The 1945 Firebird Suite, Instead of the 1919, in 2001

We braved the cold weather and rain last night to hear the 1945 version of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite at the DSO. This was the first time I’ve heard the piece live and it was quite impressive. Even when you know exactly what’s coming the dynamic range and volume of a live orchestra can still catch you by suprise. The 1945 version is a bit longer than the more common 1919 version (which was itself a revision of the original 1910-11 work) and utilizes a piano instead of celeste.

For my money, the best performance of the Firebird Suite is still the Telarc recording of Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony doing the 1919 version. This is definitely one of those recordings which utilizes the full dynamic range available on CD.

In other news, the ever-increasing level of spam on the net resulted in a new upgrade of the spam filtering measures on NCC’s primary mail server yet again. We’ve been using RBL for a while and it does catch some spam but not much. I’ve now added the new (and experimental) ORBS database that’s updated hourly. It’s been working great so far. RBL was catching maybe 2 or 3 spams per day but the ORBS server caught 56 in the first 24 hours. There is still a fair amount getting through but it’s back to manageable levels.

Flying Lizards and Other Music

I finally managed to obtain one of two out of print Flying Lizards CDs that I’ve been trying to get my hands on for while. I won an eBay auction for their first, self-titled CD last week and it arrived today. It’s the first time I’ve heard their stuff in years. Now if I can just find Top Ten, the other Flying Lizards CD I’ve been looking for.

Speaking of music, Susan and I attended the Saturday performance of the DSO. It was a very trimmed-down orchestra – really more of a chamber orchestra – playing a selection of Haydn symphonies and Gabrieli’s canzonas for brass. Both were enjoyable. Unfortunately, I’ve had to add the Gabrieli pieces to my CD shopping list. More CDs to hunt down!

Rocks or Pointed Sticks

Yikes! Over two weeks since I’ve posted any news… Don’t worry, I’m still alive. And nobody has missed much anyway. I worked a lot, spent a few days not working because of allergies or the flu or something, the Dallas Symphony season has started (the first performance was great the second one not so great). That’s about it. Not much to show for two weeks, huh?

While the last two weeks haven’t been that interesting for me, there’s plenty of news from the rest of the world. The weather here in Texas went from 90 degrees to 40 degress overnight last Friday due to some freak cold front. Cold weather in October is unexpected and just plain weird. I not sure if it’s due to the 11 year sun cycle that’s peaking this year, global warming, or one of those James Bond type villains with a fluffy white cat and a weather machine.

Red Hat released version 7 of their Linux distribution. I received my CD from them Monday but will probably just try it out on a development box until 7.1 or 7.2 is out. For some reason they didn’t bother releasing the Sparc version along with the Intel version this time. There were rumours they’d dropped Sparc support but when I called Red Hat, they said it would be back when 7.1 shipped so who knows.

Looks like after a brief outbreak of peace, everyone in the Middle East is back at their usual occupation of trying kill each other. You’d think they’d get tired of it after a couple of thousand years. Makes me relatively glad to live in the US. Over here a “race issue” is worrying about whether or not people of different races can get jobs or enrolled in school with equal ease. In a lot of the world, it seems the biggest race issue is deciding whether to use rocks or pointed sticks to kill each other.

Airbills Take to the Air

Wow, the weird event of the week just occured. We got a call from someone in the office building across the street saying that there were NCC FedEx airbills blowing around in the street. We looked out the window and the street was covered with paper for about a block in both directions. A few of us went outside to pick up the mess and try to figure out what was up. Turns out that the garbage collection service had dropped a couple of bags of trash as they were leaving the parking lot after todays pickup. The paper was not just airbills but old memos, invoices, and all kinds of things like that from NCC and other companies in our building. Someone at NCC had trashed about 100 FedEx airbills yesterday because of an incorrect address and most of them spent the morning getting run over by cars, blown in the wind, and otherwise doing things that airbills don’t normally do. We managed to collect most of the debris and get it back into trash bags without getting hit by cars.

Otherwise, it’s been a short, fast week. I took Monday off so Susan and I could go to an outdoor concert celebrating Memorial day and the Dallas Symphony’s 100th anniversary. They played the 1812 Overture which isn’t that unusual but they had colorful exploding firework displays to simulate the cannons and that was certainly different. Towards the end of the piece they had so many fireworks going off that Andrew Litton waved a white hankerchief in the air to signal that the orchestra just couldn’t compete with the volume and they stopped to watch the explosions along with the rest of us.

Mahler Symphony No. 8

I’ve been keeping busy today writing Perl code as usual. This weekend Susan and I attended the last regular concert of the season at the Dallas Symphony. It was a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8. The 8th requires a lot of performers and, in addition to the usual Symphony and Chorus performers, there were quite a few additional performers present including several well known soloists. An extension to the stage and choral terrace had to be constructed to make room for everyone. This is apparently the first time Mahler’s 8th has been done in Dallas and the performance was recorded by Delos for release on CD. While Mahler isn’t my favorite composer, it was definitely an enjoyable evening.

I managed to avoid going to the office all weekend and, other than swimming laps at the pool and going to the symphony, didn’t really do too much.

I spent a little time today hacking on newslog. I may release a new version soon.

Movies, Books, and CDs

I just saw a spot on TV for Disney’s new movie, Dinosaur. The guy doing the voice over for the spot pronounced the name of the movie as dinosore (ryhmes with more) instead of dinosaur (rhymes with car). I’ve noticed a few other people lately mispronouncing that particular word. I wish they wouldn’t do that. Dinosore sounds like some sort of medical condition that you’d want to see a dermatologist about. So remember folks, it’s Dinosaur, as in sauropod or saurian. I can just imagine a Discovery channel documentary with the narrator saying, “millions of years ago great ‘sores covered the Earth”.

I finished reading How the Irish Saved Civilization to Susan and I’m now reading her a couple of chapters from an old out of print MIT music theory book while we decide what our next read-aloud book will be. For my programming book of the week, I picked up Eric Harlow’s Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK. It doesn’t deal with Gnome issues at all but if you’re trying to build a custom GTK+ widget, you’ll find the examples much more helpful than Havoc’s GTK+/Gnome book (though his is better if Gnome is what you’re interested in).

My CD of the month is Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann. I love all of Herrmann’s compositions, most of which were soundtracks. This is another in a series of remastered original recordings. This recording is particularly interesting because it was the first time Herrmann had recorded a performance in the new two channel technology called “stereo”. The recordings were later mixed into a coventional mono recording for use in the movie and this CD is the first time the original stereo recording has ever been available. They also threw in a couple of the Pat Boone songs that were fortunately cut from the movie, but they’re good for a laugh at least.

And speaking of music, last night we attended the DSO‘s performance of Anton Bruckner‘s Symphony No. 8 in C minor led by guest conductor Claus Peter Flor. It’s a very long piece. Most recordings run 70 – 75 minutes. This performance ran over 80 minutes. And Claus is one weird conductor – he seems to have learned most of his arm and hand motions from extensive study of the mad scientists in 1950’s B grade science fiction movies. He also had quite a range of bizarre facial expressions (we were sitting in the choral terrace seats behind the orchestra). Susan mostly noticed the odd contortions of his nose as if he had detected a skunk nearby while I was impressed by strange shapes he made with his mouth, which never remained closed for more than a few seconds during the entire performance.

Today was yard work day – a little mowing and edging before the afternoon rain. And we noticed one of our large, green anoles perched on the side of the house watching us. The males tend to be quite brave when it comes to humans and, once in a while, they’re brave enough to eat from your hand. This one looked like he was in need of a meal, so I offered him a cricket. After a moments hesitation, he took it and after scooting off a safe distance he ate it while watching us out of one eye. I spent the rest of the afternoon getting a head start on next weeks work and playing with some GTK+ code.