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.

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.

Beginning of the fall semester

Tomorrow is the start of a new Columbia Orchestra season. It’s the first rehearsal. I could not be less prepared either. For the first time I can remember, I am starting a new semester and nothing in my life is changing. I don’t have a new place to live, any new classes, any new books/clothes/shoes for school, or even any new school.

At this time last year I was about to return from East Hampton. I was moving into a new house, one I had never seen, and was about to start searching for a new job. It was exciting. From almost nowhere, I decided I was going to get a job writing webpages, or programming, or both. I wrote up a resume, replied to a few postings, and got a temp job. I was offered a regular position within a week-and-a-half and have been doin’ it since.

As an aside, I believe I’ve come a long way. First, I’ve made many new friends, and have been many new places doing many new things. It has been a lot of fun. I have taken my HTML & CSS from zero-to-sixty, learned a ton of Javascript and Rails, and am now looking into usability, design patterns, graphic design, typography, algorithms and more. And I pick up things very quickly, and hope to get even faster.

But back to the semester starting, I’ve got my usual panic. End of summer. Start of fall. Baseball, hot days, and lazy weekends are all winding down. Football, brisk breezes, and rehearsals all starting. Time for something big and new. I just have to figure out what that is going to be this year.