Random February Thoughts

Published: March 01, 2008 • Read time: 6 min read min

In an effort to inspire me to write something else, I am throwing a few thoughts out from the last month.

My orchestra, The Columbia Orchestra, is playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for our next concert. The orchestra is trying to make at least a small cultural event out of it. There is a website (embracingthemillions.com) a flickr discussion group (flickr.com/groups/embracingthemillions), and a number of artists (not just musicians) participating in the event. Since I threw together the website (no comments please, I’ve been very busy), I know the statistics of people visiting it. And there are quite a few people visiting. What I can’t figure out is with 30 or so people visiting per-day, why hasn’t anyone a) commented, b) written something on the discussion board? I made a post in the discussion group. It took me a few minutes at best. No one else has posted. Are people’s lives really so busy that they can’t be bothered? I’m confused by this. Technology aside, I am delighted to be playing Beethoven, he was simply a genius.

I went to see the Ingmar Bergman film, The Magician the other day at the AFI Silver Theater. I liked the quirky nature of the film, and found it to be totally engaging (I’ve yet to see one of his films that isn’t). I regret not being able to see more movies from the first part of the Bergman Retrospective they are doing now, as I have been ridiculously busy of late. However, I do own most of them on DVD (I don’t own the Magician). I look forward to the next few parts of this retrospective, as I don’t know as many of his later works.

I have been working extremely hard on the next version of My NCBI, the preferences section of the NCBI website. This is where you can set preferences for PubMed, Blast, and all of the rest of the NCBI sites/databases. It is hard, writing everything in a internally-created language, which is slightly buggy and tends to make easy things easy, but hard things very hard, with XSLTs completing the system. I haven’t had to write a ton of recursive XSLT functions or anything, (mostly because of the inclusion of EXSLT extensions), but development time is still very slow. It also seems that with every step I take forward, I discover 4 new things I have to do. Throw in the fact I made time estimates without knowing the language, and the NCBI announcement that the budget fell flat (and actually decreased) this year and people were dismissed, and that makes my life particularly fun. I knew what I was getting into when I signed up, and I wanted to do a LOT of work, but that doesn’t mean I feel that way every second of every day.

Additionally, I’ve had to meet a bunch of deadlines for the legal aspects of my dad’s passing. Trips/talks to lawyers, a visit to DC Vital Records, Orphan’s Court (yes, they call it that!) and NASA have really been a… treat, let’s say.

Also, some of the better (or at least unexpected) and smaller moments of the month were:

• Re-discovering IRC. I hadn’t even thought of IRC until I saw it mentioned in a twitter post. I found, however, that the groups in irc.freenode.net are going strong. I’ve read some of the #scheme discussion, answered a considerable number of questions in the #html and #css groups, and just lurked watching #microformats and #javascript. Interesting stuff.
• I’ve been taking a number of photos. I like holding on to moments, which is probably why I like taking pictures so much. Hopefully I will continue. I keep telling myself that if I do, I’ll upgrade to a D-SLR when I finally get all of my money issues (paying my father’s bills) worked out.
• I went on a kick of listening to nothing but David Bowie (thanks @ashleylynn) which was nice. I’ve been floundering around, listening to whatever CD was closest for a while now. I love finally regaining some direction. I also feel a Prokofiev kick coming on. Maybe, maybe not.
• I got a new monitor. A Dell 24” flatscreen, which I really like. I knew they were coming out with new models (which have since arrived on their website), and luckily the only real difference was HDMI inputs, which I don’t need since I don’t plan on watching HD movies or TV on it (unless from my computer). My PC now has the 24” as the main, and my 20” rotated 90 deg. as a secondary. It is an extremely useful setup. I love the multiple inputs, since the press of a button on the front will switch me from PC to Mac and back again
• The Giants won the Superbowl. That was teriffic. So my Red Sox took the World Series, my Giants have the Superbowl, who will win the NBA Championship? (Ha, not the Knicks!) But I would love to see Detroit or Boston make the finals. Especially Detroit, I think.
• I ordered a new laptop hard-drive from Newegg, which should arrive either today or Monday. I installed Leopard on it last month, and during that time got tired of squeezing everything onto my tiny 60gb drive. So 250gb will be here soon, and I’ll transfer. I’ve found the only thing I really like about Leopard is Spaces, the virtual window manager. On the otherhand, it works in ways I don’t expect (or think it should work). Eventually, I will look to see if there are some command line settings I can use to change behavior. For now, it will just occasionally annoy me.

Finally, I am quite tired of the weather. Continual cold with occasional teases of warmer temperatures have made this, in my mind, one of the longest winters ever. I can’t wait for even slightly warmer temperatures, so I can convince myself to get back outside on my bike. I haven’t rode, again, in forever. I look forward to changing that.