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.
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