Even now, I persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
This page renders best in Firefox (or Safari, or Chrome)
Projects
I like to work on things, with my hands and with my mind. Since 2000 I have been an amateur woodworker, and since we moved in to our house in 2002 I have been doing a good deal of carpentry as well. Also, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about computer programming, and occasionally do some human-directed writing and translation.
Cool! I found and fixed a bug today using gdb's watchpoint feature, which I have never tried before. (Not cool: the bug was a careless typo that I should never have introduced.)
posted evening of January 23rd, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Programming
This is the epigraph in front of Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle:
To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person -- what else is this but the birth of great passion?
This seems really intriguing to me: Pamuk is quoting a mistranslation into Turkish of a French text (and presumably a real, historical mistranslation), which has subsequently been (who knows, possibly mis-?)translated into English! (This book is translated by Victoria Holbrook, a new name to me -- it will be interesting to see how her rendering of Pamuk's work compares with that of Maureen Freely and of Erdağ Göknar.)
I'm not familiar with Proust and have no way of knowing what the correct translation of the quoted bit is -- not really something I can look up via Google. I wonder...
I have 3 woodworking projects that I would like to get done this winter (and that Ellen would like me to get done this winter):
A decoration for the front of the walk in front of our house, in the form of a short fence or two short fences with a post at the corner. Ideally with nice carved finials at the top of the fence stakes. We want to grow some kind of vine or rosebush against this.
A bench for the front entry. Size is kind of tricky since the entry is mostly occupied by the swing of the front door; but there is a corner where a narrow bench would fit. Ideally this will be of the same wood and vaguely similar design to my garden bench in the front yard.
If I get ambitious, a similar bench for the top of the staircase.
I haven't been in my wood shop much at all in the past few years; but I have been wanting to do more with my hands. So I better seize the day.
posted afternoon of January 10th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Woodworking
If I have an AVI file that is 128bit, 29 frame/sec, and I want to copy a clip from it into a new AVI file, what is the best tool to use? I am trying to use AVITrimmer, but the output file doesn't look any good. It still claims to be 29 frame/sec, but the video is wrong. It is not synchronized with the audio any longer.
Hmm... wait, that might be wrong... Yeah -- that was just weirdness from Windows Media Player.
posted evening of January 9th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The site
Today I drove a bunch of tile over from Barry's house to my own (long, non-interesting story) and carried it inside. I was washing my hands afterwards and had the thought, Frequently, washing my hands seems like a useless bit of ritual, but right now, it is having a clearly visible effect. Which led directly to the thought, maybe the proportion of head work that I'm doing to hand work has grown too high.
Fortunately I had a handy project just waiting to be done, namely fixing the pocket doors between our dining room and music room -- these are sliding wooden doors which it would be nice to use, but they don't slide very well in their tracks. We haven't really done much with them since we moved in, until the other day when I closed them -- the one on the left moved along smoothly but the one on the right had to be sort of wrestled out; and when I had pulled it out all the way I heard something falling down in the cavity it lives in, and then it would not shut.
This evening I took down the stop which is on the ceiling in the middle of the door track, so I could pull the right-hand door all the way out and see what was blocking it. Turns out the cavity was full of debris, fallen bits of plaster, lengths of 2X4 (one of which was blocking the door's return), chips of brick, and a huge amount of plaster dust. I was able to pull most of it out with a long stick, and the door slides much better now. And I had another chance to wash my dirty hands.
posted evening of January 8th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Carpentry
I think I am not going to do any more Songs posts until I buy a microphone and an audio processor. I have been planning to do this sometime soon -- I think I will feel much better about the music I am posting if the audio quality is a little better. What I have been doing up till now counts as a sort of a proof of concept -- the concept is pretty well proven.
If any of you have got advice about what sort of mics and audio converter I ought to buy, please leave them in comments, or e-mail me if you prefer. I will be most grateful.
This afternoon I thought of a short tune. Played around with it on my violin and I came to realize that it integrates really well with "After Midnight".
I came up with guitar chords to accompany "Creepy Charlie" -- I am looking forward to recording the piece with viola and guitar, and maybe to writing a "b" part as well. (In the recording I posted the other day, there is something that sounds like it might be a "b" part but I think it is actually just a second voice on the "a" part. This is something I don't know how to figure out.)
Update: bullet two is no longer operative; I have ordered an Edirol E-MU EM8740 audio interface (which I will call "emu") and a pair of Behringer C2 microphones.
posted evening of January 7th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Guitar
Wow, look! This is my nine-hundred and ninety-ninth post to this blog. The counter's about to roll over. Fun! Just in time for the new year.
So I came up with a little air for viola; I am inaugurating my new policy of giving my songs titles, by calling this one "Sally's Sleeping"; as Mr. Fritz observed in comments a few days ago, fiddlers name their tunes "after any damn thing". This is my first song (a) in 12/8 meter and (b) for which I was able to correctly work out notating the rhythm without help from ABCEdit's playback feature.
I found a streaming music player which is not dependent on Windows MediaPlayer, so I am going to try using it. Please let me know if either you were not able to play my music files before, and now you are, or you were able to play them before and now you are not. Thanks!
Here is the music for it, ABC format and PDF. Note that I didn't play exactly the same fourth bar that is written down; the whole point is to play a different variation every time.
posted morning of December 30th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
So it seems like people using Macintosh computers will not be able to play the streaming audio in my Songs posts, but will instead get a "This playlist format is not recognized" error. I'm trying to figure out why; in the meantime I will put links to download the mp3 files next to the streaming objects.
Update: If you can't play the songs embedded in my site, could you try the two players I posted here and let me know if either of them works for you? Thanks.
So I have a letter in the in-box this morning from Network Solutions, letting me know that my domain name is expiring in a year. This seems like a good time to ask: what's the story with other domain name registries besides NS? I understand there are some, and that they are cheaper -- do they do the same thing? NS is charging $100 for a 5-year registration which seems a little steep -- seems like it was less than that last time I renewed. I'll pay it if switching is a big hassle; but I reckon it's probably not a hassle. If you have any experience with this please let me know.
posted afternoon of December 11th, 2007: 2 responses
