Bread and timpani

I’ve been battling with the percussion parts on Carrion Comfort for a good couple of months now. First I didn’t know what percussion was available, and then I had to face the fact that very few of the instruments on the list matched up with the soundworld I had in my head and I’ve been wrestling with this disconnect ever since. Finally I decided to just write for the sounds in my head (mostly timpani, which aren’t on the list) and then see if I can convert those to something similar which IS on the list. So now, after much procrastination since making that decision, I have a timpani part, and I think I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s shaping and drawing together the rest of the music in the way I imagined it would (or in Finale it is anyway ) but now there’s a big challenge: how will it work for three tom-toms (high, medium, low) instead of neatly tuned timpani? Will the smaller drums have the resonance I’m after? If not, what’s best to do. These are questions I need to answer in the coming week.

In the meantime, however, I was too late to go out to the bakery yesterday and so decided to take the plunge and use up some of the assorted bread flour which has been lurking in the cupboard for far too long. Also to try out the River Cottage Bread Handbook which I bought on a cranky-day a few months ago. Well, gentle reader, if I may say so, it was frickin’ fantastic. Absolutely and by a country mile the best bread I’ve ever cooked. I ended up using 1/3 wholegrain spelt flour, 1/3 normal strong white flour and 1/3 wholemeal strong flour and it’s turned out brilliantly. The recipe freaked me out a bit because unlike every other bread recipe I’ve ever seen, this one has no sugar in it – just flour, yeast, salt, water and a tiny bit of oil – but it rose perfectly, and the quantity was great too. The recipe made three medium-sized loaves, which is perfect for storing spares in the freezer and hopefully will get me through the next week. I can probably make time to bake bread once a week, at least while I’m freelance, but more often than that would be a stretch. Guess I should be glad that D’s really only eating white bread at the moment, although he did taste it when it was fresh out of the oven and pronounced it ‘orgasmic’, which I was rather pleased with.

My only criticism of it is that between the wholegrain spelt and the wholemeal flour, it’s REALLY fibre-packed. I’m glad the white flour was there because I think 70% wholemeal would have been too much. I’m going to test out an assortment of flours and combinations over the next few batches. Ideally I’d like to make a good mixed-wholegrain loaf. I love spotty bread. The other thing is that – probably due to the oven in this flat being rubbish – setting the oven temperature to 250C was a little high and the first loaf browned VERY quickly. I liked how the recipe gave 3 different temperatures to turn down to after the first 10 minutes, depending on how quickly it was browning, but I did dial it down a little for the next two, which made a big difference but they still turned out great.

And it worked well as Vegemite toast this morning, and even better as a slim cheese sandwich for lunch today. Mmmmm. Bread…

Today’s very own achievement was not so grand, but worthwhile. It’s been bugging me for ages that since I moved the featured piece on the caitlinrowley.com homepage into the central section and started using the SoundCloud widget, the blog post has been bumped way down the page and is almost guaranteed to be below the fold on all but the largest (or portrait-oriented) screens. It’s also been bugging me why I’m not getting new signups for that website’s email list, and I came to the conclusion that having the Twitter, etc. links in the same space was distracting, so I’ve moved the social media links to the bottom of the page, cleared them out of the email list box, changed the heading and intro line, and moved the blog post to the right column, under the (shortened) email box. So now at least headlines should be visible above the fold and I think the whole page looks more interesting and magaziney. Now to wait and see what happens with the stats…

Tagged with: baking, code, composition, experimenting, learning, music, self-promotion, tools | 1 comment

A busy day!

Super-productive today. As with a lot of my days recently, I’ve been largely focused on self-promotion stuff rather than strict creativity per se, but it does exercise my creative brain in that I have to think up new ways to do things.

The last few days I’ve been working on getting a proper mailing list established for caitlinrowley.com using MailChimp. I have to say, that I am absolutely delighted with MailChimp. Great-looking product, easy to use, very generous with their free account (2000 subscribers! 12,000 emails a month!) and the whole thing seems to be completely customisable, assuming you’re willing to put in a bit of coding work. I had some difficulties and emailed their tech support without much hope of anything coming of it (because tech supports in general are pretty useless for anything other than pre-scripted issues) and WOW WOW WOW! Not only did I get a reply within 2 hours, but the guy had actually read my email (SO rare) and had multiple solutions for me, even though it’s not an off-the-shelf problem. SO impressed. And when you set up a campaign they give you a PDF download to make your own papercraft chimp. Now that’s got to be a winner.

Anyway, so the list is set up now. Today I also posted a new blog post and have linked via the signup form to the score of the piece – it’s a temporary measure because getting it working properly is going to take a little time, but it’s better than the SoundCloud option I’ve been trying out which turned out to just be incredibly clunky and uncomfortable (and some regular internet users said they couldn’t even see the link to download. Fail).

So super-excited about all that. Hoping I should get some subscribers soon. It’ll be interesting to see if and how well it works…

Oh, and the on-again-off-again film project is on again. Got a call on Monday about that one. And I went to see a potential client about a website project yesterday… and came away with another film score project (and a website one) – woot!

Tagged with: blogging, code, completion, composition, dayjob, experimenting, learning, music, programming, publishing, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

Second attempt

Well, not seriously. I didn’t really expect to just be able to walk in to the Apple Store at Shepherd’s Bush and walk out with an iPad 2. And look! I was right! But I did achieve my officially-stated goal of inspecting the covers. They’re very cute. Such a shame they didn’t make one that covers the back too. I mean, it’d be less sleek, but a whole lot more effective if you drop the thing. And of course there are no third-party covers out pretty much at all at the moment that one can inspect for feel, style and weight, so I guess I’ll have to go with an Apple cover, even if only for the interim. I was going to get an orange one but in RL the orange is a little yellowy and not really that grand. The red leather is gorgeous but way too expensive. The green is practically fluoro. So I’m thinking I might go for the low-key pale grey. Keep it nice and neutral. And maybe get a nice bright neoprene pouch for it to travel in. Summat like that. But of course first I have to get my paws on an actual iPad all of my own. Apple’s now opened up instore reservations from the website for next-day pickup, which I made an attempt with, but the wretched system let me get all the way through before telling me there weren’t any slots! VERY annoying.

I shall cease to talk about that experience any more. It was very frustrating. I shall probably be similarly frustrated every evening for several weeks to come.

Apart from that, not too much to report. I watched the last bit of the summary videos for the end of the first week of my JavaScript refresher course. So far I seem to understand everything. There’s been one or two newish concepts (or rather, concepts that I knew existed but didn’t know quite how they fitted in) but mostly – understandably – the first week’s been mostly about basic principles. I’m pleased to say that I got through the week’s coding challenge first time, and worked it out in just a few minutes. Huzzah! Not as dim as I felt I was!

I also finally sat down and went through the new orchestral song thingy trying to pick out themes. There really aren’t that many to speak of, which is a little disturbing. The piece itself seems to have stalled somewhat following its superhero start, which is disappointing. I should push myself more with it. The plan is to send it off to my tutor on Wednesday so he can see what I’ve been up to and prepare stuff accordingly if need be. Um.

And had a bit of a panicky doubting think about jobs and what I should be doing about them. Conclusion: I have no idea. I’m a total mess and don’t know what I should be doing. I’m enjoying the composition teaching, but that’s not really a money-making option (not enough private students and academia is out because a. I don’t have any contacts and b. I don’t have even a Masters degree). I like building websites but I don’t really like dealing with clients. Or people in general. I like publishing and so on but ditto. Which kind of seems to wipe out the work-for-myself option because there’s no getting away from clients when you’re freelance. I’m beginning to think that, in spite of all the conceptual journey I’ve been on over the past couple of months, I’m kind of back where I started: short term web contracts, while trying to bring in a little money from this and that on the side. Which is a little depressing. But I think it’s more practical. I got so caught up in the sideline stuff of getting my own business running that the music kind of got shunted to one side. And when I de-shunted it because it became clear that I might need to have to find a job sooner than expected and I didn’t want to waste composition time, then the business stuff ended up shunted. Maybe I can’t actually do both. How depressing. I want to be superwoman! (I’d prefer Batgirl because the outfit’s cuter, but still…) Anyway, thoughts still bubbling away, ideas about priorities and how do I deal with them. Still no solution on the if-I-get-a-real-job-how-do-I-keep-the-music-going-while-not-letting-down-either-my-employer-or-myself issue. Perhaps there never will be. If you have any suggestions, please comment away!

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Hibernation

Feeling – if possible – even worse today than yesterday, so I’ve spent a lot of time in snooze-mode, which seems to be helping. Glad I started the antibiotics now. Not helped though by intense lower-back pain which I think has been caused by the landlord’s crapulous couch. Ow.

Day 2 of the JavaScript course today. Lots of reading. LOTS of reading. But it was really quite well done – digestible chunks. And I think I’m finally starting to see where Objects fit in. I understand why they’re a good thing, but I’ve never really got how they connect with other elements of the language and I think that’s starting to become clearer. Anyway, I guess I’ll find out when I start using them.

Amazon delivery arrived today: The ABRSM Grade 5 theory books, which I need for my teaching. Plus a book called Made to Stick, which sounds like it might be good for the eBook writing that I’ll get around to sometime.. very… soon.

Ploughing through my to-do list now, in spite of fuzzy, limited-capability brain. The new GTD system I’ve implemented seems to be working well. YAY. Next I have to find some time to revamp my paper files and do a TON of scanning. That will be less fun. Maybe in front of the TV sometime.

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Refreshing

Crappy-feeling day today which culminated in me deciding to finally take the antibiotics the dentist prescribed for me, just in case. And then realising just afterwards that the timing means that I’ll still be on them when I go to the dentist. Hoping they won’t interfere with the anaesthetic. I can’t imagine they would, but that would just suck.

Yesterday’s browser conference really made me feel how old-fashioned my skills are. Oh I’m grand at the HTML and CSS, but over the course of my last contract I was beginning to feel increasingly like a bit of a dinosaur because my JavaScript skills are such a mess. Basically, I learnt JS way back in 2000, but it’s a completely different beastie and with DOM scripting cobbled on top of my stone-age knowledge, and trying to mash in the whole object-oriented concept, it just hasn’t been working. Couple in the fact that I’ve not had much chance to use my JS in a considerable period of time and what you get is a horrible monster that looks nothing much like JavaScript at all. And there’s soooo much cool stuff you can do with it now! Especially in the realm of mobile apps and creating extensions for browsers and it’s starting to feel like if I don’t do something soon, I’ll be totally left behind and semi-unemployable. I’ll never be a JS ninja, I’m sure, but I can at least take a stab at getting my skills to a level where I can write stuff that ninjas can then optimise without sniggering.

Fortuitously, SitePoint is having a sale. So I’ve signed up for their offer, which is a 3-week online JavaScript course, plus a 3-week online course in PHP/SQL plus 3 books on website hosting in the cloud, PHP/MySQL and SQL, which can’t go astray. And considering the cost of the whole bundle is less than just getting the two courses, I’m pretty happy with that.

So I did lesson one of the JavaScript course today (leaving the PHP for a little – I’ll either do it when I’ve finished the JS, or at least when I’m a little further along so I’m not doing two rounds of beginner stuff at once, even though I’m not an absolute beginner in either) and it’s looking pretty good: HTML5 for the HTML parts and in the course of creating a simple “Hello World!” alert, the tutor managed to slide in a nice point about the difference it can make between putting your script in the head of the document and at the bottom of the body. Smooth

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Web nerd for a day

Today was the State of the Browser one-day conference organised by London Web Standards. Which meant I had to wake up at stupid o’clock in order to be in North Greenwich somewhere in the vicinity of 9am, which was painful, but it was a good day – some interesting stuff out there, but unfortunately the chap who was going to talk on IE9 couldn’t come as his wife had been in a car crash the day before. Which was, of course, entirely understandable (I believe she’s fine though, if you were concerned) but I was a little astounded that Microsoft couldn’t manage to provide anybody else at all to talk about their latest and much-hyped browser to the people who have to develop for it. Who knows why? But bizarre. Apparently the guy who was supposed to speak is going to record the speech once everything settles down and it’ll be distributed to the attendees online, which is cool.

Anyway, the summary basically is: all browser manufacturers are doing cool stuff with HTML 5. They are not all doing the same cool stuff. Which was all kind of a given, but it was still quite nice to see the sort of cool stuff that’s being played with.

The breakout sessions were good – I went along to one on Jetpack, a new streamlined way of creating Add-Ons for Firefox 4 using only HTML, CSS and JavaScript, then one on “Performance Optimisation for HTML 5 apps” which wasn’t actually about HTML 5, it was about JavaScript. Still interesting and useful, though I was a little out of my depth in places.

There was a lot of JS being bandied about and I think the time has come to do a bit of refresher work on mine – I first learnt JavaScript from tutorials on the net way back in 2000, when it was an entirely different beast. Gluing on DOM manipulation and vague half-understood concepts of Object-Oriented Programming has not helped my confidence in my JS skills. I can write JavaScript, I’m just not really writing MODERN JavaScript.

I can read (eventually) what’s going on in a script, but I lack the skills to mostly be able to say “Oh, this and then that and … ah. This” – it’s more “um… I think this… then that? Maybe… ooh – what’s that???”. I can get there in the end, but it requires so much looking up and testing and re-testing to do the simplest thing that it’s just not the best use of my time for the client.

So I think some sort of brief refresher might be a good place to start. SitePoint is doing online training courses now and have a special deal for a 3-week JS course + a 3-week PHP course (which would also be very useful and hopefully consolidate the bits and pieces I’ve kind of picked up by poking at it in the past) plus 3 e-books on PHP/SQL sites and cloud hosting, all for less than the two courses would cost on their own.

Special’s only for a couple of days, so I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel about it in the morning. Feels like a lot to take on, when I’ve got so much to do anyway, but I’m beginning to feel like I need to do something just so I don’t flounder so much. Feel so old! And that wasn’t helped by the leader of the 2nd breakout session saying “Who remembers Netscape 4?” and me being the only person to raise a hand, while thinking to myself “I remember Netscape 3. And IE 2. Good grief. How did I ever get so old??” Things like this shouldn’t happen shortly before birthdays.

Had a great conversation over lunch too with Jamie Knight (and Lion) – really lovely to just be able to chat so freely with someone. Normally I find talking to strangers quite hard work – either it’s hard to find common ground, or I can’t think of anything to say or I end up feeling deeply inadequate, especially if the conversation takes a turn into unfamiliar waters. Of course, it can be rewarding too, but it’s just wonderful when the chat just flows along. Kinda made my day

Anyway, I ended up not staying till the end. By the early end of the second breakout session my brain felt extremely full, so I figured I wouldn’t hang around for the 45-odd minutes till the Q&A session started, but head home to a quiet cup on tea and a contemplate while my brain was still capable. Mmmm tea.

Tagged with: code, conversation, dayjob, events, learning, programming, social life, study, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

Building, building, building

Made some good progress on the Raspberry Blue website today. The site layout is starting to take shape and look all proper, not crappy and default any more. It’s really developing a certain style, I think. Simple but usable. The content still needs a lot of work and I need to learn how to handle the two separate blogs for the homepage, not to mention two separate RSS feeds/email signups… that for tomorrow maybe.

Apart from that I’ve written the blog post for tomorrow’s caitlinrowley.com update. That was a bit of a tough one actually – trying to summarise a bunch of disparate thoughts into a single, coherent, but ultimately speculative post. I’m not sure I’ve achieved it. And there’s a bunch of issues I’ve had to cut out to keep it to a reasonable size. But I guess I can use them later. Just hoping I get some responses to it – it’s a different approach I’m thinking of taking in my bid to help more people discover and understand my music and one I can’t find any mention of anyone else doing. Anyway, I can’t really talk too much about it today because it’s not live yet, so you can’t go and read it till 3pm UK time tomorrow

I also spent a couple of hours talking art and web dev with a friend in Scotland. That was enjoyable too. All very Sunday

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A sense of achievement

I’ve been a little poorly today – not much, just a bit coldy and urk, but enough to make even small achievements feel big. And it’s been a pretty good day. I actually got some stuff done I’ve been putting off for a bit, so that’s got to be good, right?

First up, I finally read Chris Guillebeau’s A Brief Guide to World Domination which has been on my to-read list for some time. It’s pretty good, but I don’t think it’s really told me anything I didn’t already know, being fairly well-read in the matter of world domination (isn’t everyone?). I’d still quite like to read his book, though. I think I’ve got to a point though where I need to stop faffing about and just be brave and DO stuff. If I want to get alternate revenue streams up and running, then I need to write stuff and send it off – finish my book (for small businesses, on how to build a website that actually works rather than one that just looks pretty), submit some articles, see what I can find out about writing music to order. That sort of stuff.

I also rang Thames Valley University. Again. To try to find out some last-minute information about their individual composition tuition which I’m hoping to do this semester. Their form is ambiguous (and so keenly designed that it’s practically illegible – lime green on lighter lime green? Even 20/20 vision doesn’t help with that one, dears!) and their documentation confusing – the individual tuition is listed in a brochure called “Junior College” which is a programme for kids. Because it’s for kids, the composition tutors are all either BMus(Hons) (like me) or MA, unlike the music-school-proper which has fully fledged composers, which is what I need if I’m to learn anything that will be of use to me in applying for an MMus. But the person I need to speak to never answers her phone, and never calls me back, which is a little on the frustrating side. I’d give up if I weren’t so damn keen about doing it. I’ve sent her an email too, so hoping she at least responds to that before the week is out so I still have time to apply if appropriate. AARGH! Think I need to set up a contingency plan in case I get no response at all or find out it’s only the recent grads who are teaching individuals. Not sure what that might be.

And I’ve got a site for the London Composers Forum up and running – it’s for a super-secret project, so I can’t link to it (and no point anyway as it’s all behind a login) but it’s been great to be using Drupal for a proper site so soon after messing with it. And I’m quite pleased with it – it’s doing everything I want it to do and it’s taken minimal effort to get it to do so. Yay me

And last but definitely not least, I tried a new recipe tonight. I had decided to make the Greek salmon kebabs and was facing an inadvertently small quantity of fish and yet more tedious salad, so I perused the interwebs and found this recipe for garlicky bulgur wheat. I just so happened to have bulgur wheat in the cupboard after the Nigel Slater beetroot lamb burger thingies (MOST excellent), so I gave it a go – and, you know what?, it turned out really really nice! I mixed it in with the salad and it went very well indeed. I am looking forward to attacking the remnants with some leftover chicken for lunch tomorrow.

So not really any music (although I did listen to Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the Maya Beiser album World to Come which never ceases to be amazing) although I’m still mulling over ideas for the short solo violin piece I’m thinking of writing for an upcoming Fifteen Minutes of Fame call for scores. I need to start somewhere with composing for a single string instrument if I’m ever to get this cello tango written, and this seems as good a place as any, but I’m still at a bit of a loss as to how to tackle it. Guess I should do a bunch of listening…

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Quiet achievement

Back on the quintet today. I’ve deleted a chunk off the end of the piece and put it to one side for use later on – I was just feeling that it was coming in too soon and I needed to stretch out what I had a bit more before this particular bit recurred. Haven’t quite found what I want to do in the space now, but I feel it’s edging its way, crab-like, towards a new jumping off point. Just wish it would get a move on – I’m off to Portugal for a week on Tuesday!

Also finally got back to the new website and I’m very excited to report that I’ve now fixed it up for IE7 and 8. Firefox 2 is looking pretty broken, but FF2 makes up only 0.3% of the site’s visitors so for the moment (as in “launching by Friday”) I’m going to ignore it. I’ll come back to it later – apparently there’s a hack you can do to make FF2 recognise HTML5, but it sounds a little fiddly, so low priority it is. Opera likewise makes up a mere 1.2% of the minim-media.com populace and Opera 10 is certainly pretty much in need of no tweaks at all, so again I’m going to ignore that for the launch and focus on the one remaining browser that is both significant in usage and crap at rendering. And I don’t think anyone who works at all on websites will be in any doubt as to which one that is – yup, our old friend IE6. It’s pretty gebrochen – indeed unusable at present – so it unfortunately has to be a pretty high priority, but hopefully a touch of zoom: 1 here, a little position: relative there and a few numerical adjustments and it’ll come back into the fold.

I think I’ve basically decided to not apply for the London Sinfonietta’s fabulous-sounding Writing the Future programme – everything’s getting too squashed, I need to provide a live recording, and don’t have one for anything I’ve written in the past decade and there have been some issues with getting a reference (mostly because there’s really only one person who could write it, and she’s snowed under [although very generously willing to do her best]) so it’s feeling like really it would be best to just set it to one side, ask the London Sinfonietta to put me on their mailing list and hope they’ll do another one I can apply for next year. Disappointing, but I think there are enough opportunities coming up through the Composers Forum to keep me well and truly occupied – including a four-session workshop on writing for percussion in January! Can’t wait!

And I discovered a fabulous recording of chamber music by the Russian composer Taneyev. It’s on Spotify or check out the details on Amazon. The piano quintet’s scherzo is particularly awesome – very cheeky!

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Quietly productive

Didn’t get as much done today as yesterday – slept in far too late, which was a bit of a whoops – but my parents and I do seem to have settled into a quietly productive sort of a routine – for the mornings anyway, which is working quite well – for me at least, and I hope for them too. It goes something like this: Once I’ve woken up, I sit up in bed and do my morning pages, then I read a bit more of John Adams’ autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, which I’m absolutely loving. Then I drag my sorry carcass out of bed and greet the lovely parents and have breakfast. I then take my coffee back into the bedroom and start work on some of my theory study while the mama inhabits the study and plays the piano for a little. The afternoon is a little more freeform, but at some point I take over the study and do some listening and some work in there.

Today’s theory study was seventh chords exercises. I found these relatively challenging – it’s the diminished intervals I have to fully get my head around, but the exercises are being very useful – not just building a specified seventh chord on a tonic, but also on the third, fifth and seventh as given notes, which I’m finding VERY helpful for working out the intervals because it’s not as simple as just altering the notes above – you need to work out sometimes whether your actual tonic needs to be raised or lowered. Really makes one think, which is exactly what I needed. Think I’ve got them sorted in my brain now. More or less at least

Did some more work on the site too. Unfortunately, it seems that of the web-fonts-supporting major browsers, only Firefox and Safari understand the text-rendering property, which means that the kerning on the fancy font I’m using in a couple of places is all off in Chrome. I’ve yet to test it on IE in its many flavours. Not sure how/if to hack this one. For Chrome it should be relatively simple – there aren’t too many seriously problematic letters, so one could just surround the tricky sections in <span>s and apply letter-spacing, hopefully, but I’m not sure how IE will react. Yes, I still have to do proper testing in IE. Have been avoiding it. Need to stop that.

Also nearing the end of the scarf I’m knitting for my chilly and very frail great-aunt in Sydney. She’s 94 now and apparently they keep her nursing-home at an Arctic temperature at all times of the year, so I’m knitting her a nice lightweight scarf to keep her warm. I spent a lovely quiet half-hour with my Da this evening in the study, listening to the Mendelssohn string quintets and Schubert’s Moments musicaux, him reading his book and me working on the scarf – happiness! I have lent him Art & Fear which he seems to be finding interesting, as I thought he might.

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