Author: Laura Conrad

Housecleaning story

I mentioned in my post about cleaning
out Bonnie’s house that there were more stories than fit
into one post. Here’s one of them.

Part of what I needed help with was just carrying all the old
papers out to the trash. Of course a lot of people who came to
“help” were really more interested in snarfing things, and I
didn’t have a problem with that. But I think most people did
manage to take a couple of bags of trash out along with the
books and CD’s and kitchen equipment they were taking.

However, one day I arrived and there were two bags of wet paper
smack in front of the front door. I moved them enough to open the
door, and later had to stop my 86 year old mother (a dedicated
snarfer of books, objets d’arts, and plants) from trying
to take them all the way to the trash. They were really heavy
enough that my shoulders felt it the next day after moving them 10 feet to
the trash cans.

I wrote the mailing list:

A couple of undesirable things seemed to have happened between when I
was last there on Thursday and when I arrived yesterday afternoon:

For those who have been inhabiting some alternate universe and
have just arrived in this one: the current climate of New England
has a fair amount of rain in the summer months. Therefore, it is
unsuitable to leave paper outside exposed to the elements. Please
put paper trash into plastic bags before taking it out.

One of the points of this exercise is to remove large amounts of
stuff from the house. Therefore, it is counterproductive to leave
things in front of the door.

The culprit replied:

Sorry, that was partly my fault. There was a large pile of paper trash
blocking the door when I tried to leave. I had to put it outside in order to
close the door.;-) I was exhausted by the time I noticed that problem and
didn’t have the energy to try to bag it.

Someone who had been there while she was opined that if there
was trash blocking the front door, she was who had put it there.

So if you’re dealing with this kind of housecleaning problem, be careful who you get
to “help”. If a volunteer has any kind of history of creating
messes and then leaving them for other people to clean up, you
want to direct that person’s energy elsewhere.

Roasting vegetables

A frustrating part of getting a giant box of vegetables every
week at the height of summer is that the easiest thing to do
with lots of vegetables is to roast them in the oven. But when
the temperature and humidity are both high you don’t actually
want to turn the oven on.

I no longer have that excuse, so tomorrow or Friday lots of
things are going in the oven.

I’ll be spending the weekend at the New England Sacred Harp
Convention (5 hours of singing a day, and nobody minds if
you sing loud), which means I’ll have to bring potluck
contributions for lunch on both Saturday and Sunday.

I’ve already written about some of the possibilities:

The announcement of what’s in the share this week suggests
another option, courtesy of another shareholder:

Oven Roasted Kale
the kale last week was the most amazing. I roasted it in the oven at 350 until crisp, with a little olive oil and sea salt–better than potato chips!

There’s also just plain potato salad, a bunch of leeks staring
at me wanting to be put in a sharp mustard vinaigrette, a
cabbage that wants its leaves to be stuffed with something…

Report on the September 29, 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.

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

Web page

We had a new member come last night, and when she called me it
was clear that the website had not been as enlightening as I’d
hoped. When I looked at it, it was clear that it was confusing,
erroneous, and outdated in some major respects.

So there’s a new
version. Please look at it and let me know if you can think of
any improvements.

First they came…

I thought everybody knew and had reflected on the famous poem:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.

But I had dinner with a friend last night, and was telling her
about my
neighbor being arrested. I said that the fact that they’d
siezed his computer and all the peripherals and his cameras made
me feel I should have off-site backup.

She said, “But why? You don’t grow marijuana.” So I pointed
out all the other stories of people being arrested without having
done anything illegal: Gates,
the
father who took pictures of his kids, and the more recent story
about the grandmother who’s being prosecuted for buying
two bottles of cold medication in one week.

She said, “You’re not black,” and, “You don’t have kids,” and
“You don’t live in Indiana.” (This last one still has me
puzzled.)

About this specific problem, she’s just plain wrong — I’ve
been worrying about the hole in my backup
procedure that it doesn’t produce an off-site backup for some
time, and of course I’m worried more about it because my
next-door neighbor in the same building has been in a situation
where he should have had one. After all,
even if there’s no conceivable situation where the police would
break into my apartment and steal my computer, someone else
certainly could. And there’s the risk of fires and natural
disasters. Having an off-site backup of the things that are
important to you is just a Good Idea.

But I’m concerned that she doesn’t empathize more with all
these people getting arrested. Especially the grandmother in
Indiana. Her grandchildren all live in the same household at the
moment, but if her other son ever gets married and has kids (which
is something she wishes for), I would think it quite likely that
she could buy two bottles of something for the grandchildren in
one week.

Then they came for the people who had two children with
offspring and I did not speak out — because only one of my
children had offspring?

More about converting MIDI to lilypond

I wrote a a
couple of days ago about having tried out a new way of
converting MIDI files to lilypond. I posted the gist of the
idea to the lilypond
users’ mailing list, and got some more suggestions of things
to try.

The idea I liked best was that the MuseScore program has an
experimental Capella import (and
lilypond export),
which would have let me avoid using the MIDI files as an
exchange format at all. Unfortunately, in its current state,
the import crashes on the capella files for Holborne.
(I did report the bug on the MuseScore tracking program.)

So I tried several other programs that import MIDI and export
lilypond, and the one that seems to work best for this
particular purpose was the rosegarden one. I
haven’t finished a whole piece, but from what I’ve done, it
looks like the work I have to do is work I couldn’t reasonably
expect a MIDI reading program to do for me.

The most time-consuming part is that the MIDI files for the Holborne
are what lilypond calls “unfolded” repeats, and I want “volta”
repeats. That is, when something is repeated, these MIDI files
play it twice (which is what you want when you’re using the MIDI
file to practice with), whereas I want to print the music once with repeat
signs around it. But otherwise, I’m just making the changes
which are necessary because I want unbarred parts.

Hobson’s Choice

I watched this
movie last night, and enjoyed it a lot. It’s about a
woman who does all the work for a family with a mostly absent
father and two lazy sisters.

Not that I believe the fairy tale about getting capital for
your business from the first person you ask and paying it off
before it’s due. But the fairy tale about a woman deciding what
she wants and going and getting it is a lot of fun to watch.
And she gets to be the fairy godmother to the bootmaker in the
basement who hasn’t ever thought of getting a better job or a
better place to live.

The key sentence of the plot goes, “This business runs on the shoes you
make which sell themselves and the boots everyone else makes,
which I sell.” So obviously they should go into business for
themselves, and ditch the parasites.

Which they do. Unfortunately, the “happy” ending has them
coming back to the original shop and taking care of the
alcoholic father, but at least the lazy sisters are out of the
picture. The Cinderella ending I always imagined after “and
they lived happily ever after” was better, but the one in
Rossini actually leaves her still dealing with the father and
the stepsisters, so probabably I’m just being too escapist about
my fantasy life.

The cinematography of the alcoholic delirium is a bit dated,
but Charles Laughton’s acting of a man who’s drunk himself into
oblivion and incapacity is really good.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001LMU1A0&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=B00005BEYB&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

MIDI to MusicXML

One of the problems of sharing music with people who prefer
some other music notation software is that until recently the
best available way to do it was MIDI. MIDI has many fine
qualities, but it doesn’t save the same information that printed
notation needs.

There’s a fairly well-thought-of standard exchange format
called MusicXML. Lots of programs (including lilypond)
implement an import of MusicXML, but export is a lot less
common, so most people (including me) who put their work up on
the web can’t give you MusicXML from their source. Finale users
could, but mostly don’t.

The reason I call it an exchange format is that while it
captures all or most of the information any of the notation
programs save, it doesn’t do it in a way anyone would want to
work with. For instance, here’s the information for one note (a
g quarter note in the second octave above middle C) in
MusicXML:


<note>
<pitch>
<step>G </step>
<octave>5 </octave>
</pitch>
<duration>96 </duration>
<voice>1 </voice>
<type>quarter </type>
<dot/>
<notehead>normal </notehead>
</note>

In lilypond, you would normally enter that “g4” (or just “g” if
it were in a string of other quarter notes) and in ABC it
would usually be “g”. So you can see why people would rather
type ABC or lilypond.

Earlier this week, I wanted to transcribe a piece
by Antony
Holborne. The whole book this piece is in has been
transcribed, and is on the web at the Werner
Icking Archive. But the person who did this did it in a
notation program called Capella 5, which I
don’t have. He did provide sources, as well as PDF and MIDI
files, so I tried importing the MIDI file into lilypond, and
decided it would be easier to just enter the lilypond.

One reason I decided this was that midi2ly had decided to spell
all the MIDI pitches that are a half note below B and a half
note above A as A♯ instead of B♭. (The MIDI format only records
what the pitch is in terms of how many half steps from 0
(roughly the bottom of the piano) it is, it doesn’t know
anything about how a notation system would want to write that
pitch.)

So I was excited when I read in a newsletter from Noteflight that they now
have MIDI import. Noteflight is a web-based notation system
that seemed promising when I looked at it a few months ago, but
hadn’t yet implemented anything I was particularly interested in
using.

So I ran the next of the Holborne MIDI files through it, and
was gratified to see that it spelled the notes between B and A
as B♭ instead of A♯. Unfortunately, it spells the ones between
F and G as G♭ instead of F♯. But you can import the MIDI file,
export the XML file, and import the XML file into lilypond and
get something you can work with more easily in several ways than
the direct import of MIDI into lilypond, which is fairly
orphaned. And it may well be that some of the manipulation
you’re going to have to do to the score can be done more easily
in noteflight than in lilypond, although I can’t tell you that
from personal experience.

So if you’re looking for a web-based music notation software,
or a fairly clean way to get MIDI files into MusicXML, look into
noteflight.

Here’s the Holborne Galliard as I imported it from the MIDI
file. I think the only thing I did was to change the key
signature and edit one G♭ into an F♯.

More ebook sloppiness

I never minded stuff like this when the ebooks I was reading
were being produced by volunteer labor, but now that I’m paying
real money for them, it really irritates me.

I’m reading The
Confusion, volume 2 of The
Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, which I purchased
from fictionwise.com.

The chapter I’m reading takes place at a castle in Germany, and
I believe Stephenson refers to it by the german word Schloß.
However, the producers of the ebook got the code for the German
double s wrong, and so instead of a Schloß, the ebook keeps
talking about a Schloé. (Html entity 233 instead of 223.)

This book is published by “William Morrow, An Imprint of Harper
Collins Publishers” and I’m sure there are lots of people who work
for that organization who could spot a typo that bad and that
consistent, so I can only conclude that none of these proofreaders
was asked to look at the book after the people who converted the
text to the epub format were through. And that the people who did
the conversion aren’t good proofreaders.

Of course, this would be even more irritating if I weren’t
running the illegal script that turns the ereader format back into
html, which I can edit with emacs.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0060733357&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
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What I wanted to yell at the President

I watched the address to the joint session of Congress a couple
of weeks ago with a friend. In general, I really like watching
Obama speak, because it’s such a relief to have a President who
isn’t embarrassing me with every sentence out of his mouth.

But there was one point when I was talking back to the TV
screen. It was after he’d talked about how he and everybody else
in the country could design a system from scratch that would work
better than the one we have, but he believed that we could get
more done by building on the system we have.

So then he said, “We will place a limit on how much you can be
charged for out-of-pocket expenses, because in the United States
of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.” I
remarked to my friend, “So how is that incremental?” At the time,
and until I just looked at the text of the speech, I believed he
actually had used the word incremental.

The reason I’ve continued to think about this off and on for
the last two weeks is that I think that really is the reason
health care reform has been so hard to get. There really isn’t a
consensus in this country that no one should go broke because they
get sick.

This is why, although it was a well-delivered speech, the polls
all found that it didn’t convince anyone. People who believe that
they won’t go broke when they get sick because they’ve done the
right things all their lives, and that the people who will go
broke are lazy and improvident, want to hear why this new system
isn’t going to cause them to go broke because other people get
sick. And the President did say that, but not in a way that anyone
really believes.

The reason I understand this better than President Obama does
isn’t because I’m a better politician than he is. It’s because
he’s spent his life doing what the system says he should do and I
haven’t. I know people who really believe that I should go broke
when I get sick because I retired at the age of 50. They don’t
say it in such crude language, but their disapproval of someone
making that choice says it for them.

So the right way to pitch the reform shouldn’t be telling sad
stories about the people who go broke because of the present
system. It should be making the point that the present system
is in fact making you go broke because other people get sick,
and spending money differently will make you go less broke as
well as making them get less sick. I don’t say I know how to do
that, but I can see that that isn’t what the President is trying
to do.