Category: Uncategorized

“The Baroque Cycle” by Neal Stephenson

You would expect a 3000 page novel about the men who invented
natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries to occasionally get tedious, as characters explain the
difference between Leibnitzian Monads and atoms to each other.

It sometimes does, but it’s well-written enough that you care
enough about the characters to put up with it. (Think about the
long essays about the nature of history in War and
Peace — you keep reading to find out what happens to
Pierre and Natasha anyway.)

Actually, the comparison with War
and Peace isn’t far-fetched at all — I’m sure
Tolstoy’s intended audience for his disaster novel was
interested in the question of how history would have been
different if Napoleon hadn’t had a cold at the battle of
Borodino. Neal Stephenson’s audience is interested in how
alchemy turned into modern physics. Both audiences want to read
about the mud and stench on the battlefields as well as the
high-level strategy and tactics that led to the battle.

The action of this novel takes place on 5 continents and
numerous islands; the characters vary in social standing from
slaves to King Louis XIV of France; they invent not only
ingenious methods for winning battles, but the modern banking
system and long-distance shipping; the details of organization
of the places they live, from palaces to jail cells, are
meticulously described.

In other words, there’s plenty of material for a 3000 page
novel, so if you’re interested in at least half of it, you’ll
enjoy reading it.

I criticized
the ebook preparation a couple of weeks ago. I want to pick one
nit about the writing.

The typical bodice-ripper, with just the stuff about eighteenth
century life that everybody knows, lasts about 250 pages, and I
don’t often get through even that much. In order to justify
3000 pages, the reader has to really believe in the
meticulousness of the research. Not that all the writing has to
be in the style of the eighteenth century, but the willing
suspension of disbelief becomes harder when the author is unable
to resist glaring anachronisms like this:

Again, Mother, almost the whole point of mistresses is
that they may be hot-swapped.

I’m sure that character would have used current technological
jargon in gossiping about court liaisons, but Stephenson really
should have resisted twentyfirst century technological jargon.

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http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1400079985&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Musick’s Recreation: Seventeenth-century English music for lute and viol

I went to this concert last night because a friend had an extra
ticket. It’s the first concert on this
series, and I recommend you check them out. You can catch the
same concerts at
the Somerville Museum.

Carol Lewis, viols, and Chris
Henriksen are married, and have been performing together for
several decades. It’s a nice combination, because both
instruments can be used either solo or as accompaniment, and both
performers are good at both roles.

Last night’s concert was about the lute and viol music people
in London were playing during the tumultuous years of the early Stuarts,
the Commonwealth under Cromwell, and the Restoration. Chris said
he’d done a lot of music from this period before, but always
looked at it from the point of view of what was happening at
court. This time, he realized that London was at that time one of
the few places in Europe (Hamburg was another) where there was a
thriving music scene independant of the court, with nobles and
even well-off commoners paying professional performers and
composers for lessons on viol, lute and guitar.

A lot of these same composers also wrote for recorder, so I was
familiar with a lot of the names. One revelation was a composer
named Thomas Mace (ca. 1612 — 1684), who wrote one of the
latest lute method books, Musicke’s Monument in
1676. The Saraband that Chris played from that was
the jazziest piece on the program.

I really enjoyed the music; both performers are very good;
I wish they got a slightly more animated audience. I couldn’t see
anyone else laughing at the jokes in this extremely witty music,
and several audience members were clearly asleep.

More on squash pudding

I’m roasting squash so that I can make a squash
pudding. Squash is one of the things I get a lot of from my
farm share. I’m going
to try baking it in mini-muffin tins with paper cups, to make it a
bit more like finger food.

I have to bring something to a friend’s house this afternoon.
She’s been having surgery and other therapy for cancer, so she
hasn’t been getting to all the singing events that are normally a
big part of her life, so she’s invited people over. She says:

George and I will provide
beverages; we’d be very happy if you would bring snacks. (Bear in mind
that because of my condition this will be an abbreviated event, so
don’t bring anything elaborate. We just need something to munch on.)

Unfortunately, except for carrots, the farm share hasn’t been
giving me much finger food. It was better in the summer, with
cucumbers and green beans. I thought about squash muffins, but
I’ve really been enjoying the pudding, so I wanted to make
that.

I figure if I bring plastic spoons the individual squash
puddings in the muffin cups won’t be very much more trouble than muffins.

Getting ready for winter

We’ve been having mild, September-like October weather, but the
last couple of days have been the dank, November-like October.

So last night, with threats of snow in the forecast, I brought
in the plants from the fire escape, and this morning I filled
the humidifier.

I thought you’d like to see some of the plants.

The basil is from a branch from the farm share that grew
roots before I could use it, so I planted it in the windowbox.

[basil in bloom]

The rosemary I just bought at the store, but it’s done well in
the windowbox. I hope it likes being indoors until Spring.

[rosemary]

Some winters here are mild enough that rosemary survives
outside, but of course then it isn’t as easy to go pick a
sprig.

I haven’t turned the heat on yet, so it’s a little early for
the humidifier, but even if I don’t turn my heat on, the
neighbors might turn theirs on and make the air drier.

Hooking up surround sound, part two

When I left this
saga yesterday at this time, I had two main problems:

  • How to connect the subwoofer? This turned out to be pretty
    easy. The connection labeled “subwoofer” on the new receiver is
    just an RCA cable, and should go to the connection labeled “from
    mono out” on the subwoofer, which I hadn’t been using so I’d
    forgotten about it. So the real problem was finding an RCA
    cable long enough and realizing that I needed to flip the switch
    to tell the subwoofer it was connected via the RCA cable and not
    the speaker wires.
  • How to connect the TV set to the receiver so that surround
    sound comes out of the TV and into the receiver? This turned
    out to be very complicated.

I had what I thought were several of the right kind of cable,
but they all turned out to be TOS-Link to Mini-TOS-link, and I
needed a TOS-link to TOS-link cable. I bought one at
MicroCenter on my way to my recorder lesson last night, and
hooked it up this morning. This led to lots of playing with
options on all kinds of devices. The bottom line is:

  • I get surround sound on Broadcast TV.
  • I get stereo on Cable TV.
  • I get stereo from the shiny new disk player.

I have checked with expert opinion, and the consensus is that
the TV set is behaving badly, and I shouldn’t depend on it to
pass through audio that it’s given from external devices.

So the upshot is that I’ve ordered several more HDMI cables
from monoprice, and when
they come, I will hook everything up through the receiver and
have it handle all the sound.

So unless broadcast TV plays something good, I still won’t be
able to tell you how I like surround sound until I get my new
cables.

Note that I haven’t addressed the issue of connecting the
computer, and I haven’t even started setting up the remote
control.

So if you’re thinking this is a small project, at least order
enough HDMI cables with your receiver. Maybe it would all “just
work” if I had done that.

Setting up the new surround sound system

The audio stuff mostly came yesterday. Of course, on Tuesdays
I don’t have time to play with new toys, and I suspected that
starting to play with this would leave the living room
discombobulated and I need to be able to have people there on
Tuesday night. So I just unpacked the boxes and put things
roughly where they’re going to go and left it for later.

Another issue is that the speaker cable I ordered with the new
toys isn’t coming tomorrow.

But setting up my new toys was what I really wanted to do, and it paralyzed me in
terms of thinking up something else to write about here this
morning, so I decided to go see if I had speaker cable in the
audio cables box, and of course I did.

So I bit the bullet and unplugged everything from the old
receiver and put the new receiver up and started plugging things
in. Getting the two existing speakers and the radio antennas
plugged in and getting stereo radio was trivial.

Plugging in the three (center and 2 surround) new speakers
turned out to be pretty easy, and now the sound from the radio
was coming out of five speakers.

It was easier after I discovered that you can actually see the
hole you need to put the speaker wire through if you put the
speaker on its face, instead of trying to wire it in place. I’m
not sure who came up with the idea of connecting speakers to
speaker wire by threading the wire through an invisible hole. I
think long-term it works better than the screws used to, but the
screws are really easier.

The subwoofer turns out to connect to the receiver via some
kind of plug I don’t have, so I couldn’t connect that. I hope I
can figure out what the name of the plug is, and get one that I
can connect to the speaker wire. The stuff that’s coming
tomorrow is coming with some plugs, but I’m pretty sure they
aren’t the right kind.

So on to connecting program sources. I started with the TV
set. Ultimately I probably want to get some HDMI cables and
connect everything that way, but I started by just plugging the
cable box into the TV the way it was before this exercise and
connecting the TV to an analog audio input on the receiver. I
was only getting sound through the two old speakers when I did
that, so I fiddled with options on the TV set menu, and stopped
getting sound through the receiver at all. I think I probably told it I was using
the digital out, and since I’m not, it isn’t sending the sound
out the analog out and so the receiver isn’t getting any. I’ll
go downstairs with a digital cable soon and check this out.

I have one hdmi cable, and I decided to use that to connect the
new blu-ray disk player to the TV set. This is working (minus the
sound), but I wasn’t able to check out the netflix, because the
remote doesn’t seem to be doing anything. And of course it’s
the kind of minimalist box with one button for power, and
everything else you do with the remote.

So basically, after a couple of hours work, I have less stuff
working than I did when I started, but it looks like all the
hardware is working right, and I just have to get it connected
right.

I’ll let you know how I like surround sound when I actually get
some.

Forsythia wreath in October

No, this is the Northern Hemisphere. Sunny and I walk by a
house that has a forsythia
wreath on its door, right now.

[forsythia wreath]

For some reason, I find this a lot more jarring than the people
who leave their Christmas decorations up until Spring.

In New England, forsythia is one of those pledges that Spring
is about to arrive. Everything’s grey and brown and muddy, and
hardly any green has gotten going yet, and suddenly there are
bright yellow flowers.

If you’re getting tired of the grey and brown, you can bring
some branches in and force them even while there’s still snow, and get the bright
yellow in your home even before it gets going outside.

In October, there are trees blazing orange and yellow and red,
and still lots of green grass, especially in a rainy year like
this.

So my guess is that the person with the forsythia on their
front door isn’t much of a botanist or seasonal decorator.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001VDYCP4&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Progress report on the website move

I assume you’re a little less bored by this topic than I am,
since you haven’t been trying to force yourself to spend time on
it every day.

To summarize: I split off the music publishing last June; I
have to move the DNS to a different ISP by next week; and I’m
trying to modernize and redesign the laymusic site.

The Serpent
Publications site is making progress. I moved the
best article to the new site over the weekend. I have most
of the book information moved. What’s left is one other
article, a book that never made it into the database, and a bit
of miscellaneous stuff.

I think I know roughly how I’m going to do the DNS move, but
it’s always nerve-wracking, especially since laymusic.org is
where I get my mail. I’ll probably do it soon after I finish
the serpentpublications split, so that I won’t have to be moving
things between laymusic.org and serpentpublications.org after the
move, although I will still be moving things from the html part
of laymusic.org to the blog.

I’m doing very badly indeed on moving things from the html into
the blog, and may in fact just decide just to leave all the old
stuff, and just make new pages instead of editing the old
pages.

I’ll try to write about more interesting topics later in the
week, when all the new
toys are arriving. The other topic I thought seriously
about for this morning was the end of the Red Sox baseball
season, but that was even more depressing than how little I’ve
managed to accomplish on the site move.

Upgrading a computer

I’m trying to drag my sister into the 21st century from the
point of view of her home computer.

First, I gave her money to get a broadband connection last
Christmas. She finally got it set up before I was going there
to spend a few days in March, but not on the desktop where she
reads her mail.

Then last summer I upgraded my desktop computer and gave her
the old one — it’s slower and has less memory and disk space and fewer CPU’s
than my new one, but lots more than her current one.

But she still isn’t using it. It doesn’t have a floppy drive,
and her old machine doesn’t have a CD writer, so she hasn’t
figured out how to get her files across. She hasn’t even
tried connecting the wireless adapter, because her experience is
that every time she connects something new she has to remove
something old, because she doesn’t have enough disk space.

I could of course spend an afternoon there and fix all of this. But
she doesn’t like having someone just fix things for her; she
wants to do it herself. And she won’t talk to someone who knows
more about how to do it than she does, so she doesn’t know what to
ask me to bring to help her do it. And I have trouble figuring it
out, because she won’t talk to me. I delivered my old computer
with the graphics card still in it, although I knew it wouldn’t
work with VGA if that was there because I just didn’t know
whether she had a monitor with a DVI connection. Yesterday she
tried setting up the computer (not on her desktop) and it didn’t
work. I did remove the graphics card before I left, so the
computer is working, but not yet connected to either speakers or the
network.

The next time she skips town and I go down to spend time with
my mother (she’s in good shape for 87, but shouldn’t have to
live alone), I’ll get the network set up outside of her
desktop. But I don’t know how many more months or years she’s
going to keep on with the old desktop and the dialup modem.

Bought some electronics

I had a conversation at the dog park a couple of weeks ago with someone who’s more
expert than I am about broadcast television and maybe some other
kinds of consumer electronics. I asked him what he has for an
audio setup in his living room.

He said he went with a cheap surround sound setup and is
replacing things as they break or he gets disgusted with
them.

He currently has a good center speaker (because the original
cheap one broke), which makes TV and
movies sound pretty good. He’s thinking about upgrading the
front speakers, because when he plays music, it all goes through
those, and they don’t sound as good as the center channel.

We decided that I could just buy the center channel and a
receiver, and use my current speakers and subwoofer, plus the
rear speakers from my computer set which I never really bothered
to wire to the rear of the computer room.

In fact, when I went to order, the receiver I ended up with
came with a free pair of rear speakers, so I’ll be able to use the
computer rear speakers for whatever the 6’th and 7’th speakers
in a 7.1 channel setup are.

And I broke down and bought the cheapest blu-ray disk player
that connects to netflix. When I’m tired, turning the computer
on and booting windows and firing up the Internet Explorer
browser to watch my Netflix Watch Now stuff is too hard, and I
end up watching junk on the TV set.

Backups

I also wrote the local linux users mailing list for advice
about external speakers that would stand up well to being put in
a backpack and taken to my mother’s once a month or so, so that
I’d have off-site backup.

The consensus was that you should buy an aluminum external
enclosure and a recognized brand of SATA internal drive with a
good warranty.

So what’s coming is 2 of those, and two Western Digital 500 GB
drives, for about $100.

Other stuff

And while I was at it I bought a long USB extension, because I
don’t seem to be able to keep wireless keyboards and mice
working on the living room computer.

And some speaker wire with connectors, in case what I have
isn’t the right stuff for connecting my old stuff to the new
stuff.

This should all come the end of next week — I’m sure I’ll have
things to tell you about it then.