Michaela Sue

Remember the fax machine? When was the last time you used one? In the cleaning-out process I just found some documents from 1990 when a fax machine was being purchased for the lab I started working in five years later. $1500 to $2500 for a fax machine, the kind that uses curling-up quick-fading thermal paper. There was a laser-printer model for $3200. Aside from not having any use for a fax machine anymore anyway, it's hard to imagine them as exotic, costly technology rather than a bonus unimportant feature built into a cheap ink jet printer.

Last night Samuel Hutchison played a recital on the Overture Concert Organ in Madison Wisconsin. (program here) He concluded with Noel Rawsthorne's Hornpipe Humoresque, a piece that probably isn't as well-known as it ought to be, though I'm sure the organists among you know it. I found this performance of it on you-tube. Truly a piece that leaves you wondering how the heck that just happened.

It may be below freezing on many mornings, plus occasional flurries, but the really wintery, snow-sports weather sort of winter is behind us here, and the Pettit Center closed down the 400 meter oval today, so it's time to look back at winter.

( longish, plus a photo )

Happy birthday to jrittenhouse!

Capricon was lots of fun. I have a few of the very cutest photos up on flickr already. I've just not been in a musical mood for some time now (and I've just been busy with other things, too), but we had some small open filk circles and I ended up contributing a good bit myself. I bought a few CDs, I've already found a few songs I really want to learn. One is very beautiful. Another, is, um, something else, but I have to learn it, too. There were lots of lovely concerts. There were Eric and Lizzie. There were small children so I could perform my role with them: Oh hai! I wound up your kid for you! 'K tnx bye! Cutest thing: Showing the not-nearly-so-tiny-anymore daughter of harperjen a photo of her when she was pretty much newborn. She said, "that's not me!" Another thing I noticed about the small children is, as they get less small, I can understand more of the actual words they are saying, but much of the time I still have no idea what they are talking about. Eventually people grow up and either grow out of that level of incomprehensible imagination, or else they don't and get jobs as software user interface designers (what the hell is this icon supposed to be???)

I took today off from work, and it's been nice sleeping in and then skiing and then speed skating, plus getting groceries and doing laundry.

It snowed around here recently.

The snow got going for real Tuesday night. I went out on snow shoes down by the Little Menomonee River right outside my home. It was a lovely night, snow blowing in sustained 40+ km/hr winds with gusts up around 65 km/hr, but the temperature was up around -6°C, so not very cold, quite comfortable even with the wind. Big gusts would blow and pick up whirlwinds of snow, lots of fun to be out in. Everything at any distance was obscured in the blowing snow, like a fog only with a lot more tactile sensation when it hits you! Besides the overall roar of the wind there was the constant clatter of the tree branches hitting each other, and in places the squeaky sounds of rubbing trees. I suppose the actual chance of being hit by a falling tree was very small (I'm not sure any actually did fall out there during this storm at all), but it seemed rather more likely than usual. If there was any thunder I couldn't hear it for all the noise. I got all the way up to near the intersection of Good Hope Road and 91st Street, climbed up the hill to the road level to see the (minimal) traffic on the mostly-plowed roads and get blasted by the unobstructed wind. Needed some care to stay standing in the gusts. It was a fun time to be out on the snow shoes.

There was enough snow overnight that even my employer, which usually won't officially close for weather even when every other school and college and university closes and officials are asking everyone to stay home, actually officially decide to close at 5AM rather than waiting until noon to suggest that anyone who managed to come in should go home if they can. The roads in my immediate neighborhood were actually plowed mostly clear in the morning, but the interstates south of the city were closed and declared "impassable." The wind had diminished somewhat but was still strong, so depending on a road's orientation and what was upwind it's easy to imagine deep drifts continuously forming.

I spent some more time out in the woods on the snow shoes. The snow back in the woods was mostly in the half-meter total depth range, with some areas a bit thinner and some deeper. It was soft snow, and made for quite slow going even with the snow shoes. Very pretty, sunny and just below freezing. Very little traffic on the roads, so hardly even any road noise audible even though I was never more than a few hundred meters from a road.

It's not exactly wilderness, but I live within city limits, can walk to my local coffee shop, cycle to downtown and to work whenever we don't have snow and ice, and yet just across the street from home can wander out in the woods out of sight of anyone else. Plus I can go out alone at night in ridiculous weather and what's the worst that can go wrong? I'm 2km from home, 200m from a paved and plowed road, have strong 3G cell phone signal, and am maybe 4km from a fire station. It's safer than driving on the interstate with all the morons.

Out in the woods it's hard to say how much snow is a lot. Life was pretty well back to normal on Thursday, and driving in the city it sure looked like a lot of snow, piled up high beside the roads, blocking the view for turning in lots of places. The snow firmed up a bit and it was easier walking on the snow shoes today. The ski trails have been groomed and should be good this weekend.

( a few photos )

I have a new game, the Sounds Similar But Not Similar Department: Shakti and Schottky

After the half marathon yesterday I'm not feeling all that energetic today, but I went out for a short walk. The sky is clear, the wind calm, and the temperature a nice wintery -11C/+11F. There is a row of condos by the highway that can be seen from near the river, all lined up in a row with their chimneys all lined up with the plumes of smoke rising nearly vertically in the still air, all in a row. On the one hand that's pretty much the classic image of people warm and snug indoors by the fire on a cold winter night, and it's pretty. On the other, I always think that if those buildings were designed and built better they wouldn't need so much heating (and those are probably not very efficient heating units, either). I suppose I have the some feelings, only more so, about campfires. It's lots of fun to sit and watch the flames, and the caveman in us all loves to feel the warmth on a cool evening (or even a not-very-cool summer evening if you are, you know, skyclad and it's not that warm), but while the wood smoke in very low concentration has a pleasant smell, a shift of the wind will send you running to breathable air, the fire itself not burning well at all, and pretty near all of the heat is wasted, only the tiniest fraction being intercepted by the people gathered around it. As waste goes it is pretty, though.

Well, I got Music Player Daemon running on the Infocast. It's interesting installing software on a minimal system like this, the dependencies and dependencies of the dependencies that would probably already be installed on a full Linux installation aren't on something like this. (Tip: if you are going to compile a fresh glib to get all the development files, use the exact same version as the runtime files already installed.) I may add some more add-ons later, but for now I do have MPD running and playing flac files off the usb disk attached to the Infocast. I'm using, at the moment, the Gnome Music Player Client to control it from either the netbook or the big computer. Yay for open source: This device isn't really marketed as a music device, but now I have it doing pretty well exactly what I wanted all along. It's small, it's cheap, I've attached local storage for the music files, and I can control it over the network from a real computer with keyboard and mouse.

( one photo, some more text )

Windycon was tons of fun.

Tricky Pixie and the various permutations of Sooj, Betsy, Alec, and everyone else was wonderful. Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps are crazy-cheerful. Tomboat was great. Mary Crowell. Fiddling Amy. Just sort of all the awesome you can stand.

Set of photos!

Random Observations:

• Percussionists hit objects to make sound. The majority of objects in the universe will make sound if you hit them, not just Official Percussion Instruments recognized by the Percussion Institute and sold in music stores. Also objects purchased at Home Depot.
  
• Everyone loves fiddle! Thanks sweetmusic_27!
  
• Should have brought my heart rate monitor. The climb up to the 14th floor (where my room was) was fun. The hotel is a bit confusing, but stairs actually do have a few signs. Not enough, but better than average, though that isn't saying much. Stairs were slightly less ugly than average, too.
  
• It is much awesome to be right up near Amy and Betsy when they play.
  
• I grew up near the current hotel's location, and used to go to that shopping mall, though it doesn't really look anything like I remember anymore.