Wanderings.

For any of you who read my blog, you can now sign in with OpenID (what’s this?)

Usually, an OpenID is just your blog’s address. So if your blog is at http://myblog.livejournal.com, then you just put that in, and you’re logged in, and can comment without typing in your stuff everytime! If you choose, you can stay logged in so you never have to login again from that computer, or you can choose to type it in any time.

Another cool thing is, you don’t have to have a different login wherever else you leave comments, you can just login with that URL. I like this a lot.

The only catch is that your blog has to support OpenID. Livejournal does this and I believe others do as well. More will support it soon.

Just click on “login” on the right side, and you’ll have the option to login with your OpenID, or find the blank just above “login” and type it in there. (you may have more luck with the login page though)

“As in her big brown eyes”

(heads up: If you haven’t seen the show Dead Like Me, this post won’t make any sense at all.)

I enjoyed watching many consecutive Dead Like Me Episodes with Polly a few months ago, and we enjoyed a character called “Dolores” who is hard to describe unless you have seen her. She’s like an Office Space character, except a lot more developed.

Anyways, this morning when I was getting ready for work, I flipped on the SciFi channel and started watching this show about a teacher who was telling her class goodbye for the year, and actually goodbye for good. We learn from the teacher and from the kids that there has been some kind of “Dark Rain”, which is the title of this Outer Limits episode. There seems to be something wrong with people’s reproduction in this world, and they must be the youngest generation to be born before a disaster happened which made it impossible for couples to have viable infants.

So through some turns in the plot, she gets pregnant by her husband and goes to a local clinic where she and her husband get taken to a government run facility where tests are run, and where after the normal child is born they aren’t allowed to leave.

Well, one of the nurses is played by Christine Willes, who later played Dolores! It was pretty funny to see her as a doting nurse. Later she looks ominous when the couple tries to escape. But later still, she helps one of the NRA (good guys in this story), help the couple escape, and she looked just like she did when she was “bending the rules” for George. It made me smile.

I guess for the rest of the day I’ll be “Getting Things Done with Dolores” (The title of Dolores’ highly task-focused internet only TV show on Dead Like Me, where you can learn how to iron, file, do laundry and many more seemingly trivial every day tasks much more effectively.)

Well, my friend Bill, is a composer among many other talented things, and sometimes when using LINUX I think of him. He chooses Mac over LINUX for obvious reasons I won’t go into here. He comes to mind, because he was succinct about highlighting how ridiculous LINUX is as a desktop machine.

I use LINUX as a desktop machine. :-) Usually I use windows, but I’m comfortable with LINUX, and sometimes LINUX is just easier.

Christmas Revels happened in December, and I went to hear them. It was really wonderful. I would choose that over the Nutcracker every Christmas, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is hearing it at the Moore’s School Opera House at University of Houston Moore’s School of Music

There was one song that, in the context of the performance really caught my ear. It sounds simple and almost dry here, though you can still hear some of the weight of this old Russian folk song, “Mlada” from the shores of lake Onega (оиега). You need to listen to it with good headphones, or with speakers that have enough bass in them to hear the low bass singer.

Since I don’t do enough recording to use the ProTools setup Bill sold me very often at all, I use smaller tools. Usually I use audacity on my laptop, and can easily work with that on my server since audacity is released for windows and GNU/LINUX both.

RedHat Fedora Core (LINUX) in particular is great for music because CCRMA at Stanford puts out PlanetCCRMA which is an easy way to turn LINUX into a digital audio workstation.

Anyways, one day I was riding home from Denver on the plane when I decided to write down some of this song so I could play it as a tuba trio.

Then later one day this weekend I thought, what the hey, I’ll typeset it and play a verse of it to see what it sounded like:

The results are a lilypond source which is adequate for importing into a TeX source for typesetting, or rendering as a pdf or ps or dvi as well. the pdf of the score, the .ly source file and the trio I recorded (only 30 seconds of it. c’mon, it’s only a sketch!), are available here.