News of the week of November 10, 2015

[bee]

Meeting report: November 3, 2015

We played:

Meeting report: November 10, 2015

We played:

Schedule

We continue to meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at 233 Broadway,
Cambridge, MA.

News of the week of October 27, 2015

A Banquet of Love — Frans Floris
[banquet]

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We continue to meet on Tuesdays at 7:45pm, at 233 Broadway,
Cambridge.

This will be true next week, November 3, because David will be
there on time to open the door.

News of the week of October 20, 2015

[new piece for the week]

Meeting report:

We played:

Schedule

We are meeting regularly on Tuesdays
at 7:45 pm, at 233 Broadway.

As usual, on November 3, Election Day, I won’t be there for
most of the meeting, so either someone else will have to to be there to
open the door and find the music, or the meeting will have to be
somewhere else.

Performance opportunity

Last chance to sign up for the Wort Processor’s cider picnic on
Sunday, October 25 from noon to 3pm at Cider Hill in Amesbury.

It’s free and if some people wanted to come play after we eat
and drink enough, it would be fun. It’s a nice orchard with a
good store for buying apples and such. (The cider donuts have
been highly praised.)

Dogs have food prejudices

[Mongolian dogs]

T
his article about where dogs originated contains this quote
about research methodology:

Dr. Boyko traveled to a number of the locations where blood was drawn from village dogs. He said: “The great thing about working with dogs is that if you show up with food you don’t usually have trouble recruiting subjects. Usually.”

He added: “We showed up in Puerto Rico at a fishing village and the dogs turned up their noses at roast beef sandwiches. They were used to eating fish entrails.”

News of the week of October 13, 2015

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We are meeting regularly on Tuesdays
at 7:45 pm, at 233 Broadway.

As usual, on November 3, Election Day, I won’t be there for
most of the meeting, so either someone else will have to to be there to
open the door and find the music, or the meeting will have to be
somewhere else.

LayMusic.org goes Social

Me and Social Media

There are clearly people in the world who have figured out how
to follow large numbers of friends, acquaintances, businesses,
etc. on Facebook and Twitter.

I am not among them. I do check Google+ regularly and know
some nice people who occasionally post there, but if there were
more of them, I would probably stop reading regularly. I want my
news and email sorted nicely into categories, so that I can get
the stuff that I really want in 30 seconds, and look at the other
stuff when I have time for it.

To that end, I read my mail with GNUS, which splits it into as many
“groups” as I care to configure based on the mail headers. I also
follow a large number of blogs and other webpages with RSS
feeds via Gwene.org.

I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do it this way, but they
don’t. I’m always talking to someone who has unsubscribed to
something interesting but not critically so because it was cluttering up they (presumably one) mailbox.

I tell people I don’t do Facebook because I maintain two
websites and that’s enough to keep up-to-date. So I keep getting
annoyed at my closest friends because they aren’t interested
enough in what I write to bother to read my blog. But of course
it’s because their lives are so cluttered with Facebook that they
don’t have time to also follow blogs.

So I caved about Google+

There are actually things it’s easier to just post on Google+
than to put on my blog. WordPress is pretty clueless as far as
just posting a picture with a short caption, and Google+ is easier to use for a
one-link pointer. So some time ago, I put a widget in my blog’s
sidebar that had pointers to my last few Google+ posts.

Then last June, one of my Google+ friends said how much she
wished my blog posts on the Boston
Early Music Festival would show up on my Google+ feed. I
decided to experiment with this, and set up the Jetpack Publicize
feature to automatically post blog posts as Google+ posts.

Of course, this makes the blog sidebar pointers to Google+ less
useful, since often all or most of them are just pointers to the
last few blog entries. But it has led to more +1’s and even a few
comments on what I write, which the blog basically doesn’t
have.

So today, I caved about Facebook and Twitter, too

So I decided the people who are always claiming they would like
to follow me on Facebook but they don’t have time to read my blog
should have their chance. I have now configured my blog to
automatically post to my Facebook and Twitter pages.

I don’t know that I’m going to take up reading Facebook or
Twitter, but if you do, you now have a chance to read my blog if
you want to.

News of the week of October 6, 2015

Meeting report

We played:

Schedule

We are meeting regularly on Tuesdays
at 7:45 pm, at 233 Broadway.

As usual, on November 3, Election Day, I won’t be there for
most of the meeting, so either someone else will have to to be there to
open the door and find the music, or the meeting will have to be
somewhere else.

News of the week of September 29, 2015

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We are meeting regularly on Tuesdays
at 7:45 pm, at 233 Broadway.

As usual, on November 3, Election Day, I won’t be there for
most of the meeting, so either someone else will have to to be there to
open the door and find the music, or the meeting will have to be
somewhere else.

Performance opportunity

The Boston Wort Processors
are having their annual Cider Picnic on Sunday, October 25 at noon
at Cider Hill in Amesbury. In the past we’ve played drinking
songs and dance music; we could maybe try out our new shawm band
if people wanted to come.

There is no admission charge, but they do like to have a
headcount, so let me know if you want to come. There’s also an
opportunity to buy unpasteurized cider, which must be ordered in
advance, so let me know if you want cider, and how many gallons.