Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to kyburg and aerowolf!!! Have a great one!!

Tres Gique: Weekend Wrap-up

This is the second or third (depending on whether you count this one) post about last weekend's Tres Gique rehearsal session. The first was titled Weekend of Win, which sort of gives you the general idea. There will be one more, on the River aspects. You'll find the links for the weekend's music here. (There's also a technical report on issues of interest to some of my coworkers; I probably won't post it on LJ.)

cflute got in late Friday night, after nearly missing her flight because she believed the airline when they said it would be leaving two hours late. If I hadn't already had a flight tracker up when N. called from the car, ...

Saturday we went up to our secret mountain hide-out $COMPANY to use one of their conference rooms; ended up in a lobby/lounge area in the administrative half of the suite that offered a little more convenience, comfort, and space without having to move tables around.

We started out with a couple of songs that we all agreed we wanted to work up: "Gilda and the Dragon", and Fred Small's "Big Italian Rose" and "Everything Possible". Then a couple of older ones that we're all pretty familiar with: "Cicero" and "The Owl and the Pussycat". At which point I realized that I ought to have been recording, and hauled out the Zoom H2. We did "The River", "The Toolmakers", and "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of".

The final chords of "Stuff" were interruped around 12:30 by Colleen and chaoswolf arriving with lunch, in the form of a big pot of chicken curry. Yum. Kat stayed for the afternoon, though I think she was mostly bored.

In the afternoon we did another run-through of "Stuff", worked pretty hard on "Millennium's Dawn", and finished on a high note with "Quiet Victories". That's the point where Joyce decided it was worth investing in a bass, which she'd been thinking of for a while.

Sunday we gathered at Joyce's place, which meant that Dave didn't have to schlep the sound equipment. The room is wonderful for sound; the four-footed denizens less so, between interruptions and allergies.

Sunday was awesome. It was clear from the first song ("Cicero" again) that Joyce has found her instrument of choice, and that the band is clearly a band and not just a bunch of random filkers getting together the Friday before a con.

OK, there's undoubtedly a lot of New {Instrument, Group} Energy involved, but we can put that to good use. There's still a little doubt about whether we can sustain a once-a-month practice schedule both logistically and financially, and whether we can do enough work, separately or in small groups, between sessions to make it work. But at this point it looks hopeful.

cflute left Sunday evening. The weekend was intense, highly productive, and way too short.

A couple of kitchen notes:

To whichever kid put the dishes in the dishwasher: thanks. It helps.

To me: an important part of "putting dinner away" is checking the rice cooker to make sure it's turned off. "Keeps rice warm for two hours" does not mean "turns off the warmer after two hours", it means "rice will be crunchy by morning".

Tres Gique on the River

This is a follow-up to my upstream posts Tres Gique: Weekend of Win and Tres Gique: Weekend Wrap-up, this time from the point of view of the River posts.

A weekend is barely enough time for catching up with a friend. Fill it with 8 hours of rehearsal, a couple hours of commute time, lunch and snack breaks, and add the fact that cflute is not only my good friend but Colleen's. I got plenty of time with Callie, but most of that time was busy and tightly focussed. All the one-on-one time was spent in my car, and while I can talk and drive, I can't concentrate as much as I like to do when I'm talking with a friend.

Colleen, of course, got even less time -- she'd wanted to at least do a little recreational shopping. Schedules permitting, we'll have to try tacking an extra day onto the next visit.

 

Colleen ended up feeling excluded, even though she excluded herself because she knows that listening to us rehearse would drive her crazy. And because she knows that if she's around we'll be trying to entertain her -- perform for her -- rather than working on the hard parts in a way that would be excruciating for someone who listens to music purely for pleasure.

Next time we'll have streaming audio, probably using icecast, with a text backchannel probably using either IRC or Jabber. That will mean that remote participants like Colleen and pocketnaomi can be flies on the wall if they want to, and drop out quietly if they're bored.

Having Colleen cater lunch on Saturday was highly successful. Next time we'll have her come in with a snack on Sunday as well, which will hopefully make her feel even more connected and give her a chance to say goodbye to Callie, and sit in on our last session if she wants to.

 

We had a different set of problems with pocketnaomi, who wanted to be included even though she was stuck up in Seattle. Our initial attempt on Saturday, using a cell phone, was disastrous: Callie interpreted N's saying that the sound quality was barely tolerable as meaning that she didn't want to continue listening. The result was a very upset PocketPerson on the other end of the line, especially since Callie and I turned our cell phones off at that point.

Sunday we set up Skype on my laptop, which was much better, especially after we turned off the video. We used IM (to Callie's laptop) as the backchannel. Naomi told me the next day that

I'm quite happy communicating to you in text while being able to hear you but not be heard. It means if I need to deal with the kids or ask someone a question or rustle the pages of my book, I'm not interfering.

The only glitch came when we took a break, and both of our laptops timed out and dropped the connections. Leaving an upset PocketPerson on the other end of the line again. This time, fortunately, we were able to recover quickly and almost gracefully.

( The lessons for next time )

Starport: Mirror, mirror, on the disk

With disk usage on my main fileserver hovering around 98% after a weekend of recording and a week of editing, it was clearly time to Do Something. And this particular something has been planned for a while.

About a week ago I thought to check, found the "etch-and-a-half" (2.6.24) kernel, and installed it. It seems to completely fix the mysterious hang-up on long writes that's been plaguing me for a year on 2.6.18, so I was finally able to move the Debian mirror off the fileserver and onto the gateway machine, where a 175GB partition has been waiting for just such an occasion.

With 100GB moved, the fileserver is down to 71%; the gateway stands at 68%. So I get to keep my 500GB disks for a while longer; hopefully until 1TB gets under $100.

Adding to the excitement, I found that my mirror hadn't actually been updated since January sometime, when I cleverly renamed the administrative user (because admin is taken now) without renaming its crontab. Oops. All better now.

I've also put in some work on the Tres Gique website.