Month: August 2005

Gearing up

Tomorrow kicks off a virtual “road month” for me. I’m taking the train to the Brackbill family picnic tomorrow; leaving the picnic early on Sunday to fly to San Francisco for the Pink Elephant ITIL Case Studies Symposium; coming back only to turn around next week for a sales meeting in Stowe, Vermont; then relaxing for a week prior to the Munich trip in mid-September. Hopefully it will be quiet for the rest of September, as I also have a trip to the HDI ITIM conference in early October.

Of all the travel, I’m most looking forward to the trip tomorrow. I get to spend time with my first-cousin-once-removed Johnathan. I spoke to him on the phone for the first time yesterday (when I met him before, he was too busy putting things in his mouth to have learned to speak yet). I’m looking forward to teaching him “A birdie with a load of dirt” and other family jokes.

The CD Project: Other people’s laughter

Ripped in the last few days: about eight or nine PDQ Bach albums and a bunch of jazz (Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck). —Let’s read that back. Eight or nine PDQ Bach albums. Surely, as with the Anonymous 4 recordings, one or two would suffice?

To hear me tell a joke today (or to read this blog), one would never guess that I used to gather comedic material like a beetle collects dung. Bill Cosby, Allen Sherman, the Smothers Brothers… and the psychotic classical tweakings of Peter Schickele, professor of music at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.

I remember getting about a third of the musical jokes. Mostly, though, I remember listening with my parents and their friends as they roared at the musical jokes—which they did get. And I think I wanted that laughter, or that attention.

So I memorized the album that we had (“Portrait of PDQ Bach,”) then chased PDQ through album after album, listening to such wonders as the oratorio “The Seasonings” and “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice: An Opera in One Unnatural Act.” And after a while, I stopped laughing. Either Schickele was running out of material, I was losing my sense of humor, or both.

But one weird connection in the last recording in my list (The Short-Tempered Clavier): playing piano in the title work is none other than Christopher O’Riley, better known (or perhaps more infamous) for his piano renditions of Radiohead pieces. Who knew?

Insulated

Well, partly insulated, anyway. A contractor came out for about two hours yesterday and insulated the attic—placed batts around the blower for the upstairs AC and blew loose fiberglass everywhere else, and installed screened, louvered vents in both gables. Last night was the first time the upstairs AC cut off before 11 PM since it was installed.

Unbelievable, how much of a difference this has made. Even with the AC there was still the sense of oppressive heat overhead upstairs. But now it feels like the whole house is cooler.

Our first month’s electricity with the AC was $50 less than our monthly oil bill during the winter. I think, thanks to yesterday’s work, that month’s bill will stand as a high water mark.

Next week: the gas-fired high efficiency boiler, at last. I spent last Sunday building a platform against our basement mechanical room wall where it will be mounted. The basement walls slope inward by about five inches about three feet off the ground, and the plumbing contractors needed a straight shot out of the bottom of the boiler for the pipes. So I bolted 3/4″ plywood to the upper concrete wall with big-ass concrete anchors; screwed two-by-fours in a square frame around the outside of the frame; screwed another layer of two-by-fours with longer screws through the first layer into the plywood; and secured a final layer of 3/4″ plywood through the two-by-fours with big lag bolts. Final result sticks out from the bottom of the wall by about 1/4″ and isn’t going anywhere.

I am, though—catching a train to Lancaster, PA on Saturday for the family picnic, then flying from Philadelphia on Sunday to San Francisco for a conference for another few days. So I’ll miss the reveal of the boiler. Maybe, though, when I get back it will be working and the old oil burner will be gone. That would be something.

CD Project Days 1-2: So many

As I write this post, I’m ripping the last of my J. S. Bach discs. I am going more or less, on this project to digitize all my music, in the same order as my discs sit in their cabinet: classical first, then jazz, world, folk, Christmas, and blues, then rock, boxed sets and whatever else is left. I’m actually alternating blocks of classical and jazz so that the library isn’t too overwhelmingly classical for the next month or so.

As I go through the process, I have the opportunity to ask myself questions. Like: why do I have four Anonymous 4 discs? Isn’t one of them enough? In a sense, the answer is yes: they all sound the same if you aren’t listening too closely. Though if I hadn’t kept exploring the group, I wouldn’t have found their sublime Miracles of Sant’Iago, which granted is still four perfect female voices singing Renaissance music but which has much more distinctive material to work with.

But yeah, I have a lot of discs. Why? Sure, I love music, but so do my parents, and they just listen to the radio. Why do I—did I, I guess—buy so many? I read a post recently that talks about the “acquisitive nature of men.” Maybe that’s it, or maybe that’s just a convenient shorthand.

I’ve also had an opportunity to gripe, yet again, about the metadata for classical discs in the Gracenote CDDB. While most jazz data is getting pretty good—even starting to include accurate composer and recording date info, if not lists of performers—I’ve found classical discs that put the name of the composer in the title track, or the piece name in the title track and the movement in the artist.

My preferred order is to use the Grouping field for the work title, as it’s done on the iTunes Music Store, then movement in the track title, performer in the artist line, composer in the composer line (gee, what a concept). Recording date goes in the Year field. I would love to have more dates to play with, but for right now working by composer gets me where I need to go there. To display the information, I made a smart playlist, which simply chooses all music with a genre of Classical, and customized the displayed columns for the playlist so that the order is Grouping, Title, Time, Composer, Artist.

Stats at the end of ripping the last disc of the Furtwängler recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: 9134 songs; 26 days, 5 hours, 24 seconds total time; 46.10 gigabytes. Of these, the cds ripped for the project constitute: 349 songs; 21 hours, 26 minutes, 27 seconds time; 5.81 GB. The whole library numbers include my existing library, and will probably grow dramatically until I get into the rock area, where I’ve already digitized much of the music albeit at a lower bandrate.

Very, very hungry

NY Times: In Virginia Beach, Restaurants Where the Food Moves Sideways. Probably the first time that a New York Times reviewer has darkened the door of a Chick’s Oyster Bar. Props to Mimi Sheraton (is that a real name??) for finding the restaurants in the list, referencing Beautiful Swimmers, and calling out Hatteras clam chowder, on which I was raised. Boos for missing the Duck-In, which has a lousy buffet but the finest bucket of boiled shrimp, and one of the finest views, money can buy.

Friends for dinner

Lisa and I were lucky enough to get an old friend, Daria, to join us for dinner last night. I knew Daria from my undergrad years at UVA, where she was the roommate of Caroline, a good friend in the physics program. Then I bumped into her at Sloan. In about three weeks we’ll lose Daria to the vast midwest, where she’ll be relocating to join her fianc&eacute. So we were thrilled that we finally got her to join us for dinner, and we pulled out all the stops with three experimental dishes.

Lisa made a version of a broth-based minestrone with cabbage, zucchini, carrots, onions, garlic, celery, tomato, white beans, and herbs. We jointly produced a pollo diavolo — a broiling chicken flattened, covered with crushed black peppercorns and a little salt, marinated with olive oil and lemon juice, and grilled. And the meal ended with a black cherry granita: tasty but not quite right (perhaps a little too sweet—we’ll definitely make it again and play with the proportions).

Now that Lisa is regularly traveling for business, it was nice to have the chance to collaborate in the kitchen with her on a weeknight. My only regret is there wasn’t much chicken left over. Maybe next time I’ll make two.

The CD Project commences

As a result of this past Tax-Free Weekend, I now have the hard disk space necessary to start digitizing all my CDs. (It’s a long story and involves a painful morning spent staring at the SBOD while trying to go over finances with Lisa, and my mentioning that moving my music files off my laptop would greatly free the system, as most of the slowdown appears to be in paging to and from the hard disk when there is very little free disk space. Also involves purchasing some wool carpets for the living room and stairs, but that’s a different story.)

I ended up with more of a solution than I thought, actually. The way I had been laying it out in my head, this was a two phase project with months of separation between the phases:

  1. Move most or all existing music files off the laptop to an external drive; change the music folder location to the external drive; rip CDs losslessly to external drive. Music can be played as long as external drive is physically connected to computer.
  2. Connect external drive permanently to home network, either by placing it in an enclosure that would allow for network access (turning it into NAS), or by connecting it to a new machine that would be connected permanently to the network.

Obviously there was potentially a large expense attached to the second phase, which is why I was delighted when Lisa found a gadget from D-Link that connects USB and USB 2.0 drives to the network via a 10/100 Ethernet cable. It now looks like my second phase is going to consist of taking the drive, once all the CDs are ripped, and plugging it into our hub.

The actual storage part was a 300 GB Maxtor drive and a Venus enclosure from AMSElectronics—previously recommended as a low noise enclosure with both USB 2.0 and FireWire support, and, as it happens, available off the shelf at our local MicroCenter.

I’ll post updates as I go through my collection. I can’t promise that my progress will be as artful or as quick as Fury’s—I’ll be lucky if I get more than five CDs ripped a night, at which rate my collection will be entirely transferred by Eastertime next year. I intend to take the opportunity to fill in performer, performance date, and composer information and cover art as I rip the albums, which (particularly for jazz discs) will probably take a long time.

But the first album I ripped using the lossless codec, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, went quickly—just as quickly as ripping to MP3 or AAC. The file sizes were in line with my estimates too, with the 9-minute-plus recording coming in at about 44 megabytes.

Morning Car-B-Q

Exiting the Mass Pike onto Route 30 in Framingham this morning, I smelled smoke. It was a frustratingly slow rainy commute, so at first I thought I was just smelling cranial smoke. But no: There was a car ahead with a bad smoke problem. Really bad. Can’t see inside the car because of all the smoke in the passenger cabin bad.

I passed the car as the driver was getting out. He was running around to the front of the car, which, I noted with some alarm, now featured flames starting to lick out from around the edges of the hood. And he was trying to open the hood.

I called 911, of course, and went on my way. But it made me think: Darwin Award candidate. If you can actually see flames coming out of your engine compartment, do you:

  1. Run like hell
  2. Stay a safe distance away from the car and wait for the fire department
  3. Risk burning your hands and a fireball in your face to open the hood

I know which one I wouldn’t choose.

—Incidentally, the title is the word that would inevitably be used in the radio traffic report back in Washington DC any time that a car fire occurred, and it always creeped me out. Because on the one hand, I could visualize people hurt and thousands of dollars worth of damage, and then at the same time … barbecue! So I just had to inflict that little piece of mental damage on my loving readers this morning. Happy Monday.

QTN™: Oud Beersel, Oude Geueze Vielle

I’ve been holding onto this one since my first pilgrimage to Downtown Wine and Spirits. My favorite kind of beer on the planet (very broadly speaking) is Belgian, and my favorite Belgian beer style is geueze, the amazingly complex melding of young and old lambics in one wild-yeast-fermented mouth bomb. And, as of this writing, my favorite geueze might be the Oude Geueze Vielle from the Brouwerij Oud Beersel.

What to say about such a complex beer? The nose is peppery with citrus overtones, with deeper notes of earth. The flavor is a little sweet immediately followed by a yeasty sour depth, with the lingering carbonation picking up the flavor and brightening it again. It’s all in perfect balance, and spectacularly tasty. Almost as refreshing as a Flemish red, but with a bready aftertaste that inevitably recalls Champagne—fitting, as Michael Jackson calls beers in this style “the Champagnes of the beer world.”

Lisa tried a little of this and said, “Wow. That’s different. Save me some.” I regretfully complied, though not without severe temptation.

I tasted this with a non-traditional food accompaniment—a platter of burnt ends and pulled pork from Blue Ribbon Bar-B-Q. Somewhat to my surprise, it was a great combination, the sweetness and smokiness of the meat playing perfectly against the breadiness of the beer, and the vinegar in the greens joustling happily against the tartness of the geueze. Belgian beers may not replace sweet tea at Southern roadhouses anytime soon, but they may well at my table from now on.

North End boom

low tech google map hack showing north end buildings reported to be affected by underground explosions. the map pin is where we used to live.

As in “kaboom.” A pretty good roundup of this week’s underground fires and manhole explosions at Universal Hub—three this week—turns up personal observations from Catherine, Marianne Mancusi, Jeremi Karnell, Kristen, and Ron Newman. The Boston Globe article suggests that a fault in a buried electrical cable is to blame.

From the locations mentioned in the article, Lisa and I would probably have been affected if we were still in our North Street apartment (our apartment was where the Google Maps pin is in the photo).

Incidentally, that there were five bloggers who were personally affected by this is still nothing short of amazing to me. I think that three years ago I was probably the only blogger in the neighborhood.

Mmmm, bacon

The Bacon Show. “ONE BACON RECIPE PER DAY, EVERY DAY, FOREVER.” Um, subscribed.

Via Metafilter, where there are some really alarming links in response, including the Baconoff, a competitive bacon-eating contest party. Surely they can’t mean “each round is one package of bacon” each, can they?

New phone, new challenges

My new Sony Ericsson S710a arrived yesterday, after a three week wait (oy—for anyone who’s playing along, this is the drawback for ordering mobile phone service from Amazon). I plugged it in and let it charge overnight, and started setting it up this morning. First impressions: the phone is much shorter but just about as thick as my old Nokia. The screen is better, but the keys feel more sluggish—though online forums suggest that there are firmware updates that may address the latter problem.

iSync works well, though I get a spurious message at the end of the sync that “Device memory is full.” I have all my contacts and calendar info on the phone, though, which is A Good Thing. The Bluetooth range also appears to be much better than on the old phone.

A few drawbacks. I can’t find a way to send more than one photo from the phone via Bluetooth at a time—though given how long it took me to figure out how to do it on the Nokia, I’m somewhat unconcerned about this right now. I also wish that the screen wouldn’t completely shut off in Standby mode; I have gotten used to using my mobile as a watch, since the Nokia displayed the time on the screen at all times the phone was on. To get the time I have to press a button. Not the end of the world, but less inconspicuous. I also hate the animated wallpaper and will be changing that at the earliest opportunity—ditto the startup sounds.

The real test, though, will be the reception. So far it appears that reception is better at our house, but I won’t know for sure until I start making calls.

And you thought “Cluck-U” was bad

Boing Boing: There’s a restaurant in Japan called “Chicken Pecker.” As Xeni says, ’nuff said. Except that these sorts of restaurant names seem to be not uncommon.

From DC up at least as far north as Newark, there is a chain of greasy fried chicken shops called “Cluck-U” that’s frighteningly good (their “traditional recipe” uses honey, which doesn’t concur with any tradition this nominal Southerner is aware of, but it’s tasty, yo). And, further afield from the chicken area, Bellevue, WA sports the charmingly named What the Pho’, which sells Vietnamese noodle dishes.

Vale Audioscrobbler, ave Last.fm

As a sometime user of Audioscrobbler who frequently forgets that the service has a web site, I visited Audioscrobbler.com yesterday and got the surprising message that “Audioscrobbler has evolved,” along with a pointer to Last.fm. Now that the site has gotten over the transition, it looks like the merged site represents an update of the old Audioscrobbler look and feel and tighter integration of the Last.fm functionality.

The new site is still a bit slow, alas (not that Audioscrobbler.com was a speed demon). But it’s usable, and you can visit my profile page to see what I’ve been listening to (newly relevant since I installed the plugin here at the office) or even add me as a friend. Hey, I have to know more than two other people who use the service…