It’s the last day of April, and it was a beautiful one. Still, given the rest of this month, these May flowers I’ve been told about had best be something special.

Good weather brings ants. We get a pest control man in around this time every year, but there’s always a few kicking around so long as the weather outside is pleasant. These are not the soul devouring fire ants of my childhood, but wee teeny black ants, hell bent of finding every last crumb in the house. It is now my theory that the impending arrival of is are the real impetus for Spring Cleaning.

I noticed that my entry for April 30 last year was about running; I took my first run for a long time. What I failed to mention was the resulting agony and stiffness I felt the next day. Since then, I’ve been running more or less regularly. It hasn’t gone as smoothly as I’ve hoped, but I’m still proud of how far I’ve come and don’t see how I could have made it through the past year without it.

Somehow it feels like I’m waiting for something to happen. Perhaps a May flower.

This is an interesting, though unsurprising, read: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality.

A few Baroque Cycle t-shirts arrived, including one with the logo of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, and were received with more relish than most articles of clothing. Something about wearing the emblem of a fictional 18th century institute in the very city in which was supposed to be brings me more pleasure than it ought.

A while back I had the idea of making a t-shirt of the Guidonian Hand with the caption Dic ad manum. on the back. Sadly, one reference is 900 years too old, and the other 10. Still, it’d get a chuckle at the next medieval musicology convention.

A lot of high quality was done today, but somehow I don’t feel satisfied with myself at all. On occasion feels like a few dice in the morning to determine how I will react on any given day. Hardly fair, but that’s really beside the point.

No more men on horses for the time being.

I’m in the midst of another round of tech support with Apple. The PowerBook is finally in the shop for the wonky case, and I also had the stick of RAM with the PowerMac go bad. So far, the interactions I’ve had (I am avoiding the Apple Store altogether) have been fantastic.

The repair department even replaced my bad 256 MB chip with a 512 MB one. I called up to make sure it wasn’t an oversight, but it was intentional. I’ve been more than critical of service in the past, but it’s important to give credit where due. Kudos to AppleCare.

I’ve signed up to attend the Tinderbox Weekend Boston. I use Tinderbox a lot, and am pretty darned excited.

A bit more reading revealed that in 1655 Cromwell’s head was superimposed on the earlier Charles I engraving. To the detriment of my “Charles I is Cromwell” theory, the Schama seems to have included the wrong engraving. The Cromwell version looks a bit more Cromwell-esque:

This turns out to be quite a remarkably interesting piece with a long and dubious history, and is nicknamed the “Headless Horseman.” The Folger Shakespeare Library has a bit on its history here, and a version of the engraving without a head at all is to be found here.

Perhaps it would be good business sense to make a large flat wooden cut-out of the scene, and cut a hole where the head ought to be. This would allow tourists to pose for photographs as a 17th century equestrian lord.

This page of engravings, scanned in from from Schama’s History of Britain, caught my eye. On the left is an engraving of Charles I on a horse, on the right, Oliver Cromwell. Click on the image for a rather larger version.

Surprisingly similar, down to the twisty mustache on the attendant. Either Peter Lombart was a lazy fellow, whoever set the plates for the book got tired of looking at pictures of men on horses, or Cromwell is Charles I in disguise and all other portraits of Cromwell are forgeries. Think of the historical implications!

Cavalier…	or Roundhead?	(and who is this, then?)

It is grey, grey, gloomy and grey today.

The past two hours I’ve been wrestling with a very strange web browser problem related to forms, carriage returns and undesirable extra submits. With some help I’ve finally nailed down exactly what’s happening, and have devised a workaround and a fix, but the reason it was happening is going to have to go in the Computational Voudon drawer for the time being.

Someone has been posting the journals of Samuel Pepys, 17th century diarist extraordinare, online. Today, on April 25th, the entry for April 25th 1661 is posted. An excellent blend of old and new, and a good way to commune with the journalists of the past.

A great boon of being a programmer is that we are enabled, moreso than the average user, to let the computer do more work for us. A good programmer ought to be lazy (or economical in effort) enough to actively wish for the system to take as much of a load as is possible. I believe that RSS is a good starting point for dealing with problems related to continually updated information.

As such, I’ve been thinking about RSS quite a bit over the past few days, namely ways to make it work better for me. The concept of having information in a digested form arrive on the doorstep is not a new one. As technology progresses, however, this information arrives when it’s wanted and is more and more customizable. Applications like NetNewsWire make the sorting and viewing of information painless.

The question I’ve been having is “what sort of information do I want to get?” News, certainly, but there’s more that it can do. For example, I’ve been using a site called Blogdigger to provide me with a feed of other sites that match a query. A very dumb, yet very dedicated, personal research assistant. So I get my daily news and journals (the sites that I read everyday) as well as whatever entries for the day that might catch my interest, as determined by Mr. Blogdigger.

There’s more it can do. RSS feeds that provide updates on server and application health, or provide a rolling set of statistics. Feeds like Mr. Pepys’, that give daily doses of history. Presently, any thing I check or do on the computer more than six times a day is fair game for contemplation.

We walked by a purse shaped like a Chinese food takeaway box mounted on a camera tripod. I pointed it out, and Varia said “What? It’s just a purse shaped like a Chinese food takeaway box on a tripod.”

On closer inspection, it turned out to be a cymbal stand.

Moo goo boom tsk.

Finally got around to watching the Avengers film from ‘98. After experiencing the magic of the Macnee/Rigg series, I can safely say that the movie played out like a very long episode of the television series with too much money allocated for special effects. It did a much better job than I expected at retaining the feel of the series, but on the whole it didn’t combine into a great film. Pity.

As I was tracking the trajectories of the various cast members in the movie, I ran across a reference to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, which put me in mind of a radio advert for a production of Hedda in Boston a while back. It ran something like this:

Hedda Gabler is … captivating!

Hedda Gabler is … unrestrained!

Hedda Gabler is … passionate!

Hedda Gabler is … playing Thursday through Sunday!

Despite efforts to pump up the NPR crowd for some serious Ibsen, it came across more like a promo for a monster truck rally featuring Norwegian playwrights. Thanks to the magic of an alarm clock radio, this was the first thing I heard in the morning for a few weeks; I woke up smiling.

It’s been a long while since I posted any music, and for that I apologize and present Dream Flight of Atalanta, hot from the gallery. This is the first piece I’ve produced using Logic 6, so be gentle.

The piece is in E-flat and uses a repeating vi-IV-I-V bassline, one of my favorite progressions. The pitch stratification is rather severe at times, and includes a very fat cuddly bass.

The race of Atalanta has long had attraction to me. The fastest runner in Greece, she would only marry the man who beat her in a footrace. She lost only by treachery; during the race, her opponent Hippomenes would toss out golden apples (a.k.a. “shiny things”) to distract her. Unable to resist these divine apples, for so they were from the garden of Aphrodite herself, she stopped to pick them up, and Hippomenes dashed to perhaps the first rigged race in the world.

In the year between undergrad and grad I wrote a fast and furious orchestral piece base on this myth, which never got performed. I was very proud of it, and it was fiendishly complex while still enjoyable to the ear. During the “apple toss” portions the tempo dropped into something resembling slow motion; the pounding motives of the race were still present but it was being heard through some highly viscous liquid.

As I was finishing this guy up, I recalled Atalanta. Beyond “feeling sort of similar” to me, they have absolutely no musical relation, which is enough to warrant the name. Hooray for art! For the programmatically inclined, you may imagine an elderly Atalanta, long resigned to her life as a Greek matron, daydreaming of the moment that she lost her glorious future, trapped in the haze of Aphrodite. You are also more than welcome to say “Ooh, pretty bells” instead, or in addition.

I finished The Confusion yesterday afternoon, and I want more. Sadly, I will have to wait until September. Now that my mind isn’t dangerously fixated on an alternate version of the late 17th century, I can turn my attention elsewhere, to the seemingly endless sea of tasks alloted me. Once I take bearings.

Fortunately the foray into organization, begun in late February, has held up remarkably well so far, so this will be neither terribly arduous nor time consuming. Still, it’s amazing how quickly things tend to explode into disarray. Despite thousands of years of civilization, chaos is never more than a hair’s breadth away.

I’m now pumping out full text RSS/RDF feeds for your aggregating pleasure.

Have a nice day!

In 1998 I purchased a complete set of the New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, twenty volumes in paperback. These were books I had consulted on a semi-weekly basis for years, and having a set at home meant that if I was struck by a midnight urging to trace the development of the ricercar, I didn’t have to wait for the library to open until the following morning.

When I packed up for the New England adventure, 40+ pounds of music encyclopedias wasn’t on the short list. I left the New Groves in the keeping of a theory student of mine, who expressed interest in them. Years passed.

As of late, having access to this sort of research aid has started to become more and more needed. The civilian world tends to lead to libraries being a tad less accessible, even in this mecca of culture. So, a month ago, I thought it would be worth a shot to see if I could retrieve my books, lent out six years ago.

My former student, who I remember as a bright and hard working Freshman, has in the intervening years distinguished herself as an excellent scholar, performer, and recording engineer. I was lucky enough to catch her before she moved to The Hague to do graduate work at the Royal Conservatory. She still had the New Groves, and within a few days had posted them.

After an interval of nearly five years, the New Groves are home, and I can once again research folk ballads of Romania or whatever else I like at my leisure.

When Varia was growing up, Twinkies were featured in comic book ads. As these ads did a remarkable job making Twinkies sounds like ambrosia itself, and as Twinkies were entirely unavailable in Tasmania, she managed to make it to adulthood with this perception of Twinkies as a magical food, a perception she’s never broken by managing to actually eat a Twinkie.

Now I’m a good old fashioned American boy, and I’ve eaten Twinkies, and I remember enjoying them. If I eat one these days, though, I’m sick to my stomach, and never to I approach something close to the feeling of enjoyment. Why do I even bother? (I don’t bother anymore).

There are some things in life where memory is almost certainly better than the reality, things that if I ever had the chance of going to back to revisit I’d pass on, merely to preserve the magical property of my memory. Not because it’s gotten any worse, but because I’m in a different stage of life now, and I’ve changed. This is alternately depressing and heartening, depending on my mood.

Somehow I think she got the better bargain, Twinkie-wise. Which is a bit of an interesting proposition to consider in the abstract; that not doing something at all to preserve its desirability is better that doing something, and in the act of doing, eradicate the desirability entirely.

In addition to the anniversary of the battle of Lexington, this is also TV Turnoff Week. Take a rest from the grind of network programming and contemplate metaphysical snack cakes.