h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This morning's task, after driving Iz to college, was to tackle the rust on the shelves in the shed. We had stored some cardboard boxes on the steel shelves in the shed. The boxes contain lawn sand and compost accelerator, both in plastic bags inside the cardboard boxes. For some reason, the boxes are soaked with water and the shelves under them have rusted. I don't understand this, as nothing else in the shed is wet, even the things directly above them.

Anyway, I'm going to put the boxes into plastic bags, and I've spent a few hours cleaning the rust off the shelves, so they should be OK.

This afternoon's task will be to clean out the guinea pigs' hutch in the shed. This needs to be done at least once a week. Then I have to tackle the mayhem that is our attic - there's all sorts of things up there that we don't need anymore, so they can be dumped or given away.

At the same time as all this, I'm working on something I consider exciting - I'm going to add a couple of musical examples to an h2g2 entry.

A while back I wrote an entry on Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, but never got it quite ready for Peer Review. While I was dithering / working on other things, Researcher Vip wrote a similar entry and put it into Peer Review. A major feature of Vip's entry was the difference between two different versions of this piece of music. To illustrate this, she included links to Youtube performances of the two versions, but she had to ask people to go to a particular point in the youtube recording (3 minutes and 10 seconds in) to hear the particular phrase, and a different point in the other recording (3 minutes 25 seconds in) to hear the equivalent phrase.

This didn't really work. It wasn't easy to do - certainly a person determined to see the point she was making could have followed the instructions, but we want h2g2 to be an easy read. People should be drawn in to being readers, and come back for more.

Vip had other problems with her entry and eventually withdrew it. She didn't think she'd have time to fix it, so I finished my one off and put it into Peer Review. To illustrate the same point, I've decided to use two small images, showing the musical notation of the phrase in each version, and then a midi file behind this which will play the phrase on a synthesised clarinet when you click on a link. Here's an example, although it is not the final version:

http://h2g2.com/h2g2/blobs/midi/clarinet1.mid

Pastey has tested it and is happy with the technicalities, so it is just a question of constructing the midi files, which I need to do on daughter El's laptop as she has the Sibelius software for writing musical scores.

Did Sibelius really use software to write musical scores?



The things you learn in this place...

It gets worse. Beethoven used auto tuning.

The real Sibelius used to turn his fecord player up really loud because he liked to hear every little detail.

Yay, I've got my list of entries in progress down to only 144! I'm sure there are still plenty in that list that will never be written, so when I find these, I remove them from the list.

They either go back to being empty entries called Gnomon Test, which my Recycle link will find, or if they have conversations attached, I delete these.

Glad you're OK with your desk situation - moving all one's kit around in the office does get tedious, I know...

Fascinating midi thing - it didn't work for me the first couple of times, but it was third time lucky

There's something I can do with midi on my electronic keyboard (so I see from the user manual) but as the keyboard is about 20 years old, I'm not sure my computer would be able to recognise it. I record my tunes on to my digital sound recorder and transfer them to the computer that way, which is not too bad, although I have to watch out for background noise. Sibelius software sounds fascinating, though

Sibelius is expensive, but my daughter needed it because she was doing a degree in Music.

It's very good at producing music scores - it's the standard that all composers now use. But it's not so good at producing the sound itself. I also have an old copy of Cakewalk Pro Audio 8 which is very good at the sound, but not so good for the score. I actually haven't tried installing Pro Audio 8 on my present computer - the last time I used it was on a Windows XP machine. It might not run on Vista.

[[[ lil ]]]

Deb

We went out from work today for our end-of-year lunch, paid for by the company. We went to a French restaurant called La Mère Zou, although I've been told it's really Walloonish (French Belgian). I had deep fried brie followed by a shank of venison hotpot, with a selection of cheeses to finish up.

This ran on long enough that it wasn't worth returning to work, so I went down to Trinity, where at 5:15, Daughter El conducted the chapel choir in Evensong. I'd never been to Evensong before, and this was Dyson's arrangement in C, which is very impressive.

Then I walked out to Donnybroook where we had a big-choir rehearsal for our Christmas concert on the 9th of December. We're doing a piece by Respighi which is turning out to be harder than we expected and requires a lot of extra rehearsal. We still have more than a week to learn it, so it should be good on the night.

Sorry, I forgot to update the conversation title for that posting. We are now on Thursday.

Deb

Which piece by Resphigi?

It's called Lauda per la Natività del Signore.

There's a beautiful old moon this morning. Only another couple of days until dark of moon.

I only barely made it yesterday with my first post of the day in the journal being at 23:10. This was because I was doing lots of interesting things during the day and wanted to report on them all.

This evening, the daughters are hosting a "Toy Show Party" in our house. The Late Late Show is a chat show, the longest running one on Irish television, first airing in 1962. For many, many years, the show has done a special a few weeks before Christmas which is called the Toy Show. Instead of talking to guests, the show presents toys - most of the presentations are done by children, and it is often amusing to see how little they are impressed by some of the toys. They also intersperse lots of musical and dancing performances by talented children.

Despite the rampant commercialism, the programme is actually quite tasteful. And the presenter Ryan Tubridy repeatedly warns children that Santa Claus is having problems in his factory and there might be problems getting some of the more expensive toys to children - they should consult with their parents before deciding what to ask for. All the toys reviewed on the show are donated by toyshops and are given to charity at the end of the show.

My daughters' idea of organising a party is just to ask everyone to turn up. Mrs G is going to cook a vegan, coeliac-friendly stew and my task will probably be to buy a lot of fizzy drinks. Their friends aren't heavy drinkers, thankfully.

It's two minutes to 4 now and it is getting dark. Sunset is 12 minutes past four. I notice that since the sun rose at 8:14, we've reached the point where the day is only 8 hours long and the night 16 hours.

At the very middle of Winter, on the 21st of December, the day is as short as 7 hours 29 minutes, so we're almost there in terms of dark days. Another seven weeks or so and we'll be back to days longer than 8 hours, and people will be filled with new hope.

I wish Pastey and his gang would fix the bug about conversation posting titles. I thought I had put the right days on the postings, but they seem to keep changing back to former ones, so it is not clear when I posted things. Anyway, I posted at least one journal entry every day for the entire of November. Today's the last day. I'll go back to my "journal every few days" style from now on.

The Toy Show Party went well last night; the girls' friends arrived, watched the show, a couple went home and the rest stayed the night, not going to bed until 3.

Today was a lovely day - it's not over yet, but the sun has set. I had a lie in until 9 (I'm normally up around 7). Spent the morning drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. The friends left at about 12, then after dropping El to her piano class, Mrs G and I went for a brisk walk around Marlay Park. We did two laps which is 7.6km. It was a cold, crisp morning and the few remaining leaves on the trees are spectacular golden colours, something which is very unusual in Ireland. Normally they just turn a dirty brown before falling off. This year, the exception summer has somehow contributed to the best autumn colours I've ever seen.

There was a craft and food fair in Marlay - we got some sweet potato fries. Finished the walk, then returned home as it was getting dark.

I managed to get a couple of minutes on El's laptop and created my two Midi files for my Mozart's Clarinet Concerto entry, but the files disappeared into the ether, so I'll have to do it again later when she's not busy with the laptop.

Now I'm enjoying more coffee.

I think the titles get mucked up if someone replies to an earlier one?

I'm pretty sure you did post every day, and well done for getting there

Deb

There's also a bug whereby if you reply in Pliny, the title is not the one you expect. I tried to work out the details, but couldn't figure it out.