Meet the new hat, same as the old hat.

Well, almost the same. In what is becoming an inadvertant bi-annual tradition, yesterday I went out and purchased a new hat. This is no plebian baseball cap with an amusing logo on the front, no! It is a hat of character and style, a hat with a hit crown and a handsome brim. This one is the third of its kind, and is a shade darker than the last two, a lush tobacco brown.

My hats have life-cycles similar to those of running shoes. They start out new and well-shaped; With a new hat I am a sharp lad indeed, and I can’t help but grin as I walk through downtown Boston. As the hat ages, it becomes more humble, more rough-and-ready. It’s an Indiana Jones hat; trusty, true, and comfortable, if a little dusty. by the time it decides to leave me. And leave me they do.

If I had my preferences, I’d probably still be wearing my first hat, which would be happily beat up to the point that if Sherlock Holmes saw it, he’d say that my wife no longer loved me. But, fortune has had another path for me, one more to V’s fancy. Just as my hat gets worn in, at the moment it reaches its peak of character, it dissapears. Hat #1 left me in a taqueria. Hat #2 has escaped undected, and there is a chance it’s lurking in the house somewhere. I am doubtful.

The Jungian in me aches to dive into the delicious pyschological undercurrent of my hat habit. Do I secretly fear comfort, and am unconciously misplacing my own hat on purpose, or is this a case where a hat is just a hat?

There is a tendency, as one learns about a particular field, to imagine knowing more than is really known. My life as a musician has been a constant back and forth in this regard, a see-saw between “soph” and “more.” As I’ve gotten older, the “I don’t know enough” sentiment seems to be winning out, and I’m feeling less and less informed every month.

On one hand, it doesn’t help that I’ve fallen out of the musical loop that I’ve lived in since I was 6. It’s been nearly 3 years now, and I can tell that things that felt familiar to me once are a bit foreign. On the other hand, it’s been a wonderfully enlightening experience, allowing me to partake of new directions that would most certainly have been frowned upon by my peers in academia.

In any case, I’m lacking in knowledge, and have started reading again.

I’m poring over a work by Ulf Poschart, DJ Culture. I’m not very far through the book, so a full review will have to wait, but even in the first hundred pages, I’m impressed, and have had some thoughts. One is a painful realization of how little I know about this slice of the musical world. Another has to do with musical “freshness.” Poschart (through his translator) says that in the 1930’s, a song had a lifespan of about 18 months, which was reduced to 4 months thanks to top 40 radio. People realized it, and started creating songs faster, to keep them fresh. What I’m curious about is if we extend this concept of musical shelf life can backwards and forwards in time, can we get a function. What was the lifespan of a popular tune in the 1850s? the 1600s? What is it today?

It’s most likely the speed of communication that is the influencing factor with freshness. In 1100, a song took an awfully long time to make it to Paris from Scotland, whereas now, a song is released, ripped into mp3 format and slung across the globe almost instantly. I’m curious to know if there is a correlation between shelf life and quality in general, or if those two things are by and large independent.

I’m curious to see just how ephemeral a popular song can become. Instead of a shelf life of 4 months, think about a song with a life of only 4 days, or 4 hours. What happens then? Does pop music becomes little more than improvisation, or does something unexpected happen? I don’t know if DJ Culture will answer these questions for me, but if it gives me some more musical hypotheticals to ponder, I’ll be happy.

Mothra is indeed a giant moth.

I’ve just finished reading The Keys To Egypt, a popular biography of the French scholar Champollion. He was the person who first was able to decipher Heiroglyphics in the first portion of the 19th century. There are no footnotes, and a minimal further reading section, but still a very engaging read.

Some of my favorite points in the book were those of academic politics, which were hard and heavy, seeing as Egyptology was on the cutting edge of academic research. It’s both reassuring and frustrating to know that institutions such as academia change very slowly.

This book has made me eager to revisit the Louvre and the British Museum, to see once more with new knowledge some of the amazing artifacts I passed over last time. I particularly recall a fervent desire to see the Rosetta Stone (discussed thoroughly in The Keys to Egypt), and after searching the wing and consulting maps, my friend and I were finally able to look up and notice the enormous sign marking the stone. It was quite small, and I was saddened for some reason.

I had some time to do some thorough cleaning of the kitchen, and it was wonderful. Many people don’t particularly enjoy this activity, and there the times that I don’t care for it, but more often than not, I find it to be a very satisfactory experience. There’s just something about having something about starting with something very disorganized and messy and ending with a well-organized kitchen. It’s as if I clean my own thoughts up while I clean the plates; when I’m done, I have a feeling of accomplishment and am always more relaxed.

Our kitchen is not the nicest one I’ve seen. It’s quite old, like the rest of the house; there are cracks and holes, and a single fluorescent bulb shines nakedly down on us. To turn it on at all requires no small amount of coercion. But for all that, it’s a good kitchen, very livable. We’ve got a nice gas range, some solid pots and pans, and a sharp set of knives along with plenty of counter space. There’s enough room for the wife and I (and a guest or two) to bustle around making dinner.

Most of the real cooking goes on over the weekend, as most weekday evenings fatigue has set in, and the thought of spending an hour or two preparing food isn’t the most tantalizing. We usually cook together, and we both have our specialties. I’m good with soups, stews, and all things mexican. V. takes care of risotto, pizza, breads (excepting cornbread, which I make in our cast-iron skillet), and desserts. I do most of the cleaning, but I don’t mind. It’s not much of a chore, really.

It’s good to be back in development. My job as a developer entails building things and solving problems, two of my favorite activities. Some days I’m almost ashamed that I’m getting paid for it.

For a while, however, I’ve been relegated to the pits of Quality Assurance, which does not suit my temperament. I wonder about how I would fare in the trenches of Tech Support.

My first intention upon embarking upon this log was to avoid link propogation as much as possible, and instead focus of writing only works of profundity and depth. This decision was, in part, in hopes of avoiding turning tinctoris.com into yet another pointless weblog.

After a few days of pondering, I realized that tinctoris.com is at heart yet another pointless weblog. It might turn into something more than that eventually, but in any case there is certainly some room for link propogation. Further thinking will perhaps give me insight as to why link propogation is useful, besides the simplistic “this is interesting, take a look.”