Writer's Block: Sultans of swing

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Heh. Actually, I'm working on two different albums at the moment: a solo album called Amethyst Rose, and one with my band, Tempered Glass, tentatively called Crazed.

Amethyst Rose has actually gotten to the point of recording some scratch tracks and coming up with a tentative track list. All but one or two will be my songs, mostly relating to my family (the other way of expressing the theme is "songs people have told me they'll kill me if I don't record", which explains the presence of Ship of Stone on the track list. The cover will be a picture of a Royal Amethyst rose in the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden; the disk will also be a rose, seen close up.

Crazed is, so far, just at the planning stage -- it will be about 2/3 songs by one or more of the band members (me, Naomi Rivkis, and Callie Hills), and about 1/3 covers of filk and folk songs we love.

9/11 -- "Stand Up For Religious Tolerance Day"

It's Cat Faber's idea:

You remember the Koran burning thing.

Well, I have an idea. What if we start a backfire (metaphorically)? Let's make September 11, 2010 "Stand Up For Religious Tolerance Day"

Everybody post something on religious tolerance.

That way we don't reward Koran burning trolls with attention, BUT we don't stay silent and let it look like we don't mind, or even agree.

If you think it's a good idea, please pass it on!

I do, so I did. See you Saturday.

Done yesterday (20100906 Mo - 07 Tu)

( raw notes )

Monday was wonderful. I went for a walk around the Rose Garden in the morning before Colleen got up. In the afternoon, we went to San Francisco for the newly-rebuilt California Academy of Science and Steinhart Aquarium, and the DeYoung art museum across the street. Ended up buying both memberships; we'd had a DeYoung membership, but it had lapsed several years ago. But well worth it.

The Academy of Science/Steinhart Aquarium is a simply wonderful space. The rain forest exhibit is a helical path through a spherical enclosure that takes you from the forest floor to the canopy, from which you can look down into the segment of river three floors below. The elevator then drops you into the aquarium's Amazon River exhibit, looking up into the rain forest. Unlike the rain forest, the aquarium is highly non-linear -- we kept turning corners and running into new sections that we hadn't seen and hadn't realized existed. The only problem is that, being highly nonlinear, there isn't a clear path through it that guarantees that you'll see everything.

Over at the DeYoung, we managed to catch the last day of the Birth of Impressionism exhibit. I ended up pushing Colleen through it because the scooter's batteries were flagging; this was probably better than her trying to motor through the crowd, so it all worked out.

I was pretty damned tired by the time we got home, though, and my left hip was hurting. We picked up a bucket of KFC for dinner on the way home.

 

Tuesday was pretty good, too, but I didn't have time for a walk. Probably just as well. The main event was a code review. It ran late (three hours rather than the scheduled two) and only got through half of the four projects, which didn't surprise me. But I had fun, as well as learning a lot. The gimmick was that everyone had to learn someone else's code well enough to present it. This was brilliant, because it not only got me familiar enough with Joe's code (for example) to work on it, but meant that one was less likely to get defensive about it.

I brought my netbook in for the presentation, and it worked perfectly. Emacs makes a very good code browser. I used the Mac laptop for notes; I had one terminal window open on my file of pre-review notes, and a second for live note-taking.

The catch is, now I get to fix the bugs we found. But I expected that, and it'll be a good way for me to learn PHP.

The bear is going to go fall over now. Lots of good links under the cut.