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Monday, July 16th, 2007
Tonight we saw the New Zealand String Quartet performing four pieces by Mendelssohn, and challenging strongly my professed inability to dig classical music. I will say this, of "String Quartet #2 in A Minor Op. 13", which was my favorite piece of the evening and which the violist (Gillian Ansell) was selling as a love song in her introduction: I could not hear it as expressive of emotion. Rather it had the cold, haughty beauty of a fireworks display -- and indeed had many sensory ephemera in common with watching fireworks. A fantastic thing, it was.
posted evening of July 16th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, July 14th, 2007
We are leaving tomorrow morning for Ithaca, for the Suzuki Summer Institute. It will be very good to get some time to unwind -- these last few weeks have been pretty stressful for me. (But hooray! On Friday, I finished up two important projects that have been bothering me, namely an HTML-to-text translation utility (which ended up being pretty simple; the main hassle was figuring out how to pipe both stdin and stdout for a child process) and converting a text reader to read XHTML input -- so no work projects to think about, much, on vacation.) Reading material for the trip is Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up To Me, set in a fictionalized Ithaca. Hoping to do some busking in the town center, which is a pretty busker-friendly environment.
posted evening of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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(In the manner of Big Bill Broonzy) They took my pick an shovel away Lord, I can' dig no more
Took my pick an shovel mama, can't dig no more
Where'm I gone go now, Lord these diggin hands is sore.
posted afternoon of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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For about 4 years, I have owned a Reliant 14" band saw, which is a Taiwanese clone of the Jet model. For nearly as long, I have been angry at the shop owner who sold it to me, when I came in to purchase the Jet, persuading me that it would be just as good. Convinced I had bought a lemon, I never really bothered learning to use it properly; and every cut I have made on it has been a battle against the machine. Well, a couple of things happened recently -- I am planning a new project which is going to involve a fair amount of ripping, and having not used the saw in a while, I decided to have a go at tuning it up. As I got into the internals of it, I discovered a number of settings that I had not gotten right when I first set it up; I straightened some of those up (but missed a fairly critical one) and was doing a test cut, when I snapped the blade. So, I put on the spare blade that I had bought back at the time I bought the saw; and discovered in so doing that the blade guides were totally worn out. Ordered a new set, which arrived today; put them on, and noticed that I had been ignoring the vertical adjustment of the blade guides for all this time. Well with everything back together and tight, and the guides lowered to a more suitable level than they had been, I tried it out and found it cuts through wood pretty much like butter! Happy day -- I don't believe I will be using it to resaw through too thick a piece of wood, for the time being anyway; but I'm intending to get more comfortable with ripping than I have been.
posted afternoon of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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My plan for the site: I will create a new 404 error page, that redirects requests for pages other than this blog to the way-back machine. Since other content on the site is static this should be fine. I am going to buy a new machine, a Linux box, from Sub300, and move the server over. This will necessitate re-coding this blog, which I have wanted to do essentially since I first wrote it, to make it more powerful and more fully featured, in PHP. ... More interesting stuff will happen.
posted morning of July 14th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, July 13th, 2007
...And in keeping with today's date, I just accidentally deleted a slew of data from the site. Damn. This blog is all that's left! Time to go dig up some of the files that I was fond of, out of archive.org. ...And, success! In a very limited sense. The wayback machine has all my files but it is pretty laborious to replace them all -- infeasibly so. But I have replaced a couple of the ones I like best, and I'll replace more of them as I think of it.
posted evening of July 13th, 2007: Respond
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Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month.
posted morning of July 13th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
There's something in music I like, a quality I can't identify, that gives me this rush of pleasure that is strongly associated with wanting to sing along. I've talked about this before in relation to Perspex Island, and this afternoon when I was mowing the lawn and listening to Nextdoorland it hit me -- Robyn sings "Can you make it rain,/ Can you make it rain tonight" and I can't help it, singing along is just an instinctual reaction to the pleasure I feel. And then, just now I was sitting and listening to the Band playing "Up on Cripple Creek" and the same thing happened to me when Levon sang "If there's anything she can do --"... (A few nights ago Ellen and I were watching The Last Waltz and together we sang along with the whole song when they were playing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", and that was a beautiful thing.) I want to know what this quality is.
posted evening of June 27th, 2007: Respond
➳ More posts about The Last Waltz
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Tuesday, June 26th, 2007
The peaches are just really good this year. I bit into one just now and got such a rush of pleasure.
posted afternoon of June 26th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2007
Last time I watched The Last Waltz -- which must have been 15 years ago -- I did not appreciate it. I think I was watching it for the Dylan appearance, which is only a few songs at the end, and wasn't really paying attention to the greatness of every song in the movie (well except "Dry Your Eyes", I wouldn't count that as a great song, though I do think it might have some possibilities if someone besides Neil Diamond were singing it). Ellen and I watched the movie last night; what a wonderful thing it is.
posted morning of June 23rd, 2007: Respond
➳ More posts about Music
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