Degas to PIcasso, Followed by Evelyn Glennie

Posted on 3 April, 2000 by steevithak

Time for a weekend update. Saturday Susan and I headed off to see the Degas to Picasso: Painters, Sculptors, and the Camera exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art but we never made it. About half way there I noticed the temperature gauge on my car pegged on the hot side. I knew the radiator was on the way out so this wasn’t totally unexpected. The car is more than 8 years old now and begining to need a fair amout of service. Still, I’d like to keep it going for a full 10 years (or at least for one more year so my next car can be next millennium’s model – I’d hate to buy one this year and be stuck with a vehicle from the last millennium). Anyway, I did a U-turn and headed for the nearest Acura dealer which was only a mile or so away. We managed to pull into the service bay just before closing time. They checked it out while we picked up a loaner car. The final verdict is pretty bad. I’d been putting off some other maintenance stuff that really has to be done. All told, it needs a new radiator, timing belt, and water pump, one of the cooling fans has to be replaced, one engine mount is shot, the master cylinder has to be replaced, and assorted other minor things. Yuck.

By the time we finished at the service center it was too late to make it to the exhibit (maybe next weekend). We had DSO tickets for that evening however, so the day wasn’t a total loss. The soloist was Evelyn Glennie, the first (and only?) full-time solo percussionist in the world. She brought a set of percussion instruments that rivaled the setups Neil Peart used during the big Rush shows of the 1980’s. The piece being performed was James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. She is an amazing performer to watch and at times the entire orchestra seemed insuffucient to balance her performance in volume or intensity. Her instruments were spread out all over the stage and she had to constantly run from place to place to get to the right instrument in time to play it. If you ever get a chance to see her play live, I highly recommend it.

Sunday was much more uneventful. I spent a lot of the day playing with those pesky ALSA drivers. But it wasn’t until this afternoon that made any progress on them. I got some email today from Steve Ratcliffe with a patch that fixed the problem. After patching the driver and recompiling, I finally have MIDI in and out working correctly. Woohoo! Now I can do something more interesting than recompile drivers all day.

One last bit of good news today. My copy of Havoc’s book,
GTK+/Gnome Application Development arrived. I’m looking forward to getting up to speed on GTK and Gnome stuff. Perl is a lot of fun but it will be nice to work on some C/C++ programming again.

Music and Sea Disasters

Posted on 6 March, 2000 by steevithak

Now that I’ve finally finished hacking on newslog for a while, I’m going to post my weekend update and then get some sleep. I decided not to post the freshmeat annoucement tonight as it looks like freshmeat is having some sort of problems – each post is appearing about 5 times. Probably best to wait until tomorrow.

Saturday I did a much needed software upgrade to the NCC phone system. In the evening Susan and I went to the DSO. The program consisted of Don Juan by Richard Strauss (ok if you like Strauss), Concert de Gaudi for Guitar and Orchestra by Christopher Rouse (sorry, classical Guitar is just not my kind of music – I found Adam Seymour’s guitar work at the Pretenders concert earlier this month much more to my liking), and finally Symphony No. 4 in E minor by Johannes Brahms (quite good – made the program worth going to).

Sunday we went to the Titanic artifact exhibit at Fair Park. It was really intersting and the only complaint I had about the exhibit was that the lighting was really bad. Everything was in dark rooms with black walls and only a few spot lights that seemed to have been carefully placed so that there was no way to view a display case without standing between the light and the case, thus casting a shadow over whatever you were trying to see. But there was lots of cool stuff there including a huge section of an actual hull plate, the steam-powered whistles, life-vests, and an assortment of personal items such as jewelery, money, and letters. There were a couple of models of the original ship as well as really big (about 40 feet long!) model of the front section of the hull as it exists today on the ocean floor. There was also the ever-present gift shop as you leave the exhibit: Titanic shirts, hats, mugs, shot glasses, spoons, posters, puzzles, books, you name it. There were CDs of the music heard on the Titanic, a batter-powered, inflatable Titanic, a Titanic computer game, complete sets of china with the Titanic and White Star Line logo, key chains, ash trays, cigar cases, and zillion other things I can’t even remember.

Lowell Liebermann’s Symphony No. 2

Posted on 17 February, 2000 by steevithak

It’s been a quiet week so far. The weather has improved enough that I can wear my DVD CCA T-Shirt now. I’ve actually had a few people stop me and ask what it means.

This past weekend, Susan and I got to attend the world premier of Lowell Liebermann‘s Symphony No. 2. Neither of us had any complaints about his new composition (we actually quite enjoyed the performance) but Scott Cantrell, a music critic at the Dallas Morning News, gave it a pretty bad review. Oddly, the review makes no mention at all of the DSO performance of the piece, only assorted complaints about what Mr. Leibermann did wrong in composing it. Mr. Cantrell called the composition “excruciatingly conventional”, “foolhardy”, “uninteresting”, and reminiscent of “third-rate high school choruses”. And he didn’t seem to like the choice of Walt Whitman’s work for the choral text either. Oh well, those who attended the performance liked the piece enough to give it a standing ovation. But I suppose if music critics really knew anything about music, they’d compose some instead of complaining about those who do.

A Copyleft License for Artistic Works?

Posted on 31 January, 2000 by steevithak

Not much happened over the weekend. The weather is warming up again. Susan and I attended our weekly symphony at the DSO. I ran across a new web site called Project Magnus that’s archiving interesting image tiles for use as desktop backgrounds. I dug up a copy of our Web Wrangler CD-ROM, sucked off about 30 of the more interesting tiles we created for it, converted them to PNG format and uploaded them to the Project Magnus site.

The other thing I’ve been pondering lately is a solution to the intellectual property problems that are cropping up as a result of the clash between the old way of doing business in the movie and music industries and the new way of doing business in the open source and Internet world. I think the solution is a new type of license for intellectual property that does what the GNU GPL license has done for software. Imagine a license which would make movies, recorded music, printed music, artwork, etc. freely distributable and usable by everyone. I’ve written a first draft of such a license. Once I get it a little more refined, I’ll make it available for comments. In the meantime, if anyone has any comments or suggestions on this idea, I’d love to get some feedback.

Alexander Courage and Blink 182

Posted on 16 December, 1999 by steevithak

Another busy week… here’s what we’ve been up to lately. On monday, we went to the DSO Christmas program. It was about what you’d expect – with one exception. The last piece of the evening was an arrangement commissioned by the DSO for the Christmas program. The arranger was Alexander Courage. Anyone who’s a Star Trek fan will immediately recognize the name as the composer of the music on the original series. Apparently he’s still around and has become a fairly well known arranger of music.

Monday was also my birthday but we didn’t get around to doing anything about it until tuesday. Susan came up with a tasty chocolate cake which was pretty much finished off with some help from one of my sisters and her family. Later I bought myself a birthday present – the new Blink 182 CD.

In other news, the saga of the SWB/Worldcom/Verio T1 continues. We’re still having problems with random drops though they are now generally 30 seconds or less.

Another Night at the DSO

Posted on 4 October, 1999 by steevithak

We attended the Dallas Symphony again this weekend (that’s what happens when you have season tickets). You’re probably tired of hearing all the details so I’ll just give the executive summary: Symphony No. 82 in C major by Haydn, Beyond Autumn: “Poem” for Horn & Orchestra by Joseph Schwantner, and Symphony No. 2 in C-minor, Op. 17 by Tchaikovsky. The second piece, Beyond Autumn was very good. It was a recently composed work commissioned by the International Horn Society and written for Gregory Hustis and the DSO. If you want to know more, check out the full program notes on the DSO site.