Saturday, April 28, 2007
A small, but enthusiastic, audience greeted the Imani Winds last night at Lorain County Community College. They presented works from Brazilian, Cuban, American and Thai composers that featured incredibly sophisticated syncopation, structure, harmony and rhythms. My favorite was the one by the Thai composer. The flute player opened and made her orchestral flute sound like an Asian bamboo instrument with note bending and incredible slow-pulsed vibrato control. Then my favorite was the two-movement piece by the Cuban composer, titled "Kites". The first movement evoked kites over Havana, and the second movement described wind chimes in the breeze. The players spoke the lines of poetry about flight and freedom that inspired the composer to write this piece. Then my favorite was a piece by Wayne Shorter written expressly for the Imani Winds. The French Horn opened with a two-note heartbeat pulse that was echoed throughout the work, first underlying the phrase, then split between the instruments, as many heartbeats together, slightly out of synch, then represented in the abstract by the spaces between the notes, then reprised by the ensemble trading phrases and harmonic structure. I was hearing one mind and one set of lungs play five separate instruments. They closed with a Brazilian "Tango Nuevo", which, as the French Horn player described, was intended not to be danced, but to be played with the same passion as the dance. It certainly worked well for me. Thanks to Russ for suggesting this evening out.
Posted 7:07 AM by Andy (0) comments
Comments:
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Still pushing the books and computers around. Took another test today. They are getting more obscure and arcane with each new topic. F'rinstance - what the heck is a WebDAV Redirector in IIS 6.0? I don't know either. But I can guess, and that is what enabled me to get through the exam today. Things I have never seen, nor studied, nor suspected were asked. The old "eliminate what you know it can't be and SWAG the rest" kept me afloat. So now I am a MCP. Alms? Alms? Will compute for food?
Well. On to bigger and more diffuse things starting Monday. Another week, another textbook to digest. I wonder if my head will explode?
Posted 4:00 PM by Andy (12) comments
Comments:
- Say what? Who doesn't know what a WebDAV Redirector in IIS 6.0 is? I mean come'on, even my dog knows that! Well, she says she does. She also says she knows who killed Kennedy, but that's another story.
Oooh, what's that Niki? You're gonna tell me what SWAG means? And it'll only cost me two milkbones! Such a deal!
- 795. Brent told me he squeaked by with 715. That's too close! SWAG means "Sealed With A Gluegun". Actually, I think it's from the military and originally was a "stupid wild-assed guess". Microsoft Internet Explorer doesn't even support MSJVM (Microsoft Java Virtual Machine) any more. All licenses extended from Sun Microsystems through Microsoft to you and me for Java will expire at the end of 2007. So plan your transitions well, grasshopper. Microsoft has a transition to Visual C+ as the recommended replacement. On to Server 2003 on Monday.
- Brent? A 715? Ye gods, I thought he would have aced it.
With about ten questions left to go I actually considered walking out. That's how bad I thought I was doing. Half of my answers were educated guesses at best. Kelly told me only four people from our class had taken it prior to my showing up and two failed.
- Andy - What do you think the subnet mask should be for an assigned IP of 172.x.x.x/24? I know that's a class B private number and the mask would normally be 255.255.0.0 but does the /24 make it 255.255.255.0?
- Yep. The /24 means the first three octets are the Network address, and the last octet is the Host. Question authority and consider the source (as cited by John).
- You both now qualify for three (3) doggy biscuits in your choice of regular, peanut butter or bacon. And let's just keep this between ourselves. If Niki finds out, well, I don't even wanna think about it.
Post a Comment- SWAG-Scientific Wild-Ass Guess. The rest of this discussion is making my head hurt. Anyone for old-fashioned language, as in spoken.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Here. Amuse yourself.
Posted 9:16 PM by whatley (3) comments
Comments:
Post a Comment- Under the spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy sat
Amusing himself by abusing himself
And catching it in his hat.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Friday, April 13, 2007
While wandering aimlessly (and I do it so well) through the halls of LCCC during class breaks I noticed a poster announcing an upcoming concert at Stocker Center by a wind quintet (And what, pray tell, is a wind quintet? Judging by the poster four hot babes and one lucky guy.) called Imani Winds. How cool! Stocker Center - Friday, April 27, 2007 - 7:30pm - $15.00. Anybody else wanna go?
Posted 8:25 AM by whatley (4) comments
Comments:
- Excitement over elegantly clad beautiful women blowing on long rigid objects to produce an evening of crescendos and climaxes . . .nothing Freudian there. Sounds like fun.
- Dulce Pontes is performing fado, the passion songs of Portugal, at John Hay High School on Friday, April 27 at 7:30PM. Tickets are $29. Info here. I wanna go, but I can buy a couple of CDs for $29 and replay at Will (whoever he is). I think I will go with Russ. Lemme call Betsy and see if we want to go. I will tell Byron and Alice also. Maybe we can have a "cultsure" night.
- Sounds better and better. The group, according to their web site, consists of "five unabashedly adventurous yet delightfully accessible musicians" and won't Tony be jealous!
Post a Comment- Imani Winds was way cool (and the babes way hot). Kind of a small crowd but I guess Stocker's like that. Too bad.
Monday, April 09, 2007
wildwestradio.com
A tad on the country side but still yummy.
Posted 7:15 AM by whatley (0) comments
Comments:
Thursday, April 05, 2007
TODAY'S WRITING TIP: In writing a resume, make sure that it is ''up to date'' and reflects current economic conditions:
WRONG: 'I am currently working for a `dot-com' company.''
RIGHT: ``I am currently living in an appliance carton.''
Posted 1:22 PM by Andy (3) comments
Comments:
- You have a carton?!? a whole appliance carton? AND you complain?
There was a man who thought he was poor because he had no carton until he met a man who was living in an USPS Overnight Delivery envelope WITH his wife and five children because his government couldn't find him shelter because they had to balance the budget and the $1,000,000 a week in Iraq was straining the budget (and my increduluity).
Post a Comment- John you left three zeros off that weekly Iraq figure. Its actually around $1,000,000,000/week. And we haven't been in Kansas for a very long time Dorothy.
So much for spring. Snow, cold, wind through Sunday. Dogwood blooms, daffodils, trees in bud - four days of twenty-degree temperatures will take care of all of that. The spring peepers are silent, but they can survive with their teeny carcasses partially frozen. I checked the weather for Alaska. Anchorage and Valdez were in the 20's, while Fairbanks, Coldfoot and points North reported 10 above to 10 below. Let's all go to Florida.
Posted 6:12 AM by Andy (1) comments
Comments:
Post a Comment- If you don't mind the fifty four degrees it will be tonight. Still planning on waiting for the Easter Bunny at the beach.
Hurry though, you have 45 days before hurricane season starts.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Busy, busy, busy. Russ and I are still in hot pursuit of the chimera of IT fame and wealth. And you can keep the fame. Since I will be entirely studious this riding season, I have decided to sell the great gold beast and convert my decades-long obsession with dangerous transportation into cold cash. After all, a fella's gotta eat. Akin to a cowboy shooting his horse in the desert to feast for a time on the offal, in hopes of civilization and surcease beyond the shimmering horizon. Can't eat the Ford stock, which I sold before they cashiered me anyway.
I heard an NPR news item yesterday wherein GM has surplus funding for their retirement program. GM invested billions in the market several years ago, and unlike the State of Ohio Workman's Compensation fund (which sought out a dealer in rare coins, who subsequently absconded with millions), they realized a much larger than anticipated return. GM currently has a solvent retirement system. It would have been much larger but for the 35,000 buy-outs last year, which offered better-than-expected retirement conditions for the early go.
So I have optimism about the GM retirement planning managers' abilities (or luck?). If GM is learning to treat its "family" well, even if base-level self-interest in corporate survival is the motivator, it bodes well for possible sanity in management philosophy. Next, if they do the Ben and Jerry show, reducing the pay gap between the lowest and highest levels of the company, things will be looking up even more. Now they have to stay the course and develop a truly efficient, fuel-sipping urban-mobile that parks like a motorcycle and protects occupants versus the elephantatic rolling mansions that currently populate the byways. Personally, I would welcome a small two-seat vehicle built like a motorcycle helmet, with 5-point harnesses, roll cages, and crash-absorbent internal material throughout. Two or three-cylinder diesel engines could propel them down the road at a top speed of 70 mph and still get 50 mpg. Modular assemblies to permit repair access and replacement. Don't repair an engine, swap it out for a fresh module which is returned for recycling. Why not? People have been selling "short blocks" for years. Just extend the concept.
But many customers will not relinquish leather and luxury for efficiency.
And then there is the frog problem.
Posted 6:53 AM by Andy (5) comments
Comments:
- And speaking of IT fame and wealth I saw you at the testing center this morning. I never knew a human could sweat that much and still live. After you left they put those little yellow "danger, wet floor" signs all around your terminal.
Me? I took two tests didn't sweat a drop. I pissed myself instead. They're ordering some "danger, wet chair" signs.
- That wasn't sweat, it was condensation as I felt the chill of utter panic sweep over me when the questions presented had no apparent relationship to the class and study materials used to prepare. Next would have been the piss that passeth all understanding, as you experienced.
- On my way back in to take the second A+ test (I did really well on both) I met one of our classmates coming out from the Net+. He had a shell shocked look to him and said he passed but just barely. Ye Gods, what's in that thing? Guess I'll find out tomorrow.
- Congrats, homey. Glad you're back with the living, in all senses. It wasn't so much the questions, which were not unreasonable, but the way they were put, which, to my way of thinking, required putting concepts together that, in my mind, had a piece missing. I have never worked with networks before, so probably find myself at a disadvantage. BTW - pasing score on the N+ is 554 on a grading scale of 100-900. The A+ tests required 675 for Essentials and 700 for technician on a 100-900 scale. I was in the mid 800s for A+ and low 700s for N+.
Post a Comment- Maybe you put all that good ol' American know-how to work on something like this
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