Author: Laura Conrad

Wimbledon

I’ve been watching Wimbledon instead of reading
newspapers and listening to radio news the last couple of weeks,
so I can’t tell you anything about either Michael Jackson’s death or the
situation in Honduras.

But I thought I’d share a few thoughts about the tennis:

  • The women’s singles draw would have looked like less of a
    vast wasteland populated only by the Williams sisters if they
    had shown us some of Elena Dementieva’s matches in the early
    rounds. American TV networks have trouble believing that people
    want to see good tennis, rather than Americans playing tennis.
  • I’ve always liked Tommy Haas, and I’m glad he managed to win
    some difficult matches this year. He’s had a history of playing
    better than his ranking but then losing in 5 sets when he plays
    a higher-ranked player. But this year he won a 5-set match in
    the third round against Marin Cilic and a 4-set match in the
    quarter finals against Novak Djokovic, and played Roger Federer
    almost even on serve for two sets in the semi-finals.
  • Of
    course, one hopes that this is because he has his head together
    better and not because he’s changed his doping regime, but I
    don’t think we should be cynical about that without some
    evidence. This is of course what the tennis association hopes
    we’ll think, and the point of the article is that they’re
    refusing to test so that we won’t have any evidence to think
    with. That is, they’re testing only during the big tournaments,
    and apparently the doping that would be likely to help happens
    during training.
  • There are some good young American players coming up —
    18-year old Melanie Oudin qualified and made it to the fourth
    round, by beating sixth-seeded Jelena Jankovich in the third
    round, and the Men’s junior tournament had 3 Americans in the
    quarter-finals.
  • They really have to look at the computer program that
    determines the rankings. Nobody watching Dinara Safina (seeded first) play
    this year would believe that she should have been ranked above
    any of the next three seeds (Williams, Williams and
    Dementieva). What happens is that if you play lots of
    tournaments and get to the fourth round, it outranks playing
    fewer tournaments and winning them. And the fact that the
    Williams sisters (who play fewer tournaments) are still
    there and most of the people who’ve been ranked above them for
    the past 10 years aren’t should make them think about whether
    the rankings should be giving points for playing too much.

Hugo Award Voting

One of the things I have to do today or tomorrow is vote on who
should get the Hugo Awards.

I signed up as a supporting member of Anticipation so that I could get the
packet of nominated works as ebooks.

I’m going to discuss the novel category, since it’s the one I
most care about. I expect to read enough of some of the shorter
works to vote in some of those categories, but it’s having good
novels to read that I care most about.

Voting options

The way the voting is set up,
you rank your choices, and “No Award” is one of the
choices. So the first thing to decide about everything you read
isn’t “Should this get the award?” but rather “Would I rather
there were no award than that this should get it?”

Did you enjoy it?

This year’s field of nominees is quite strong, and they’re all
well-written, but there was one (Saturn’s Children)
that I disliked. If I were looking for a good book to read, and
picked that one up because it had won an award, I would be
annoyed at the people who gave it the award. So I’m going to
rank that one behind “No Award”.

Do you want to read another one?

The others are all books I really enjoyed reading, and I
wouldn’t feel that the voters had done me a disservice in voting
for any of them. So I have to look for some other criterion to
decide how to rank them.

I’ve decided that the next factor to consider about the effect
of an award is how it might influence the writers. So the
question here is not so much, “Did you like this book better
than the others?”, but “Do you wish other writers would write
more books like this one?”

Now obviously to some extent, each book in this genre is unique
— nobody else is going to write a book exactly like The
Graveyard Book about a child growing up
in a graveyard raised by the ghosts. But lots of people will be
writing “coming of age” narratives about a child who struggles
to overcome an unusual background and join the “normal world”.
And I will read many of them and enjoy them.

Little
Brother (Free
download) was the first of the books to occur to me as in
the category of something I was glad had been written but I
didn’t want to read again, but now I’m not so sure. Certainly I
don’t want another coming-of-age narrative where Linux and
Social Networking save the world, but another coming-of-age
narrative where the intrepid hero realizes that the world he’s
being educated for is wrong in important ways and fights to
change it could certainly be enjoyable.

Similarly, Zoe’s
Tale seems like a rewrite of all the Heinlein juveniles
where the intrepid heroine saves the world and learns martial arts, but
if you think about it, it’s been updated quite a bit. Both of
Zoe’s parents do a lot of nurturing, the discovery of the
opposite sex is a lot less embarrassing, and the characters’
dealings with aliens are interesting. I don’t mind at all that
Heinlein wrote one juvenile a year (timed to appear at
Christmas) for over a decade, and if John Scalzi wants to start
doing that too, it sounds like it should make a few people’s
Christmas buying easier. Whether they
should all win Hugo awards is another question, of course.

Old adult versus Young Adult

You may have noticed that the last three books I mentioned are
all Young Adult(YA) fiction. I don’t believe in being prejudiced
about this — many of my favorite books of all time (Little
Women to name one) would be Young Adult Fiction if they were
published today.

Anathem
is definitely not Young Adult fiction, although in a way it’s
the same kind of coming-of-age and saving the world narrative
that the YA books have. To some extent this is a disadvantage
— there really isn’t enough character and plot for a 900 page
book, and there are a number of places where this reader wished
that it had gotten the kind of editing that the YA books
did.

The acknowledgements page credits a philosophical lineage
that can be traced from Thales through Plato, Leibniz, Kant,
Gödel, and Husserl. Most of those writers couldn’t have
survived YA editing, either, so I suppose if you enjoy this book
(and I did), you have to be glad there are editors who will
allow the kind of digressions that turn this from a 350 page
novel to a 900 page tome. I do hope someone finds a middle
ground some day, though.

So how am I going to vote?

I don’t know. Part of why I wrote this was to see if I could
figure it out. Here’s what I’m leaning to right now; I may
change my mind before I actually vote.

  • Anathem
  • Little Brother
  • Zoe’s Tale
  • The Graveyard Book
  • No Award
  • Saturn’s Children


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Potato Blight hits New England

The email from my farm
share this morning includes a warning that there have been
early signs in New England of a disease called “Late Blight”,
which is what caused the Irish Potato Famine. It includes
information about what to do if you notice things wrong with your
potatoes and tomatoes. You can read the whole article at The
University of Vermont Extension Site.

The symptoms that develop on tomato leaves, stems and fruit are quite dramatic, and are very obvious to the naked eye. The infected areas on leaves appear to be water-soaked, varying in size from a nickel up to a quarter, often beginning at leaf tips or edges. They proliferate when
the foliage has been exposed to watering, rainfall, or heavy overnight dews. If these infected areas dry out quickly, they may appear lime-green or beige in color.

The edge of the water-soaked area, either on the top or bottom of the leaf surface, will be covered with white fungal growth (mycelium) that contains the spore inoculum (visible with a hand lens). Spores are easily blown to surrounding areas and infect plants and even weed
species, in the plant family Solanaceae (the black nightshade family).

Brown to almost black lesions appear on infected stems, and the same lesions will develop on fruit, either directly on the infected plants, or a few days after they are sitting on your kitchen counters.

Please inspect your tomato and potato plants on a daily basis! If Late Blight symptoms are already appearing on plants in your garden, these plants should be removed immediately and put in a plastic bag for disposal. Don’t just put the removed plants in a compost pile as spores
will still spread from this debris. Your neighbors, not to mention commercial growers, will appreciate your taking this action immediately.

Report on the June 30, 2009 meeting

We played:

Schedule

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

We’ll probably skip August 11, so that people can go to the
special West Gallery
Quire workshop with Francis Rhodes.

What I should be doing on the new site

I started the laymusic.org site before there
was such a thing as a Content Management System for a website. I
thought I was being pretty sophisticated by having it database
backed.

SerpentPublications.org
would indeed not be up yet if I hadn’t done that, but there’s
still a lot of stuff about the books and about why I do what I do
that’s in basic html at laymusic.org, and should be moved into wordpress.

I didn’t expect it to be that hard, because I’m using the raw-html
plugin for wordpress. So I was thinking that all I had to do was
to put two html comments around my html and put it in as a
wordpress post.

This is true as far as it goes, but consider the following
complications:

Links within the html
The content of the link has to be moved to the new site, and
the link has to be updated. This is easy enough on a one-by-one
basis, but doing thirty of them at once is a pain. I think I’m
not putting most of the pictures into the WordPress media
library; it’s just too much easier to copy them to a directory
and link to them there.
Links to the page
Until you’ve put the page into wordpress, you don’t know
what the link is going to be, and you don’t want to change any
links until you’ve published the new page. This means you have
to start at the bottom of the tree, and the set of links-to
relationships between my html pages is not a simple tree graph.
Redirect the page on the old site to the one on the new
site
A lot of people link to the old site, and I haven’t yet
gotten around to telling them all to change it, and when I do,
they’ll take their time about changing their links, at least if
they’re anything like me. So I want to keep the pages on the
old site, but have them redirect to the new site. This is
another thing I can’t do until I’ve published the page on the
new site, but want to do right afterward, since I’m doing a fair
amount of improving things as I move them, so I don’t want
people reading the old, inferior stuff when they could be
reading the new, improved stuff.

On a cheerful note, the new site is as much easier to make
additions to as I hoped it would be. On the old site, I would
spend a morning doing the additions after I’d made several of
them, but with the new site, I just do a “make upload” when I’ve
proofread a piece and think it isn’t too embarrassing.

What’s being downloaded

Yesterday I
wrote about how I was keeping track of which blog posts get read
the most. That was so much fun that I’ve also been keeping track
of what pieces on the
Serpent Publications Site are being downloaded.

It’s also fun, but a bit more irritating. Most of the old
stuff that people are still reading on my blog is fairly good
stuff (most notably the Bread machine
brioche post, which is almost three years old, but I really
haven’t changed the way I do it, and it’s still something I like
bringing to places and people still ask me for the recipe).

Unfortunately, a lot of the music people are downloading from
Serpent Publications is my really early attempts at getting music
notation software to print unbarred parts, and isn’t anything like
as good as what I can do now.

So if I ever get this website migration under control, one of
the things I’m going to be doing is taking the stuff that people
are interested in and fixing it up to the current standard.

Another problem is that the most downloaded piece is a not very
interesting drinking round, called Tom
Jolly’s Nose. It’s the most downloaded because it’s
by a man named Henry Aldrich, so in the alphabetical list by
composer he comes first, even before the really popular
“anonymous”. I’m still producing the most downloaded list in the
sidebar by hand, and I’ve thought about cheating and just not
listing that one, since anyone who wants it can see it right at
the top of the page anyway. I am cheating and giving the Drinking
Songs book address instead of the composer, since that will
lead to other songs of interest to someone who wants that one,
whereas clicking on Henry Aldrich will only give you another link
to Tom Jolly’s Nose.

But most of the other pieces on the most downloaded list are
real big hits that people who come to the site actually are
probably interested in seeing.

The reason some of the older ones are downloaded most often is
that they were the ones I wanted to typeset first, and
so people like me want to download them first. And a lot of them have
been updated, even if they aren’t this year’s latest and greatest
typesetting.

One third down

I started this project of posting something to my blog every
day on February 25, four months ago. So if it ends up being a one-year
project, it’s one third done.

I have been successful at making a post every day. The only
one that was a real “I can’t post today” post was last Saturday.
And I really was over half way done with a fairly long and
difficult post which I really did post the next day. John Scalzi, one of my
role models for doing this, is known for posting a picture of
his cat when he doesn’t feel like writing, but he’s also done,
“I don’t feel like writing today” posts.

You as readers can tell better than I can how well it’s worked
for entertaining the readers, but there do seem to be some
readers. I started keeping track of how many hits things have
gotten in April sometime. And it looks like even the most
inconsequential posts get a couple of dozen readers, and the
ones that get hit by a search, or have been pointed to in a
large mailing list, get hundreds.

Speaking as a writer, it has done some of what I wanted it to
— I now know a lot more than I did a few months ago how to pick
a subject I can write about in less than an hour, and how to
polish the 20-30 minutes of writing into coherence and then stop
and publish.

I was thinking it would be possible to see what the blogging
has done for my writing by reading the blogs from the Boston
Early Music Festival two years ago
and this
year. Actually, there wasn’t as much difference in quality
of writing as I’d hoped for. The editing was definitely better
this year, and I think I’m more comfortable letting my
personality come out now. The quantity was definitely more two
years ago, but I remember that quantity as being very
difficult. This year I just decided it wasn’t possible to blog
and do 11 PM concerts and do morning concerts, so I just didn’t
do anything in the morning.

One disappointment about the blog as a way to connect with
people is that there really isn’t as much feedback as with the
other kinds of internet writing I do. If you post to a mailing
list or email a friend, it immediately becomes obvious if you haven’t
made your point. If you write a post on your blog, it’s quite
likely that you won’t get any comments at all. But it looks
like my audience has doubled in the last four months, so maybe
if I keep going I’ll eventually get an audience that
comments.

In terms of using the numbers of readers as a guide to what to
post about, it’s pretty inconclusive. It looks like of the easy
categories, the ones about food are read more than the ones
about the garden. The ones about using technology are also read
pretty often, probably because it’s something that people are
used to using google as a way to find answers for.

Another thing I hoped to accomplish was writing about my
experiences being involved in Bonnie’s death. That has
certainly happened more than it would have otherwise, but less
than I expected. This is partly because I still don’t have the
knack of breaking that subject up into small enough topics that
I can make those posts easy ones. Maybe I’ll get better at
it. Or maybe I’ll clear more time for hard posts, but that
doesn’t sound very likely. I’m still in the throes of the Serpent Publications
websiteredesign, and when that’s done, I’ll have to move on
to redesigning this site.

The posts about books and movies are usually pretty easy, and
seem to get read fairly often. For the
most read one, about Little Dorrit, I
took the precaution of taking brief notes over the week or so I
was reading the book, so I ended up with several interesting
things already written. I should try to be more organized about
doing that.

One surprising thing is that none of the people who actually
know me personally seems to read the blog regularly. This
actually makes it easier — I don’t use anyone’s actual name
when I write about them, but I certainly sometimes say enough to
make it clear to someone who knows my friends who I’m talking
about.

So, Gentle Reader, do let me know what you think. If there’s a
topic you’d like more (or fewer) posts about, let me know. If
you’d rather have pictures of Sunny or the garden than “I can’t
post today” posts, let me know. If I’m being completely
incomprehensible about something, tell me and I’ll try to clarify.

Maintenance trick

I took my car to the mechanic yesterday because the air
conditioner didn’t seem to be doing anything. Not that we’ve
needed it for cooling this Spring in this part of the world, but it wasn’t defogging the
windshield, which we have needed.

He checked it and found the fluid was low, which was probably
from a leak, but there was no way to tell what was leaking, except
by filling it up and seeing where it came out.

In this case, he only had to start putting more in, and it was
clear what line was spewing expensive ($150/tank) fluid.

But if it had been a slow leak, I would have had to come back a
week or even a month later. And I wouldn’t have come back until
quite a lot of environmentally destructive stuff had leaked out on
the roads.

So what my mechanic has started doing about this is putting in
fluid with a flourescent dye in it, so that he can see as soon as it leaks where the leak is.

This seems like a very good idea, and I would encourage
manufacturers to put the flourescent dye in in the first place, so
that a leaky air conditioner can be caught and fixed in routine
maintenance.

In general, manufacturers who aren’t also maintainers should
look for tricks like this that make maintenance easier, cheaper,
and greener.

Marley and Me

This
film is exactly what you’d expect — Hollywood’s take on a
family’s love for its dog. I enjoyed it.

One thing some critics have said is that the
book is a little bit less of a Hollywood picture of a
marriage. So that might be a good thing to read, some time when
you need an easy read, or one you can get from the drugstore or
airport bookstore.

The end of the movie is a tearjerker, but putting down a dog
you love is a difficult decision, and people should have seen
versions of it in other people’s lives. I thought the John Grogan
character’s verbalization of it was apt: Marley, you tell me when
it’s time. And the funeral where the children write letters to
Marley is beautifully done.

Of course the “world’s worst dog” subtitle is completely
unjustified; Marley doesn’t ever do anything that any dog doesn’t
do. The Kathleen Turner dog-trainer turn is brilliant, but not at
all fair to the dog-trainers I’ve known.

The least well-captured aspect of dog-ownership in the movie
was the other dog-owners in the park — my experience is that you
can get a great deal of support for dealing with a difficult dog
(and they’re all difficult sometimes)
from other dog-owners.

Hollywood doesn’t really try for the kind of accurate depiction
of a lifestyle that some of the European and Independant
film-makers do, but they really should have done better in the
scene where Marley decided stairs are too hard, even to sleep with
the family. He lies down in front of a blazing fire, which the
family is just leaving there as they go to bed. I’m sure this
isn’t what the real Grogan family does.

In terms of my personal situation, Sunny is at the stage where
he doesn’t always hear me come in, but he’s still dealing with
stairs. It will be a major decision point if he decides he can’t,
since I can’t carry him, and our apartment starts on the second floor.

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Last day stew

One of the things you have to do when a farm share is dumping a
large box of produce into your car’s trunk every week is have some
general recipes to use up the stuff from last week when the stuff
for next week is coming.

So Tuesday I put all the salad greens I still had into a salad
and fed it to the band. Then yesterday I made a stew of the
cookable stuff still hanging around.

This was basically the Bok Choy from the first week and the
Kale from last week. So I took two cans of tomatoes, a cup or so
of quinoa, two cups of liquid (in my case, a cyser that’s too dry to drink straight) a can of pinto beans (if I’d been organized, I would
have soaked beans early in the day, but I wasn’t), two medium
onions, several cloves of garlic, and some seasonings, and threw
everything in a pot. I sauteed the onions, the garlic and the
stems from the leafy vegetables in olive oil before adding them to
the pot. I let this simmer while I practiced tuba and recorder
and vocalized, and then had it for dinner.

I don’t have feedback from anyone else, but I went back for
seconds. It will be a good thing to have around for meals when I
don’t feel like cooking any of the wonderful things in this week’s
share.