• What is TiVo? – Answerbag.com

• System Administrator Appreciation Day Friday July 28th 2006
  (tags: sysadmin)

Neat. M&M’s announces the return of Dark Chocolate M&M’s. Previously they were only available as a Star Wars light/dark promotion. They’re mighty tasty. I hear Sam’s has them — time to stop by and get the big bag.

The second and final summer band concert is Thursday, July 20th. Usual time and place – 7pm on the Quad (unless it’s raining, and then it’s at Harding Band Building.) I don’t expect rain – I expect it will be balls hot, so dress and use that deodorant accordingly. There will most likely be drinks afterwards, and Mom is planning on coming up for the concert/weekend.

I’ll post the program tomorrow after I get it. Highlights for this concert are the CU local thespian troop singing Oliver (it’s their summer show too,) and three baritones (Pete, Ken, and Maurine (?)) playing Bugler’s Holiday. There’s also a Sinatra tribute, U of I March, some Von Suppe (not the light calvary) and some cheese schmultzy waltzs I expect you hear on cruise lines. Good times.

2006
Peter J. Griffin, Conductor
Daniel Neuenschwander, Guest Conductor
Kenneth Steinsultz, euphonium
Maureen Reagan, euphonium
Peter Griffin, euphonium
Cast members from Champaign-Urbana Theatre Company production of “Oliver”
*PROGRAM*
Thursday, July 20, 2006

Star Spangled Banner

Brighton Beach / William Latham

Summer Dances / Brian Balmages

Italian Polka / Rachmaninoff, Leidzen

Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna / Franz von Suppe
Daniel Neuenschwander, conductor

Bugler’s Holiday / Anderson
Kenneth Steinsultz, euphonium
Maureen Reagan, euphonium
Peter Griffin, euphonium
Daniel Neuenschwander, conductor

Recorded by Sinatra / Warren Barker

Selections from “Oliver” / Lionel Bart, arr. Norman Leyden
CUTC cast of “Oliver”

Beguine for Band / Osser

University of Illinois March / John Philip Sousa

Illinois Loyalty

• Greasemonkey Bloglines Hide Archived Items
  Need to fix the left column
  (tags: greasemonkey bloglines todo)

Amazon mailed me today about their Grocery beta. Does the mega-successful online bookstore model map to food? Can this beat out stopping at the local Ma and Pa Mega Conglomerate for anything that I can otherwise have shipped?

What would my grocery queue look like?

You know me, and you know I get excited about shuttle launches. Even though I was out and about two weeks ago, I was listening to the launches getting scrubbed (what a funny word – why not say postponed or delayed?) on Sirius radio. I finally was able to watch the launch with Tony and Telemecha, and the replays in STL on Mom’s TV.

I’ve been pumped that the main point of this most recent mission (landing Monday,) is to test the safety improvements to the space shuttle. This means lots of new video and still picture captures of the shuttle and all of its components. I know that thanks to the Internet, NASA is going to release a large amount of this media to the public domain. Then we can see all the nifty things people do with thousands megabytes of multimedia of the shuttle.
Anyway, today I found this. It’s a streaming video of the ascent and descent of one of the solid rocket boosters as seen from a camera mounted near the top of the SRB. You get to see the launch, exiting the atmosphere, the separation from the shuttle, and its spiraling end-over-end drop back down to the ocean, ending its tumultuous ride with a peaceful float in the ocean.

Very, very, very cool. Go watch it.

• Library Book Purchase Referral Site
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Who benefits the most from the ability to run Windows on an Intel chip based Mac?

Microsoft, because now they can license their OSes to Mac users who otherwise wouldn’t have purchased them. (MS long since bit the bullet at ‘fighting’ Mac, and has been happy to buy 10% of the shares when Apple was low (pre-Ipod) and sell Mac copies of Microsoft Office.)

Apple, for being able to sell people who would like to have a nice, metal, shiny PowerBook but can’t give up their Windows applications? No more emulation — true Windows support internal to the OS?

The public, for being able to choose their platforms better based on their needs, and flow between them. (We’ll ignore Linux users, who have been using Mac/PC for a long time.)

Antivirus vendors, for being able to sell their products to security conscious Mac users who worry about installing Windows on their otherwise secure OS. (Dual boot and virtual machine environments are really problematic to secure — I hope that the early adopters jumping on the Boot Camp band wagon appreciate that.)

IT people, who get to explain to Mac users what “the command prompt” is. Hopefully, this OS merge will illustrate to both parties how much a good IT professional is worth — better yet if they can do cost recovery on these types of systems.

I guess time will tell. It’s interesting to me that the change in CPU type has broken quite a few software applications that aren’t designed for Intel-chipped Macs. That breaks the “it just works” Mac mentality, as software packages need updates to support this new platform and not all of them are available yet.

I’m also waiting for the Mac commercial where the kid from Ed puts on a shirt and tie like the PC guy from the office wears. The last from Animal Farm rings a bell: “… but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Since starting LIS school, I’ve been more aware of how information is conveyed or embedded in communication, and how (inately) we know how to decode and decypher that ‘marked up’ information. That fascination probably comes from being submerged in a foreign environment (LIS) than LIS itself, because now that I’ve made myself aware of it, I find it every where. Baseball is great example — the fact the same game is differently portrayed when seen in person, watched on TV, or listened to on the radio. The ‘language’ of baseball — “full count, bottom of the 5th, men at the corners, batting .257 against southpaws who had an RBI grounder his first time at bat” — means nothing if you don’t understand what’s going on, but paints a descriptive picture if you know what it means.

It’s also witnessed in my internal struggle with the vocabulary of librarianship, where I try to decide if book vs. monograph or patron vs. user has embedded purpose — besides to differentiate between library in-crowd and outsiders.

I witnessed a great example of conveyed information in summer band rehearsal last night. Mr. Keene brought in his directing class to site read music with us for about an hour. Eight, I think, students used us to site-read/direct music that we site-read played. Musicians use the director, especially when reading new music, to get all sorts of information — style, volume, entrances/cues, tempo variations, etc. Some of this information is present on the sheet music, but it’s often situational — dynamics or style are relative to the group, and although the individual musician interprets those, it’s the centralized role of the director (and the teacher, who can hear, acknowledge, and instruct to adjust those things,) to bring it all together. I hadn’t realized what a hard job that was until we played under the directors who didn’t necessary convey/address things that I thought needed to be there. That’s the weird part. I don’t know how I would instruct a band to do some of those things, but I know when they were missing. (It’s been likewise said that it’s hard to define pornography, but we “know it when we see it.”)

Or maybe I’ve been spoiled to work under some very gifted conductors and clinicians, and don’t witness the other side of that too often. (I’m not being critical of the students who conducted — I’m happy to help give them experience and an exercise to take back to the classroom and dissect. If anything, they showed me how hard that job is and how badly I would do if I tried it.) So I guess that skill comes in two parts — being able to convey to a group how something is to be played, and to identify of the thousands of things to tweak/adjust which specific ones have the greatest impact.