In the fifth grade my class was taken on a field trip to a neighboring junior high school where we heard the band play. After the arranged pieces were done, each instrument was introduced by the conductor, so we would start to know what they were and what they sounded like. After that performance we were all asked if we wanted to play an instrument. While hazy, my recollection is that all the boys wanted to play drums and the girls, flute.
Those who were interested, and whose parents could afford to rent or buy an instrument, started learning how to play. My mother was able to borrow from one of her friends, Mrs. Lamb, a cornet, which I played for the remainder of fifth grade and all of sixth. Midway through the sixth grade I started what would become four years of braces on my teeth and playing the cornet wasn’t fun, as its mouthpiece was small enough that I didn’t like the sensation of my lips pinched between the mouthpiece and my braces.
In seventh grade I switched to baritone, which had a significantly large mouthpiece. Heck, the instrument in its case was nearly as big as I was. Which led to its downfall. Miss Mathesson, the band leader, was unhappy about the lack of practicing we were all putting in at home, so she sent home practice sheets to be signed by our parents. Thirty minutes of practice each and every day was the requirement. Riding the bus too and from school every day with the baritone case perched in my lap was uncomfortable, and I soon talked my parents in to letting me quit band and join the rest of the non-instrument playing students in music class.
At some point in the next couple of years I talked my way into getting a guitar and lessons. The instructor was probably only a few years older than I at the time, with long hair and not much patience for a bumbling beginner. The hurdle that I could not overcome was tuning the guitar; this being long before electronic tuners were available, you had to tune the strings by ear to each other. The instructor was never able to help me understand what “in tune” sounded like. I was also not motivated to practice. Something I now understand isn’t an innate ability. Good teachers not only cover the material, they cover how to learn it as well.
The peak of my guitar “playing” was being able to fumble my way through three or four songs I learned through sheer memorization - all with the same finger picking pattern. I didn’t even know the notes I was playing, beyond a vague mention of the chords. In college one of my roommates, who had played piano for nearly a decade already, grew tired of my endless repetitions of the same few chords and volunteered to teach me music. I had no idea what that meant, and when he presented me with the music theory I once again recoiled from the work involved.
I have always wanted to play an instrument, to be able to make music. Watching Sibylle play is beautiful; seeing her hands gracefully coax such wonderful passages and sounds from the piano brings me great pleasure. I want to be able to play, I want to be able to produce music.
Sibylle has been teaching me about music, almost from the beginning of our relationship. Through her I have learned that practice isn’t something I, or anyone else, should just know how to do. Watching her teach, and having her answer my questions, has shown me how to go about learning this thing called music.
In the little that I know already I see parallels to the martial arts (posture, natural technique, breathing, tension and relaxing) and parallels to computer science (polymorphism, re-use, and functions). I am intrigued intellectually as well as musically. In my own way, with her loving assistance, I am starting to take my first steps into the world of playing music.
As seen on Kottke. Here are the 263 titles that I’ve seen. The original list is here.
For many years Non Sequitor has been one of my favorite daily comics. Today’s edition is particularly good.
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It isn’t often that I add a new artist to my music collection, but thanks to Ted, and a generous birthday gift, I have not only added Loreena McKennitt to my collection, I’ve discovered a new favorite artist. Her music is hard to describe except to say that it beautifully combines Celtic origins with poetry and verse, and varied instrumentation.
Rating: Playing continuously in my ear buds for two days now.
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As you can see, I was a tiny baby forty-seven years ago. These images were taken 21 days after my birth, when my weight was back up to a healthy level. When I was nineteen my mother told me the story of my birth, and the events that followed. The day I was circumcised I apparently didn’t eat much, being somewhat cranky about the procedure. Each day thereafter I wasn’t strong enough to eat enough, and I steadily lost weight. From a birth-weight of roughly 6 pounds I dropped to 5 pounds. My mother realizing something was wrong called the doctor on a Friday afternoon.
He was able to give her the last appointment of the day, and immediately had her start feeding me with an eye dropper every 2 hours. Neither she, nor I, got much sleep, but I did start gaining weight. By May 28th, when these pictures were taken, I was back up to 6 pounds 8 ounces.
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After hearing a story about the FDA investigating reports of problems following LASIK eye surgery on NPR this morning, I followed the provided complaint link, and reported my experience to the FDA. In the NPR story it was mentioned that it is believed as many as 5% of the nearly 1,000,000 LASIK patients per year have some difficulties following the surgery. Unfortunately, the FDA has only received about 140 reports of issues in the past ten years.
If you had LASIK surgery and, like me, are experiencing vision that is less than what you expected, or worse, some debilitating side effects, please take 10 or 15 minutes and complete the FDA’s adverse effect form.
The form isn’t the most user-friendly, and is at times confusing. You will need to enter a made up identifier on the initial page, and select the “adverse” category on the subsequent page. I described my situation in detail on the next page, and skipped over all the drug/dosage type questions. At the end information about the reporter (who may or may not be the affected individual) is collected. I have no idea what will happen as a result of my submission, but I feel better for having reported my difficulties.
Recently I have been dealing with a particularly egregious form of spam - technical recruiter emails. One company in particular, Talentberg, stands out for its lack of professionalism and ignorance. They absolutely refuse to prune their mailing list, even when repeated requests are made. And they attempt to justify their actions through an intimidating, if false, disclaimer.
As an Information Technology professional I have maintained a current copy of my resumé online, both on sites of my own as well as on Dice.com, for more than a decade. Technology placement firms and recruiters traverse the web and catalog all the resumés they can find. Each resumé is indexed by keywords, allowing the recruiter to automatically send out emails soliciting interest in new positions they are trying to fill. Post a resumé that is buzz-word compliant online and you too will start getting “Urgent Opening - Respond with Rate Immediately” emails.
Are these messages spam? Not in the strictest sense; placing your resumé online for all to see is advertising and contains an implicit offer. The recruiter is responding to that offer. However, these messages are still in a bit of gray area. They are unsolicited, and often are wildly off base with regard to the alignment of the opening they tout and your actual experience or interest. How the sender of these messages responds to requests to cease sending the emails, is the final criteria that determines if they are spam or not.
Most recruiters understand relationship management is their true business; can they develop a cordial, professional relationship with me that is mutually beneficial to all involved? Unfortunately, some feel that high-pressure and a lack of common courtesy is warranted, even acceptable. Who cares if we trample the sensibilities of one or two or even a hundred people we blindly email? After all, there are lots of IT professionals out there, we’ll focus on the ones who aren’t squeamish about integrity or ethics. This descent into used-car-sales techniques is not an endorsement.
The disclaimer that Talentberg, and others, use to claim their message isn’t spam is Senate bill 1618 or House resolution 4167.[1] Both of these bills contained language outlining what was or wasn’t spam. The disclaimer looks like this:
S.1618 does exist, and contains this language:
Some email may alternatively quote H.R. 4176 § 101:
Two, the erroneously quoted S.1618 is usually incomplete. It appears that their email template truncates the notice. Either they don’t know how to configure their own outbound email, making them incompetent, or they are deliberately trying to make it hard for people to unsubscribe to their messages, making them unethical. Either way, I am not interested in putting something as valuable as my professional life into their hands.
Three, their absolute refusal to remove my address from their mailing list despite numerous, repeated request from me to do just that. I have finally caved in and added rules to my mail server and client to “mark as read” and “delete” all messages from their domain.
In researching this “company” several inconsistencies appeared. Their web site was only registered in February of this year, yet they claim a longer history than that. Their site lists only a vice-president as part of the management team. Furthermore, while you can find at least two people associated with the company on LinkedIn, one seemingly has two names, on American sounding and the other Asian in nature. All of which adds up to a fly-by-night organization.
[1] Source: Spam and the Law - S. 1618 and H.R. 4176
In Random Is As Random Does, I talked about how I configured some smart playlists in iTunes to provide a better random sample of the music I most wanted to hear from my MP3 collection. Basically I created smart playlists for the least played tracks, the least recently played tracks, the most played tracks, the most recently played tracks, and random tracks that weren’t already part of the first four playlists. These five playlists are combined into one massive list, and that list is in turn filtered through the list I spend the most time listening to; one that grabs only 25 tracks at random provided they haven’t been played in the last 3 weeks.
This scheme has worked out surprisingly well except for one small beef. While the ordering of the songs is random, and does represent a nice cross section of my favorite songs, it was surprisingly repetitive. The pool of songs, those with 3 or 4 stars in my rating system just wasn’t large enough to produce freshness in the playlist as well as randomness.
Until today I had used the rating system rather haphazardly. When I started with iTunes I imported some 400 MP3s from WinAmp and gave them all 4 stars. Many of these titles were ones that I no longer had the CD for, and I wanted to keep them segregated from any new imports, purchases, or rips. 3 stars were given to new favorites outside of the original 400. Songs that I grew tired of were demoted to 2 stars, and since you can’t remove stars from a track once it has been assigned any, 1 star is for those tracks I don’t wish to hear, but are unwilling to delete. 5 stars were used for a while to create playlists for my iPod, but that scheme hasn’t been used in a long time.
The Shuffle playlist used only songs with 3 or 4 stars as it’s universe, and as it was rather underpopulated, produced repetitiveness. A quick scan of my library revealed some 3789 tracks that either had no stars, or hadn’t been played for one reason or another. Time to include them in the lottery.
First I added 2 stars to all the tracks that didn’t already have 3 or more stars. Scanning down through this new list of tracks I quickly eliminated several I don’t care to hear (but keep for completeness sake) by giving them 1 star. My new and improved star scheme looks like this:
Next, I created two new smart playlists to include a much larger swath of my collection in the shuffle. First I made a list of tracks to avoid. Audio books, holiday music, and some children’s music that I don’t want in my daily rotation. This list is called P:Avoid, and uses the genre tag to eliminate tracks.
The second new playlist is called P:Obscure, and it grabs all tracks with a rating of 2 stars or higher that aren’t in the P:Avoid list. The P:Obscure list is included in the shuffle composite list, bumping the universe of songs from 1675 to 3975.
Over time I expect I’ll be able to increase the “not played in x days” value to something much higher than 21. For now I am getting to hear lots of music I haven’t heard in a long time. There have been a couple of tracks I’ve wanted to banish to the 1 star level already, but I’m resisting the urge until they come around on the playlist a second time.
Here are the playlists that make up my Shuffle:
A composite list, made up of the 250 songs selected in the six underlying lists is next. Finally a smart playlist that you actually listen to, Shuffle, which selects songs from the composite list provided the song hasn’t been played in the last 21 days. Hopefully, even after I’ve chewed through the new tracks in the shuffle universe, the larger universe of tracks will eliminate the repetitiveness that had started to plague the previous shuffle.
I currently support four public facing sites that use Wordpress as the back-end content management system (CMS). I also have a Wordpress test platform on my laptop, where I tinker with several different themes, that supports another four sites. So, I’ve got eight different Wordpress installations to update each time a new release is made available. Running through the update steps is tedious at best and, with the need to not inadvertently overlay the theme or plugin directory in each installation, there is a fair amount of stress. Using ftp to accomplish the update isn’t difficult, but after doing the same steps four or five or six times, it is easier to make a mistake.
Wordpress does provide instructions for how to accomplish site updates using Subversion. Unfortunately, my host provider doesn’t have Subversion installed, nor are they inclined to add it just for me. As I am comfortable with command line tools, I decided to investigate rsync as a solution for my update tasks.
Rsync is remote synchronization software that allows you to keep files in two locations in sync with each other. This is not a rsync tutorial, so I high encourage you to read the man page, or visit one of the numerous sites explaining this powerful tools uses.
For my purpose I want my Wordpress update steps to be the following:
There are a myriad of options for rsync, but the three (or four) that I used are:
To update my locally hosted test sites, which are built upon MAMP, the command looks like this:
rsync -rav ~/Desktop/wordpress/ /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/siteRoot
In his seminal book, Object-Oriented Technology: A Manager’s Guide, the author, David A. Tayor, describes polymorphism as
In my recent efforts to learn music, specifically the piano, I have started seeing striking parallels between some object-oriented technology concepts and music. Polymorphism occurs in different chords derived from scales.
Each octave scale is comprised of eight steps, with the first and last step being the same note. A C Major scale is C D E F G A B C. Chords are combinations of three or more notes, for example C-E-G is the I chord in C Major scale. It is called the I Chord because the lowest note of the chord is the first note of the scale. A IV Chord is built on the 4th note of the scale. (The chords are denoted with Roman numerals, I, IV, V; but in speech are pronounced “one chord,” “four chord,” and “five chord.”)
There are three primary chords in an octave scale: the I chord, the IV chord, and the V chord. These are the primary chords because with them you play all the notes within the scale. The patterns for these chords is as follows: I Chord - 1 3 5, IV Chord 4 6 8, V Chord 5 7 2, where the number represents the step in the scale that is played.
For a C Major scale the I Chord is C E G, the IV Chord is F A C, and the V Chord is G B D. The chord patterns are polymorphic. While the pattern remains the same regardless of the scale being played, the notes do change for each scale. The implementation of the I Chord in C Major scale is C E G, but in a D Major scale it would be D F# A.
The chords are also polymorphic in that a C Chord (C E G) occurs in multiple scales, as the I Chord in C Major, and as the IV Chord in G Major, for example.