July 30, 2009
Atlanta and Midtown in the 70s
A friend sent me a gallery of photos of Atlanta from the 1970s. From the crazy strip clubs (The Centaur!) to The World of Sid and Marty Krofft in The Omni: Midtown was the site of sheer awesomeness. To wit:
July 26, 2009
Two prints ordered from Giant Robot
Two prints captured my fancy when Lisa and I visited the Giant Robot store during our last visit to NYC. It was the end of our last day of the trip so I made no effort to purchase. Earlier this week, I emailed the store and the manager replied promptly (thanks!) telling me that the Los Angeles store had them. Score!
Blinky's "My Lovely One" (Blinky on MySpace, Blinky's Flickr stream, Blinky on deviantART):
[ updated 30 Jun 2013 ]
Monkeyhouse Toys has the original "My Lovely One" painting for sale for $1700. Taken from their Deliberate Alchemy show curated by Blinky. The show ran from 14 Jul to 12 Aug 2012 at the Monkeyhouse Toys art gallery in LA.
Christopher Bettig's "Stargazing":
Prokofiev and composition
From Boris Berman's book of analysis and performance notes, Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas, is a comment he heard from Prokofiev's son:
I recall Prokofiev's younger son, Oleg, remembering that Prokofiev frequently referred to the need to "Prokofievize" a newly composed work.
This is an honest insight into the mind of a tinkering composer (cf. the oft cited battlefield of a Beethoven score with the pristine pages of a Mozart:
)
Prokofiev's Prokofievization comes from the more common sketch-and-refine school of composition. Inspiration may sprout fully formed from the head of the inspired, but it doesn't necessarily emerge in its final form. Corollary from advice I'd received, the source of which I don't remember: don't get married to your first idea.
July 22, 2009
The Concepts feature removed from C++0x
Bjarne Stroustrup discusses the standards committee's decision to remove Concepts from C++0x in DDJ [ via Reddit ]. A description of the feature has already been removed from the C++0x Wikipedia entry, so you have to go back to a previous version of the article to read about it. Simply: concepts are a form of rule-based verification of the duck typing found in templates. Compile errors stemming from invalid template parameters are currently reported only after a template is expanded and it becomes clear that the resulting code disallows the type. Concepts would be syntactic rules attached to template that provide more explicit hints about parameters' requirements.
Also read Stroustroup's paper defending the use of concept maps [ via endnote #1 -> "The Removal of Concepts From C++0x" ]. A little heavy, but it pointed me to Stepanov and Paul McJone's new book (out 3 days ago!) Elements of Programming.
July 15, 2009
2009 and one half
Purchased an HP TC1100 Tablet PC from eBay for $300 (and, no, I refuse to continue to look for deals 'cause I know that the day after I ordered I could've saved big $$$) for a b-day present to myself. I'd been itching to get a tablet or a Kindle to sight read scores from IMSLP while sitting at the piano. Should arrive today, so afterwork will be filled with music-geek-fun! Even compared to the Kindle DX, the TC1100 wins out for my needs: bigger screen, better browsing, cheaper.
Lunarpages, the company that hosts my non-personal other web sites, went down last night at around 6. I resisted the urge to check Twitter just to see whether such "live" information could be found elsewhere. The Google blog search brought up nothing; Internet Traffic Report for North Amnerica was too course-grained and also reported no major outages; and all of Lunarpages related sites and forums were, no surprise, down. On Twitter I found hundreds of messages from others with unreachable web sites hosted by Lunarpages and ultimately got a response from one of their PR people. The last company I followed tweeted nothing but self-promotion, but I'll give Lunarpages a chance.
Back into composing music after several years. I've had sporadic bits of notes and ideas filling a binder for just as long, with every intent of getting a new work written more sooner. I'm not sure what I accomplished in the intervening years, but I'm sure it was interesting. Although I'd kept up with classical pieces during this time (mostly Bach and Prokofiev) it feels good to get back to writing. Plan is to finish by the end of the year.
Tonight is b-day dinner at Pacci Ristorante at the Hotel Palomar a couple blocks away from us.