households banding together to help one another out in the current unfriendly times.

Here's her original post, where she says:

I want to see what we can do with this. The filk community is the group I know, the people who already have a predisposition to help each other when someone truly needs it, to regard themselves as family, and to see with a bit longer an eye than most of modern economics. It also covers a wide cross-section of economic, geographical, and occupational ground.

The resulting community here on LJ is called filk_friendly. See you there, maybe?

10:29 pm - Blatant commercialism

I don't know whether this makes me feel old, proud, or what. My older daughter, chaoswolf, has posted to announce her shiny new Etsy shop called Chaos of Creation. The name comes from my song The World Inside the Crystal.

She sells chainmail jewelry and bags.

Current Mood: indescribable

07:54 pm - I can haz Kazoo!

Somehow I seem to have neglected to mention the fact that my songwriting talents have been recognized once more in the form of another Kazoo Award. Specifically, Thrill-Seekers' Waltz was the winner in the "Recycled Fish" category. I am speechless.

It's worth noting that T-SW was the first of two songs I wrote after the Challenger disaster; the second was Keep the Dream Alive. Which I think is probably more worthy of recognition, though I suppose that's a matter of taste.

10:57 am - SQUEEEE!

The 2009 Pegasus Awards Final Ballot is up, and I'm on it! In the "best writer/composer" category.

Just being nominated is a big honor, of course. But if you want to evaluate my credentials as a songwriter, go to the song index on my website.

(Added 11:33) My congratulations to my fellow nominees, of course. And I just want to add that if I'm the only filker you know on that ballot, or if you have no idea what filk is, you shouldn't vote.

Current Mood: excited

09:18 am - Done yesterday (20090809)

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It appears to have been a fairly productive day, in spite of ending rather badly. I did quite a lot of puttering, installed the other new shelf in the office, did some shopping, went to Kathy Mar's bash (and bought her new CD/DVD set), and boxed up Kat's computer, keyboard, and monitor. Discovered that just after getting up seems to be the best time for meditation.

On the minus side, no walkies, I got a well-deserved chewing-out from Colleen about the fact that email still doesn't work on her computer, and I ended the day sore, dead tired, and unable to get to sleep. A bath and a bit of IM conversation with another insomniac helped.

My stomach muscles were all knotted up as if I was afraid of something, but I still don't know what. Weird.

Current Mood: calm

12:56 am - Random notes from Baycon

No, I haven't dropped off the face of the Earth, though I sometimes feel as though it might be a welcome vacation. This is just a quick note from Baycon -- I haven't even had time to update my to.do list with completed items. No, I will not tweet them.

High order bits:

The Tres Gique concert kicked serious ass -- probably our best yet. In spite of (or perhaps because of) our having to vamp for half an hour or so while the next act got unstuck from traffic. And we were afraid we were running a little long...

The Tempered Glass concert kicked ass, in spite of Callie losing her voice mid-song toward the beginning of the set. And Naomi having a blood-sugar crash, and my voice flagging a little. We adjusted, moved on, would have had to drop a song anyway, and made it through.

Filk tonight was great fun, though I wish we could have stayed longer.

Caring for Colleen took up a good chunk of time and energy. So did caring for a five-year-old, even a fun, articulate, well-behaved five-year-old.

And finally, an Announcement: Colleen and I are fan guests of honor at next year's Baycon!!!

More if I ever have time.

08:40 am - Done yesterday (20090514)

( raw notes )

It was a pretty good day, with glimmerings of hope.

I went to the 1800wheelchair.com site to check on my order for Colleen's scooter, only to find that it had actually shipped Wednesday morning, and was due to be delivered today!

Kat said "I loves you, mdlbear" in an IM, for no particular reason except that she was thinking about me. Wow.

Colleen surprised her PT with how well she's doing, and had an appointment with her gastroenterologist where she got prescriptions that will, hopefully, take care of the diarrhea. He said by Tuesday. She's already revising plans for Saturday, but I remain skeptical.

Naomi and I settled on a tentative set list for Tempered Glass's Baycon concert, and Joyce and Jordan came over for a Tres Gique rehearsal where we firmed up that setlist.

Yeah, a pretty good day. I think I was mostly happy and guardedly hopeful, though too busy to really think about it much.

11:19 am - Breaking the logjam

Many projects and subtasks have been stalled for a long time. Two of them got done this morning.

First, I hooked up my new printer (Epson Workforce 600) to Dorsai, downloaded the latest version of Gutenprint, and it worked. No such luck with Nova, which is still running Etch: the latest version of Gutenprint available for it is too old. I have the choice of either trying to backport, or upgrading to Lenny. I'll choose the latter, later.

Second, I dragged in a music stand, headset mic, and Flame; hooked them up, and recorded a couple of test tracks of pocketnaomi's Riverheart. Oh. My. [ogg] [mp3]

A couple of minor vocal/wording glitches, and a few mic position/level tweaks still needed, but nice and clean; not bad for the second take of the day. The headset mic is close enough to my mouth that there's almost no guitar crosstalk. We likes it.

Waves to pocketnaomi.

07:03 am - Done yesterday

( to.done 20090227 )

A little better at noting emotions today, though I see that I totally failed to note my walk, which included a phone call to cflute, at the time. Not slowing down helps. It also included a second call, to AT&T's technical support, to see what could be done about telling the phone to favor the edge network over 3G, which has crappy coverage.

I was delighted to find out that both pocketnaomi and cflute liked The Owl and the Mountain Goat, my first song of the year. A bit lightweight and far too full of in-jokes for general consumption, but a lot of fun.

07:25 am - Done yesterday

( to.done 20090226 )

A very long, mostly very boring day, which is exactly what one wants when a family member is going in for surgery. I had the notion that I was relatively calm, but the contrast in mood after I actually heard that things had gone well, and again when I went in to see her, was noticable.

I'm feeling perversely gleeful about having written a parody of "The Owl and the Pussycat" about a couple of my friends. They'll probably kill me.

I was very disappointed about having to go to bed so early, both yesterday and the night before. I needed the time, damnit.

07:24 pm - Five things from sweetmusic_27

1. Fractals (Because of your default icon, I originally thought your LJ handle was short for Mandelbrot Bear.)

My handle is (partly) short for Mandelbrot Bear; it was shortened both to make it fit in less than 8 characters and to make it ambiguously mean "middle-sized bear" as well. You can find more about the set and the program I wrote to generate the icon here. I came up with my original description when I came in to alt.callahans feeling "infinitely fuzzy"; someone else described me as a Mandelbear and the name inevitably stuck.

I love fractals. I bought Benoit Mandelbrot's books, and explored the space with fractint on the PC and some other program on the Mac 2. I think it was fractint that let you play around with different formulas; I discovered the Mandelbear set by replacing z_i² with z_i³ in the usual Mandelbrot set definition (the set of points z₀ such that the series z_i+1=z_i²+z₀ remains bounded).

The Mandelbear and Mandelbrot sets are actually cross-sections of four-dimensional objects; the cross-sections in the other direction are the corresponding Julia sets.

I first encountered fractals in grad school, before the name had even been coined, when I was introduced to the Dragon Curve. This is the shape you get when you fold a strip of paper back on itself repeatedly, then open each of the folds out half-way. Four of them fit together to make a square with fractal edges that can interlock to tile the plane.

Fractals are perversely beautiful: they take difficult mathematical concepts such as limits, self-similarity, complexity, and infinity; and wrap them up in an image of such breathtaking gorgeousness that you forget just how weird they really are.

2. Filk

Let's see. I think filk first came to my attention in bardic circles at the SCA tourneys that Colleen took me to in lieu of dating. It was sometime in the late 1970s that we started going to SF conventions. My real intro to filk was through Amy Falkowitz, who had learned most of the songs on Leslie Fish's "Solar Sailors" album. I wrote the first song that I actually identified as a filksong, The Shores of the Night, in 1981 shortly before Bayfilk 1, if I remember correctly.

Ask three filkers to define "filk" and you'll get between four and six definitions. Mine is "the indigenous folk music of science fiction fandom." Your mileage may vary.

I love writing songs, and I've even gained enough self-confidence to love performing them. I love hearing other people cover my songs. I think the best things, though, is the filk community; just being able to hang around with a bunch of amazing, talented people, swapping songs and talking about everything in the universe.

3. Coffee

Let's face it: I'm addicted. For better or worse, one of the best coffee roasters on the West Coast, Barefoot, is only a short drive from our house (and on the way to the hospital, for what that's worth). Not surprisingly, I have song about it.

I usually drink two or three 12-oz mugs worth in the morning. I have learned not to drink coffee after noon unless I need it to stay awake driving at night.

4. The River (It's something you already write about on LJ, I know, but it is nonetheless one of the first things I think of.)

I'm glad The River is one of the first things you associate with me -- it's been an amazing ride, and I'm still more than a little bemused to find myself a respected authority on getting along with geeks. It surprises and delights me that some people are finding it helpful.

It started with the song a little over a year ago, turned into a major theme in my livejournal, and is now threatening to spawn at least two books.

5. Cross-talk (I remember you mentioning it in a post about geekboy care and maintenance or flow or something, and it made me more aware of my own sensitivity to cross-talk.)

I ganked that usage from cflute, who's even more sensitive to it than I am. Some of us don't multitask very well, so if there's another conversation going on, or more than one person talking to us at once, or a major distraction like a TV in the room, our train of thought gets totally derailed.

My main post on the subject was this one.

Current Mood: anxious

05:39 pm - River: One year ago...

... I wrote a song titled "The River". I posted about it the following day. It was another ten days before I started using the title as a tag, but the song definitely marked a transition of some sort in both my songwriting and my thinking.

There will be a couple more posts coming out on the River over the next ten days, but I felt that it was worth marking the occasion.

05:57 pm - Conflikt: concerts on Sunday

After half a week of nervousness, frantic practice, and raw fear, the concerts went well. Small audience, but that's to be expected mid-afternoon on Sunday. A few screw-ups: a swapped chorus in Middle-Sized Bear, and a large number of botched chords that probably nobody in the audience noticed. Nailed all the chord changes in Landscapes, which I wasn't expecting to do. And after taking out two verses in QV I ended up with room for one song. Callie came to my rescue by suggesting WitC, which we can nail cold.

Set list later; I'm about to head out to dinner.

11:40 pm - Travels with Plink: Good trip so far

It's been a good trip so far; relaxing. Got in some good rehearsing for pocketnaomi's set on Sunday, some of it with cflute listening in to double-check my chording -- some of the songs don't have lead sheets. Or they didn't.

A fair amount of socializing, but not as much as I'd like. Naturally. (It's basically impossible to get as much socializing in as I'd like, since one has to sleep sometime. :-) No walking. :(

I'm pretty sure that a larg part of my congestion is due to an allergy -- it's less here. But not gone completely.

Ordered flowers for Colleen, at her request demand. We miss one another, of course. Next time...

Current Mood: sleepy

08:16 am - Productive?? Maybe not

So yesterday evening, rather than do anything actually useful like my sales taxes, I sat down and finished transpose.pl, which automagically transposes lead sheets with chords enclosed inline in [square brackets]. Based on the file extension it either uses "#" and "b", or "\sharp" and "\flat".

Of course, the sales taxes really have to get done this morning, along with paying any bills due at the end of the month (when I'll be out of town). And two phone calls, which still scare the hell out of me, to AT&T about my cell phone service and fiber. The cell phone call should have been made a month ago, and is probably too late now to help with my previous astronomical bill. Maybe even with the current one. My finances suck, and I suck at handling them.

(09:54) Sales taxes done.

Current Mood: productive

08:23 am - I can haz music!

Spent some time last night with cflute working on a harmony part for Mike Richards' "Will Ye Come Back Home?" (since there are a couple of lines in the chorus that are way too high for me to sing, and it needs a low harmony anyway), followed by several hours tunesmithing "A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear". Which, if you're paying attention, now has Callie as co-composer. Don't have a recording of the new melody, but there's a MIDI file if you can handle one of those. It crashed my ancient Iceweasel, but plays fine in timidity.

We finally crashed a little before 1am.

As far as process goes, it was me on guitar and vocals, with Callie transcribing into Concertware and me revising the lead sheet in Emacs. It would be good to have a note editor on Linux that imports Concertware files, though I suppose I can get by with something that can import MIDI files.

11:43 pm - Song: A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear

Remember that song I posted a couple of days ago? The music isn't quite stable yet, and it's a very rough performance as one might expect, but it'll do for the moment. A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear [pdf] [ogg] [mp3]

Tomorrow I can haz Callie!

06:54 pm - Song: A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear

No music yet, though I have a few vague ideas. Inspired by a number of conversations over the last year.

A Talk With the Middle-Sized Bear

© 2008 Stephen Savitzky. Some Rights Reserved.

You've had a rough journey; a hellish long day;
There's a fire in your throat and an ache in your head
And you long to be back in your own cozy bed.
But the world you grew up in has vanished away.
You're weary and sick and you're frightened by change
When something wraps 'round you like a swirl of warm air
For there's no place as comforting, gentle, or strange
As the mind of the Middle-Sized Bear.

    For the Middle-Sized Bear is a creature so rare
    He'll feed you on honey and tea in his lair
    And you don't think you trust him, but maybe you'll dare
    Have a talk with the Middle-Sized Bear.
( He's clumsy, forgetful, ill-tempered, and shy; )

The last repeat of the refrain may want to be modified or left off altogether depending on who's singing it. YMMV.

The Middle-Sized Bear is a character out of science fiction: the section ``Conversation With the Middle-Sized Bear'' in Cordwainer Smith's novella, Mark Elf. For several years I've used it to refer to the aspect of my personality that is, so people have told me, comforting to talk to and be around.

This song is very much a composite; the first verse is almost entirely out of Cordwainer Smith; the last two are more about the women in my life who have encountered the Middle-Sized Bear over the last year. The last refrain is mainly for anyone who may encounter him in the future.

Current Mood: accomplished

10:32 pm - A good year

It's been a remarkably productive year for me. I spent a few minutes this morning summarizing -- I've written five songs this year (counting the one I finished this morning but don't have music for yet, but not counting the unfinished one). Not only is that more than the previous five years put together, it's my most productive year ever, even if you don't count the one with no music.

Add a poem or two, some unknown number of prose poems masquerading as LJ posts, and The River, and it adds up to a fair amount of output, at least for me.

I'm not complaining, and the year isn't over yet.

08:33 am - Loscon: Saturday on the River

Except for the afternoon filk concerts I spent pretty much all day Saturday talking with people. Mainly the lovely Moira Stern (who should comment to tell me whether I should use her LJ ID, real name, or both interchangably), whose concert came after mine. With a concert harp and three kids, she certainly needed help gear-wrangling, and it made a good excuse to talk.

Had dinner with the Rubins, after which I hooked up with Moira again (we were at the same restaurant in the hotel). After that I party-hopped, which made for a couple more good conversations and a fair amount of tasty stuff containing ethanol. Trying to be gluten-free is annoying.

The concert went well; the Wolfling was trailing the beat a little -- we need to work on that -- but I was mostly on. It was all stuff I've been singing recently, so I was actually able to look at the audience a little. Tearful hug from Moira by way of a review. We really should have swapped sets; she needed time to tune the harp. And it's really hard to follow QV, or start one's set after one has been crying.

No, I'm not sorry about that.

My setlist, cobbled together mere minutes before the concert, consisted of:

Side note on gear: I took my notebook up on stage, which let me jam my watch fob into one of the rings where I could see it. Very useful. I found myself wishing that I'd taken one of the cup-holders, though.

I find the fact that I spent essentially the entire con as the Middle-Sized Bear to be deeply odd. I have noticed that I've been spending more time talking to people, and much less time in programming. And I've noticed a tendency recently to spend a lot of my time talking to one person during a con, usually somebody I want to know better. (It was cflute at Baycon, for example, and joecoustic at OVFF.) I love it, but it does mean that I get to meet fewer new people. (On the gripping hand, I've always had trouble meeting new people.)

On the whole, I'd rather spend my time deepening old friendships and making new ones than sitting around in a circle waiting for a good opening to slip a song into. Swapping songs with a small number of people is a lot of fun, though; I'm not sure how to find a good balance there.

Current Mood: awake

07:45 am - LOSCON Friday

As predicted, Loscon is being weird. Good, mostly, but weird. Got pounce-hugged by snobahr in the lobby, and much later had a good conversation in the elevator lobby. Spent a lovely couple of hours talking to impresaria1 by the pool as she watched her three kids. Then we went out for dinner, to the nearby Mongolian barbecue, with Bill and Carole (WINOLJ), and the Y. D.

What impresaria1 failed to mention -- or think of -- was that she's seriously allergic to soy. As in soy sauce. Can you say dumb? Thought so. Spent most of the evening taking care of her. She seemed OK when I left her around midnight, but an emergency call was only minutes away a couple of times.

Spent about 45 minutes down at the filk circle after that; sang Toolmakers and QV off-book using KR's 12-string. Not entirely sure I like QV capoed up on a 12 -- it could stand to be lower. (It's in C; I play it capo 5 with G fingerings, because that works better on a 6 with my fingerpicking style. So it can go either way.) Sang Wheelin' up in the lobby, and spent a lot of time noodling.

The whole day was punctuated with calls to Colleen. She managed to get out and go shopping in the afternoon. So that's very good progress.

Current Mood: awake

09:51 pm - Meanwhile...

Over the course of the last couple of mornings I've finally finished fixing my toolchain software, and in particular the rather misnamed album.make, to handle multiple named sessions (concerts, for example) in a single directory. There are, needless to say, a few bugs left, but I should have split copies of cflute's and tibicina's concerts at ConChord by sometime this weekend.

My attempt to upgrade Matrix, the ancient Thinkpad that I've been using as the living-room browsing machine, to Lenny ended with no X and a mysterious hang. Considering its age and condition, I'm going to give up and either drop back to Etch, intall Puppy, or, more likely, give it an honorable burial in the attic. Harmony or one of the mini-ITX systems will work fine. I'll start with Dantooine, currently the bedroom computer, because Colleen won't be needing it for the next month or so. I'll have to come up with something to put it on.

Some good phone conversations: cflute on Tuesday, joecoustic today, and of course multiple conversations with Colleen. Still not as good as I'd like to be at originating calls -- it's all too easy for me to procrastinate them.

I slept fairly well last night, but woke up about 5:30 with a somewhat sore throat and the impression that I'd forgotten my facehugger. That or woken up, taken it off, and gone back to sleep. *sigh* I really resent the time I spend sleeping. Especially when I don't have anyone to sleep with. That's what I miss the most.

05:04 pm - Travels with Plink and Cthulhu: OVFF Saturday

Not much to say about Saturday, really. Lots of good conversation, but I've forgotten most of the details.

Sang The River as a one-shot in the morning group, and took in the concerts, which were wonderful as usual.

People have already posted the details of the Pegasus awards, so I don't have to.

After the Peggies I crawled off to a thinly-populated filk room so I could sing The River to joecoustic, who had missed the one-shots and wanted to hear it. It was starting to fill up around midnight, when I decamped to the Just Plain Folks theme circle. This was followed by childrens' songs in the Pajama Party circle, which turned into open filking at 1:00 by way of Daddy's World. Went off to bath and bed at 2:45.

04:52 pm - Travels with Plink and Cthulhu: OVFF Sunday

I think I'm going to do this in reverse chronological order:

Just got back from the Sunday evening expedition to BD's Mongolian Barbecue. Only had one serving, though I opted for the 2-bowl "unlimited" variety. Asked for tea and got iced with some kind of fruit mixed in. Sigh. OTOH, it has a huge variety of fixin's, and the conversation was fantastic.

Rode to BD's with joecoustic, continuing a conversation we'd started earlier in the con suite. We were joined by Kanef and Ben Newman, continuing a conversation on the computational linguistics of songwriting. Notable quote (about a bit of Smalltalk trivia I tossed into the mix) "You mean they implemented Boolean as a union of two unit classes? Cool." They did, and it is.

I'd found myself in the con suite because I'd been sent to deliver a message to Peter Alway; ended up in a good discussion on dulcimer. It's been like that all weekend -- the main reason I haven't been blogging much is that I've been spending most of my time (outside of concerts) talking to people.

Won a handsome gourd/guiro/rainstick in the Interfilk auction; it'll be interesting seeing how it fits into my luggage. I didn't mind bidding it up to $30 because I'd been lazy and hadn't brought anything to donate.

Caught the song contest and a couple of the morning two-fers.

Breakfast was interesting -- Came in by myself (through not immediately asking the two young ladies ahead of me in line if I could join them), but another table had already mentioned to the greeter that they were looking for more. They were all locals; the woman next to me was a children's librarian named Lin -- short for Linea. The series of coincidences was impressive: Mom is Lynn, short for Evelyn, and a (retired) librarian; the young lady whose wedding we attended last weekend was named Linea. Fun.

Table-hopped after breakfast, with conversations with musicahumana and Barry and Sally Childs-Helton, and the GOHs, stevieannie and micktim.

Saturday to follow, to prevent this from getting too long.

07:08 pm - Sunday wrap-up

Sunday (yesterday, assuming I get this post finished in the next five-and-a-half hours) was reasonably well-filled with Good Things. I'm not complaining.

I woke up long before Colleen, as usual; eventually she noticed and sent me out, first for an English muffin with butter (so she could take her meds), then for a walk. I walked from the motel to the little shopping center at the corner of Pony Express Trail and Sly Park Road; about 45 minutes round trip.

After I got back it didn't take long to load out; we headed back to the Buttercup Pantry in Placerville. I had a seafood omlette this time, with hollandaise sauce. Made of yum. Hollandaise seems to be particularly good on egg dishes.

Placerville is an old gold-mining town; it got the name "Hangtown" (as in ... Fry) from, obviously, the numerous hangings it was host to.

The drive home was uneventful, but pleasant. I love taking long drives with the Cat, and with gas prices what they are these days it's good to have an excuse.

After an hour or two to catch my breath, I headed up to Berkeley for donsimpson's 70th birthday party. Fewer people than I expected, and it's a good thing Colleen didn't go; she wouldn't have been able to handle the stairs. I sang The River, Wheelin', Quiet Victories, and (obviously) Don's Ship of Stone. Which remains my all-time favorite song.

Decided I wasn't up to unwinding the directions in the dark, especially since I was on a street far too narrow to turn around on, and parts of the route I'd come in on didn't look particularly reversable. A look at the map showed that I was close to SR13, so I took that, heading South. South SR13 merged smoothly onto East I580 (which heads South from Berkeley); I turned off onto North SR238, just before 580 finally heads East, to go West to South I880. I love the Bay Area. It was a fun explore.

This is, by the way, another data point on panic and being lost. I had one look at a Google maps printout, which only got me as far as SR13. From there I was, essentially, lost. I was not in a state of panic -- what I was feeling was the sort of calm curiosity I feel when I'm solving a problem, or taking a walking tour of a city I've never explored before.

I think that there's a lot of history with Colleen -- she has seen me panic in the car, about 25 years ago. The kids have seen me get (mildly) lost and flustered, and have seen what happens when my memory of a map or a previous trip disagrees with the directions I'm hearing. There are several feedback loops that happen when somebody else is in the car, either trying to be helpful, or teasing me because I'm lost again, or maybe just counting on me to know what the heck I'm doing. They're not there when I'm by myself.

Current Mood: content

07:47 am - Tres Gique 2.0

(Takes deep breath. Jumps off cliff.)

"My" Toastmaster concert at ConChord this year was actually a Tres Gique concert, and it went off remarkably well considering that we really only had two rehearsals together as a group since last May, and that the set included three songs we'd never done as a group before.

It wasn't awesome. Parts of it came close, though. Quiet Victories, even with a couple of flubs and my flagging voice, was very close to awesome. I don't usually tear up listening to recordings.

Callie's partner, Naomi, pointed out that we could be awesome, consistently, if we got together every 4-6 weeks for a weekend of intensive practice. So that's what we're going to do. Or at least try to do -- we'll get together sometime in mid-November and see how it goes.

This is going to mean some big changes.

The biggest change for me is that we're not going to be "Steve Savitzky and his occasional backup group" anymore. We'll be doing a mix of my songs and other people's songs -- we won't even stick to filk; Joyce has been singing folk since forever. We'll try writing stuff jointly -- I have some ideas about that. I won't always be lead singer (I can hear the cheers from the audience already). I won't get nearly as many concerts as just me -- that's part of the price. But I'll learn to be a better performer, and my concerts, with or without TG, will sound a lot better -- that's the payoff.

For Callie and Joyce, the big change will be that they'll have equal billing as performers in the group, not just as part of some singer-songwriter's backup group. That's what happened to Callie with Echo's Children: she was many people thought of her as just Cat's backup and never became known as the fantastic performer she is.

Jordan, our drummer, will stay in that role at least for a couple of years; eventually he may move out, go into impoverished college student mode, and we'll have to worry about what to do next. Kat, who's performed with us a couple of times, won't be able to make it down from Canada for rehearsals; she can sit in via streaming audio if she wants, but mostly will become our Webmistress. Things will sort themselves out.

Joyce's husband Dave, who has been doing live sound for her and others for years at folk dance camps, will be the official Sound Guy. Colleen is, of course, Catering and Hospitality, and possibly logistics.

Now, about that version number. Back around the end of last year Kat and I came up with a version-numbering scheme: I was 1.0, Callie and Joyce were 0.1 and 0.2 respectively; Jordan and Kat were 0.0.1 and 0.0.2 respectively. Add 'em up. Wwll, we're not playing mix-and-match anymore, and I'm not the main performer anymore. So, Tres Gique 2.0.

If this comes off, we'll have our first concert at Consonance or Baycon.

Current Mood: indescribable

07:43 pm - The concert at ConChord

My toastmaster's concert at ConChord, which happened a week ago last Saturday, is finally split up, properly indexed, and uploaded. You can find it here. For field recordings, the sound quality is remarkably good; they were captured on my H2, just in front of the audience. The performances a little less so, but parts of it are, if not awesome, at least served up with win and a modest amount of awesome sauce. I did tear up at the ending of QV, so that says something.

08:05 am - Travels with Plink and Flame: ConChord mini-report

It's been a good con. Colleen flaked out of the Dead Dog at about 10:30; I bailed at midnight. Colleen had me do QV before I left, in part because AJA hadn't heard the whole thing. Got a big smile of recognition on "Mirror, mirror". After Colleen left I played stunt guitar for a couple of songs that cflute and tibicina sang. Sang "Desolation, Oh, No!" in a sequence of self-referential songs, and "Keep the Dream Alive" as a follower to something Paul Estin sang. Probably one or two others..

Noticed, especially on QV, that I'm still not entirely comfortable with Flame even though I did most of my practicing on Ruby; there must be a slight difference in the neck. Was very glad I opted to perform with Plink; I was, apparently, much more relaxed once I made that decision during our Friday rehearsal.

Being Toastmaster keeps one very busy; I'm not sure I'll want to do that again. Probably not. One can't skip concerts to have conversations, the way I've been doing lately, or to squeeze in a last-minute run-through of something I'm not familiar with. Squeezed in a couple of rehearsals with tibicina so I could do "The Merryman and his Maid" in her set, and we pulled it off, but it was a near thing.

8:50 ETA: Managed to leave our hot-water pot and tea chest in the con suite room last night, figuring I'd collect them this morning. (Besides, I was already in bed when I remembered.) But they were already reconfiguring the room when I got down at 8:40. We'll probably reconnect with them at Loscon, unless somebody made other arrangements.

Current Mood: awake

12:01 am - Travels with Plink and Flame

Well, here we are at ConChord. Got in about 4:30 after an easy trip down 101. Stopped at Solvang for lunch at The Chef's Touch -- made of yum. Small place, very small menu written up on chalkboard. Two large-screen monitors showing the stove from above, so you can see what the chef is doing.

Dinner here at the hotel wasn't nearly as good, but made up for it by being more expensive. The company was good, though; Joyce, Dave and Jordan; Michael and Allison. Nobody else had shown up by the time we went upstairs at 11:30. Grump.

Spent all evening sitting in the lobby playing guitar: Plink before dinner, and Flame after.

We're borrowing a scooter from Michael for the weekend. It took up an enormous amount of space; we ended up using the back seat for additional stowage. We would not have been able to take two additional people plus luggage, though we could have managed one. So far, the only person who's actually used the scooter has been me.

Musical mayhem starts tomorrow.

10:12 pm - Listen to Flame Darling

Flame Darling (Ovation CC-48). Brand-new Martin Silk and Steel strings. Let me know if you can hear the buzzing strings on loud notes. Tiny editing glitch in Paper Wings, numerous flubs, and a bit of background noise (including Colleen answering a phone call in the middle of QV), but... The point is to listen to the guitar on this one.

The Zoom's USB storage mode seems to have abruptly stopped working; I've tried several different ways of rebooting or resetting it. The card works fine in a reader, and passed an fsck. *shrug* at least it works in the reader, and that seems a little faster, too.

Going to go re-string Plink now.

10:50 pm - My daughter is starting to scare me

My 16-year-old just wrote a couple of song lyrics. I'll see if I can get have persuaded her to post them in public; you'll find them here.

Actually, she's been scaring me for the last year or so, ever since she grew taller than me. But that's another matter.

10:37 am - Countdown to ConChord

Here's the tentative setlist for ConChord. It's looking suspiciously like a Tres Gique set, but there's a lot of stuff that's either new or old but recently revived. Order is, of course, up in the air at the moment.

08:52 pm - Song: Wheelin'

Having obtained approval from pocketnaomi, who inspired commissioned it by promising to come to ConChord if I would sing a song either by her or about her, here it is at last.

Note that the audio files were done during last night's practice session with Joyce; the tune is still quite unstable, and some of the words have changed overnight, as they often do. I'll probably have a better one tomorrow, since Joyce is going to try to make it down for Wednesday.

Steve.Savitzky.net/Songs/wheelin/ [pdf] [ogg] [mp3]

Wheelin'

© Stephen Savitzky. Some Rights Reserved.

When you see her in the evening in a bright green dress
Walking fast down the hallway you might never guess
That the lady has a weakness she's reluctant to confess.
No, you might not notice when she's dancing reels
That she made it through the airport on a set of wheels,
And she still isn't certain that she likes the way it feels.

    With her lover right behind her lookin' tired but proud
    They were wheelin' their way through the airport crowd;
    The way it made her feel made her want to weep out loud. 
    'Cause they were cuttin' past the line at the TSA
    Asking healthy young people to get out of her way
    Savin' her strength to make it through another day.

When she has a good day she can walk a mile
Dance through the evening with grace and style
Greet her lover at the door with a tight embrace and a smile;
Next minute she's collapsing like she's half-way dead
With a fire in her body and an aching head
And she'll pay with pain and the rest of the weekend in bed.

    So with her lover right beside her lookin' calm and cool
    She walks up to the counter feeling like a fool
    And tries to tell herself that a wheelchair's only a tool.
    Soon she's wheelin' past the line at the TSA
    Feeling weird watching people getting out of her way
    But it's the easiest journey in years to the end of the day.

Well, her body is a battleground and life's a war,
And she's lost against her limits many times before;
But she's still fighting with a few new tricks in store;
Because a wheelchair is a weapon, not a mark of defeat
And she can stay standing longer with some time off her feet
The battle isn't over, and winning will be sweet.

    With her lover right behind her lookin' fierce and proud
    They'll be cutting a swath through the airport crowd
    The way it makes her feel will make her want to laugh out loud.
    'Cause she'll be wheelin' past the line at the TSA
    Watchin' tough young punks scurry out of her way
    Savin' her strength to make it through another day.

    Yeah, savin' her strength--to fight another day.

This song is the answer to ``I can walk, damnit! What do I need a wheelchair for?'' Once I learned that Naomi was booking a wheelchair for the airports at both ends of her flight to ConChord, it all fell together in a day and a half and promptly attached itself to one of my blues-style noodling patterns.

It's remarkably hard to write a song "about" someone that's both specific enough to be about her, and yet might be of interest to more than a handful of people. But since you might be in a similar situation, or you might know someone who's in a similar situation... (oh, wait -- that's another song altogether).

Current Mood: accomplished

11:55 pm - A good day.

It's been a very productive day, though not so much at work. I was attacked by a new song last night, and mostly finished it at lunchtime; I'll probably end up writing off a lot of today's work time as vacation.

Had a really good practice session with Joyce and Jordan this evening; "Paper Wings", "Millennium's Dawn", "Quiet Victories", and the new one (still need to run that past somebody before I can post it). Did the new women's ending for QV and verified that it works correctly with the men's ending when they're sung together. It'll work. The concert at ConChord has every potential to be made of win. The amount of awesome sauce remains to be determined.

I need to practice more -- the fingertips on my left hand feel a little numb.

Made two social phone calls around noon; both went to voice mail so I am, as it were, off the hook for the moment.

11:17 pm - Saturday at the Bash

Good party today at Kathy Mar's -- like the Starport parties, Kathy's winter and summer bashes are a Bay Area event not to missed if you're in the area.

Sang QV four times, "The River" twice, "Paper Wings", and a lot of noodling. Got quite a few tears from QV, including some unexpected ones, the laughter I hoped for on Bev's verse, and harmony on the women's coda. It'll work.

The Bohnhoffs were there, so not only did I get to sing QV for them, but picked up a copy of their new CD, "Mobius Street". Yes, chaoswolf, we got a copy for you, too. Signed.

Sang Carole's (verse the new one) for her; that was the only one of the extras that I put in, since none of the other people I wrote them for were present.

We left around 9:30; Colleen was getting stiff. She's doing a lot better, but still doesn't have a lot of staying power. Just as well -- I was getting tired; any later and it could have been dangerous. Passed a nasty accident just past the on-ranp; seven cars involved. Good thing we didn't leave about 20 minutes earlier.

11:23 pm - Music time

As I mentioned earlier, Colleen has decreed that the hour between 9 and 10pm is for me to work on recording or other, hopefully related, music projects. Tonight was the first opportunity to put that into practice, if you don't count 8-9 yesterday at Joyce's.

In the event, what I ended up doing was relocating my microphones so that I could record within reach of the new workstation, with its large monitor. That, of course, also required moving the associated preamps and the head-end of the M-Audio Delta 1010 interface. And their associated wall-warts, and the power squid they were plugged into...

Took more like an hour and a quarter, all told. And I spent the 45 minutes after that practicing.

Productive evening, in other words, even if I didn't get any actual recording done.

09:26 am - Countdown to ConChord

Exactly one month from now I'll be eating breakfast in the Warner Center Marriott, getting ready for my Toastmaster gig at ConChord 21. EEEEP!!

Went over to Joyce's last night for some practice; we worked on the three songs in the tentative setlist that we hadn't worked on before: "Paper Wings", "Millennium's Dawn", and "Quiet Victories". Also worked on "The River".

There's still a chance that Joyce won't make it down to ConChord. She just got laid off last week (anyone -- especially a startup in the Bay Area -- looking for a senior tech writer or documentation manager?) and is currently dealing with some medical/mobility problems. So the setlist for my concert Saturday night is still slightly up in the air. I need to practice more of my repertoire than just the setlist, though, so that's ok. I figure on running through about half the set plus a couple of other songs every day.

It's not at all clear whether I'll be able to get a single of QV put together in time for the con.

09:00 pm - Eeep!

Exactly five weeks from now I'll be at ConChord, hanging out with friends and getting ready for my gig as Toastmaster. Eeep!

I just found out this afternoon that Joyce will be going; that means that my concert can include some Tres Gique material. Cool!

Does this mean that it's a good thing that I haven't completely settled on my set list? Err, I mean, ummmm,...

tibicina, are you still thinking of bringing handbells?

I think I've just acquired a couple more projects for this weekend.

09:42 pm - Productive?

Did a little project planning at work today, and had lunch with a coworker who wanted to know about online communities and how they get used by filkers. Yes, really -- has to do with niche markets and what's going on in communities of musicians and fans.

The planning was interesting, too, but I can't talk about it yet. Probably not until next year at the earliest. But both projects will be very cool. And will give good demo, so I'll back in that scene, too.

Around lunchtime, while waiting for M to get out of her previous meeting, I did a little editing on steve.savitzky.net and set up the working directory and a very rough cut at the web page for a "super-single" of Quiet Victories.

It's still hot out. Upper 90's when I went out for a short walk after lunch.

10:54 pm - Party at the Starport Saturday June 14

There will be one of our four annual parties here at Grand Central Starport (San Jose, CA in case you're just tuning in) this coming Saturday. Maps, directions, contact information, and so on are on the household web page.

As usual, it's a potluck. There will almost certainly be filking, if only to show off my latest song.

02:06 pm - QOTD: from an IM exchange about songwriting

Naomi: "Do not have affairs with bards for your name is funny and scans to Greensleeves."
me: "Have affairs with bards, for your name is beautiful and scans to almost anything"

10:50 pm - Baycon: Sunday

Sunday morning started with cflute, the flower_cat and me having a huge brunch at the El Torito about a mile from the con hotel. (Well, actually it started with LJ on the Mac, coffee in the room now that I'd brought the coffeemaker and filters from home. But you get the idea.)

El Torito's Mexican Sunday brunch is made of yum. Chile verde, chile colorado, chile rellenos, enchiladas... fresh tortillas... flan and rice pudding... Have to go back there with the kids. Often.

One reason we went out for lunch was that the hotel's coffeeshop was made of fail, especially the buffet. The bacon, as far as I could tell, was deep-fried in the same oil used for french fries and fish. Bletch. But the other reason was to give Callie and Colleen some time for conversation. If we'd gotten started a little earlier they could have gone out shopping together, but Callie needed the sleep. Still, they talk on the phone a fair amount. I need to do that more.

I ended up not having any dinner which, with a 90-minute wait for the restaurant, was a Good Thing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The main event for the afternoon was the Recording Music panel. I was moderator, and some of the panelists were rather out-of-hand. Professional sound people, very experienced, but all of that experience was doing live sound with professional performers, big venues, and analog equipment. One or two good tips, but not as useful to a home recordist as it would have been if Jeff Bohnhoff (for example) had gotten more air time.

Callie spent much of the late afternoon and early evening in our room; a little conversation but mostly trying to get enough spoons back to play flute on a couple of songs in the evening's concerts.

Got to the first two concerts: Paul, Taunya, and Seanna; and Seanan McGuire and friends. Skipped the last one (The Roving Tars) in order to get more time in the open filk, meaning more time with Colleen and Callie. This time, the circle achieved what cflute called critical mass, and a lot of good songs got performed. Sang "Another Country", which Callie had wanted to hear, "World Inside the Crystal" (which mysticfig suggested as a follower to "Where the Magic is Real"), "Bound for Hacker's Heaven". Might have been one or two others. Got a bit sleepy between songs; somewhere in there Colleen decided to turn in, so I ran her upstairs in Igor at about 1:30.

Callie and I went out on "Demon Lover"; I finally got to bed around 2:30.

08:59 pm - Baycon: Friday

Friday of Baycon began with eggs and large quantities of excellent bacon for breakfast -- cflute seemed impressed that I remembered her preference for skillet over microwave. I explained that, while I don't have the flower_cat's memory for tastes, allergies, and ingredients, I do pretty well on processes.

We loaded up the Cat's van, and she and the Younger Daughter (home early from school) shipped out to the hotel. The chaoswolf and selkit headed off the bus stop at about the same time.

There followed a late morning and early afternoon of delightful catch-up conversation with cflute, punctuated by a trip out to Michael's and CommuKnity in an unsuccessful search for what turned out to be a Japanese braiding device. Many thanks to the woman at CommuKnity who positively ID'ed the device from the description, though I'd been pretty sure that's what it had to be based on descriptions I'd seen.

It seems Callie and I had a lot of catching up to do. Probably still do -- we really haven't had an extended conversation since, what? OSCon nearly two years ago? About right. My recent changes may have had something to do with it.

We'd planned on meeting the Ugglas for a rehearsal at 4pm, but they hadn't arrived by then, and cflute was tired, so she had a nap instead. We finally got it together around 7pm IIRC, and ran through most of the set -- at least enough on the older ones to make sure we were still solid and make last-minute adjustments.

We followed the Bohnhoffs (with vixyish), who set the bar pretty high, but I don't recall a mass exodus, so it must have gone OK. That's a bit of an understatement, actually -- we got some positive feedback from a few people in the audience, and I don't think the audience noticed the flubs. Probably wouldn't have noticed the biggest one at all if Callie hadn't called their attention to the fact that I'd left the capo off on "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of". But if that was the worst flub, we did pretty well.

Set list here

A little open filking, and turned in around 1:30.

06:48 am - Blink...

... so instead of taking the flower_cat's sensible advice around 4am, rolling over, putting on my facehugger, and going back to sleep, I decided to go for the snuggle. Seemed like a good idea at the time. So here I am reading LJ at some ridiculous hour in the morning after altogether too little sleep the first night of Baycon. Clever bear!

The Tres Gique concert last night went very well -- a couple of glitches, but I don't think the audience heard many of them. More on that later.

10:55 pm - We have a Callie...

... and you don't (to paraphrase cadhla). We win. Picked her up at the airport with almost perfect timing: in and out of the Terminal A parking lot in under 20 minutes, meaning it only cost $1. Beats circulating until she got her bags and called...

Dinner was quick and easy: carnitas.

Good Tres Gique practice session. Tomorrow's concert should be a winner.

10:21 pm - Where my day go? I missed it.

It hasn't been a terribly productive day. Decided to stay home sick mainly so that I could take a nap if I started to fall over in mid-afternoon. And did lie down for about an hour, though I didn't actually sleep.

Watered my nose three times so far, plus once in the middle of the night last night. Will do it again before bed. It's roughly as effective as a dose of sudafed, but doesn't dry out my throat.

Had a great phone call this morning from cflute, who'd seen my morning post and offered to sing lead on a couple of songs in our concert Friday night. Quickly rejiggered the setlist, adding crypto, alphabet, rrprayer, and lcm; and removing heaven and demon, which is too much of a vocal stretch for me right now. Many of the remaining songs have Joyce on unison, so I can lean on her for support and sit close to the mic. Yay for cflute getting her brain back! Glad somebody has a brain right now -- I don't. More on that sort of thing later.

The setlist is still running a little light; about 50 minutes. That's what it's supposed to be, of course, but as it's the last concert we can run over a little. I'll plan to make it up on patter.

Joyce and I had a short practice session - basically ensuring that we had a good grasp of the additions, and going over the few remaining rough spots, mainly "The Toolmakers" and "I Have a Song to Sing, O", which we're still pretty shaky on. The melody line is tricky. I copied the sheet music at work on Monday, which helped a lot.

Skipped my walk today in favor of the aforementioned lie-down, and had hot buttered rum with honey instead of my usual gin.

Basically a wasted day otherwise. A little reading (re-reading Mount Analogue, which I haven't read for a while), LJ, and ripping CDs. Including tracking down many of the CDs that had been ripped before but not marked. I'm putting little sticky dots on the spines now so I can keep track. I'm up around 200 disks now. Useful, in other words, but totally mindless. Of all the things I've lost...

Current Mood: tired