Sibelius Symphony no. 1

My orchestra is playing Sibelius 1 tomorrow in Columbia, Maryland. It’s not my favorite symphony, seems a little naive, though he wrote it when he was 35. If you wanna check it out, first check out the site.

Affecting your situation

I don’t typically link to other blogs/articles, nor do I mention classical music particularly often, but I found this article and blog entry so interesting and thought-provoking that they deserve a re-post.

First, a moving blog entry from David Finlayson, trombonist in the New York Philharmonic, and second, the New York Times article describing the background, as well as referencing the blog post.

While I’ve never had a specifically parallel experience, I can relate to the concepts of “fakes” in a particular industry. I find Mr. Finlayson’s reaction (that all musicians must take responsibility and blame for the situation) to be both bold, yet… well, correct. It takes a strong person to identify a stormy situation clearly and react in an appropriate fashion. I only hope that I would react the same way given the circumstanses.

Random February Thoughts

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.

Concert Tonight

I’ve got a concert tongiht. Check out the Columbia Orchestra site for details. Tchaikovsky 4, along with Strauss’ first Horn Concerto, and a Brandenburg. Should be pretty good, especially since I’ve practiced a fair amount for this.

I don’t expect anyone I know to come, as there is also something going on in Boston tonight. Some sort of baseball game?

So yea, come and see me torn. Don’t expect me to hang around after the concert for any more than a second though.

catching up

This is my appropriately named “catching up” post. As most know, I’ve moved over the last month. Despite my early action, I still had to do a lot of work at the end of the month. C’est la vie, that’s what moving is. Aside that, I’ve also been focused on various work related things (css, xslt, and the “portal” system), as well as the end of baseball’s regular season and the beginning of the post season.

On my list of things to touch in full… 1) Advanced DOM Scripting. I finished the book (a while ago) but haven’t had a chance to review it yet. At the risk of ruining the surprise for my one (hopefully) reader, it was teriffic, and I highly recommend it. I will do a full write-up later. 2) My comments on The Little Schemer. This is simply an amazing book that’s opened up a number of paths in my brain. I’m afraid that any review wouldn’t do it justice. Maybe some thoughts on the book everyone should read. 3) Random thoughts on Bethesda, Kensington, Rockville (my new home!), riding my bike again, the Tchaikovsky concert coming up, my xslt class coming up, my recent css exploits… as you can see, I’ve got a lot of things that I am thinking about, but nothing to put down on paper… yet. (Yes, I know, really, there is no paper… shut up!)

Contrast that with the time that I MUST spend with friends, and the potential Boston trip coming up… and I’ve got a lot to do!! Better get started. Washing my clothes now…