Monday I enjoyed a late night outing with Sue, trying to find a restaurant that managed to make both a decent salad and french fries. We found a diner in Inman Square which didn’t fumble on either, but it was an arugula leaf or two away from nirvana.
The beta of SideTrack, which I’d installed so long ago on the PowerBook, unexpectedly expired today; I was desperately flailing around until I was able to get the updated version and a license key. The ability to right click and scroll on the trackpad is something I can’t seem to live without at this point.
In the playing with fire department, I called up my new wireless provider, and enjoyed listening to them bend over backwards to keep me from canceling. I ended up with a free month’s service, a one month extension of the cancellation period, and assurances that they’re going to be putting up a tower closer to me any day now. I’m probably going to regret not just canceling, but the phone is so lovely (and so nicely integrated with OS X) and I was having a good time niceing the poor customer service representative.
I was delighted to find that I could just upload MIDI files to be ring tones; I tested this out with a few pieces I’d written in graduate school, and low and behold — they worked! — I soon had murky quasi-tonal chamber music piping bravely from the phone. I settled on an invention I wrote for 18th century counterpoint class which I was particularly fond of. Now I just need that tower to be erected so it can manage to ring. I’m sure that’ll happen any minute now.
I was pretty excited to receive my new cell phone today, a slick new Sony Ericsson T610 with bells and whistles; camera, bluetooth, you name it. I absolutely love it.
Sadly, there are a few problems. The phone seems to enjoy crashing, which is never a delight. I could live with that but for the fact that I get absolutely no signal inside the house. Actually, I have to walk about two blocks before I get anything resembling a signal. Not good.
I get the distinct pleasure of initiating a return and a cancellation of my day-old service contract tomorrow.
It’s Sunday, and as the first wave of pre-Christmas shopping has temporarily ebbed, I feel safe to dip my fingers into the code again and work on various bits of tightening. Like just about everything, the last few bits of polish and function require an insanely disproportionate amount of time and energy. It’s no wonder that a lot of folks never bother going there; it’s much easier to cover it up and hope that no one notices.
If delicious chocolate is in your gift-giving plans, you’re always welcome to buy things from tinctoris store, lovingly hand coded by yours truly. You get stuff for ridiculously low costs, I make a fraction of a dollar, and then you have the option of sending me feedback on site usability — I ♥ feature requests!
Mark Bernstein periodically makes me reconsider the direction I’m heading with the layout of my site. I am in no small amount of awe over the amount of data he manages to set down on his pages. My page, on the other hand, seems to be naturally paring itself down, and I find myself removing things. I’m not entirely sure how I can reconcile a need to creating something richer with the site’s apparent need to be as minimal as possible.
No turkey for me today, but thanks were duly given. And there’s a heck of a lot to be thankful for right now.
Mostly I indulged in a dormant vice and, together with V, travelled around World of Warcraft hacking up trolls and boars. The game, which launched on Tuesday, is remarkably detailed; the dwarven capitol city of Ironforge even has a substantial museum. Props must be given to the game designers, especially since they included Macintosh support from day one.
I’m listening to some old (14th century) dance music at the moment, and while I’ve been listening to myself in attempts to come up with a subject to write about, my ear has decided for me, dragging the rest of my body deep inside the music’s ever-present drone.
There’s a theory text on my shelf, Harmonic Experience, which I first experienced years ago and is waiting on me to get back to it. It starts with the drone (asserting that modern tonality emerged organically from the earlier “dronality”), and explains intervals in relation to the tonic. It’s not a matter of a perfect fourth being two notes 5 half steps apart, but rather a note 5 half steps above the drone. This is an important conceptual distinction, as a the latter charges the interval with context. The book has a strong emphasis on singing with a drone for the early chapters of the book so that these intervals and their contexts can be felt on a deep level.
(bio-tidbit: The author of this book is the only person to whom I’ve ever written a fan letter)
There’s magic in working with a drone; it gives meaning to what goes on around it. It can be easy to forget, given other activity, but its lack is acutely felt. It holds its own mysteries; dive into the drone’s sound and you’ll curse the day you thought it was static and unchanging, for inside it lies an endless variety of subtle changes and shifts.
I’d like to think that we all have our own personal drones playing through the course of life, holding us together, giving us meaning, keeping us centered.
Open communication is the cornerstone of a good relationship.
This morning I’ve been dwelling on a conversation I had with the instructor of my installation art class. I was at a stage in my life when I’d recently gotten over my youthful aspirations to create great and magnificent works, and was comforting myself with the opportunity to continually be involved in the act of creation. In most cases, I did this to the exclusion of the final product. This made perfect sense at the time.
We were sitting, going over my early plans for the installation, and she asked me “what does this mean?” I carefully explained my position, saying that my role in the art’s creation was merely to bring it into the world, at which point the art itself would find meaning in its interaction with the audience. She shook her head at me and said something like: “You can’t avoid this question or this responsibility. You bring it into the world, it’s yours. You give it meaning even if you don’t consciously choose to.”
This hit me like a blow to the forehead. It was a formative moment; that sentence bored deep into my being and stayed there.
I’m aware that this journal falls under the rubric of “my work.” It’s an especially important one, as the subject is for the most part my life. And that comes with responsibilities.
I feel like a spider who, having woven a beautiful and complex web, finds out that her web has been woven into dozens of other webs.
On the way to Davis Square to drop of Danuv at the airport, we passed by two people dressed as Star Wars Stormtroopers. I said “how’s it going” and they saluted casually. I also saw a bumper sticker with an American Flag that said “These Colors Don’t Run… The World.”
Busy busy — house guest. The ever lovely Danuv is staying with us this weekend, and we’ve been walking all over the place. Tonight the three of us wandered over to the Prudential Center to dine at OSUSHI. It was, as always, fabulous; on the way home, I was convinced that one could hear the ocean if one held one’s ear to my tummy. They’d revamped their menu quite a bit since our last visit, including among other things a roll featuring beef, sun-dried tomato, and mozzarella cheese. Hmm.
I ran across this on the site’s incoming search queries: “harry potter sheet music for trombone that dont cost any money to get.”
I so want to write some Harry Potter sheet music for trombone now. Just because.
It’s a Diesel Day. I’m drinking coffee, programming up a storm, and all feels right with the world. Someone is fixing the photo booth in the back, and I’m reminded of Amelie.
In a moment of commercial magic, someone I don’t know bought something from my online test store. This effectively pays for today’s lunch, and engenders a feeling of delight.
I love e-mail spam as much as the next lad or lass. I take all precautions to keep it from ever gracing mine eyes, and the random mail that does make it to my attention is only read long enough to identify and destroy. For some, however, it offers an outlet for creativity.
For example, Spamusement, in which Steven Frank takes a spam subject line and draws a cartoon to go with it. For example, my current favorite “It’s cheating, but it works!” I wouldn’t go quite so far to say it’s the spiritual successor to The Far Side, but it captures the spirit often enough.
I especially like the way the site is set up; I can read the headline and envision the way I’d draw the cartoon (I’m an excellent cartoonist in my mind) before seeing what he did with it.
I’ve been experimenting with Audioscrobbler, a nifty project that uploads information on what I’m listening to a database, runs all sorts of statistics, then displays them on the web. I’d read about this a while back, but didn’t realize that they had something for iTunes (they do).
It does seem to lend itself easily to a “my record collection can beat up your record collection” mindset, but if it can somehow manage to get some new sounds into my ears eventually, I’ll run the risk of turning into a hipster scout.
