The Mandelbear's Musings

This morning, after getting up significantly later than usual (even factoring in the extra hour due to the time change), I finished up work on the Tres Gique concert at Consonance. This consisted mostly of fixes to scripts and makefiles; not surprisingly a couple of bugs showed up. There will be a little more hacking involved around cflute and tibicina's set, since I don't have distribution rights on the songs. That means I'll have to keep them out of the index, which in turn means I have to write an index.html file rather than relying on Apache's automatic one. Well, it's not particularly hard -- mostly cut-and-paste.

After that I went out for a four-mile walk. The weather has turned warm over the last week or so -- it's entirely possible that we've seen the last wet, cold week of the season.

As for album status, so far I've worked on four tracks today: "High Barratry", "Mushrooms", "Pigeon Flight", and "I Wanna be a Webmaster". "High Barratry" and "Mushrooms" were the only ones that involved more than tweaks. This leaves me with 7 tracks essentially done, 5 needing little more than editing, and 2 wanting new parts, and 4 wanting old parts rerecorded. I'll be taking a day off this week (having to take my car in for service makes a good excuse).

8 new preorders on paper, and 2 by PayPal since Consonance. The main task now is to set up a mailing list.

Spent a little while unpacking the last bits from Consonance -- I'd tossed my suitcase under the bed and collapsed in a heap after the con. Also boxed up the last of my old T-shirts and took three boxes up to the attic. Did I mention that I bought more banker's boxes? Office Max was having a 3-for-2 sale.

Came home from work Monday evening and found cflute and jenkitty still at the Starport, with Callie seriously under the weather. After dinner, the flower_cat and I went off to artbeco's and it_aint_easy's after-con party. Fun, and a little bit of good singing, though many people had to leave early to get to work/school in the morning. Including me, though I stayed up late to talk to Callie. I'll take good conversation over sleep any time.

There's a housefilk at Kanef's this Saturday, and the March party at theStarport next Saturday (the 17th.)

Sometime next week I should be finished with technical reports at work -- all but one are basically done except for data entry (due tomorrow, but I'll get it done today) and final submission to rowanf. That means that sometime next week I should be able to take a little time off to work on the album.

Great concerts, great conversations. Who could ask for more?

Highlights of Sunday included concerts by nimuejohn, decadentdave, vixyish and Tony (whose LJ name I'm having trouble finding right now) tfabris, and the impromptu bawdy circle in room 502 this evening. Hauled out "Hackers", which is ancient. It's getting late; I'm going to go fall over now so I can take the kids to their respective destinations in the morning.

Here I am at Consonance, blogging from the audience listening to Dave Rood's Interfilk concert. The auction will come after that; I don't know at this point whether my preorder package will end up in voice. (update: it did; $150. The wenching is strong with this one...)

Our concert slot went pretty well. I say "our" because this was the world premier performance of the group "Très Gique" (feel free to correct my French if I got the accent wrong) -- me, cflute, and Joyce Uggla. Some glitches and a lot of really rough transitions (dropped lyrics, mic fiddling, and problems deciding what to do next) but pretty good on the whole. We sounded good, at least in the monitors, and that's the important thing: some of those songs really came together. I always imagined "Demon Lover" and "Silk and Steel" with flute, and Callie's voice/whistle part on "High Barratry" was a honk.

Hopefully the recording came out OK. A lot of my being flustered and confused came from taking too long to set up the rig and then being on the wrong input device. Lost a lot of cflute and tibicina's concert as a result; hopefully I caught the last song at least. Pretty sure I did I did.

They may be small compared to other mountains, and the weather in California may be warm compared to winters elsewhere, but there was still snow on the peaks this morning. It was still there as I drove home, the white domes of Lick Observatory floating among the clouds on a raft of white snow. Below the snowline, the grass on the hills is green.

Walked 2.5 miles today, which makes up in part for missing yesterday completely. Things have been busy this week at work, getting ready for a week of visitors, demos, and posters next week. Most of them will be there Tuesday and Wednesday; hopefully I'll be able to get away most of Thursday. And Consonance starts Friday. I'm not ready!

Managed to get a crude but effective data-entry form mostly working; I'll have it finished this evening. Then we can start mailing confirmations and URLs to the people who preordered Coffee, Computers, and Song! during the last two months. ( implementation notes )

The fileserver is still freezing; there's a Debian install in my near future.