Category Archives: Uncategorized

Embedded Music

Back when I was a small child, my parents played quite a bit Mannheim Steamroller in the house. In particular, I remember listening to the Fresh Aire series (not this Fresh Air series, though I listen to that quite a bit these days) first on record albums then on cassettes as I played quietly in my room with my Legos (I was about 6 years old at the time). This was long before the series of Christmas albums  out that Mannheim Steamroller is perhaps best known for now. The first four Fresh Aire albums had a seasonal theme. That is, the first was spring, Fresh Aire II’s theme was summer, and so on.

I put Fresh Aire IV in the CD player back in December when I needed a break from all of the holiday music, but still wanted to listen to something wintery. As the third track, “Interlude 7” came on, I nearly stopped dead in my tracks.

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Sound vaguely familiar? I posted a song last December that I composed, or rather improvised, called “#37: Improvisational Nocturne” with very similar features: the (nearly) solo piano, the quiet start, the uneven tempo, the swelling and diminishing dynamics, the undulating bass line and dissonant chords that bring to mind a midnight caravan in a distant land… even the major chord at the very end. Heck, even the names are similar in that they both contain a number and the name of a type of song.

Sure, I’ve listened to the album a number of times since my childhood, but none of that was intentional. Granted, in some ways the similarity was inevitable. The songs were created specifically with a wintery theme in mind. I’ve never taken piano lessons so most of the bass lines I make up sound like that – playing the octaves to create a fuller sound – to compensate for my inability to come up with adequate chords on the fly (which also explains the dissonant chords, too, now that I think about it…). I’ve historically had few friends with musical tendencies interested in playing together in a band, so most of my playing is solo anyway. And the song title? It was the 37th recording I’ve made on my Roland Virtual Studio and a nod to the Dave Matthews Band’s tendency to leave some of their songs untitled (e.g. #34, #41).

I’ve never considered Mannheim Steamroller as one of my musical influences. I always think of the various artists that I’ve listened to for ages… Billy Joel, Simon & Garfunkel growing up courtesy of my parents, progressive and art rock (Rush, Yes, Pink Floyd, Genesis) or alt rock (Toad the Wet Sprocket, Jeff Buckley, Cake) in high school and college, or the electronica and downtempo stuff from my 20’s (Chemical Brothers, The Crystal Method, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation).

Though I still really enjoy all of those artists, I’m starting to realize that they apparently haven’t had as much of an impact on me as a musician as the music I heard 30 years ago at a very early age.

Hiatus Shmiatus

Back at the end of the August the server that was hosting brahm.windeler.net went belly up. Something went awry when the server was being moved by a sys admin and the hard drive just decided to give up the ghost. The people that I shared the server with and I are trying to go through a data recovery service, but it’s not looking promising.

Though I don’t have an exact backup of everything that was on the site, I do have the photos that were published on the site as well as all of the blog content.

I’ve been exploring my options over the past few months. Do I host my own site again? Do I go with hosted service? How much do I want to pay? What features are available on the various blogging platforms?

Since I was using the windeler.net domain for e-mail, my immediate action was to move the domain over to the free Google Apps to reduce the number of email messages that would otherwise bounce or be directed into the great bit bucket in the ether. I put up a placeholder page using the Sites functionality within the Google Apps framework, but it was obvious from the start that the functionality it provided was very bare bones and not really set up for blogging.

I also investigated using Typepad, as my blog was originally hosted using Movable Type, which is the blogging platform that Typepad uses. Initially the site would hang during the import because I had specified the wrong filetype encoding (what, you expect a common user to be able to tell if the file was encoded as MacRoman or UTF-8?). Once I determined the correct file type, I was able to import my blog posts just fine but was unable to import the corresponding comments. After many tries deleting and re-importing the entries, I gave up. This did not inspire confidence. If the code for importing their own export format was that buggy, I wasn’t going to spend any more time with it. Another factor was the fact that the free version was severely limited in customizability (2 themes… neither of which were particularly attractive).

After putting the effort aside for a few months, I decided to try to bring the blog up from the ashes again. I started researching if other people had also had the comment-import problem with Typepad. I didn’t come up with much, but did find a lot of pages talking about how to migrate to WordPress. On a whim, I decided to set up a free account and test the import functionality. I’m pleased to say all the posts and comments were imported intact. And I have to say the functionality that it provides is quite impressive. However, I started looking into what it would take to use a custom domain and found it would cost $12/year to do so. That seemed fairly odd to me, because technically all that should be required is to update the DNS record at my domain registrar to point to the appropriate IP or hostname. Additionally, if I wanted to customize the theme as much as I have in the past, it would require paying an additional $15/year. Blogging isn’t worth $27/year to me.

A few people I know have Posterous blogs, so I thought I would investigate that service. I exported my blog entries out of WordPress and imported them through their import tool. I used that method rather than importing directly from my Movable Type backup file because the import option didn’t seem to be able to import from a Movable Type-based site without the site already existing… not helpful when the site has gone bye-bye!

The import went smoothly again. Both posts and comments were added. I also imported two posts that I had written on my very first blog when I went to Malaysia back in 2001 (!) and thought I’d document my travels. I’ve come across a few hick-ups with the site not behaving the way I thought it should (mostly in relation to editing imported entries before merging them into the blog), but all in all I’m happy so far. Also, it’s completely free, I can use a custom domain for no additional charge (the DNS is updating as I write), and the available themes are all fairly attractive.

The one thing that I haven’t decided how to tackle is what to do with all of the broken links in the older posts. Any links that referred to other posts within the site or the photos that I hosted on the site point to non-existant items at this point. I may go back and fix them, though the thought of going back through ~270 posts to fix all of that is making me cringe. I’d also need to re-post all of the albums somewhere like Flickr or Picasa. I’ll probably just leave them as is for now and address them as I have time. For now, I’m just glad to have the blog operational again.

Training Update 1/28

Today’s training was a little rough. I got in late last night after watching a friend’s band play and then had to get up early to head to training. Working on 4 hours of sleep and forcing myself to not have any coffee prior to the training (caffeine causes the veins to shrink, thereby increasing blood pressure/restricting blood flow), I was feeling a little spacey on the drive there. The 70 minute spin session wasn’t too bad, but 3 three mile run afterward was rough. Three miles isn’t that far for me, as I often do a 7-10 mile run once a week. But it was snowing, the wind seemed to be coming from every direction, and my feet were cold and wet because the FiveFingers I ran in are anything but waterproof. April can’t come soon enough! And as many of us participants remind ourselves, every challenge and hurdle we struggle with during the training is nothing compared to the battle the patients with blood cancer face with their treatments. Nothing to do but suck it up and keep on fighting the good fight!

#37: Improvisational Nocturne

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I promised myself I’d get to bed before 1 AM this evening. This week has been a string of late nights preparing presents and dishes for family functions. I guess it didn’t happen. My wife went to bed early feeling under the weather. I started to get a little moody as I am apt to do from time to time. I decided to work through it at the keyboard. I also decided to record it. And now here I am posting it online. I’ve been improvising on the piano since high school. I was fortunate enough to attend one with a music wing and dedicated sound proof practice rooms. Though I played saxophone at the time, I often would slip into one of those rooms and tinker on the piano whenever I could steal a minute… during lunch, after school, etc. It was a good stress reliever. A few years ago I bought a small digital “virtual studio” (this was pre-Garage Band days) to start recording some of my compositions, though I use that term loosely. Most of what I create is very ephemeral. I have no background in reading piano music. I doubt I could reproduce anything I play. I only hit record when the mood strikes, capturing only a fraction of what flows through me. I’m okay with that, though. It’s all about the moment of creation and the creative spark. I don’t have much background in audio engineering either, so this recording is pretty raw. It was recorded in one take. No overdubs or edits. I transferred it into Garage Band, slapped a small amount of reverb on it, converted it to AAC and uploaded it here. So if you find yourself in a bit of a mood tonight or tomorrow or sometime this holiday season, this track is dedicated to you.

Holiday Cookies 2009

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Yes, second post in two days. I’m making a conscious effort to resume blogging. Twitter has made it much too easy to neglect this site.

Inspired by daily photo postings by an old friend which often involve food, I decided to post a few photos of the holiday cookies Jennifer and I made this past week.

The recipes come from the December issue of Sunset magazine. We chose these recipies because we figured they’d be unique and tasty. We made a double batch of the Honey Caramel Nut Bars to share in various cookie exchanges.

Google Realtime Annoyance

Recently Google started inserting Twitter posts into the search results for current “trending topics”. Apparently they, along with Microsoft, paid a handsome sum to bring this “feature” to the masses. While I’m glad this has made Twitter profitable as I am a Twitter user myself, I find the animated display of tweets in the results very annoying. The last thing I want when trying to read through the results is an eye-catching distraction.

So to take the matter into my own hands, I figured out a relatively easy way to remove the animated elements from the page. In Firefox, you can set custom Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) rules for any web site in a file called userContent.css. The file is located in the chrome folder in your profile, the location of which depends on the platform.

Once you’ve located the userContent.css file, just add the following lines to block the display of the elements used for the real time results animation:

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.google.com/search) {
#rtr {display: none !important;}
#sb {display: none !important;}
#rth {display: none !important;}
}

The first line indicates to which pages the CSS rules should be applied. The next lines block the display of the real time result (rtr) list, the scroll bar (sb), and pause link in the real time header (rth). Unfortunately there is no ID value for the markup that includes the “Latest results for [search term] – ” portion. I suppose I could get fancy with following the hierarchy of tags from a specific parent element with an ID, but I figure it’s just as well to leave the link there in case I am interested in seeing those results.

After making the change, you will need to restart the browser for it to take effect.

Apparently Safari also supports userContent.css files, though I’m not sure whether it supports site-specific rules.

Native species

I was just looking on Amazon for a book about landscaping in Michigan and came across this passage in the first few pages of the “Look Inside” feature of Landscaping with Native Plants of Michigan

Not only does a native plant depend on the organisms with which it has evolved, but the other organisms also depend on it, creating a true web of life. This natural system of checks and balances ensures that native plants seldom grow out of control in their natural habitats.

I got to thinking, why is this important? Objectively speaking, nature finds a way of “adapting” regardless. What will be, will be.

I think the importance is actually a reflection of our own values. Humans value control. We value predictable situations. Checks and balances afford predictable situations and non-dramatic, non-disruptive shifts that we can adapt to or react to to minimize adaptation requirements.

Where else do we hear about “checks and balances”? As any high schooler could tell you, the U.S. government. The founding fathers were smart men.

I only wish the financial industry were open to more checks-and-balances style regulation instead of feeling like it cramps their style. Perhaps we wouldn’t be in global economic crisis we are in now if they were.

A Reminder

It’s been 4 years now since my friend Justin passed away. Though time has tempered the magnitude of the loss, his absence still enters my consciousness on a regular basis. So much has changed since then… uprooting from CA to MI, home ownership, birth of a child, my oldest child entering the educational system, the deaths of two (in-law) grandparents… the list goes on. Each milestone and major event is a reminder of the passage of time. In idle moments when my mind wanders I often begin to dwell on my own mortality and whether I’m making the most of my time here on Earth. Justin’s passing is a regular reminder that there are no guarantees in life and that I should make the most of it while I have the opportunity. So, while I have to say I’d much rather he was still around, I’m thankful for the intangible gift he left behind. Thank you, Justin.

Site Redesigned

In an effort to get myself interested in blogging again, I’ve made some tweaks to the design of this site. I stuck with the lonely cloud image in the header, as there’s something about it that resonates with me, even nearly 5 years after I took it. I’ve also become a fan of blog designs that have a wallpaper-like background, so I modified one that I came across a few months ago on a tiling image creation site to fit what I had envisioned for this redesign.

I’ve also fixed a few things that have bugging me:

  • Styling of my recent Twitter feeds

  • The banner/background “seam” when the browser window was extended

  • Everything is now centered in the browser window rather than fixed to the left.

  • Upgraded to most recent version of Movable Type

There are a still a few “smells” that I need to take care of, including:

  • Using a proper tabber for the right-hand column

  • Re-evaluating the contents of the right-hand column

  • Re-enabling comments