Author: Laura Conrad

Site was hacked

If you’re someone who noticed that the site was down for half
an hour or so this morning, I apologize. The site had been hacked
and I had to restore it to a version without drug ads all over the
version fed to text browsers.

One thing I don’t know how to back up is the widgets settings.
This is the things in the right sidebar that help you find the
posts most people read, or the ones about knitting, or how to
subscribe in an RSS feed.

I have most of the ones that are important to me back, but if
there’s something you like that’s gone missing, let me know.

Future plans

When people give you advice about how to avoid this problem,
they always say to make sure you have the latest version of the
software. I have in fact been quite conscientious about upgrading
laymusic.org to the
latest version of wordpress, and there’s a real possibility that
the hacking happened on the upgrade yesterday morning.

Certainly one of the problems that has meant very few posts
recently is a bug introduced in WordPress 3.1.1 and not fixed in
3.1.2.

I found this bug very shortly after upgrading laymusic.org, so
I haven’t “upgraded” serpentpublications.org, and it wasn’t hacked.

So I’m afraid the moral of the story may be that you shouldn’t
use WordPress, not because it isn’t good software with a large and
active community behind it, but because so many people use it that the hackers have
a large incentive to figure out how to hack it.

So if anyone has actual experience with one of the
alternatives, I’d be interested in hearing about it. Drupal and
Joomla are two that I’m thinking of looking into.

Two reminders

  1. If you’re at NEFFA this
    evening (Saturday, April 16, 2011), you should come to the Ravenscroft
    Workshop     in the Middle School Room 108 at 9 PM. If you
    weren’t planning to go, you should think about coming
    anyway.
  2. This Tuesday, April 19, and the following Tuesday, April 26,
    the meeting is limited to people who are going to be performing
    at the Walk for
    Hunger    . If you’re a dropin member of the group, we look
    forward to seeing you again in May.

News of the week of March 1, 2011

Meeting report

We played:

  • Charlton, A bouquet of Inventions
  • lots of Ravenscroft

Schedule

  • Dropin meetings on Tuesday at 7:45 PM at my place
    until:
  • NEFFA worshop, 9 PM, Saturday, April 16
  • Tuesday, April 19 and 26, rehearsals for Walk for Hunger
    program
  • May 1, Walk for Hunger performance
  • After that, return to dropin meetings on Tuesdays.

Performing

I can’t get anyone in for free any more, but if you’re at NEFFA on Saturday, please come
play and sing Ravenscroft with us, and bring all your friends.

We have six people signed up for the Walk for Hunger — we
could do with one or two more, especially if they sing bass and/or
play a bass instrument, including recorder. We’ll be doing mostly
Ravenscroft
and Holborne,
with a few of our favorite May or Spring songs. I’m only
requiring two rehearsals this year, but if you want to play with
us, you should let me know, and start coming on Tuesdays when you
can make it.

News of the week of February 22, 2011

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

Because the Walk for Hunger program will be piggybacking on the
NEFFA workshop (which has to be accessible to dropins), we can be more liberal about when we turn from a
dropin group into a performing group this year than we have been in the recent past.

We will be spending March and the first part of April largely
working on the repertoire for those two events, but you are
welcome to drop in on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place if you’re interested in that repertoire, even
if you think you won’t be able to make either event.

However, see below.

The last two Tuesdays in April will be rehearsals for the Walk
for Hunger, and restricted to performers in that event.

However, see below.

Walk for Hunger

In order to plan the repertoire for the Walk for Hunger, I do
need to know who is planning to come. Here are the
requirements:

  • You should be available for the performance, from roughly
    noon to 3 PM on Sunday, May 1.
  • You should be able to make a substantial number of the
    Tuesday rehearsals in March and April, and both the April 19 and
    the April 26 rehearsals. I’d also really like to schedule an
    outdoor, daylight rehearsal, but that’s been difficult in the
    past, and will probably continue to be so.

So let me know if you’re interested in playing. It’s probably
the only chance you get to play for an audience in the 10’s of thousands.

Howl

This
movie, about the poem Howl and it’s
connections to the life of its author and the still-ongoing debate
over free speech, was better than I expected. Mostly because the parts I
liked best weren’t discussed in any of the reviews I read or
heard.

There are three intertwined threads:

  • James Franco reading a transcript of an interview Ginsberg
    gave during the obscenity trial.
  • An all-star cast performing the transcript of the obscenity
    trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Howl and
    other poems    .
  • James Franco reading Howl as voiceover to an
    often marvelous animation of the poem.

It’s the last of those I really enjoyed. I also enjoyed the
DVD extra film of Ginsberg himself reading Howl and
a few other poems. He wasn’t a professional actor, and he
couldn’t get through something as long as Howl
without making mistakes. (Franco probably needed retakes, too.)
But he had the rhythms of the poem in his head in a way that
Franco wasn’t even trying to. If you like the poem at all, I
think you’ll want to hear both versions.


http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0042U9B3G&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

News of the week of February 8, 2011

We played:

Schedule

For the month of February, we will be having dropin meetings as
usual, at 7:45PM on Tuesdays at my place.

We have again been asked to play at the Walk for Hunger this
year, and I have said we will.

In March and April, the meetings will be limited to people who
want to perform with us, at either or both of our NEFFA workshop on Saturday April
16 or the Walk for
Hunger on May 1.

Sunny

For those of you who were worried about him on Tuesday, he is
indeed quite sick. Yesterday, he was refusing both food and
water, and needing major assistance to get up stairs, and I was
sure this was the end.

He isn’t out of the woods yet, but he’s been getting up more,
and drinking water and chicken broth and at least smelling regular
food. He walked up the stairs to the front door, and needed only
a little help with the stairs up to the first floor.

In any case, we are all mortal, and Sunny looks like he will
demonstrate this before most of the rest of us do, so if anyone
feels the need to say, “Goodbye,” I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you.

I won’t clutter up this list with more reports on Sunny’s
condition, but if you’re interested in hearing regularly, let me
know.

News of the week of January 18, 2011

Note new format of the subject/title. Someone said it was stupid
to call something a report on the meeting and then include other
things besides what happened at the meeting. So you are warned
that there may be other things at the bottom of the email besides
what happened at the meeting. Most of you probably already knew
that.

Report on the meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will meet as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.

Starting in March, the meetings will be limited to people who
want to perform with us, but until then they will be open to
people who want to drop in.

Other events

There are several concerts this weekend which include “our”
repertoire.

Saturday I’ll be going to the Viols and
Friends Dowland concert at 8 PM in Lindsey Chapel, First
Church in Cambridge, Congregational.

Exultemus
is doing a program of Music for Voices and Viols by Byrd, Gibbons,
and Tomkins on both Saturday and Sunday.

Kindle, Wine, DRM

I finally broke down and bought a Kindle book. I don’t approve
of this behavior, but it was a book (Among Others) by a writer (Jo Walton) I’ve enjoyed
reading free (on tor.com and from
the library) quite a bit, and it was well reviewed by a number of
people I trust. And it hasn’t yet appeared on Kobo, and my account on Barnes and Noble is so well protected I can’t log into
it. (I seem to have used some odd password, and when you ask them
to let you change it, they don’t give you enough tries to guess
the capitalization and punctuation you used for the city of your
birth before disabling the account.)

I have yet to succeed in breaking the DRM, although I have
hopes that there’s some combination of the tools in this
article which will do it for me.

But thanks to this page, I
have KindleForPC working under wine. The lib32nss-mdns package is
neither present nor necessary on Ubuntu, and everything else
Just works.

So it isn’t quite the same as buying a book yet, but I can read
it on either a linux laptop or my Android phone.


http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=076532153X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Lemon Pizza

I can’t find the recipe for this I ran into on the internet,
but I think all they did was sautée the lemons (sliced very thin)
and garlic in olive oil and use it as topping.

I haven’t been quite that minimalist either of the times I’ve
made this — both times I added some thinly sliced onions and put
parmesan cheese on top.

The one I liked better, I added a teaspoon or so of honey to
the sautée and cooked it long enough that the onions were starting
to caramelize.

That time, I had a Portuguese vinho verde in the
refrigerator, which was exactly the right level of sweet, tart,
and lemony to go with the pizza.

I got Cooking
for Geeks for Christmas, and one of its recommendations for
pizza in a home oven is to cook the crust for 5 minutes before
adding the topping. I’ve been doing that, and it does indeed make
for a better baked crust.


http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0596805888&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Tooth and Claw

This
book by Jo Walton is a Victorian novel set on a world where
the biology actually supports the assumptions about gender
roles embodied in the Victorian novel. The characters are all
dragons, and dragons have a sexual dimorphism such that
females have hands and males have claws.

Walton acknowledges that she took the plot from Anthony
Trollope’s Framley
Parsonage. In both books, the plot is a bit contrived —
the antagonist goes on fighting the protagonist until the
right number of pages has happened, and then gives in. This
makes the 300 page twentyfirst century book more readable than
the 400 page nineteenth century one, but they both describe
societies pretty alien to the modern reader.

If you enjoy both nineteenth century novels and world-building
science fiction, you will love this book. The electronic
version is on sale for $2.99 for a limited time.


http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0041T4RDM&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

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