Laura Conrad

Played at an English Country Dance

The Harvard
Square English Country Dance has open band several times a
year, where anyone who’d like to play for dancing can join in.

I’ve been three times in the last year. The first time was a
bit intimidating — the band leader clearly thought she was
offering constructive criticism when she said I was playing on the
back of the beat, but I couldn’t even hear what she was talking
about, let alone figure out what to do about it. But the playing
was fun when I wasn’t feeling criticised, and the tune list worked
well on recorder. I brought both serpent and recorder, but ended
up playing mostly recorder, since even I can hear some rhythm
problems when I’m playing serpent.

The second time I was just invited to sit in when it wasn’t an
official open band. The good part about that was that I danced
for the first half of the evening, and then just sat in on the
second half. I was surprised that they wanted the serpent to play
the tunes, which I hadn’t practiced. They were happier with the
serpent than the first leader had been, but still made cryptic
comments about how my recorder playing could stand to sacrifice artistry
for rhythm. (This was during the
dance — during the rehearsal I’d specifically asked if they
wanted me to change anything and had been told it was fine.) The
playlist was mostly pretty good for C recorder, but there was one
piece that just plain didn’t work for C recorder. The recorder
player in the band played it pretty well on his alto recorder, so
I was embarrassed that I hadn’t brought mine. This is part of why
I spent the summer playing dance music on the G alto.

Last night I had practiced the tunes on both serpent and
recorder, and carefully marked on the tune list which ones would
work on G recorder. But I noticed that it was really not as
recorder-friendly a tune list as the previous two. It turned out
that this band was really excited about having the serpent play
drones. There was a good bass player, so the oom-pah rhythm bass
was covered, and several of the tunes did work over a drone, which
is a lot more fun on serpent than it is on most instruments. It
was a pretty big band with lots of other melody instruments, so I
ended up not playing much recorder, although nobody complained
about it when I did play. But the G alto as country dance
instrument is still fairly untested. The serpent did feel a lot
better about it than about the two previous experiences. The bass
player took one dance off to dance, and complimented me when he
came back to play.

Borrowing ebooks from the library

The Minuteman Library
Network, to which my local public library, the Cambridge Public
Library belongs, has just started loaning out electronic
media, including ebooks.

They have a really good record on computerizing the loan of
dead tree books. Their whole catalog is online, and everyone
who has a library card at any member library can request a book
and get the next available copy shipped to a convenient library branch. You get email when the book arrives, and another
email when it’s due.

Their first try on loaning ebooks isn’t (for me) anything like
as successful, but I’m hoping they just started with something
they could get working fast (it says “Powered by Overdrive”) and will improve it as users point
out problems.

One obvious problem is that there are only about a hundred
ebooks. They do include some newer books, including the two I
requested: Julie
and Julia, which I have requested, and The
Magicians, which I’d put on my Fictionwise wish list,
but didn’t think I really wanted to pay a hard cover price for
it, so I’ve now checked it out of the library as an ebook.

Another problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way
to check back in a book you’re finished with before the due date,
which would seem to be an obvious courtesy to the people behind
you in line.

The checkout itself went smoothly, although it was a little
irritating to have to enter my card number and PIN again, since
the Digital Media Catalog is a separate site, with the same
login and password as the Minuteman Library Network, but it
needs a separate login.

But when I checked out the book, I got a little xml file with
information about the title and the author and the publisher and
the duration of the loan. So the next problem was to get the
software that reads this XML and gets the actual book.

I turned out not to be able to do this on my Linux computer.
So I waited until yesterday, when I needed to log into Windows
to reprogram the remote control anyway.

Downloading Adobe Digital Editions on a windows box wasn’t any
harder than downloading any other Windows software. (That is,
lots more work than “apt-get install program-name”, but not
really difficult.)

Figuring out where to enter the filename of my little xml file
was a lot harder. The “open file” menu item only wanted you to
enter pdf or pdb files, and this was a .acsm file. So I finally
opened up Explorer and moved the little icon from the Explorer
window to the digitaleditions window. I suppose lots of people
would have tried that first, but it really seems like a barbaric
way to have to enter a filename when you already know the
filename.

The program seems pretty bare to me. Most of its window is
blank, so even if you maximize the digitaleditions window,
you’re still using less than half the screen for the actual
reading area. And there’s no way to rotate the window so that
you’re using the screen format in the orientation where it’s
aspect ration is similar to that of the printed page. It’s easy to increase or decrease the font size,
and the page up and page down buttons do what you expect, and
things are readable, but of course, even my laptop isn’t really
an ideal size for reading books on.

I was delighted to find that digitaleditions seems to work
perfectly under wine in Linux, so except for the software download, there
isn’t any reason you have to boot Windows to read the books.
(Unfortunately “works perfectly” means you have to use the same
clumsy method to enter the filename as you do under Windows.)

The program is advertised to work on Sony readers and some
ipods, so it may well work better for owners of those devices.
And if they continue to add more titles, it might make sense to
buy a device that works with the software they’re insisting that
you use. (Obviously not for the hundred or so titles they have
now, several of which are public domain anyway.)

Besides being too big and heavy for reading in bed, my current
laptop no longer runs from the battery, so I have to plug it in
anywhere I want to use it, even for a few minutes. Obviously if
one needed a portable computer to read in bed on there are lots
better choices than this.

So if the digital media loan program succeeds and is providing current books for
free in the format of my choice, I may consider buying a better
device for using it on. It would be even better if the loan
program would give you more choice of both software and
hardware, though.

“The Nation” by Terry Pratchett

It was interesting reading this
book right after finishing The
Baroque Cycle, because it felt in a way like a sequel
from a young adult point of view. It takes place a couple of
generations after the founding of the Royal Society, which is an
important part of the plot resolution.

It’s not a Discworld book,
and it lacks the non-stop hilarity of some of the better Discworld
books, but it’s an unusually good young adult novel, with both
male and female point of view characters.

Terry Pratchett says he wrote it because there had to
be a fourth verse to Eternal
Father, Strong to Save. It’s sung by the captain of a
ship which is lifted by a tsunami and deposited on an island:

Oh Thou who built’st the mountains high,
To be the pillars of the sky
Who gave the mighty forests birth
And made a Garden of the Earth
We pray to Thee to stretch Thy hand
To those in peril on the land.

You can hear Terry Pratchett himself sing this in on the
Barnes and Noble site.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0061433039&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Last post about setting up the new home theater

Not that I mightn’t complain about the new home theater, but I
now consider it set up, so future posts will be about interface
inadequacy or something.

I decided to stop plugging things in and out until the new DVI
cables arrived, and set up the disk player with a regular stereo
connection, and used the TOSLink cable to link the cable box to
the receiver.

This morning all the HDMI cables arrived, and it turns out that
even with all the equipment in front of me and turned around so I
could see the back, I had ordered the wrong cables.

Cable TV

I could have sworn I saw an HDMI socket on the back of the
cable box, but it isn’t there now. So I have connected the cable
box with the composite video cables and the TOSLink audio to the
receiver. This is on AV1, which is the input that’s selected when
you push the “TV” button on the receiver.

Broadcast TV

I don’t currently watch this much, but if I were to downgrade
my cable, or if there were a really good audio program on one of
the broadcast channels that’s not in HD on the cable box, I would
like the option of watching via broadcast. Right now that audio
isn’t hooked up, so I can only listen through the TV speakers; if
I get another TOSLink cable I’ll be able to hook that to the
receiver and listen to it from whatever other input has the
digital audio connection.

DVD

The new Blu-Ray DVD player with the network connection was a
pain in the neck when I didn’t have the two HDMI cables, but “just
works” when you’ve connected it via HDMI to the receiver. I don’t
have a Blu-Ray disk to test, but the surround sound was working
fine with the DVD I played.

Computer

This I haven’t tested, but it’s hooked up to the receiver via a
DVI-HDMI cable and a regular stereo audio cable. I don’t know how
much I’ll be using this for, since the DVD player will play
netflix watch now and youtube (untested). The firewire cable I
ordered turns out to be the wrong kind, so I can’t test what
channels the cable box is putting out on firewire.

Not really done yet

So I still have to buy some more cables, and set up the fancy
remote control to know about the new equipment, and tell netflix
to send me blu-ray disks and run the program that sets up the
receiver based on putting a microphone in your listening
location. But it’s definitely ready to start giving demos.

Report on the October 20, 2009 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meeting next Tuesday at
7:45 PM at my
place.

There is some interest in having a meeting on Tuesday, November
3, at Stuart’s place in Somerville. Let me or Stuart know if you
want to do that, since we’ll have to move some music to his place,
and we’ll move a better selection if we know who’s coming.

December 8 and January 19 also have elections, so we will
either not meet or meet elsewhere those dates.

We may also miss one or two more meetings in December. We’ll
make up for it by having a party. It looks like the best day for
that is Sunday, December 20, but if this is a terrible day for too
many people we’ll look at other days. So let me know if you want
to come to the party and that’s a bad day.

Other events

The group (me, Anne and Ishmael) that performed last Spring at
the Walk
for Hunger will be playing a short concert on Thursday,
December 17 at 2 PM in the Rabb Lecture Hall at the Boston Public
Library.

“The Baroque Cycle” by Neal Stephenson

You would expect a 3000 page novel about the men who invented
natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries to occasionally get tedious, as characters explain the
difference between Leibnitzian Monads and atoms to each other.

It sometimes does, but it’s well-written enough that you care
enough about the characters to put up with it. (Think about the
long essays about the nature of history in War and
Peace — you keep reading to find out what happens to
Pierre and Natasha anyway.)

Actually, the comparison with War
and Peace isn’t far-fetched at all — I’m sure
Tolstoy’s intended audience for his disaster novel was
interested in the question of how history would have been
different if Napoleon hadn’t had a cold at the battle of
Borodino. Neal Stephenson’s audience is interested in how
alchemy turned into modern physics. Both audiences want to read
about the mud and stench on the battlefields as well as the
high-level strategy and tactics that led to the battle.

The action of this novel takes place on 5 continents and
numerous islands; the characters vary in social standing from
slaves to King Louis XIV of France; they invent not only
ingenious methods for winning battles, but the modern banking
system and long-distance shipping; the details of organization
of the places they live, from palaces to jail cells, are
meticulously described.

In other words, there’s plenty of material for a 3000 page
novel, so if you’re interested in at least half of it, you’ll
enjoy reading it.

I criticized
the ebook preparation a couple of weeks ago. I want to pick one
nit about the writing.

The typical bodice-ripper, with just the stuff about eighteenth
century life that everybody knows, lasts about 250 pages, and I
don’t often get through even that much. In order to justify
3000 pages, the reader has to really believe in the
meticulousness of the research. Not that all the writing has to
be in the style of the eighteenth century, but the willing
suspension of disbelief becomes harder when the author is unable
to resist glaring anachronisms like this:

Again, Mother, almost the whole point of mistresses is
that they may be hot-swapped.

I’m sure that character would have used current technological
jargon in gossiping about court liaisons, but Stephenson really
should have resisted twentyfirst century technological jargon.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002MTU5BQ&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1400079985&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Today’s the day for the DNS move

I started writing this a while ago, and got hung up on
.htaccess documentation.

In any case, I started by forwarding all the email from the old
ISP to a gmail account, so that the DNS change won’t screw that up.

I’ve also copied all the files over from the old account to the
new account. I think I have most of the links I need.

So soon, I’m going to tell the new ISP that it’s hosting the
laymusic.org domain, and tell the registrar that the DNS is now
with the new ISP.

I will then as quickly as possible tell the new ISP where to
look for some of the things that aren’t where it might expect.

I’m sure I’ll eventually get things set up right; if they
disappear for a few minutes, or even a couple of hours, don’t
worry about it.

If there’s something you want that’s been gone for more than a
day, you should let me know.

Musick’s Recreation: Seventeenth-century English music for lute and viol

I went to this concert last night because a friend had an extra
ticket. It’s the first concert on this
series, and I recommend you check them out. You can catch the
same concerts at
the Somerville Museum.

Carol Lewis, viols, and Chris
Henriksen are married, and have been performing together for
several decades. It’s a nice combination, because both
instruments can be used either solo or as accompaniment, and both
performers are good at both roles.

Last night’s concert was about the lute and viol music people
in London were playing during the tumultuous years of the early Stuarts,
the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and the Restoration. Chris said
he’d done a lot of music from this period before, but always
looked at it from the point of view of what was happening at
court. This time, he realized that London was at that time one of
the few places in Europe (Hamburg was another) where there was a
thriving music scene independant of the court, with nobles and
even well-off commoners paying professional performers and
composers for lessons on viol, lute and guitar.

A lot of these same composers also wrote for recorder, so I was
familiar with a lot of the names. One revelation was a composer
named Thomas Mace (ca. 1612 — 1684), who wrote one of the
latest lute method books, Musicke’s Monument in
1676. The Saraband that Chris played from that was
the jazziest piece on the program.

I really enjoyed the music; both performers are very good;
I wish they got a slightly more animated audience. I couldn’t see
anyone else laughing at the jokes in this extremely witty music,
and several audience members were clearly asleep.

More on squash pudding

I’m roasting squash so that I can make a squash
pudding. Squash is one of the things I get a lot of from my
farm share. I’m going
to try baking it in mini-muffin tins with paper cups, to make it a
bit more like finger food.

I have to bring something to a friend’s house this afternoon.
She’s been having surgery and other therapy for cancer, so she
hasn’t been getting to all the singing events that are normally a
big part of her life, so she’s invited people over. She says:

George and I will provide
beverages; we’d be very happy if you would bring snacks. (Bear in mind
that because of my condition this will be an abbreviated event, so
don’t bring anything elaborate. We just need something to munch on.)

Unfortunately, except for carrots, the farm share hasn’t been
giving me much finger food. It was better in the summer, with
cucumbers and green beans. I thought about squash muffins, but
I’ve really been enjoying the pudding, so I wanted to make
that.

I figure if I bring plastic spoons the individual squash
puddings in the muffin cups won’t be very much more trouble than muffins.

Getting ready for winter

We’ve been having mild, September-like October weather, but the
last couple of days have been the dank, November-like October.

So last night, with threats of snow in the forecast, I brought
in the plants from the fire escape, and this morning I filled
the humidifier.

I thought you’d like to see some of the plants.

The basil is from a branch from the farm share that grew
roots before I could use it, so I planted it in the windowbox.

[basil in bloom]

The rosemary I just bought at the store, but it’s done well in
the windowbox. I hope it likes being indoors until Spring.

[rosemary]

Some winters here are mild enough that rosemary survives
outside, but of course then it isn’t as easy to go pick a
sprig.

I haven’t turned the heat on yet, so it’s a little early for
the humidifier, but even if I don’t turn my heat on, the
neighbors might turn theirs on and make the air drier.