Laura Conrad

Forsythia wreath in October

No, this is the Northern Hemisphere. Sunny and I walk by a
house that has a forsythia
wreath on its door, right now.

[forsythia wreath]

For some reason, I find this a lot more jarring than the people
who leave their Christmas decorations up until Spring.

In New England, forsythia is one of those pledges that Spring
is about to arrive. Everything’s grey and brown and muddy, and
hardly any green has gotten going yet, and suddenly there are
bright yellow flowers.

If you’re getting tired of the grey and brown, you can bring
some branches in and force them even while there’s still snow, and get the bright
yellow in your home even before it gets going outside.

In October, there are trees blazing orange and yellow and red,
and still lots of green grass, especially in a rainy year like
this.

So my guess is that the person with the forsythia on their
front door isn’t much of a botanist or seasonal decorator.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001VDYCP4&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Progress report on the website move

I assume you’re a little less bored by this topic than I am,
since you haven’t been trying to force yourself to spend time on
it every day.

To summarize: I split off the music publishing last June; I
have to move the DNS to a different ISP by next week; and I’m
trying to modernize and redesign the laymusic site.

The Serpent
Publications site is making progress. I moved the
best article to the new site over the weekend. I have most
of the book information moved. What’s left is one other
article, a book that never made it into the database, and a bit
of miscellaneous stuff.

I think I know roughly how I’m going to do the DNS move, but
it’s always nerve-wracking, especially since laymusic.org is
where I get my mail. I’ll probably do it soon after I finish
the serpentpublications split, so that I won’t have to be moving
things between laymusic.org and serpentpublications.org after the
move, although I will still be moving things from the html part
of laymusic.org to the blog.

I’m doing very badly indeed on moving things from the html into
the blog, and may in fact just decide just to leave all the old
stuff, and just make new pages instead of editing the old
pages.

I’ll try to write about more interesting topics later in the
week, when all the new
toys are arriving. The other topic I thought seriously
about for this morning was the end of the Red Sox baseball
season, but that was even more depressing than how little I’ve
managed to accomplish on the site move.

Upgrading a computer

I’m trying to drag my sister into the 21st century from the
point of view of her home computer.

First, I gave her money to get a broadband connection last
Christmas. She finally got it set up before I was going there
to spend a few days in March, but not on the desktop where she
reads her mail.

Then last summer I upgraded my desktop computer and gave her
the old one — it’s slower and has less memory and disk space and fewer CPU’s
than my new one, but lots more than her current one.

But she still isn’t using it. It doesn’t have a floppy drive,
and her old machine doesn’t have a CD writer, so she hasn’t
figured out how to get her files across. She hasn’t even
tried connecting the wireless adapter, because her experience is
that every time she connects something new she has to remove
something old, because she doesn’t have enough disk space.

I could of course spend an afternoon there and fix all of this. But
she doesn’t like having someone just fix things for her; she
wants to do it herself. And she won’t talk to someone who knows
more about how to do it than she does, so she doesn’t know what to
ask me to bring to help her do it. And I have trouble figuring it
out, because she won’t talk to me. I delivered my old computer
with the graphics card still in it, although I knew it wouldn’t
work with VGA if that was there because I just didn’t know
whether she had a monitor with a DVI connection. Yesterday she
tried setting up the computer (not on her desktop) and it didn’t
work. I did remove the graphics card before I left, so the
computer is working, but not yet connected to either speakers or the
network.

The next time she skips town and I go down to spend time with
my mother (she’s in good shape for 87, but shouldn’t have to
live alone), I’ll get the network set up outside of her
desktop. But I don’t know how many more months or years she’s
going to keep on with the old desktop and the dialup modem.

Bought some electronics

I had a conversation at the dog park a couple of weeks ago with someone who’s more
expert than I am about broadcast television and maybe some other
kinds of consumer electronics. I asked him what he has for an
audio setup in his living room.

He said he went with a cheap surround sound setup and is
replacing things as they break or he gets disgusted with
them.

He currently has a good center speaker (because the original
cheap one broke), which makes TV and
movies sound pretty good. He’s thinking about upgrading the
front speakers, because when he plays music, it all goes through
those, and they don’t sound as good as the center channel.

We decided that I could just buy the center channel and a
receiver, and use my current speakers and subwoofer, plus the
rear speakers from my computer set which I never really bothered
to wire to the rear of the computer room.

In fact, when I went to order, the receiver I ended up with
came with a free pair of rear speakers, so I’ll be able to use the
computer rear speakers for whatever the 6’th and 7’th speakers
in a 7.1 channel setup are.

And I broke down and bought the cheapest blu-ray disk player
that connects to netflix. When I’m tired, turning the computer
on and booting windows and firing up the Internet Explorer
browser to watch my Netflix Watch Now stuff is too hard, and I
end up watching junk on the TV set.

Backups

I also wrote the local linux users mailing list for advice
about external speakers that would stand up well to being put in
a backpack and taken to my mother’s once a month or so, so that
I’d have off-site backup.

The consensus was that you should buy an aluminum external
enclosure and a recognized brand of SATA internal drive with a
good warranty.

So what’s coming is 2 of those, and two Western Digital 500 GB
drives, for about $100.

Other stuff

And while I was at it I bought a long USB extension, because I
don’t seem to be able to keep wireless keyboards and mice
working on the living room computer.

And some speaker wire with connectors, in case what I have
isn’t the right stuff for connecting my old stuff to the new
stuff.

This should all come the end of next week — I’m sure I’ll have
things to tell you about it then.

Performing schedule

The Fall schedule in general is starting to fill up, and there are
several performance-like items on it:

As usual, I’ll be playing serpent at the West Gallery Quire
meetings. The next one has
special leaders and some new songs, and will be this Sunday,
October 11. There will also be meetings on November 8 and
December 13, and a Pub Sing on December 6. These are the best opportunities I know of to sing with a serpent playing for at least a few hundred miles.
I’m also planning to play recorder and serpent at the
Harvard Square English Country Dance Open Band night on Friday,
October 23. If you want to play, too, the rehearsal will start
at 6:15, and if you just want to dance, it starts at 7:30. It’s
at the Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church, 1555 Mass Ave.,
Cambridge.
On October 25, the Boston Wort
Processors will hold their annual Ciderfest.
Some years I’ve organized some of my playing friends to come
play with me. That doesn’t seem to be happening this year, but
I usually stop drinking at least an hour before I drive home,
and often play quite a bit of recorder music then.
A few of the more experienced members of The Cantabile
Band will be doing a concert for the Never too
Late group at the Boston Public Library. That’s the event
that needs the Wiki.

I have a WIKI

I’m not really sure I want one. I actually like writing html
(with emacs psgml mode)
better than learning new markup languages. The big advantage of
the interface is that if you’re setting up a new site, links to
the pages
that aren’t written yet are in red, and when you click on them you
get put directly into edit mode for them. But all the stuff about
lists and links and blockquotes and sections, which I do effortlessly in html,
I have to learn a whole new bunch of funny punctuation to do in
wikimedia markup.

But the application is a good one for a WIKI. There are three
of us giving a concert in December, and there’s a lot of
information about the playlist and the rehearsal schedule and
where to download the music, and where are the recordings of the
rehearsals and the drafts of the program and the program notes that needs to be kept in a central place.

The last few concerts I’ve done that on an html page, but the
WIKI concept of easily linking in new pages and easily traversing
the tree of linked pages probably will make for better
readability. And of course, the other performers are more likely
by some very small amount to write on a WIKI than on an html
page.

So I’ll let you know how it works out. In combination with my
addmedia.py
program, it was pretty easy to put up PDF and MIDI files for a
piece that’s only partially transcribed so I wouldn’t want to put
it up at Serpent
Publications yet. It was more of a pain to put up the list of
performers as a list because I’d never written a mediawiki markup
list before, but maybe the second list will be easier.

Leaving a religion

There turned out to be two ex-quakers (people formerly involved
in the Society of Friends, but now members of other churches) at
the band rehearsal (and subsequent beer-drinking)
last night, so I reflected yet again that ex-quakers are much
more civilized about their disagreements or dissatisfactions
than ex-catholics are.

I should mention that in some technical sense, I’m also an
ex-quaker, since my parents were members when I was born, but
I’ve never personally been involved. By the time I can remember
going to church, they were Methodists, and shortly after that,
they returned to the Roman Catholic Church. So I’m a Birthright
Quaker, a Baptized Methodist, and a Baptized Catholic.

The only
church I’ve attended regularly as an adult was Saint Peter’s
Episcopal Church, where I sang in the choir, and contributed
money. When the Rector suggested that I should be confirmed,
I told him that I thought my confirmation as a Roman Catholic was
enough confirmation.

One person at the rehearsal said she’d decided that the Friends
were too serious about their personal responsibility to save the
world. The Unitarian Church she’s currently attending seems to
feel more of a *community* responsibility to save the world,
which she’s more comfortable with. The other person said when asked that he’d left basically
because of disagreements about how to save the world. There was
probably some bitterness and disappointment in both those
attitudes, but nothing like the rage you find with
ex-catholics.

Of all the different kinds of education I’ve had, I probably
find the technical and the political (in marxist reading groups)
the most useful, but the Catholic catechism might come in fairly
close to the humanist liberal arts one. So I describe myself as
a non-practicing Catholic, rather than an ex-catholic, largely
because I don’t want to be associated with the kind of
anti-catholic rage that’s prevalent in quite a number of the
circles I frequent.

Report on the October 7, 2009, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We will probably miss the meetings where there are elections,
i.e., November 3, December 8, and January 19, if the Cambridge
Election Committee continues to hire me to serve as an official.
I’ve been saying this for a number of weeks now, and still haven’t
gotten any indication that they do want me, so it may not be true. I
would expect to have a card at least for November by now. But I do
enjoy being an election official, so if I get the chance, I’ll take it.

We may also miss one or two more meetings in December. But for
September and October, assume there are regular dropin meetings.

Playing opportunity

The Boston Wort Processors
annual Ciderfest picnic in an apple orchard is on Sunday, October 25
this year. The details are on the
wiki. It’s the same place as it’s been the last couple of
years. We have often had a few people who wanted to go hang out and
eat and drink and play a little bit of music.

Let me know if you’d like to go, and I’ll sign you up.

Lute tablature

They’re having a discussion at the lilypond
users mailing list about how and whether to have a lilypond
mode for entering “ancient” lute tablatures.

Some people seemed to like the idea, but not to have much idea
what the place of lute tablature was in music history, so I
contributed a post. Someone else had written:

I am not at all familiar with these old tablatures, but they
look just amazing, so simply for typographic and aesthetical
reasons, these should be made possible with lilypond.

And I replied:

Actually, there are good musical reasons, too. In the 16th and maybe
most of the 17th, and in some places longer than that, the
dominant instrument which could play many notes at a time, at least in
the home, was the
lute, or various other plucked string instruments which could read the
same tablature.

So this means that lots of the kinds of music which would later be
published with keyboard accompaniment, which lilypond transcribes very
well, was published with lute tablature.

My edition of all the part songs of John Dowland (which
many people think of as lute songs, but most of them are really
accompanied madrigals) is really incomplete, because I’ve
only transcribed the vocal lines, and in general not the lute
tablature.

For a lot of them, the lute tablature is very little different from
just a transcription of the vocal lines, but in others there’s a lot
of decoration.

I’ve made some efforts to transcribe the tablature, but what I want
ideally is to transcribe what’s there, in an input form that doesn’t
require me to translate the tablature into notes, and then use that
transcription plus the tuning of the strings to produce both a
tablature that looks like the one in the facsimile and standard
notation that a modern keyboard player could deal with.

Lute players should note that I’m aware that tablature has different
information from notation: specifically that the beginning time of the
note is specified, but not the length of the note. However, I believe
that good keyboard players are just as capable as lute players of
making the decision about where to end the note; they just aren’t as
capable as players of 6-course fretted instruments of playing
tablature for 6-course fretted instruments.

There’s a red flag in there that I’ve been meaning to address for
some time — there are eminent musicologists who have studied
the period deeply who would disagree with my statement that “most of them are really
accompanied madrigals”. So I’ll tell you why I think that some other time.

I’m back, and what’s next

I seem to have returned to the land of the living — I woke up
this morning wanting to get out of bed and walk the dog. I then
did a reasonable imitation of my usual morning routine, and still
don’t feel like it’s quite time to go back to bed.

As far as what the diagnosis is, since it’s getting better and
not worse, I don’t see any need to burden the medical care system
with this problem, so you’re going to have to put up with my lay
diagnosis. I was running a fever for a good bit of Saturday and
most of Sunday, so I would normally call it flu, not a cold.

Because people have been worrying about flu lately, I’ve been
just saying it’s a cold. I’m not someone who’s ever had the kind
of cold a lot of people get where it slows them down for a week or
even longer, but they never run a fever or get into a state where
they should clearly be in bed. I suspect that this isn’t because
I’m immune to those viruses; I suspect it’s because the virus that
gives some poeple a stuffed up head but not much else for a week
gives me a fever and a stuffed up head for a couple of days.

But if it is flu, I had the regular flu vaccine 2 weeks ago.
So it’s either a regular flu virus that got in under the wire
before my immunity took hold (or even got a little bit of help
from the virus in the vaccine), or a flu strain that isn’t in the
regular virus. In which case, it’s entirely possible that it’s
H1N1. But if so, I don’t seem to be one of the people that H1N1
kills.

What I would have been doing if I hadn’t been in bed

I have to move the laymusic.org site from the old
ISP (hostrocket) to the
new ISP (dreamhost). Note
that this isn’t in any way a criticism of hostrocket as a host if
it meets your needs. I acquired the dreamhost account when I
desperately needed a way to move a bunch of mailman
mailing lists to a new place. They’d been hosted on my home
machine when I had my internet connection from speakeasy, and this wasn’t
going to work when I started connecting with comcast.

Hostrocket doesn’t offer mailman, and while I could probably
have managed to move the mailman lists to what they offer instead,
the non-technical people who’ve been administering some of the
mailman lists would have had a lot of trouble, and I thought that
even for my purposes, mailman was better. So I found a coupon
code that gave me the first year of dreamhost hosting for very
little money. Last Spring I moved the music publishing part of
the site to dreamhost, and now I’m moving the rest of it, before
I owe hostrocket for another year.

Just moving the existing site to a place on dreamhost and
pointing the laymusic dns to the new place would be easy, but what
I’m trying to do is to move the pieces that should be on this site
and that I want to maintain
into the laymusic wordpress installation, and then I’ll just have
a pointer to the old stuff for historical reasons.

The job is a bit less tedious than it might be because of the
wordpresslib
program that adds files to the wordpress media library. I may
write a version of that that creates a post from the part of a file between
certain markers. But mostly it’s tedious because it involves
doing minimal updating of a lot of stuff that could use major
rewriting, but that would be major thinking, and that isn’t going
to happen before October 15.