* The Music: Today is the birthday of Johan Sebastian Bach. So, today’s choice is a natural: Switched On Bach. Recorded by Walter Carlos, who later became Wendy Carlos (I suppose we are dealing with Todd Rundgren called “the Tourtured Artist Effect), it stands as a brilliant use of the technology of the day. Carlos’ treatment of the Brandenburgs is amazing.
Bach’s music, even when played with conventional instruments, had the hypnotic, machine- like movement that reminded one of nothing so much as a Steam Locomotive. For all that the playing on this album is superb, the instrumentation in this case comes to a cleaner tone, and allows the listener a clear picture of what the master intended, in his writing. Imagine a steam locomotive, made of clear glass, where all the moving parts are seen. One gets the decided impression that Bach settled for the instrumentation of the day, because that’s all that was available… but also that he heard the music otherwise in his head… played by instrumentation that hadn’t been made yet.
I suspect Bach in today’s world would have had an intricate understanding of computers.
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* I see by way of Chuck Simmins’ Northshore Journal Jason Dunham, from nearly Scio NY will have a ship named after him. A fitting tribute, I think.
* It’s getting warmer, around here. I can’t say as I disapprove. I’ve been getting a little tired having to run the space heater in the basement office so I can get my work done, down here.
Oh, that’s right, most of you don’t know that’s where my office is. Actually, it works out to the advantage, during the summer, round here; during the summer it’s the coolest area in the house, and the several desktop computers and servers and routers and whatnot I have in my office benefit thereby.
* Speaking of computers, I mentioned recently, that I was having some trouble with the Palm Pilot, transferiing MP3 files to the plugin memory. I have found a solution, I think , which exposes the plug in memory module to the USB cable, which in turn shows up as a drive in XP. It turns out, that that arrangement is a little too fast on its own; it tends to overrun the buffers, and causes errors. What I have found, though, quite by accident is that Winamp helps, here. Once the Palm Pilot showed up as a virtual drive, Winamp, which happened to be fired up at the time, looked around, and blipped a dialog box at me, saying that there was a device on the USB port that looked amazingly like an MP3 player, and did I want WinAmp to manage it?
Heck, yes, let’s give it a try. It turns out, that the database and process that when it uses, slows the transfer down just enough, to the point where it’s not overflowing the buffers. I’ve gotta play with this a little further, but it does look like I found the best answer I could possibly have imagined; I use Winamp anyway… have for years… so I don’t need to change anything for this system to work. I’ll let you know.
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* Does it really take more energy to produce a Prius than it does to produce a Hummer?
Yes. So spare me the high sounding platitudes about how you’re saving the world by driving one of those little death boxes.
* Attention Ann Coulter. Garrison Keillor called, looking for you. Something about what to do when the hate mail starts showing up. Wouldn’t it figure that this is one of the few things he’s spoken on recently, where he actually makes some degree of sense. This is precisely what I was talking about, years ago, when I suggested that the culture was in danger. on a deeper level, that’s really what he’s talking about, here.
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* Hat tip to Billy for the link yesterday, . Also, to the Washington Post, who really needs to get that WordPress interlink code fixed.
* Oh… speaking of WordPress… In the past 48 hours, this Blog’s site has gotten hit with 477 individual attempts to spam our comments section. The automatics I put into play when we first started using WordPress caught ’em all. I can’t imagine that I’m not getting hit for all the bandwidth those idiots are sucking up. But at least they’re not making it on to my front page.
* For all the press trumpets the approval numbers of President Bush as being low, it’s funny, how they never bother to mention that the approval numbers of the Democratic Party-run Congress, is even lower.
Tags: BitsBlog, Nightly Ramble
