During my trip through the musical looking-glass the other day, I took a quick detour into historical musical instrument, and found that my main instrument (the Tuba/Sousaphone) had some rather interesting roots.
A tangent-laden conversation at work the other day led to a discussion of musical pitch, tuning, and temperament (in the sense of “well-tempered clavier”). As a result, I think I’ve added music theory to the list of subjects I wish I could learn in reverse order. There appears to be some interesting stuff going on at the advanced level, but only after the boring or unrewardingly difficult fundamentals that any course or book will cover first. In short I’d like to know it without actually learning it, just jump in at the deep end of and learn the basics as needed, rather than the way things are usually taught.
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I have been scouring the internet for code for extracting URLs from e-mail for the purposes of spam filtering. There’s not much out there that isn’t proprietary, written in perl, or defeated by relatively simple obfuscations. I’ve been thinking of writing my own, but one look at what I’m up against Is almost enough to make me scream, run away, and “just hit delete” for a while…
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To envision how a 4-processor system running [SunOS] 4.1.x works, think of four kids and one bathroom. — John DiMarco
On too many occasions in the last week, I sat down really, really meaning to post, but just couldn’t get started writing. Much of the time, I thought about writing, but turned on the TV and a web browser and opted to spend the evening downloading rather than uploading. Need more input. Other times I had only a little trivia (trivium?) on my mind, nothing meriting a whole sentence, much less a post.
A few times, I thought I had a lot to write about, but nothing got put into words. I either got lost following a tangent while researching or re-reading links, or else it felt like my thoughts had spent so much time bouncing around in my head they would be bruised and bloodied beyond recognition, and rendered as an overlong incomprehensible ramble (with a few run-on sentences, naturally). This eventually led to a blogging death-spiral, where not posting leads to a build-up of topics on which to post, which leads to resource contention, starvation (priority inversion?), and no posts. Livelock.
I need to break out of this funk before it spreads further into my non-blog writing…
… is Of Montreal’s Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)”. Not a bad song, actually, just addictive with a rather poppy beat, and the absurd catchy refrain
Let’s pretend we don’t exist /
Let’s pretend we’re in Antarctica
I did get a brief break from the tune while reading “Green Eggs and Ham”. The cumulative rhyme knocked anything else remotely musical out of my head, a handy trick I will have to remember for later. After the rhyming wore off, a couple Seussian thoughts kept the song at bay for a bit.
Seussian thought #1: I remember a high school speech class assignment involved reading a children’s book to the rest of the class. One rule was “no Seuss, unless you can read without rhyming.” A friend of mine was the only person to attempt it that semester, and pulled it off perfectly. She de-rhymed well enough that the teacher played a tape of the reading for the other sections of the class. That feat seems even more amazing now.
Seussian thought #2: Somewhere, I have a DVD of “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T” laying around. We also have a new DVD player. Hmmm…
Looking at my first post/TODO list, I seem to have procrastinated more than I thought possible. Nothing there is done, and I’m particularly peeved at myself for not getting anything into bottles for the Upper Mississippi Mash-Out competition, and entries are due tomorrow. I have some good stuff brewed, but it’s all on tap. I meant to spring for a semi-fancy bottle filler, and almost pulled the trigger today, but the desire to get home after a frustrating day at work (there are other kinds?) won out.
I’m considering doing a half-assed bottling job (just filling from the tap and capping on the resulting foam), or maybe just not entering. Not entering would have exactly one benefit — if I signed up to judge at the competition, I could judge the styles I like to brew and enter. The half-assed bottling job has a chance of working, but since the judging isn’t for a couple weeks, oxidation may be a problem. I’m not seeing a clear choice here (other than to get to sleep and save the damned hand-wringing for the next contest).
I think I’m becoming one of the sort who hibernates for the winter. I never used to be this bad. It’s not just the beer stuff: I’ve also abandoned a depressing number of short/quick projects around the house. None of them should take more than 20 minutes and/or a trip to the hardware store, but for some reason, that seems an insurmountable barrier when the kids are “asleep”, and I’m huddled around a warm TV, Laptop, and baby monitor waiting for the next fuss….
