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.

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Composition lesson no. 2!

It feels somewhat miraculous to have achieved a second composition lesson, given the stops and starts there’ve been. But yes, it happened this evening. And it was good. Simon brought along the scores of Paganini’s Caprices and Bach’s Partita and we looked at violin writing and what else might be done with the (ostensibly completed) Diabolus. Still some good ideas coming through – some of which I think I might touch on in the blog post when I (hopefully) get around to writing it on Sunday. In particular I liked his idea of making a bunch of versions and sending a different one to various violinists I might know, asking them each to make a recording, then listening to them all and seeing what works. Might actually follow through on this – might be a really good way to see how various things sound rather than just guessing what sounds right. Guess I’ll need to make a list of violinists now…

The rest of the day was pretty tame, but quite nice. A troubled night due to the troublesome dentals (6 days to root canal) and woke up with a crashing headache – haven’t had one of those in months, so I didn’t push myself too much but mostly tinkered around with fixing up my GTD implementation – my to-do lists in Remember the Milk had become insanely unweildy and totally unusable, so I deleted everything except my Tickler list and am starting again with a new approach. Ended up shunting about 15 projects into Someday/Maybe which had crept into Current, but just weren’t being dealt with and weren’t about to be. Someday/Maybe now lives in Evernote, which I think will help keep RTM much cleaner and entirely about the “what am I doing now” rather than the “hmm, what to play with next?”. I also went to Ryman’s and bought a stack of manila folders because my filing system’s no longer a system and needs help. Feels really, REALLY good to be getting organised again and feeling more confident that I know what needs to be done and what should be done nowish.

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Composition lesson at last!

A bit of a messed-up day again today – remnant flu meant I spent the morning struggling to breathe and had to cancel my lesson with my student, which was annoying, but gradually it passed and I was able to head down to TVU for my own lesson in the evening, albeit I didn’t recover soon enough to go and get my student card (again).

Well, the lesson was great. Just what I wanted – we had a bit of a chat, he asked about my Remembrances performance, we did some score reading (Gordon Crosse’s Thel and Nicholas Maw Life Studies I) and talked about ways of using some of the techniques in the scores in other works. He played a piece of his which specifically used techniques from Thel, which was very interesting. Then we looked at Diabolus and he made some excellent suggestions which I’ll definitely play with, and talked about what I should work on next. And kind of came to a conclusion, too! Or at least, I know which opportunity I’m working towards, exact instrumentation yet to be decided. I think I’d like to play around with the kind of space Maw achieves in the opening of Life Studies I – it’s just immense! SO wonderful. Anyway, ideas are percolating…

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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 daytrip to the British Museum

That pretty much sums it up. Took the lovely sister-in-common-law and nephew-in-common-law to the British Museum where we visited a bunch of my favourite things: The massive Assyrian wingèd horse-man gatekeeper statues, the Easter Island head, the Tree of Life in the African section (the one made out of guns) and the fabulous knives near it. I think the only one of my favourites we didn’t visit was the Isle of Lewis chessmen, but that’s OK. I also found a new fave in the Egyptian section – a colossal scarab:

In the evening I introduced the nephew-in-common-law to ebelskivers with lemon curd and extra-thick double cream. They seemed to be well received. Then after his bedtime, his mama and I talked web stats and SEO into the wee hours of the morning which was great – it helped her see where she can improve some stuff and also helped to clarify my thoughts a bit about where I want my shiny new business to go. Thinking that ultimately I probably would prefer to ditch the code and act more as a consultant, teaching other devs and designers what they need to do to help their clients. It would help the clients and it would also help to spread the word about web standards and various best-practice … um… practices. Win-win really. I think that’s a little way off yet though.

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pre-Valentine’s Day

Well, today was noteworthy. Today was the first time in all our 14 years together that Djelibeybi actually a) remembered Valentine’s Day (albeit it’s on a Monday this year) and b) did something about it. Normally he just doesn’t remember it’s happening until the day, when I give him a present or make him a special dinner and he says “sorry” if I’m lucky. Last year he went off to a film shoot at 7am and I didn’t see him till midnight, without so much as a “love you” as he left. That one did not go down so well. But this year he really did very well indeed – he thought up something to do (go to Crouch End, peruse the shops and have lunch at the fabulous Monkey Nuts), booked the restaurant (!!!!) AND actually (eventually) remembered that we had something planned (although there were a lot of “what are we doing on Sunday again?” moments). And it was nice. It didn’t really start out too well – a little minor squabbling and grumpiness on both sides of the fence, but lunch sorted us out (I had the chicken schnitzel BLT topless burger [no bun, but on a bed of little gem lettuce instead] – fantastic) and then we had a lovely walk to Turnpike Lane (lovely in the sense of enjoyable and companionable sauntering and chatting, not lovely in the sense of scenic beauty. Hornsey doesn’t really do scenic beauty, I think) where we ventured into Sainsbury’s and ventured out again with the DVDs of the new Star Trek movie & Iron Man plus snacks, before heading home to a lovely quiet evening on the couch. It may not be everyone’s idea of romance, but it was actually really nice. And it meant a lot to me that he even thought of it.

And of course, in spite of it being pre-Valentine’s Day, I still did some work – namely deciding on and uploading the last file to go on SoundCloud, which is to be my warbly rendition of the Satie Chanson arrangement. Not great singing, but I think it provides an interesting foil to the other pieces that are on there – catharsis would be too much like the beginning of Deconstruct, I don’t have time to sort out the string quartet version of Pieces of Eight (it needs a lot of work to get the pizzicati in and separation between the movements – might need to pull it into Pro Tools ultimately to get it all working right), likewise a lot of the piano pieces, which end up sounding a bit mechanical from Finale but can be made a bit more human in Pro Tools with the simple drawing of a wobbly line for the attack of each note, I don’t really want one from the vault yet even though Nightride is basically ready to go (might put that up later in the week), so with the Satie song all ready for uploading, it’s the logical choice. So I think everything’s in place now, although I won’t announce it now (when most people are sleeping) but will wait till the morning…

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Feedback

I have to say, having been without feedback of pretty much any sort on my music for about a decade, it’s just fantastic to finally be getting some constructive criticism – it makes such a HUGE difference. Tonight I steeled myself to go forth and actively seek criticism. As you may recall, I joined the London Composers Forum about a month ago and had a marvellous, inspirational time at the first meeting I attended. Tonight they held a ‘WiP/WiT’ (work in progress/work in transition) session. The idea is that you toddle along, bringing with you something you’re working on that you’d like some comments on, or you just come along, listen and join in the conversation. So I recorded a version of the quintet out of Finale (which, most unco-operatively has decided to ignore all dynamics in the score and just play everything forte, with occasional random blasts of fortissimo for no reason) and printed out a small clutch of scores to accompany it and toddled off to the meeting.

Well, it was just grand. There weren’t too many of us – just 7 – but in the course of the evening we heard and discussed a piece for bass clarinet and piano, an orchestral work, a solo cello piece and of course my quintet. The good news is that everyone was really very enthusiastic about it. Nobody thought it needed major changes (I cannot say how much of a PHEW moment that was) but some excellent ideas were contributed for small tweaks and the part I’m really having some trouble with, which is integrating the fast dancelike figures with the slow descending motif from the opening while not bringing the whole thing screeching to a halt or just continuing on blandly and being dull. Some great suggestions and I’ve already started putting some of them in place (started this on the train – I was so fired up to get back to it!).

The Forum are really a brilliant group – so friendly yet giving serious critique, all of it constructive – everyone got some great advice about their piece, whether technical about instruments or in terms of general composition techniques that might help. Words cannot express how delighted I am to have found them. If you’re a composer in London or nearby (one of our composers last night came from Brighton), you really should get in touch with them and come along to something! Their website is: http://www.forumcomposers.org.uk/

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Making a move

Today I took a step forward in my quest to get my music heard and create more opportunities for creating new work which will be heard. Today I went along to the London Composers Forum Open House meetup. I have to say, I kept my expectations low. I was half expecting to find half a dozen amateur anoraks, but what I found was what I hadn’t dared even hope to find – a group of welcoming, friendly non-anorak people, all of them interested in learning and creating and giving the group’s compositions the best chance in life they can get. Wow. It was awesome.

This particular meeting had three presentations – the first was on how one composer has drawn inspiration from historico-cultural sources (if that’s actually a term) and the methods he’s used to incorporate these ideas in his music; the second was on concerto grosso form in preparation for a Forum opportunity, which I found very interesting as an orchestration analysis and which lead to some rather heated debate on the difference between concerto grosso and concerto for orchestra.; and finally a session based on one of the members’ PhD thesis on “The Drummer as Composer”, which was a very interesting introduction and I hope he’ll continue with the second part of it at the next Open House. And in between there was various discussion about projects that are on the boil and upcoming and concerts being organised. Apparently they’re thinking of getting all members to send in a list of the pieces they have languishing in drawers awaiting performance and getting those poor dusty pieces out into the world – what a fantastic plan!

So I’m VERY glad I went along at last. Kicking myself I didn’t do so earlier, when I knew they were having a workshop on writing for the organ coming up (now sadly passed – and I can’t believe that was nearly a year ago!) but revelling in the fact that I’ll now have the chance to attend the (hands-on!) percussion workshop which is coming up.

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First-ever sushi-train experience

It seems quite hard to believe, really, that I’ve never experienced a sushi train before. They always intimidated me a bit because I’m not terribly familiar with Japanese food, plus I’m a fussy eater, so grabbing random dishes without really knowing what they are kind of put me off a little. But it was great! We ordered a dish each of chicken katsu, and pulled a few random things off the train (unidentifiable squishy balls of… something, some salmon teriyaki, a raw fish and broccolini thing, custard-filled pancakes with raspberry sauce and a little fruit salad) – most enjoyable!

Afterwards we wandered through Hyde Park with the World’s Best Ex-Boss chatting about this, that and the other – old friends, web CMSes we have known, HTML 5 and mobile web dev, among other topics. Really perked me up.

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Went for a long walk

at lunchtime, with a friend – the longest I’ve done since the accident – just over 4km!! I tested out the My Tracks application on my phone too – very cool! Showed where we’d been, how far it was, how long, how fast we walked – all sorts of things!

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