Author: Laura Conrad

Report on the June 8, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We’ll be having dropin meetings as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45
PM, at my
place for the next four weeks.

It’s starting to be vacation time — it would help my planning
if people who come regularly would let me know if they know for
sure they aren’t going to be there.

I’m going to be out of town for the July 13 meeting, so we can
either take that week off, or someone else can run and/or host
that meeting.

Sweater for Teddy

I’ve been reading Knitting
Ganseys, and one of the suggestions (with pattern) is
that you make a small sweater, for a doll or a teddy bear, that
uses some of the techniques that are a little hard to envision
when you don’t actually have yarn and needles in your hands.

So I made the pattern sweater for my sister’s teddy bear:

[Teddy in his new sweater]

Teddy in his new sweater

Here’s a shot with a better view of the pattern (the back and
the front are the same:

[back]

Back, showing pattern detail

Doing a small sweater is a good idea — there were several
things about the pattern that I understood better doing them than
reading about them, and on the small sweater it didn’t take very
long, and wasn’t so difficult to rip out a few rows if you got
something wrong.

For instance, knitting the shoulder strap is a lot like turning
the heel on a sock, and it’s hart to see what’s going to happen
until you do it:

[arm detail]

detail of arm top and shoulder strap

There are some conventions for making sweaters for humans about
things like what percent of the chest stitches you want at the
neck. They don’t all work for teddy bears, so I had to take out
the decreased neck gusset because I couldn’t get the sweater over
Teddy’s head. It was still a tight fit even with no decreasing —
if I were doing it again, I’d leave more stitches at the neck and
fewer at the shoulders.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0934026858&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I seem to have the problems on the laptop worked out about as
well as I expect to for the near future, so I’ll probably be
installing it on the desktop soon.

On the other hand, there were more of them than I would expect,
and there was less support for working through them than I would
have hoped for.

So I still recommend Ubuntu, on the grounds of the highly
supportive and large community, but if you hear of people
abandoning Ubuntu in droves for something else, you might want to
consider leaving with them.

Here’s the list of problems I hit with pointers to the
solutions:

  • I installed an early beta version, and expected there to be
    some problems, but just as the things like the cursor going away
    when you closed the lid were starting to be fixed, they released
    a kernel version that caused my laptop to boot to a black
    screen. This is still not fixed in the official version — I’m
    working around it by using an unreleased kernel version. The
    details are <a
    href="here
    and <a
    href="”>here.
  • I had been using wicd instead of network-manager, since I
    never figured out how to configure my wired connection with
    network-manager. On 10.04, there’s a problem with the wicd
    configuration. The symptom is that when you boot, although the
    networking is configured, dns doesn’t work. If you disconnect
    and then reconnect the wired configuration via the wicd GUI, it
    works fine. I never figured out
    how to fix it — I’m working around it by uninstalling
    both network-manager and wicd and writing
    /etc/network/interfaces the way I want it. This will be a
    nuisance if I ever take the laptop anywhere else and want to use
    a wireless configuration, but since the battery is dead, I
    probably won’t. If you just want to use DHCP and a wireless
    configuration, 10.04 seems to work exactly the way you want it
    to out of the box.
  • A relatively minor problem was that the xmltv underpinnings
    of freeguide were incompatible with the freeguide distributed
    with 10.04. So a program that worked fine on 9.04 upstairs,
    wouldn’t download listings on the downstairs laptop. I’m
    working around this by installing the xmltv stuff from Debian
    unstable, as explained here.

So the upshot is that I seem to have a working laptop, over a
month after the official release of 10.04. But it’s by no means
by way of a completely standard install. And this is a system
that really doesn’t have to do much. So I’m still nervous about
putting it on my desktop. I’m sure I’ll get around to it before
they stop doing support for 9.04, but I’m going to be very wary
about installing another non-LTS version.

Report on the June 1, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

For the near future, we will be having dropin meetings on
Tuesdays, beginning at 7:45 PM, at my place.

Other events

On Saturday, June 12, John Tyson’s annual student recital will
take place between 9:30 AM and 1 PM at the chapel at First
Congregational Church, Cambridge. It’s a good place to hear
lots of recorder playing, much of it quite good. I’ll be
playing some Renaissance Bicinia with John, and a Pixinguinha
Choros with my sister.

How to find a movie

I’d always thought I’d seen and enjoyed Bertolucci’s 1900.
It was in the late 1970’s, it was a long Italian movie
with gorgeous pictures of the Italian countryside and a marxist
plot, so nothing I read about 1900 disabused
me of the idea that I’d seen it.

As I said, I remembered enjoying it, so when they put out a
special collectors’ edition with restored footage that made it
even longer, I ordered it from Netflix.

I was quite surprised to find that 1900 was
not the movie I had seen. There were scenes I would
certainly have remembered if I’d seen them, and I didn’t, and
there were scenes I remembered vividly from the movie I
had seen that just weren’t there.

I tried searching Amazon,
Netflix, and IMDB for the movie I had seen, to
no avail.

Then I read a mention of Rotten Tomatoes as a
place where movies were reviewed, and up popped Tree
of Wooden Clogs, which seems to have been the movie.

So I’m putting that on my netflix list, now.

For the record, the scenes I remembered were the grandfather
gleefully implementing his secret process for growing the earliest
tomatoes in town, cutting down a tree to make his grandson a pair
of wooden shoes so he could go to school, and the whole family
being evicted as penalty for having cut down the tree to make the
clogs. So my search term was something like “italian tomatoes
wooden clogs”, and it worked on Rotten Tomatoes but not on the
other places.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000IHYXGM&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=B0001Z935W&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the May 25 meeting

We played:

Schedule

For the near future, we will be having dropin meetings on
Tuesdays, beginning at 7:45 PM, at my place.

Margot suite from Lowell concert

Margot labourez les vignes, by
Arcadelt and Lassus
was our first act closer. We played the Arcadelt on a 4-foot
recorder consort, then sang it, and then played it with the loud
band, with cornetto, fiddle, 5-string fiddle, and serpent.

Then we sang the rest of the story (underlay completely
editorial) to the Lassus setting in two verses, and then played a
slow, wistful version on 8-foot recorders.

Here’s an
MP3 of the whole thing, with what I remember as some fairly
awkward choreography between verses edited out by our recording
engineer Ishmael Stefanov.

The Map that Changed the World:

I read this
book
because I had enjoyed The
Professor and the Madman,, by the same author, about two of the people who
produced the Oxford English Dictionary.

My judgement that they would be similar books was correct, but
I didn’t enjoy the history of the invention of stratigraphy as
much as the history of the OED. Maybe because I understand
dictionaries better than I do stratigraphy, or maybe because Simon
Winchester explains them better.

Certainly more pictures would have helped. If you’ve read
about geology, you’ve seen the pictures of layers of rock with
different fossils in the different layers, but some pictures of
what William Smith actually saw in the coal mines and canal excavations would have
helped me imagine what he was actually doing.

I guess this book irritated me the same way (although in lesser
degree) that Soul
of a new machine did. There’s a writer who’s honestly trying
to describe someone who feels passionately about something that
doesn’t even interest most people in the writer’s world, and it
ends up sounding a bit condescending even though I’m sure that’s
not intended.

That being said, there is a lot of detail in here about the
relationship between the economics of late 18th to early 19th
century England, and why that produced the science of geology as
we know it, even with all the religious opposition to scientific
investigation of the history of the earth. It was because digging canals and
coal mines was the exciting technology of the time that people who
were excited about such things got to see and study the different layers.


http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0061767905&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=B000FCKM7E&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=0316491977&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the May 19, 2010, meeting

We played:

Schedule

For the near future, we will be having dropin meetings on
Tuesdays, beginning at 7:45 PM, at my place.

Cantabile returns to being a dropin group, after gala performance

[Cantabile Band: WFH 2010]

The Walk For Hunger, May 2, 2010. Left to Right: Barney
Gage, Ishmael Stefanov, Anne Kazlauskas, Aram Hollman, Richard
Schmeidler, Laura Conrad

The Cantabile Band will return to being a dropin group on
Tuesday, May 18. The meeting will begin at 7:45 PM, at the usual
place.

If you want to see what we’ve been doing since we last had
dropin meetings, you should come to our performance
at 1:30 PM, Saturday, May 15, 2010, at the ALL Gallery
246 Market St., Lowell. The performance is free and open to the
public. There will be light refreshments after the performance.

[Paul Ukleja: WFH 2010]

The Walk For Hunger, May 2, 2010. Paul Ukleja