Author: Laura Conrad

Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF)

I ordered my tickets to BEMF this
morning. I had been agonizing over how many to buy since the
brochures arrived in February, but I finally decided to go with a
minimal number. So what I got is all the Renaissance ones, all
the recorder ones, and all the 11PM ones. And a pass and a book.

The festival is a major event in the early music community,
which takes place in odd-numbered years. (In even-numbered
years, there’s an event in Berkely, California.) There are
concerts by world-renowned players, masterclasses with famous
teachers, fringe events by less-renowned players, and an
exhibition of instruments and related paraphernalia.

Two years ago, this blog was just starting to take shape, and I
announced that I would be blogging from BEMF.
I attempted to convince other people to also post about their
experiences, since there’s no way one person can cover all the
events, or even the whole set of events that are interesting to
them. I got more comments on these posts than I usually do, but
didn’t get a lot of guest blogging action, partly because a lot
of people who might have done it were out-of-town without their
usual network access. But mostly because if you’re as busy as
the really committed early music people are at BEMF, you don’t
want to add writing to it.

So this year, I’ll keep up my one post a day policy, and during
that week (June 9-14 for me) most
posts will probably be about BEMF, but I’m not going to try to
be comprehensive, even about what I’m doing. I will set up a BEMF 2009
category, and if you’d like to get a user account that entitles
you to post entries on this blog, let me know and I’ll set it
up. You don’t need my permission to post comments, and it would
be really good if my readers wanted to

In terms of preparation for BEMF, I’ll be putting out flyers
for the Cantabile Band
and Serpent Publications.

I’m hoping to get the new serpentpublications.org
site set up by then, but it’s going slower than I hoped for, and
the flyer might still have to stick to the current laymusic.org and lulu.com stuff.

Making the machine go

I’ve been spending more time than usual the last few days on just getting my
desktop computer to run.

Graphics card

The problem I was trying to solve was that it would slow to an
unusable crawl if firefox had been running for more than a day,
especially when the automatic backup kicked in every 4 hours.

One thing I thought might help would be to run the monitor off
of an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 SE/7200 GS graphics card. The network
know-it-alls on one of my mailing lists laughed their heads off at
this idea, but it still seems reasonable to me.

Unfortunately, it fixed the problem of firefox taking over the
whole computer when it had been running for more than a day,
because with the nvidia driver, the whole X system would freeze up
in much less than a day. The nvidia driver is a closed-source
product of the Nvidia corporation; there’s also an open source
driver called nv, but when I tried that, it would only let me run
at very low resolution.

Monitor

Then a small number of days later, I got home after midnight
and went to check my email before bedtime and the monitor died.
(The little light was yellow, and instead of turning green as the
screen came back to life, it went out and wouldn’t come back on no
matter what I did.)

So I hooked up the old heavy 17″ CRT that I replaced because it
got jittery and was giving me headaches, and ordered a new monitor
for pickup from microcenter. I use
microcenter (which is less than two miles away) for anything I
need fast, for anything that might have a problem with linux
compatibility, and for anything with a motor in it. They sometimes
cost a little more than buying online, but they’re really good
about taking returns.

I bought this
Acer 22 inch wide monitor.

I had to boot it several times in order to get it configured
right. It seems that with the nvidia driver, you have to run both
envyng and nvidia-setup, or some such to get it to recognize that
you have a different sized monitor.

And it ran for most of a day, but this morning when I got up, X
was frozen again.

So I googled some more, and found a different open source
driver called “nouveau”. It figured out the right resolution and
size to run the screen at, so it looks good so far. It’s only been
two hours, though.

If you’re running ubuntu and have an nvidia card, you just have to “apt-get install
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau” and then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to
say “nouveau” instead of “nvidia” or “nv”.

Browsers

I’ll tell you some more about the browsers I’ve been
investigating later. The current situation is that the google
chromium-browser is great when it works, but has serious bugs,
like not displaying this blog at all and the “copy link address”
not copying. So I’m currently using that as well as firefox,
which is still what my mail program opens links in.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B00193QFFG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Last Chance Harvey

This movie was a disappointment. Obviously
anyone who’s a huge fan of either Dustin Hoffman or Emma
Thompson is going to want to watch it. I won’t say we’re
wrong to want that, but really, there are better ways to spend
an evening. It’s slow-moving and in spite of a lot of really
good acting, not really a very convincing plot. You do believe
that they’re attracted to each other, but not that they really
convince themselves to give up their whole lives for each other
in less than a week.

I have a subjective reason for disliking movies where Dustin
Hoffman looks old — I graduated from high school the summer The Graduate came out, so I basically think of
him as my age. This is an oversimplification — the character
in The Graduate has just graduated from college,
not high school, and of course Dustin Hoffman was quite
a bit older than the character he was playing. So he’s actually fourteen years older than I am, but I still think of him as
a contemporary.

I no longer have the problem I had for quite a while after
reading Heartburn by Norah Ephron. Because he
played Carl Bernstein (Ephron’s ex-husband) in All the Presidents’
Men, I kept thinking of him as the person who was so mean
to Norah Ephron. But since the movie of
Heartburn came out, I now know it was Jack
Nicholson who was so mean to Norah Ephron, and that’s really an
easier fiction to sustain.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0015OKWKS&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=B00000F798&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=0679767959&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=B001LL9YRM&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=B000CEXEWA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the May 19 meeting

We played:

  • Sermisy, Aupres de vous (2 voices)
  • Campian:
    • When the god of merrie love
    • I care not for these ladies
    • Fain would I love a fair young man
    • When Laura Smiles
  • Sermisy:
    • Aupres de vous (3 voices)
    • C’est une dure despartie
    • Changeons propos

Schedule

Next week, May 26, we will have our usual dropin meeting at
7:45 PM at my place.

The following week, June 2, that meeting would conflict with a
rehearsal for a West
Gallery Quire performance on June 3. All the people who’ve
been coming to this group regularly are also singing in that
performance, so we may decide to rehearse instead of meeting that
night.

The week after that, June 9, is BEMF, and that meeting would
conflict with a Renaissance concert, so we’ll probably not meet
then.

But after that, we should go back to our usual dropin
meetings.

We’re also thinking about having a party on Sunday, June 21, to
celebrate the Summer Solstice.

Homebrew club newsletter

I’m late today, so I’ll just tell you about how the homebrew club newsletter I mentioned last week
turned out.

You can see it on the club site.

I’ve done quite a number of these newsletters before, but I’m a lot more
fluent now in some of the relevant LaTeX, like boxes
to associate a picture with its caption. (The LaTeX built-in
figure capability is designed for a book or serious article, not
for an informal newsletter.)

It’s still a bit of a pain using Latex, instead of a program
designed for that kind of publishing, but I’m so used to the way
to do things in LaTeX, and how good the results look, that I just
do without putting several articles on the front page and flowing
the continuations onto later pages, and such features.

If there’s interest, I could upload the source so that people
could see how you do such a thing. For now, just email me if you
want it.

The major energy drain doing this was that the club isn’t any
longer used to having a newsletter come out, so a lot of the
resources I needed weren’t on the web site, or hadn’t been used,
so they had problems. For instance:

  • The new logo adopted last month wasn’t yet on the site.
  • The link to the archive of beer-related images hadn’t been
    checked since the website redesign a year or so ago.
  • The list of officers wasn’t current.

Unfortunately I ended up doing most of the work over the
weekend, when a lot of the people who could have helped with these
problems weren’t available by email. And when they returned on
Monday, it wasn’t clear that some of the newer officers really
realized that they needed to support the editor of the
newsletter. So I ended up pretty crabby
by the time I got the masthead edited to as good a state as I
could get it into.

But I think it turned out pretty well, considering. Some of
the people on the informal newsletter committee whom I asked to
help proofread said good things about how it looked. No real
feedback from the membership yet.

Garden, May 18, 2009

Time for another set of garden pictures. It changes fast this
time of year.

Alliums

[Giant Alliums]

They’re in full bloom now.

[single allium]

It’s not a good year in terms of
numbers; I often dry them and put them in vases, and last year I
had two tall winebottles full. You can see I espouse the “buy things
neat bottles from discount stores” theory of interior decorating.

[dried alliums in two tall wine bottles]

Roses

All the roses in the back yard (which is fairly shady) are
still in tight bud, but some of the ones in front (southwest
exposure) are starting to bloom.

[roses]

Angelica

The Angelica has buds.

[angelica]

Iris

Both the iris and Siberian iris are budding.

[iris]
[Siberian iris]

Rhubarb

The Rhubarb continues to look healthy, but I don’t see any new
leaves coming in. If it were later in the season, I would say
that meant I should harvest the largest of the current ones, but I
thought you didn’t harvest rhubarb until June. On the bright
side, whatever was eating the leaves might have stopped.

[rhubarb]
[no new rhubarb leaves coming]

Woodruff

This doesn’t really look much different from last week, but the
picture of the flowers last week wasn’t very good, and I wanted
one for the homebrew club newsletter.

[woodruff]

Mental Health Day

This has been a bad year in this part of the world for people
with pollen allergies. I’ve been singing O bother the
flowers that bloom in the Spring vigorously and frequently. On Thursday
night, I was congested enough to be having real trouble sleeping.

I realized on Friday morning that while I was almost certain it
was the pollen, I was actually hoping for a bit of a fever, so
that I could spend the day in bed.

Then I realized that since I work for myself, I didn’t really
need the thermometer to validate a day off, so I declared a mental
health day, and went back to bed after posting to this blog.

Two hours later, I woke up feeling refreshed and much less
congested. I took the dog on a walk, and hit the money machine
and decided to eat lunch on the patio at the Cambridge Brewing Company.

[Cambridge Brewing Company]

Then I went home and fooled around instead of practicing and
watched a lot of the baseball game and then watched other TV all
evening.

Results

Of course, what you hope about a day like that is that you’ll
wake up the next day invigorated and get lots more done than you
would have if you’d kept your nose to the grindstone both
days.

I won’t claim to have set the world on fire yesterday, but I
did some good practicing, solved a couple of problems on the blog
(note the Most Read
Posts section on the sidebar), and took the computer apart
to put back a video card.

I did spend more time watching TV than I sometimes do when I’m
getting a lot of work done, but it was TV I wanted to
watch. The Kentucky Derby had been a good enough horserace that I
wanted to watch the Preakness, and I had a movie from Neflix that
I’d been looking forward to.

Choosing a blogging platform

I started thinking about this again after my post
about how I write my posts.

I got a comment from a
reader who blogs on a platform (jekyll) that’s set up so that everyone
posts directly from their editor.

I actually started blogging on blosxom, which
is a really nice simple program. If all you want is to post your
own thoughts in a blog sort of format, I would recommend it.

However, if you want to add features, you will soon run into
problems like this,
from a pyblosxom (a close relative of blosxom) user:

I’ve just spent the whole night setting up blog comments. PyBlosxom doesn’t make it painless, sadly, more like the opposite.

First: don’t be scared by the list of comment-related plugins on the PyBlosxom site. There’s only one important plugin: comments. All others depend on it and enhance its functionality. The last three or four times I was about to add comments to my blog I got scared at step one: evaluate the available plugins. Don’t repeat my mistake!

Second, follow the instructions carefully. There’s no shortcut.

Third, fix what’s broken. Be prepared to debug the source
code. print >> sys.stderr, "message" is your friend.

Fourth, fiddle with the look (CSS and HTML).

It was when I wanted to add comments that I switched to wordpress. I figured that if you want other people
to do the testing for you, you need to sign up with a widely used
program, so that there will be lots of other people running it.

It has worked out pretty well. When I’ve run into problems,
I’ve pretty often been able to find a solution just by googling
the problem, and someone else had hit it before me and written up
the solution.

Monoculture

Of course, there’s a dark side to using the most commonly used
anything, which has been called the monoculture
problem.

If someone wants to do the work to crack a site for their own
nefarious purposes, they aren’t going to do it on some little
python program that’s used by a small fraction of the people who
wish they could post directly from emacs to their blogs. They’re
going to crack wordpress. This is the same reason why Mac and
Linux people worry a lot less about viruses and other malware than Windows people.

My blog has in fact been hijacked
several times, and when it happens, I always think of going back
to something simpler and less common.

My current solution to at least some of the hijacking problems
is to not use the wordpress uploading facilities. I’ve often
found they don’t “just work”, and to make them work, I’ve
sometimes done undesirable things that have compromised the site
security.

What’s supposed to happen is that you tell wordpress while
you’re writing a post that there’s a file you want to upload,
e.g. a picture. Then it uploads the file somewhere it knows
about, and there’s some simple syntax you can use for including it
in that post, and a slightly more complicated syntax for showing
it with a different post.

What actually happens when I do it is that is tells me I can’t
upload, and then when I finally do get it uploaded, I can’t
remember the syntax for including it. And if I have to upload 5
pictures (for instance, for the garden posts), I have to go
through this for each one of them.

So what I do instead these days is just upload the pictures
into a directory on my site (not under wordpress) and refer to
them by their normal URL’s. This would be a bit more typing if I
did it all for each picture, but since I’m in emacs, I just type
the URL once, and modify the filename for the next picture.

Organizing

I had been thinking that I might be moving towards not being an
organizer for a while. The thing that started this line of
thought was the number of places I’ve been (including NEFFA without bringing flyers for the Cantabile
Band.

But this week has refined that perception. I’ve done two
competent pieces of organizing (see below), and so I think the
problem with the Cantabile Band is that at this point in its
life it’s starting to need a different kind of organizing than
that flyer represents, so I haven’t been feeling like printing
off the flyer and taking it places.

Meeting

The first piece of organizing I did this week was the next
condo meeting. This could have been a pretty routine thing, not
requiring any special organizer gifts. But I decided to address a
long-term problem of the association: a lawyer bought a unit in
the building 15 years ago, and he read the rules to say that
nobody who wasn’t an owner should come to the owners’ meetings.
This has effectively disfranchised the one absentee owner, who
would have liked to send her property manager as a
representative. There are also
units where the owner has a roommate or partner who isn’t named
on the deed but who might be a good person to do some of the condo work. Since it’s only an eight unit building, and
there are always some owners who aren’t willing or able to
contribute, having even one unit that could be contributing and
isn’t makes extra work for the people who are.

I have in the past tried to get the rule clarified so that
owners could send representatives and roommates could come, but haven’t gotten any
support for that.

So my strategy this time was to concede the point about owners’
meetings being only for owners. The rules require one owners’
meeting a year, for the purpose of electing 4 trustees, who have
the power to make most of the decisions without necessarily
consulting the other owners. We had that meeting in April.

So instead of organizing an owners’ meeting, I organized a
meeting of the trustees, to which other residents and owners’
representatives are invited to come. I got all the other
trustees to buy into doing it this way, so that if the lawyer
decides to complain about it, I should be able to depend on some
support.

Newsletter

The other piece of organizing (still not completed) was to
revive the newsletter of the Homebrew Club.

This used to be an important organizing tool for the club,
which came out every month, and if you were trying to organize
an event, you knew you had to write it up for the editor (who
knew he had to twist your arm to write it up before the
deadline).

The club went through a rough patch a couple of years ago, and
got out of the habit of recruiting an newsletter editor every
month. We’ve
has been adding new members pretty regularly over the last year
or so. But of course, they aren’t members who know about
writing up their proposed events for the newsletter, or
volunteering to be the editor and twisting the arms of people
who were organizing events.

So we’ve had a committee to revive the newsletter, and I
foolishly volunteered to be the new editor. I figured this week
would be a good week to do it, because all my performing
commitments would be over, and it wouldn’t yet be time for the
Boston Early Music
Festival.

I’d done what used to be the normal thing, of sending out a
request for articles as soon as I got the editor job, and
reiterating the request a few days before the deadline. That
didn’t produce very many articles.

I was feeling like I might be getting too old for this
business, because there was a meeting last week that I just
didn’t have the energy to go to. Or rather, if I’d saved the
energy for that, I would have done less practicing for the recital, and that was the priority.

But yesterday I looked at what I had (the original deadline had
been Monday), and wrote a post nagging the people whose stuff
was still missing, and for some reason, this turned out to be a
better description of what the newsletter could be than my much
more general request for articles.

So I now have several articles that I hadn’t explicitly
solicited, and the promise of a couple more by tomorrow or
Sunday.

Band

I’ll write up why the Cantabile Band probably needs different
organizing now than it did a couple of years ago later.

Wendy and Lucy

This was the most upsetting movie I’ve seen in a while. I
remember hearing a story on the radio about the R rating it got
seeming inappropriately “adult”. The story’s point of view was that if kids can
handle sex and violence, they should be able to handle a story
about a car breaking down.

I’ll avoid spoilers, as had the reviews I had read before I saw
the movie, because it would be a different movie if the viewer
knew the ending in advance.

But I think the reviewer who complained about the R rating
may have missed how violent (including a rape scene) the movie really
was. The rape scene is actually quite tame compared with the
scene where Wendy’s taken away to the police station, leaving her
dog (Lucy) in a clearly inappropriate place. This is what leads
to her having to sleep in the woods without the protection of the
dog, and hence to the rape.

So not only did I spend a good deal of time explaining to Sunny that what
happens in the movie isn’t going to happen to us, but I’ve also
been thinking about all the white-collar violence that’s been done
to me that really did hurt more than the couple of minor assaults
I’ve been victim of.

The most recent one was the crabby neighbor who lived next door
to Bonnie, who decided (without having seen the inside of the
house) that the way we were approching cleaning it up for sale was
the wrong thing to do. She interfered several times with the way
we left trash out, and probably reported our “violations” (putting
trash cans out at 6PM instead of waiting until 10) to the town.

I can understand a town needing to have limits on how much
trash can be left on the sidewalk for how long. But in this case,
the reason we had so much trash to leave was that Bonnie had been
too sick to be taking it out every week for quite a long time, so
in my opinion, they could have cut us a little slack.

Luckily, Bonnie turned out to also have some nice neighbors,
who asked what they could do to help, so I asked them if they’d
take the trash out after 10. They were surprised that that was
necessary, since apparently it isn’t a rule that’s enforced unless
someone complains (hence my theory about the crabby neighbor), but
they were very helpful when I assured them it was a real
problem.

Anyway, none of this is anything like as bad as losing your dog
because of an encounter with the police, but it really does make
you shake with rage and frustration for at least as long as some
actual violence.

To get back to the movie, it’s very well done, but watch it
when you’re prepared to be upset.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001EUSYIA&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr