The Mandelbear's Musings

08:00 pm - Taxes, but apart from that...

This post seems to be written in blog order: most recent events first. Seems appropriate.

Just finished off the data-entry for the checkbooks. That leaves the paper receipts, which are a bit more work but also more interesting, and the Amex and Paypal reports.

Tasty dinner: scalloped potatoes, pork ribs with spicy peanut sauce, and carrot-and-raisin salad.

Went for a nice drive with the Cat this afternoon. Good to get out of the house and hang out together. We don't usually talk much; it's all about good company and comfortable silences. Spent some time working on a song -- still marinating.

Did a little shopping. Mostly Office Max for white business card stock for mini-fliers, little colored dots to mark ripped albums, 9V batteries for the travel guitar, and a package-opener. Fry's for a 2GB micro-SD card and a little USB reader that's no more than a 250%-longer plug. Came with a little plastic cover threaded onto a little lanyard of the sort usually used for cell phone charms, but it seemed unnecessary and I took it off.

Did the 4-mile walk by Los Gatos Creek this morning. Felt good. It always does. The weather was cool but a little too humid after last night's rain.

08:05 pm - Mostly better now

It was a good afternoon for a walk; I'm glad the flower_cat kicked my sorry butt out of the house and told me to take one. Walked for an hour by Los Gatos Creek, from where it crosses Leigh Avenue up to the little park in Campbell and back.

Started working on a song; nothing but fragments so far. I may just scribble them down and let them marinate for a while; if I go much further down that particular rabbit hole I won't get the taxes started until next week, if then.

The park was full of people; I had a nice little conversation with a girl who was sitting on a picnic table playing a guitar. Well, she looked like a girl, anyway, until her five-year-old daughter came over for a hug. They left when the little one fell down and scraped her hand. But I was able to show off a little, help her with a C chord (she's only been playing for a couple of months), and talk about music and kids for a while. Her name was Bonnie, if I remember correctly.

It's hard not to be at least a little cheerful with music and pleasant memories in my head. Even harder after tasty rabbit stew and steamed asparagus. We started the stew just before I left; I came back just in time to help finish it, and to empty the dishwasher.

Still no real handle on why that wave of depression hit me this afternoon, but it doesn't matter. Besides, I tend to write when I'm depressed. It might just have been the song trying to get out.

06:50 pm - Lydia Kavina's fundamentals of theremin technique.

Swimming in the Air - Theremin
Lydia Kavina's fundamentals of theremin technique.

from EM archives - July 1999
woman playing theremin

The theremin is currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity. However, it is one of the most difficult instruments to play, let alone master. To play it well requires dedication, practice, and patience.

Besides being one of the first electronic musical instruments invented, the theremin was the first instrument in the world that could be played without being touched. Russian inventor Leon (or Lev) Theremin created his namesake instrument in 1919, at the age of 23. By 1928, the inventor had relocated to the United States, where he continued improving the theremin, developed new instruments, and trained a generation of thereminists until his forced return to the Soviet Union in 1937.

Lydia Kavina was Theremin's last protégé and is now the world's leading theremin virtuoso. Kavina began studying the theremin at the tender age of nine, after Theremin recognized her remarkable musical ability.

Current Mood: enthralled

11:07 pm - Busy Sunday

Walkies in the morning (just down to the Rose Garden and once around -- I was feeling strapped for time). Left-over Chinese for lunch -- I seem to be the only one eating it, but that's fine with me. Trip to Fry's with selkit and the chaoswolf for them to look at a replacement for his dead laptop. I picked up a alarm clock with huge, easy-to-read numbers for Colleen, plus a combination phone and clock radio that, as it turned out, Colleen didn't want. Then over to Central for comparison shopping. I hadn't realized there was a local dealer for Lenovo. Hmmm.

Side trip to OSH for 9v batteries, coat-hooks (actually for Colleen's bathrobe and nightgown), and angle brackets.

Dinner was lambburgers, asparagus, and butternut squash. Yum.

Then over to Dave and Joyce's for a quick run-through of "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine", and an extended cut-and-paste job piecing together a wedding ceremony. Anyone out there not know that selkit and the chaoswolf are getting married at Consonance? Consider yourself informed. Less than a week!

Our annual March "It's Green!" party is the Saturday after Consonance, i.e., two weeks from yesterday.

08:57 am - A Nobel cause

A petition to nominate Pete Seeger for the Nobel Peace Prize. From this post by technoshaman.

I've been an admirer of Pete's for half a century. Yes.

09:29 pm - Being productive

Just put up the next-to-last set of living room curtains. (The last set is the bay window; they're less critical because the window is already well-screened by the rose trellis, and because nobody is ever going to want to sleep in that section of the living room, so it doesn't have to be dark there.)

The general idea was to be able to curtain off the small section of the L-shaped living room that used to be the master bedroom, so that guests could sleep there if we had a huge crowd. As it turns out, we're unlikely to have that many people before Consonance, but we didn't know that when we planned it. It'll come in handy sometime, I've no doubt.

Going back in time again, I had a productive day at work: I was able to take a break from writing tech reports (I'm almost done) and do a little bit of actual coding on one of the two major projects I'm involved in. (They're not actually major from a programming point of view, but they'll be very high visibility in perhaps as little as a few months.)

Going still further back, I had a good practice session with Joyce last night. We worked out the chords (Rise Up Singing's chords didn't work for me) and arrangement for Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, which we'll sing at the wedding. Also sang her Ferret Went A-Courtin' and The River, which she liked.

There's still way too much to do.

09:53 pm - The River. Audio.

"The River" [ogg] [mp3]. A little rough, but since it's only about 12 hours since I finished the melody... (11:00 ... and I think the tune could still use a little work; I'm not entirely satisfied yet.)

There haven't been many songs that grabbed me the way this one did; I started out yesterday afternoon with the one line, "It's a river so deep...", and got as far as a rough version of about half the lines in the refrain before heading back to work from my lunch. At that point I thought it was a pretty metaphor, but kind of lightweight on content.

I was wrong.

There were a couple of lines I choked up on, and when I got the last two lines of the second verse I actually cried. It's only the second song where I've done that; the first was "For Amy".

I was wrong about a lot of things on this song. It started out to be about a new friendship where it seemed as though we'd known each other for a long time. And it still is, but it's also the story of me and my beloved flower_cat, and it pleases me tremendously that I was able to finish it in time to present it to her as a Valentine's Day gift. The recording, flubs and all, is from this evening's gathering at the Starport.

I can tell I've been hanging out with cflute and company -- I'm starting to hear a flute line and at least one, maybe two, vocal harmonies. And I had to totally resequence the tracks in the next CD.

Current Mood: accomplished

08:43 am - Back in the groove?

Spent some time last night finally re-arranging the recording directory: it now looks like yyyy/mm-event/ where "event" is either a convention, a day or day range, or something like that. If I'm going to be recording practice sessions I should get in the habit of using day ranges -- and perhaps make each month a subdirectory -- for conventions just so things will be chronological.

Naturally, having done this, I had to test it, so when I came out to the living room to do some practicing I set the H2 on the music stand and recorded it. Very rough, and I haven't even listened to it let alone tried to do a normalize-and-split. But I will, because I want to have it done by Thursday. It was all stuff that I need for the album. Added a little more this morning.

I also need to get this onto the web, as the start of the collaboration area. In particular, this session has "The Toolmakers" and "The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" in their correct keys.

I'm going to be a busy bear this week.

07:03 am - Explore LJ - threat or menace?

As most of my flist probably knows by now, LJ has added a controversial new feature called Explore LJ - you can see the actual page here. It looks a lot like Google News, only restricted to LJ.

Although I think it's a transparent attempt to monetize user-generated content, I don't think it's a privacy violation, and I'm not going to opt out. Here's why: I want my blog to be noticed.

Sitting in my front closet right now are about 500 copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song. If a few thousand more people get pointed to it and a few dozen of them decide to buy a copy, I'm not going to complain. At all.

For similar reasons, my LJ is indexed on Google and any other search engine that cares to drink from the firehose of LJ's live feed. I rarely friends-lock, and consider anything I post to be public. I have a long history of this, going back to my days in alt.callahans, and it's too late to back out now even if I wanted to.

(I'm in the process of setting up a private journal, where I can control access separately to every post. That's different: it'll be encrypted, unsearchable by anyone but me, and on servers totally under my control.)

Damn the torpedos search engines, full speed ahead!

10:38 pm - The Secret Garden

For, um, a very long time, we've had season tickets for the Lamplighters, a mostly Gilbert & Sullivan group in San Francisco. They're simply wonderful -- and they've won prizes. Today we went up to hear their production of The Secret Garden (book and lyrics by Marsha Norman, music by Lucy Simon, from the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett).

It was, quite simply, one of the top two or three pieces of musical theater I have ever seen. The music, in particular, was simply magical, and the singing and acting first-rate (as usual). The composer was in the audience; I was able to thank her personally after the performance.

There will be more performances, January 31 through February 3, at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek. If you love musical theater and live within 150 miles or so of the Bay Area, you will regret it if you don't go see it.

I was simply blown away by this show. I came close to tears at a couple of points, especially the end of the second act; those of you who know this cynical old bear know how rare that is. I think a part of it was the way it touched themes of loss and grieving that I'm all too familiar with.

Did I mention that the chorus are all ghosts?

I found myself thinking of my own ghosts, a lot.

[You can read The Secret Garden on Project Gutenberg.]

08:26 am - Scrobbled!

Thanks to a post by singingpatient, I now know that I have a page on last.fm. Who knew? It has 30-second clips, so I'm guessing it came from iTunes or something else that CD-Baby put into digital distribution. Anyone out there using last.fm? Tips? Advice?

Any suggestions about Facebook or Myspace? (The subject of social websites has come up at work, too. More about that later, perhaps.)

11:16 pm - ... and sometimes you get it right

After a somewhat frustrating evening of Windows malware, misconfigured servers and misbehaving hard drives, it's kind of nice to sit down with a guitar and nail five songs in a row from memory. ("The Owl and the Pussycat", "The World Inside the Crystal", "Cicero in the 21st Century", "Ship of Stone", and "The Mary Ellen Carter", if you want to know.)

Have to get back in practice between now and Conflikt...

08:10 pm - After the longest night...

The shortest day of the year is also over, and I'm home for the holidays. Whichever set of seasonal holidays you celebrate, and wherever you place the New Year, it's a time for family, friendship, and fresh starts. There was a beautiful, nearly-full moon hanging low in the twilight sky on my way home.

I've finally started to come off a long productivity slump that started somewhere in late August after the album came out. It's too early to say that I've really gotten back into the groove, but it's a start.

11:37 pm - Album notes

I've actually been getting a few things done on the music front.

1. Went down to Stanford to see who to talk to about selling albums. Most college bookstores have a section for works by alumni. Stanford doesn't: it's owned by some chain that doesn't give a damn. I pledged them $50 this year; next year I'll just send that much more to Carleton.
2. Essentially finished with adapting the various make rules and perl scripts to the new directory layout. Track working directories now live underneath the corresponding album working directories.
3. My TrackInfo script is now capable of computing total time for a list of songs, so it can take over much of the work of the Setlist script. Eventually it should allow me to integrate setlists and the corresponding concert recordings.
4. Did some tracklist planning. There are definitely three albums in the queue now. Stop laughing.

I expect to have a web page with a tentative track list up by Monday, along with a couple of new scratch tracks.

10:40 pm - The geeky bits

The other main activity for the weekend has been getting ready to record the scratch tracks for Amethyst Rose. For quite a while I've been wanting to move the track directories from their present location in .../Tracks/ to under the album working directories they belong with, so that's a lot of what I worked on.

In my usual style, I wrote another make target (snarf-tracks) in album.make. That way, I could apply it in all the backup directories as well, and avoid rewriting some 40 GB of audio files. Mission accomplished.

Along the way I also wrote the script to push the backups to my dreamhost site. That's important not only because I'm paranoid, but because it's going to be the main collaboration site for working on the album.

One pleasant discovery in all this was that I actually have recordings of 11 of the 16 songs in the tentative tracklist. Many -- perhaps most -- will need to be redone even to have useable scratch tracks, but it holds out considerable hope that I can actually get them done in the next six weeks, i.e., in time for Conflikt.

Of course, I also discovered that there were more tracks on the tentative list than I had space for, even after some trimming. I pretty much had to go into "what can I drop without having somebody hunt me down and kill me" mode. So there will be at least three more albums coming along: Amethyst Rose (family and friends), Hackers' Heaven (hackers in space), and a to-be-named fantasy and space album. That's good: it will tighten up AR and HH around their respective themes.

10:20 am - Re: Your Brains

Techdirt: Google's PageRank Works Like Our Brains

We've joked in the past about how Google effectively acts as a a secondary or "backup" brain for many people. However, perhaps it wasn't so much of a joke. New research on how human memory and recall works suggests that the process is quite similar to Google's PageRank in determining what things are more important and should be recalled first. Basically, Google's PageRank looks at "popularity," not just in terms of how many links a site gets, but also in terms of how popular those links are. Thus, if you get linked from a more popular site, that's more valuable than getting linked by a bunch of non-popular sites. It turns out that the brain does something similar in linking concepts, judging not just the popularity, but the popularity of the concepts linked to the concepts. In fact, using Google's PageRank turned out to be a better predictor of how a brain would prioritize words than more commonly known methods.

07:39 pm - Going to the Dickens

We went to the Dickens Fair today -- all but the chaoswolf, who had a job interview scheduled at Macy's. Apart from the Y.D. getting bored and a little whiny after only about 2 hours, it was pleasant. The flower_cat and I could easily have stayed all afternoon listening to the music.

My largest purchase was a tail coat, since that's what the Wolfling wants me to wear for the wedding. Also picked up some CDs from Glenn Morgan. Had a bit of a chat about CD manufacturing -- he's one of several musicians I've met recently who have started burning and printing their own disks. I gather it's about half the cost of pressing, and of course you don't have the inventory. I probably don't want to go that route, though.

Spent much of the morning tracking down and formatting a good version of Froggy Went A-Courtin'. Getting it up on the website involved a little makefile debugging -- I've moved things around quite a lot trying to get to a saner distribution of files on the internal server.

Felt very sleepy driving home. This may be due in part to having been awakened abruptly at 6am by the Cat mistaking the coffee grinder for the phone ringing. What the Wolfling was doing making coffee at that hour, I don't know, but I wish she could do it on weekdays when I have to take her and her sister to school.

11:15 pm - Odds, ends, and griffins

Finally figured out where my other Griffin iMic (USB audio interface) had to be: sure enough, it was in a box. I'd put it there during the massive cleaning frenzy last fall when we had our plumbing redone.

It'll be useful, perhaps, now that I've sent the other one off with the Griffin stereo mic that I'm no longer using, to somebody who shouldn't be reduced to voice-posting from her cell phone when she wants to get a song on the web. Shipped off the cute little Behringer interface with an orphan mic and preamp to somebody else in a similar position. It's good to get rid of clutter, but even better if you can find a good home for it in the process. It's called turning it into somebody else's clutter paying it forward.

Spent the last hour or so practicing with the chaoswolf. Good thing. I tend to get distracted; the more I practice the less likely that I'll screw up on stage at Loscon. The Wolfie still needs some work on timing, but she's close enough for filk.

I should go crash now. But I won't.

Current Mood: productive

10:21 pm - Fighting the clutter

It's been a while since I posted about "clutter", and at least as long since I did anything about it. It's been sneaking up on me.

So I spent an hour or two this afternoon cleaning up my side of the bedroom, sorting loose objects into some conveniently-available shoeboxes and generally trying to make room for the computer I hope to install there tomorrow for recording. And while I've been sitting here reading LJ, I've also been doing some long-needed maintenance on some of my web files, and simultaneously ripping the sizeable stack of CDs (mostly Janis Ian, from last year's holiday sale) that's been sitting for months on top of the computer I hope to install in the bedroom.

You see how it all fits together? It's all one big, um,... cluttered web of dependencies.

I'm still looking for one of my two Griffin iMic USB interfaces (the other is sitting on my desk, part of the clutter).

11:37 pm - A nice evening out

Went out for dinner at Buck's, followed by a BroceliandeBroceliande concert at St. Bede's in Menlo Park. About a five-minute walk from where I work, in other words. We took chipuni along -- he had taken the chaoswolf out to lunch and had never heard them.

It was a good concert. The church had fantastic acoustics, and looked striking as well. The walls were paneled in dark-stained marine plywood (I could tell because that's the only kind of plywood that comes in 13-foot panels.) The ceiling was an equilateral pyramid. As I said, striking.

Had a good talk with Kristoph at the reception afterward, mostly about recording and editing software, and gave him and Margaret a copy of CC&S. I've taken voice lessons from 'Stoph, and he's provided a great deal of encouragement and advice over the years. (By the way, CD Baby has it in stock -- just follow the link.)

02:31 pm - Well-tempered != equal tempered

From this post by braider, we get this intriguing article by Bradley Lehman, who makes a good case for having figured out Bach's original tuning based on a decoration on the title page Bach's main copy of "The Well-Tempered Clavier".

There's more at larips.com, including video demos and sound clips.

C-E, F-A, G-B, and Bb-D are calmer and more resonant than in equal temperament; D-F# and Eb-G are the same as their size in equal temperament (size 7); F#-A#, Ab-C, A-C#, B-D#, Db-F, and E-G# are more active than in equal temperament.

Some subjective remarks about key character, when playing with this temperament: Music in sharp keys tends to sound increasingly crisp and brilliant with each added sharp. Music in flat keys tends to sound mellow and warm, with a vibrant glow at each added flat. C major and its nearby keys sound plain-spoken and resonant, similar to 1/6 comma meantone.

Music in the flat minors tends to sound dark, troubled, sorrowful, yet noble. Music in the sharp minors tends to sound intense and incisive, with forceful dominant tensions. Music in major keys tends to sound smooth, having fewer strong contrasts than in minor-key music.

As for me, I'd probably have to listen carefully several times to a side-by-side comparison of the same piece played in both this and equal temperament before I could tell the difference, but the math is right.

01:37 pm - Cute, but overpriced

Bili Inc - Page/Score Turner

Few people have taken actions trying to find a solution, but failed for various reasons, until now. It's disappointing that for a long time there was no easy and inexpensive way to fix this frustrating problem faced by millions of music players eveyday, across the world, and in Internet age.

"Come on! Where have all the inventors gone?" We hear you, and here you go: Finally, a simple (2-button pedal), effective (1 tap, 1 page, by foot!), and affordable (just $59) gear, FOOTIME page/score turner, is coming to the rescue.

11:01 pm - Audio images

From Don Simpson (via email) comes this intriguing article on images hidden in the spectrograms of audio tracks. I hadn't thought of it, but it's perfectly straightforward mathematically. You have time on the X axis, and frequency on the Y axis: take your image, string together the inverse FT of each vertical stripe, and there you have it.

Hmm.

11:01 pm - Another great one gone.

The sky has been overcast -- a uniform pearly-grey -- all day. Smoke from two nearby wildfires, presumably. And some more music has gone out of the world.

Here are Reuters and CNN on Luciano Pavarotti's passing, at the tragically young age of 71, of pancreatic cancer. Same thing that got my Dad. And here is Pam Jones of Groklaw, with one of the most heartfelt tributes I've seen, made a little more poignant by her realization that a high-profile blogger writing about copyright law probably shouldn't risk linking to pirated video clips on YouTube. Just search there and you'll find 'em -- I'm not a high-profile blogger writing about copyright law.

At the moment, I'm just an amateur musician lamenting the passing of one of the great ones.

10:09 pm - This and that

Woke up with my shoulder feeling considerably better: down from pain all over to pain that was pretty localized and felt like a muscle spasm. It's been getting gradually better all day, though it still hurts to shrug or to raise my left arm more than 45^o above horizontal. Even that's an improvement: last night horizontal was as far as I could go. Hooray for gin and Flexoril.

Took a 2.5 mile walk at lunchtime. Went much better than yesterday, when I only went 2 miles and was feeling distinctly shaky by the time I was done.

I've been moderately productive at work this week, getting involved in an interesting side-project involving Google Maps and a bit of browser-side scripting. So I'm learning Javascript. The syntax is, of course, familiar; the prototype-based (classless) object semantics are a little unusual, but fun. (There's a proof, by the way, that classes and prototypes are formally equivalent in the computations they can perform, but that's small consolation when you need an anonymous closure for a callback and the language you're using doesn't provide them. JS does provide them.)

The equivalence of function in Javascript, blocks in Smalltalk, and function plus lambda in LISP makes me feel all warm and comfortable inside.

For the last couple of days I've been trying to work through the exercises in my old recorder book. I've taken to practicing in the car before heading home from work, so as to avoid driving my family crazy. (Some might argue that it's more of a short walk, but I digress.) The book, Enjoy Your Recorder by the Trapp Family Singers, has been in my possession for roughly half a century, and I have not been practicing in all that time, but the fingerings seem oddly familiar.

The album is progressing through the fab line at Oasis; the press run has started and the CD replication is scheduled. Their tracking web page leaves a lot to be desired: refreshing the job status page puts you back two clicks away. Weird. I'm not sure how you would get that effect in the first place; it may be a side-effect of whatever weird Microsoft crud they're using on the server side. (It's all .aspx pages, and some of what they claim are links aren't.)

I've been plagued by doubts about just how thoroughly I QA'ed the master. I really wish one could simply upload .wav files and a table of contents, and let them put it together.

10:08 pm - It's very quiet around the house

Our house-guest is gone for a couple of days, our older daughter is off on an extended visit to her fiance, and for the first time in months I don't have mixing or editing to do. I'm done, too, with the seemingly endless succession of test disks to listen to. There are still tasks left: I have to burn bonus disks, pull together the customer list, and let's not forget practice, all before ConChord, less than three weeks away.

But it's the quiet that strikes me. I'm not used to it anymore.

12:30 pm - Nearing the end of OSCon

OSCon's final session and wrapup is only ten minutes away; sometime after 2pm or so they'll take down their network and I'll be left hungry and disconnected. The hunger I'll be able to do something about, but I'll have a lot of catching up to do on LJ when I get back.

Last night's music BOF only had 4 or 5 people including me; the only interesting thing was a folding travel banjo (made by Goldtone, IIRC) that somebody brought.

Few conferences are as well-connected as OSCon - basically you just attach to the open WiFi network, and you're in. Access in the hotel completely sucks; I probably won't even be able to print my boarding pass in their business center.

I've exchanged email with my project manager at Oasis; as long as we get the artwork files uploaded by 4pm (presumably EDT, so 1pm my time) Monday we're good to go. That's tighter than I'd like, but OK. I'll aim for Sunday evening.

On the whole it's been a good conference, but I'll be glad to get home.

Current Mood: tired

06:30 am - Travels without Rolly and Plink

(I really need a travel icon, don't I?)

11am: SJC

I'm travelling lighter than usual this week. Decided to go back to a backpack as my carry-on after finding out the hard way that a TravelPro rolling briefcase is remarkably easy to overstuff to the point where it won't fit under an airplane seat. Ended up with a pretty nice backpack with the Rick Steves brand, but actually made by somebody else. It's enough larger than my old Jansport that it comfortably holds a modern 15.4" laptop, and the front flap hangs in front of the zippered back section rather than over the zipper. So you can get out the laptop without unsnapping the flap.

The flap is also asymmetrical, covering a sizeable zippered pocket (which I'm not using at the moment) but not the mesh bag that holds a water bottle. Yay! There's a back compartment that the straps stash into, and enough room over the front pocket and under the flap for me to put my shoulder bag in order to convince the airline that I only have one bag. That's less important this trip because I decided not to take Plink, my little Vagabond travel guitar.

Instead of Plink I took my new Yamaha recorder and my (very) old recorder book; I'll either re-learn recorder or get dragged out of my hotel room by my neighbors and drowned in the pool. To give you some idea of how long I've been out of practice, let me just say that the book is only a few years younger than my wife.

This is being written at around 11am in the San Jose airport -- they have nice desks where you can sit and plug in a laptop, but they don't have free WiFi. So it'll get posted sometime after I get to Portland.

I note in passing that the master for CC&S has been dropped off at work for UPS to pick up this afternoon.

4:20pm: Portland Convention Center

I'm here. Nothing much going on, and it seems to be difficult to connect with LJ here. Hopefully that's temporary. Doesn't matter much, since I'm currently ssh'ed in to home. I just love the net!

The Mac is its usual hatefull self. Should've brought a real keyboard. Think I'll go out and look for something to eat before the Meet and Geek at 7:30.

6:34pm: Convention Center

Seems LJ is totally hosed due to a power outage in San Francisco. So it goes. Dinner at a Red Robin's. Fried shrinp and fish and chips. Tasty, and not terribly expensive. They have several local brews on tap; I had a porter from a brewery whose name I don't remember.

The new backpack is definitely more manoeverable than Rolly, and holds at least as much stuff. Turns out, from having stuffed it under an airplane seat, that it's almost exactly the same dimensions. But because it doesn't have the wheels and so on it's lighter and holds more (though arranged differently and not necessarily more accessibly. Not quite as handy if you just want to toss something into it and move on (for example in a dealer's room or trade show). I'll probably keep using Rolly for SF cons, for example; you also can't easily use a backpack as an impromptu music stand.

6:30 am: Red Lion Hotel at the Convention Center

LJ may be back, and my master is "out for delivery". Web access here at the hotel is unuseably slow, but I can ssh ok, for the moment. Here goes!

02:35 pm - Sound check?

It crossed my mind at the last Très Gique gig at Westercon that my usual sound check song, "Jabberwocky" as a talking blues, is totally lame. A proper sound check song should be a throwaway, sure, but it also has to be something that everybody in the group can sing on, with verses we can trade off singing, geeky, totally silly, and loud.

"Old Time Computing" came to mind. Then I came up with:

When your drummer plays a doumbek
You had better run a sound check
Or you'll end up sounding like heck
And your audience will flee...

... Possibly with a chorus about a real-time musician, after which things could easily degenerate into verses about emacs/vi, unix/vms, and other software religion. But I'm not going to go there right now.

08:08 am - In praise of Grumpiness

Apparently research has shown that grumpy people do better in places like nursing homes than those with sweeter dispositions. So I can expect to live a long and grumpy life.

Here's one of my favorite patter songs from Gilbert and Sullivan: "Whene'er I spoke" from Princess Ida.

09:47 pm - Nice while it lasted

The little LG UP3 music player I bought Saturday worked fine yesterday, but as of this morning it would turn on, display the current title, and turn itself off. It's behaving like the battery won't hold a charge.

Well, I'll take it back to Fry's tomorrow. I have other devices I can play music on. Or maybe I'll get one of the super-cheap ones. In any case, whatever I get will not have rechargable batteries -- I've had too many rechargables crap out on me.

update after deleting all the old files and putting one back in just to see if the problem was reproducible, it now seems to be working. I still don't trust it.

Current Mood: grumpy

06:09 pm - Whistling in the key of...

According to this table, I would have to get whistles in G, A, C, and D in order to hit all the keys I commonly sing in. I will probably start with C and D, which are common. There's a Clark C whistle somewhere in the house...

11:42 pm - Tracks and hacks

So now that I have this nifty ogg player, the obvious thing to do is to put the oggs for my album on it so I can listen to them. There are a couple of subtleties to this, since all the soundfiles have uninformative short names that don't sort in proper track order.

The solution was to add a new format to my TrackInfo program that makes symlinks (in a subdirectory) that have proper long names starting with a two-digit track number. Then it's a simple matter of invoking it from the Makefile, and rsync'ing the music player from the subdirectory.

Q.E.F.

BTW, it sounds really good. Clean. Claves don't work in "Daddy's World", though. Sound out of place.

06:04 pm - 07-07-07 -- my lucky day?

Don't know, but it's going pretty well so far. After some recording, some editing (I'll post about those separately), a stack of mail that included the CD I ordered last week, some lunch, and a nice five-mile walk, the Bear went shopping. The main targets were a a cheap MP3 player (Fry's has several on sale this weekend) and a pennywhistle in A. I started with Guitar Showcase.

GS often has woodwinds in their consignment shop, but no whistles today. What they did have was an M-Audio Delta 1010, for $115. Since this has a list price of $500 and a street price of something like $400, and since I'd been thinking about buying a Delta 44 for a street price of around $150, I snapped it up without thinking twice.

Next stop was Fry's. They did indeed have cheap MP3 players, at prices all the way down to $15, but the one I ended up with was an LG UP3 for $60. It has a sharp-as-a-tack little OLED display, 2GB of flash, plays OGG as well as the more usual formats, and lists Linux on the box under supported systems. When I got it home (getting a little out of order here) I was a little puzzled by the lack of a USB cable until I discovered the knob that slides out the connector that makes it into a USB stick. I was also puzzled by the fact that my box wasn't seeing it, until I traced the USB extension cable back and discovered that it wasn't connected. Duh. Only thing missing is FM, but I can live without that. Especially in these days of ubiquitous podcasts.

The final stop was Starving Musician. They had whistles in C and D; but not A. I bought a cheap little Yamaha descant recorder instead -- I had one, but can't find it. Probably lent out to somebody's kid. For $8.25 I can afford another one.

So all-in-all it's been a pretty good day. Happy Bear.

10:15 pm - Not only stranger than we imagine...

I'm not sure what tangent I was off on when I decided to search Google for the Charles Ives piano pieces I remembered from a concert at Carleton 30-odd years ago, but this time I found them. I'll almost certainly order ordered this album soon Wednesday, 7/4. Meanwhile you can listen to them here, or watch performances here, here, and here.

Following references from the Wikipedia article on quarter tone can lead you to some rather strange places.

Current Mood: enthralled

10:31 pm - Tracks?

No, I probably shouldn't be allowed to try singing harmony. Finally have a decent lead track for "Someplace in the Net", but the harmony isn't where I want it yet. (We're not even going to mention that annoying hesitation in the intro.)

Also recorded a fresh shaker part for "TEOTW" only to find that I still preferred the previous one. Three steps forward, two steps back, I think.

I think I'll stick a fork in "TEOTW", and see what I can do with "Net" again tomorrow. I may try guitar for a couple of harmony parts -- I can tune my guitar.

And I have to come up with a setlist for the Tres Gique gig at Westercon, which is coming up in (urk!) two weeks! We won't have cflute, but we'll have Joyce and Jordan. It'll be good. 10pm Saturday after Alexander James, so we might actually have an audience (if they don't all leave).

General note: I will not be taking preorders for any future albums until they're actually in duplication. I was stupid this time.

08:28 pm - Shiny!

It seems that Musician's Friend is having a "moving our warehouse" sale. The old bear can't resist the shiny stuff, so I snarfed up a pair of CAD GXL3000 PRO multi-pattern mics for $70 each. List is $219, they say. They arrived today. Sweet!

Gave a listen to the current state of CC&S in the car -- level problems on 5 tracks, plus the two that still need major work. Getting there.

08:43 pm - Murder, mastering, and mayhem

From this post by eleccham comes a link to this article in The Times titled "Why music really is getting louder". Basically it's about the current practice of mastering music so damned loud that it clips.

The article has a few inaccuracies: for example, it confuses the kind of dynamic range compression done at mastering time with the kind of data compression done by codecs like MP3. But the fact remains, a lot of popular music these days is compressed to within a fraction of an inch of its life, destroying any dynamic range it might originally have had.

Fortunately, I don't listen to that kind of music, nor do I intend to subject my listeners to it. I do a minimum of compression on my CD tracks, and I do it by hand in Audacity using the Envelope tool. That lets me bring down the notes where I whack a chord too hard, or the verses where I lean to close to the mic, or the spots where I pop a "P", without affecting the overall dynamic range of the music.

Not that I have a whole lot of dynamic range when I'm singing. The main challenge in the final phases of the mixing will be making sure that the songs where it's just me and the guitar don't have me sounding louder than the ones where I have backup. That will require overriding the standard normalization parameters for just those songs during the build, so as not to maximize their volume.

I've also decided not to throw money at Oasis to have my CD professionally mastered. Maybe next time, if I can find an engineer I can trust who's local and who has done folk music before. For the moment I think I can do fairly well in Audacity, which also gives me the opportunity to correct my problems at the track level before they get mixed down.

09:12 am - The Heir to the Heatherlands

Took the household out to Alexander James's concert in Palo Alto last night. Wow!

He has a few of Heather's mannerisms, like the lopsided grin, and uses a couple of the same guitar and fiddle riffs, but he's definitely his own person. More mellow, quieter, and seemingly a lot more comfortable in his skin than Heather was in hers.

And his version of "Creature of the Wood" is just plain awesome.

04:00 pm - Musicians and the Web

Techdirt: Musicians Realizing That Access Is A Key Selling Point

While I've been writing this series of posts about the economic models involving non-scarce things like content and ideas, a key element of understanding the business models that come out of this is recognizing that a key, scarce component is access to the musician. Clive Thompson has written up a great article for the NY Times Magazines about how new musicians are discovering the two sides of this coin. Basically, they've learned that the internet and the ability to communicate with fans is a key element in allowing them to be successful in the first place. That is, it's that ability to go straight to the fans that allows them to have a music career at all. I particularly like the one musician who strategically tours by using his online presence to figure out if over 100 fans will show up at any particular venue -- and then will make plans to perform there. Nearly all of the musicians being profiled probably wouldn't be nearly as successful without their online presence, without promoting their music for free, without asking others to help them promote their music for them -- and without being around and being accessible to fans.

09:06 am - Baycon concert notes

Since The Owl and the Pussycat is in the tentative set list, I figured it would be a good idea to finally get around to putting chords and performance notes into it. Hit the pdf file for the chords. I've never been entirely happy with the results of putting chords into the HTML files -- it's impossible to control the typesetting well enough to get them onto one page.

11:20 am - I don't need another blasted project...

... but it looks as though I'll be starting one anyway. this post by catsittingstill got me thinking about tweaking my CD and website build tools (edit to fix broken URL -- how did it end up being "starpnetort.com"?) to make them more generally useful. Right now they're specific to me, my website layout, and the idiosyncratic file format I use for lyrics. But it wouldn't be hard to generalize them, and I think a lot of people, especially in the filk community, would have a use for what amounts to a singer-songwriter's web toolkit.

I'm not going to do more than think about it between now and whenever my CD is finished -- hopefully Baycon.

Current Mood: geeky

08:26 pm - Friday the Thirteenth, part 2

Went to work around 11:15, which meant that I got there in time to have yummy shrimp won-ton soup at our little deli. I try not to eat there more than once or twice a week.

Went out for a 2-mile walk, feeling at a rather low energy level. I'm wondering: I had a Flexeril last night -- it's a muscle relaxant, and my back's been hurting for the last couple of days. But it's also a CNS depressant, and I have a history of reacting, um, inconsistently to depressants. Could that have had something to do with my depression this morning?

Work on my car was done around 3:30, so about 4:30 I headed out to pick it up. Ended up costing over a grand -- about twice what I had been expecting -- even with help from the extended warranty. Good thing I got paid today.

Picked up gin at BevMo, and rat-sized glue traps at Home Depot. The gin is now in the fridge, and the traps upstairs in the garage attic.

Got home and found catsittingstill's homebrew CD, I Promised Eli, waiting for me. Combined with quadrivium's CD, Courting My Muse, which arrived Wednesday, there's been a certain amount of fanboy squeeing in the house. (Cat's CD is being published by samizdat, by the way -- I got my copy on the condition that I'd burn more copies as needed. The track list, btw., is here. If you're not local to me, Cat can probably point you at somebody closer.)

Now I'm going to try to ignore the siren song of my new DSL line and its makeshift gateway, and try to get some editing done.

09:46 am - Pearls before breakfast

Fascinating article in the Washington Post about what happens when a famous musician tries his hand at busking in the subway at rush hour. Kinda sad, actually, though a few people noticed. I think many of us, myself included, need to stop and notice beauty more often. Yeah, sometimes I'm stopped in my tracks by a bird, a fish, a flower, or a pretty girl on my walks, and sometimes I'll see a rainbow as I'm driving to work. But I rarely mention it to anyone, or put it in my LJ.

If a tree falls in the forest...

(First spotted in this post by ohiblather; later seen on artbeco and cflute. Maybe I should post less about geekery and more about things that matter.)

07:18 pm - Hacks, tracks, tools, and cool

I'm not normally home at 4:30 in the afternoon, and I don't normally expect calls, either. But there I was, setting up to do some recording (more on that later), when I got a call from one Buck P. Creacy, a storyteller and retired toolmaker in Kentucky, who promptly put me on a speakerphone to listen to his performance of my song "The Toolmakers", in front of a live audience. Is that cool, or what?

Buck performs "The Toolmakers" as a dramatic recitation, since he first encountered it years ago without the music. As I've said many times, I love hearing what other people do with my songs, and this kind of thing is one of the reasons why.

I stayed home today mainly to do some recording -- I'm hoping to finish the recording on my CD this weekend, and the mixing hopefully in the next week. I also got in a four-mile walk, picked up some random bits of hardware at Guitar Showcase, and moved my recording box back to the back bedroom studio. The random bits of hardware are intended to make it unnecessary to move it back to the office -- instead, I'm going to try running the audio out from the Delta 66 soundcard to the monitor speakers in the office, using an unused run of Cat5. Unshielded twisted pair isn't the best thing for audio, but when it's low impedance at fairly high levels it should be OK.

Recorded vocal retakes for "Little Computing Machine" and "Mushrooms". That leaves two vocal parts to redo ("Someplace in the Net" and "Guilty Pleasures"), three guitar parts ("TEOTWAWKI", and "Guilty Pleasures", and "Silk and Steel", and two songs that ought to be re-recorded because the recording was sub-standard ("Uncle Ernie's" and "Stuck Here"). Those last two were among my earliest attempts at recording -- I've learned a few things since then, especially about mic placement.

That makes some seven tracks to do, in an evening plus two days. Even a notorious procrastinator like myself ought to be able to do that. (The editing and mixing are another matter, but...)

And did I mention that I need to get moving on my taxes? I kept thinking, "plenty of time after I finish the album sometime in March..." Yeah, right.

10:29 pm - Songwriting workshop report

This weekend was almost entirely taken up by a songwriting workshop at Kathy Mar's. It was thinly attended -- only four students on Saturday, and two didn't make it to the Sunday session due to health problems in one case and a scheduling conflict in the other. But we had a blast anyway, and who am I to turn down free food?

The format was that each of the four teachers lectured for an hour, answered questions for an hour, and workshopped for an hour. In practice the lines between the three were extremely fuzzy, and the general atmosphere was more like a graduate seminar or one of the tech-transfer sessions I'm familiar with from work.

The Saturday morning session was Kathy's introduction to songwriting; Saturday afternoon was Jeff Bohnhoff on parody. His session included actually writing a parody, in the group. Much fun; it'll turn up in a one-shot at Consonance, so I won't spoil the surprise.

The Sunday morning session was me. Since everyone else was concentrating mainly on the words, I decided to talk mainly about writing original melodies, with side-trips into the revision feedback loop, the benefits of noodling, and some of the challenges involved in setting poetry to music. I'd written up some notes in the form of an article, then presented off-the-cuff with my hardcopy as notes. Worked pretty well.

This afternoon's session was Bob Kanefsky's course in advanced parody -- he had gone so far as to make up a set of slides in Keynote, which were both informative and quite entertaining. I skipped this evening's meal (roasted chicken) in favor of getting home in time to go out for dinner with the family -- we figured we owed the chaoswolf a congratulatory dinner.

On the whole I'd say it went well. I think everybody -- not just the students -- had fun and most, if not all, of us came away with some new and useful information.

08:56 am - Blink. Blink.

Got up earlyish (6am) this morning -- the flower_cat woke up coughing. The entire family has been fighting the cold/allergy/whatever post-nasal-drip-from-hell for the last couple of weeks; the Y.D. was out of school for two days, and crashed before I got home yesterday. Up until Monday I seem to have been the only one who's worked out a combination of drugs that controls it, so I've been moderately functional through the whole ordeal. The Y.D. got some good drugs (prescription cough syrup with dextromethorphan, chlorpheniramine malate, and phenylephrine -- spelling optional) on Monday, so she's back in operation. Better living through chemistry.

I only managed about 1/2 mile of walking yesterday; I started hacking about 10am and it was about 1pm by the time I looked up. I did finally get the touchscreen working rotated -- did you know that some Via video chipsets are rebranded S3 Savage chips rather than Unichrome? ( if you need to know... )

Had a good practice session with Joyce last night. It'll work. The tentative setlist concentrates on songs that I think will work well with either three voices or two voices and flute. It's just a little bit darker than my usual -- not so much ose as thoughtful -- but there are still a couple of funny songs in there. Adjustments are still likely.

On the schedule for today is transferring my configuration to the other tablet; this turns out to be harder than one might like, but it's doable.

09:45 pm - Earthlight

On the way home from dinner at Spencer's with the flower_cat I saw a beautiful crescent moon with the rest of the disk clearly visible, lit by earthlight.

Largely as a result, I've had "The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens" running through my head most of the evening except when I was mixing tracks.

I saw the new moon late yest'reen
Wi' the auld moon in her arms
And I greatly fear, my master dear
That we shall come to harm.

I'm specifically hearing Buffy Sainte-Marie's version from Little Wheel Spin And Spin, accompanied by mouthbow. Been a while since I played that album, but it's the sort of thing that sticks with you.

10:46 pm - Mostly music

Went out for a walk; Los Gatos Creek again. I was feeling a little creaky, so I didn't take it quite as fast as I usually do. Still, three miles is a reasonable walk. Took it easy on lunch.

Along the way I did a little more thinking about the inside two pages of the jewel-case insert, and spent some time this afternoon working on layout. Not as much as I should, of course.

Spent most of my time this morning and afternoon finishing a Debian upgrade (Sarge + DeMuDi to Etch) on my IBM laptop, and trying to persuade Audacity to recognize my USB soundcard. Darn it, I have it working on the desktop system. Maybe. A fair amount of the morning went into getting X working again -- the secret is disabling DRI. Late in the afternoon I decided to give ALSA's dubious OSS compatibiltiy (if you're not a Linux audio geek don't worry about it) and compile the new Audacity from CVS to see if it would get me ALSA support. It does, so I'm a happy bear.

I also know exactly what it's going to take to upgrade my main server, which was the real point of the exercise. It should be pretty smooth.

At 5pm the flower_cat, chaoswolf and I headed for Don Quixote's International Music Hall for delicious Mexican food and a concert with Mike Simpson and Broceliande. I had the chile verde, and found out that when you order it "spicy" it comes out red. Tasty anyway.

Mike was OK; a very good guitarist with a pleasant enough voice that would have been even better if he'd stuck to the lower end of his range. (And a couple of up-tempo pieces would have varied the set a little.) First time I've ever seen someone use a tenor guitar in a concert.

It was Broceliande we really wanted to see, though. They didn't disappoint us: seasonal medieval and renaissance music on their usual wide range of instruments. They did P.D.Q. Bach's "Throw the Yule Log On, Uncle John" as their encore, probably as a way of ensuring that they wouldn't be called back for a second one.

We'll be back -- they have Wake the Dead coming up on Sat. Feb. 3.

Current Mood: happy

11:29 pm - TGIF

Started out the morning -- well, after the LJ and coffee, anyway -- with a trip downtown to the CA State Board of Equalization, which for some unguessable reason is what they call the place where you register for a sales tax account. Mild screw-up because I'd filled out the wrong form. Apparently I'm not the only one who got the wrong form off their website. Took a little over an hour.

I had my new tweed hat (that I'd bought at Dickens Fair a couple of weeks ago) in my jacket pocket, and it fell out in the office. Unfortunately, I didn't notice until I'd gotten back to my car, up four flights of stairs in the Second and San Carlos garage. Cursing to myself, I quickly dashed back down and up the stairs, in case I'd dropped it there, then got out of the garage, parked at a parking meter, and retraced my steps. Luckily, somebody had found it.

I very nearly skipped my walk, figuring that going up and down four flights of stairs twice probably counted as exercise, but it was a nice day and I felt like walking. I even did the hill both ways.

Got very little done at work in the afternoon. Evening was the annual Golden Bough winter concert. Wonderful, as usual. A 16-year family tradition.