I had trouble with the blosxom writeback plugin instructions, but I
got some help from this
page.
Anyway, I’ve been wanting to see if people want to comment on what
I write here, so have fun writing back.
I’ll test it here for a while, and figure out how to format the
writeback pages, before I put it up on the laymusic site.
I’ve been using the camera for quite a while without getting the
pictures off. So I finally did, and put them in the appropriate
galleries:
The concert was all seventeenth century Dutch songs to do with
sailing. The 7-member group had three singers (Soprano, Tenor, and
Baritone), a recorder player, a violin, a bass viol and a lute, who
was also the director. Everybody sang along on the choruses.
That much singing of pretty but often uncomplicated music in a
foreign language could have gotten tedious, but I felt the
arrangements and “staging” were varied enough that I wasn’t bored.
Two songs were sung in English translation. In my opinion these
were among the most effective of the evening. Some leaving audience
members were heard complaining about the slightly accented English,
but I thought the diction was superb, and the songs were much more
effective for not requiring the audience to read along.
The lyrics to one piece were written to be sung to a psalm tune
that has a 6-part polyphonic setting by Sweelinck, so they did it that
way. The result was interesting, but probably not what the sailors
did on deck after a hard day in the rigging.
The instrumental backup was superb, and most of the singing was
very committed to the subject matter. I wish my group could find as
effective a way of presenting our drinking songs.
What was probably last concert of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education
Renaissance Ensemble took place before a standing room only crowd.
(There were only a few more people than usual, but there were fewer
chairs than usual.)
Last Sunday’s dress rehearsal must have been the kind that leads to
a good performance — almost everything was better in performance than
in rehearsal. I’m told my divisions on Suzanne un jour was an
exception, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t true. There might have been
a few things that worked better on Sunday, but I’m sure the
performance as a whole was more comfortable after a few more times
getting through it without falling apart.
In any case, nothing was a total disaster; a lot of the rough edges
that had been glaring on Sunday were fixed by Wednesday, and we
recovered from the new rough edges that had never happened before with
a fair amount of aplomb.
The cornetto playing is what I can do without warmup these days. I
was expecting the pieces to be easy, because neither of them has a Bb,
both have an easy range, and they were next to each other. However, in the Michael Altenburg the
Cantus Firmus has two pages of rest in a 3-page score, and the viols
needed to tune between the pieces. I should of course just insist
on brass players equal warmup time with the viol
tuning time, but I haven’t managed that yet. Another problem was that
the director asked for crisper articulation on the repeated notes in
the Altenburg, and I haven’t figured out how to do that well yet. The
repeated notes in “Come Live with Me” seem quite separate and much
prettier to me than the Altenburg ones, so maybe I should just ignore
direction like that.
My singing was almost entirely in the tenor range, since I have the
lowest voice of the 5 female singers. I was annoyed that she gave the
“Come live with me” solo to the baritone, because it was more
comfortable for him than for me as a mezzo, but it would have been
even more comfortable than that for me as a tenor. Anyway, I managed
to not push the low F’s and to sound pretty good on everything above
that. I blew the entrance on the C above middle C in Sumer is icumen
in (the last piece), though. I think if people want an exposed
entrance on c, they should give you a note above G some time before
that.
I got lots of compliments on the “Suzanne un jour” divisions. I
guess they were good. There are easier pieces to do divisions on.
And doing them with a lute player who takes 6 weeks to simplify his
part to what he can play in an 8-week term doesn’t give you much
rehearsal time.
The serpent playing was quite good. And the microphone
configuration I found with the borrowed mic last time produces better
balance with my mic, too.
Update: The pictures are in the serpent.laymusic.org
gallery.
The calendar listing is on the
BRS calendar.
The report on the last concert is on
my blog. It now points to the audio recording by Dennis Ehn.
This program is a bit more ambitious than the last one, and should
be fun if we avoid disasters. There’s lots of good May music.
There’s a Loyset Compère hymn to the Virgin Mary that takes advantage
of the wonderful acoustic of the CCAE exercise studio. The serpent is
getting good at doing bass on dance music. There are two settings of
“Petite Camusette”, and 3 of “Suzanne un Jour”. And the program ends
with everyone bursting into song on “Sumer is icumen in”.
On a serious note, the Cambridge
Center is probably going to cancel both this class and the Baroque
Ensemble class. If you’ve been to the concerts, or enjoyed listening
to the recordings of them, you might want to write Jim Smith, the
director, and tell him you think that decision should be reconsidered.
Having tested OpenZaurus 3.5.3 and found that for my purposes it
has gone backwards from OZ 3.5.2, I decided to go back to TheKompany
and let OpenZaurus mature without me for a while.
The backup program is quite good, so there’s very little work
involved in going back, if I decide to try something different and
don’t like the new thing. And there’s more software built for that
generation ROM than there is for the OZ ones. I believe that someone
can run the software with the compatibility libraries, but I haven’t
been able to.
My Speakeasy DSL line went
down sometime during the day of Sunday, May 1. It finally came back up at
about 2 PM on Monday, May 8.
It was a little bit hard to get sympathy from people once they
realized that my phone was working and I had a dialup line for
internet access. But really, a lot of things I do depend on having my
not only the high speed, but the static IP address. Here’s the
list I emailed a friend on wednesday of the horrible week:
DSL runs on the same technology as the telephone system, so you
would expect it to take the same amount of time to fix if the line
gets broken.
My Verizon telephone service goes down every year or two and
usually takes between two and three business days to fix. This is
longer than you want to be without phone service, especially when it
happens over a weekend, but is a lot shorter than the six business
days and one and a half weekends it took them to fix the Speakeasy DSL
outage.
The obviously relevant difference is that when my phone breaks, I
can call Verizon directly, explain that if they need access to the
phone closet I need to ask my neighbor for the key, and they tell me
when (within one day) the repair person will come and I get the key.
When the Speakeasy DSL broke, I called Speakeasy, they placed a
trouble ticket with COVAD, which placed a repair call with Verizon. I
have a log of all the “communication” that
happened between Speakeasy and Covad. From my point of view:
Another possibly relevant difference between getting Speakeasy DSL
fixed and getting a Verizon phone line fixed is that it may well be
part of Verizon’s business plan for selling Verizon DSL to make fixing
rival DSL’s difficult. If Speakeasy had fixed their system so that it
was clearly Verizon losing relevant information instead of Sepakeasy
or Covad not transmitting it, they would then be in a position to make
this claim through the legal system, and I would be happy to assist
them.
However, I think if Verizon’s lawyers got hold of the log of this
trouble ticket, they wouldn’t have any trouble claiming that they
weren’t responsible for this delay.
Originally posted to speakeasy.net.
I’ve just been through two experiences with the Speakeasy/Verizon
interface in the Boston area, and find the results disquieting.
What I was hoping to accomplish was to get Speakeasy naked DSL,
transfer my land line phone number to my cell phone, and stop paying
Verizon for the POTS that I don’t use very much, which breaks for
several days every year or two.
I called to order the naked DSL, and was told there was no problem; it
would take two install appointments and $6 more per month and a $99
installation fee. So I signed up, and COVAD came and installed a
line, and Speakeasy sent me a new modem.
The log for the install reflected that the line had been provisioned,
but there was a problem with the voltage.
After I pinged Speakeasy about the problem a week later, they called back
and said they were cancelling the order, because it seemed that my CO
didn’t have the right equipment to provide naked DSL.
Meanwhile, my current DSL line broke, and I was using dialup for over
a week. The details about this outage are at this
entry.
For this purpose, note that during the DSL outage I was using the Verizon POTS
line for several hours a day for dialup access to the internet.
So this means that not only can I not cancel the POTS line completely,
I’m nervous about even going to the minimal charge (3-4 times the
$6 that the naked DSL would have cost, had I been able to get it).
How do other people deal with this? I know there are ways to use a
cell phone as a modem for internet access; is there one that works
particularly well at a cheap price point in the Boston area? My
current service is T-Mobile with a pretty generic Motorolla phone, but
if I were saving money per month over my current Verizon + T-mobile
service I could afford to buy a better phone or change cell phone
service.
Is there any possible way to reverse the decision about the naked DSL?
It seems like a lot of all these problems may be Verizon’s business
plan to sell their own DSL — if someone threatened to expose this
(they’d need better cooperation from Speakeasy than I’ve been
getting), could the CO equipment suddenly become adequate?
It looks like the only widely-used broadband access in Boston that
doesn’t depend on Verizon is Comcast cable broadband. If you don’t
also pay for cable TV, this costs roughly what speakeasy DSL does for
less service (I actually use the ability to run servers and have a
static IP). But does anyone have Covad plus cellphone working with a
LINUX system for a noticeably lower price than I’m currently paying
for Verizon + t-mobile + speakeasy?
I was surprised at how good it was. He (Robert Macnamara) says a lot more things that
pacifists would say than you would expect from what he’s spent his
life doing.
Another unusual thing was that the “deleted scenes” section of the
DVD was about as good, and in some places more interesting, than the
regular video. It’s about another hour, so leave 2.5 hours for
watching the DVD rather than 1.5.
Flashed fine.
Attempted to set default font to larger size and was unable to run
the console. So it’s back at a 7 point font that’s completely
illegible for anyone over 40.
Attempted to run route commands that worked with 3.5.2 and get
device not found error. Will look at website to see if I did
something before that.
No, doing what the website says in the order I’m sure I did it last
time is not establishing USB connectivity. Ping is hanging and ssh is
saying:
ssh: connect to host zink port 22: No route to host
So I guess it’s busted, since I can’t read the console on the
zaurus and I can’t log in from the desktop. I’m trying to log a bug
on the console, but I’m having trouble reproducing the problem — now
it isn’t crashing, but it also isn’t changing the font. Update: it crashes if you change the font in the
default Settings => Appearance, but just ignores it if you do it in
the terminal settings.
I’ll see if the mailing list can help.
Update, May 12: No response from the mailing list.
I have to decide which distro to reflash from before I finish the
gothic romance novel (Mary Stewart’s “The Ivy Tree”) I’m reading and
want to get back to the Trollope Parliamentary novels. It looks like
going back to theKompany makes more sense than going back to OZ
3.5.2. TheKompany doesn’t work as well in landscape as OZ does, but
I don’t do that very often, and I think if I had Opera working
(theoretically possible on OZ but I never managed it) I would actually use
browsing. Also, being able to contribute the the OZ project pretty
much requires running the current version, so going back to 3.5.2
isn’t going to accomplish that.
LayMusic.org 