I’ve been accepted into CoMA’s Midwinter Composers Masterclass!!!! This is both deeply awesome and rather scary. Not having really received any feedback from other composers in about 15 years, it’s a wee bit daunting. As is having to write a string quintet from scratch by the middle of December, but I really feel like this is a big step towards whatever’s next on the agenda for my music. Scared but elated. The Masterclass is organised by CoMA, who are an organisation who promote contemporary (classical) music for amateur musicians, and the composer in charge of us composer-participants is Tansy Davies… who is the same age as me, which could be a little weird, although I’m hoping not. I really liked what I heard of her music on her website and, reading about her approach, she seems to use architecture as a launching-point in a similar way to how I’ve been using modern art, so it could be interesting. There’ll also be a composer ensemble, made up of whatever we selected composers can play. Not sure if/when we’re advised of what that is – the notes sent through recommend flexible instrumentation – who knows, maybe Deconstruct:Point, line, plane could get another outing? SO EXCITED!

Anyway, that was at the end of the day. Haven’t achieved a vast amount otherwise, but I was feeling I needed to get back to composing, but I’ve been finding the prospect a little daunting with so many people in the house, even if it is a large space and we’re not all on top of each other like we used to be in the old place – it’s just not the same as being on your own. Anyway, so I figured I needed to start doing something about it so I pulled out the music for Egg the Tenth, which I wrote earlier this year (it was the original interlude for the Whitman songs, but didn’t really mesh well there, so I put it to one side to be an egg, but never got around to putting the detail in the score) and dropped in appropriate accidentals, hunted out fonts and did a little layout on it, so it’s basically ready to go now. I also did a MIDI export because I was planning on reworking it in ProTools to sound a bit more like a proper performance than Finale can do… and then discovered that I don’t remember how to wire my tracks in ProTools to get it to use proper sounds, at which point I lost heart and had a nap.

And there was a baking experiment too. When I was seeing my nutritionist, she encouraged me to get hold of this natural sugar substitute called xylitol so I could avoid using sugar when I baked (if you’re new here, I have an insulin resistance – it’s not diabetes [yet] but basically the insulin my body produces forgets what it’s supposed to do with sugar it encounters – unless I exercise regularly, but having been crippled for coming up on a year now, this hasn’t really been happening, hence decision to experiment…). I was in the organic shop today picking up some bits and pieces, and thought that maybe I should give it a go, so I decided to make a crumble with the tasty-but-dry remaining nectarine and some lingering apples – I figured that at least if it was only in the crumble topping, then that could be abandoned if it was too awful. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘awful’. I guess the flavour was kinda OK, but the texture was All Wrong. The crumble didn’t crisp and it certainly didn’t go chewy. But it wasn’t particularly sweet either (that could have been my fault). So basically it ended up like one of those worthy but tedious baked bars they fill with jam. But without the jam. Sort of bland and like eating a high-fibre pillow. There’s a bit left from the rather small packet, so I might have a go at using it up in a cake (possibly cut with some real sugar) and see if that fares any better.

And finally I started work on getting IE6 sorted out with the website layout while I watched Alice in Wonderland – turned out the problem with the fonts wasn’t anything to do with either fonts or code, it was to do with IE6 not applying styles to the new HTML 5 elements which were referenced in the cascade. So that’s sorted out now, which is a bit yay

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Got an absolute truckload of work done on the site today and now the blog is pretty much ready to go – very nearly entirely. I think the only thing left to do with it is to work out the custom template so I can import the latest blog post into the homepage. Worked out some cool features too – selecting subnav items depending on whether the post is in the news or article category (or if it’s a category list page of either) and setting the posting date within the <time> tag automatically.

Also accidentally watched The Omen. I’ve avoided this one for years, but it came on and nobody turned it off… and by the time it got halfway through then I was stuck and had to watch it right through to the end. Really good film – very suspenseful, and much more effective than a lot of more modern movies that have to rely on effects to be creepy.

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Got another clutch of content pages done this evening – for the pieces Remembrances of half-forgotten dead people, Deconstruct: Point, line, plane, Egg the Fifth and the Satie Chanson arrangement. I suspect there’s going to need to be a LOT of work done on these – linking in cover images, PDFs and sound files properly, to start with, once I get home. Planning on hiding in my study for the first couple of days back in London to get through everything. Although time’s a bit tight, I’m determined to send this site live on the 30th of September – because I know what I’m like – otherwise I’ll procrastinate and procrastinate and it’ll never go live, which would rather defeat the purpose of all this work!

In non-Creative Pact news (sorry for crushing the posts together, but my Internet connection here is VERY flaky and needs to be reset after every gap in use – spend more than about 10 seconds without actively clicking or uploading and the connection dies!) today involved a major culinary revelation. I had resolved to entirely avoid Mariage Frères tea shops, in spite of the intense interest of the fairly-recent tea-convert that I am, on the grounds that I didn’t want to try it, fall in love with it… and then move back to Australia where I have seen it for sale at $170 a tin. But it snuck up on me. Marriage Frères have a little shop lying in wait for the unwary, in the middle of Galeries LaFayette’s homewares store. I said I was just going to look at the beautiful array of tins, but then I found a vanilla tea and, having been liking the concept but not that thrilled with the execution of Lipton’s vanilla tea which was in residence in the cupboard of the flat we’re staying in when we arrived, I couldn’t resist having a sniff. O.M.G. Then I discovered that it was a mere €10, even though it came in a lovely black tin (I use the word ‘mere’ in the context of $170 a tin, obviously not in the context of Tetley’s from Tesco). How could I resist? The smell is amazing and the flavour, when we tried it, was glorious – a beautiful balance of vanilla and black tea, neither overpowering the other, and absolutely none of that tanniney aftertaste you get with normal tea. Absolute heaven. A little worried I may feel compelled to go back and buy a refill pack before we leave to make sure I don’t run out before the next Paris trip, but I should face the expense of the pain de mie tin first… Baking-shop expedition tomorrow

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This morning I left the (metaphorically) sunny shores of England for the (actually) sunny shores of France (the fact that both starting and ending points are inland I’m ignoring because it ruins the poetry). Which gave me a lovely couple of quiet Eurostar hours to do some Creative Pact work, so I fired up Gusto on the iPad and proceeded to see what it could do.

QUICK REVIEW: My verdict is that this is a very neat and useful little app. Of course it’s limited in what it can do, but for anything that just requires simple text edits, well, it does the job nicely. I would say that a certain amount of patience is needed – typing on the iPad’s keyboard is never the easiest, especially when symbols and numbers are regularly employed, but the developers have done a great job of making this easier than it would normally be by including a quick-access bar above the normal keyboard, including brackets and quote marks and other symbols commonly used in web development. From my work today I can say that this is a fantastic addition and what makes Gusto actually usable. For my part, I’d like to see =, : and ; added to the quick access bar, but it’s hardly a complaint – I mean, they even included a tab key so I can keep my code neat! It does lack some of the niceties of desktop editors still – no automatic indenting, for example, and syntax highlighting is yet to be implemented (although it’s apparently in development) but then, it’s not really a rival to desktop systems anyway. As a way to keep working on a project while travelling without carrying tons of equipment, though, it’s just grand. The FTP setup has been great and very easy to use (although the one crash I experienced was when I tried to download a large folder of files into Gusto, so I’m trying to keep the number of files I transfer at a time to a reasonable level) and it also let’s you preview locally, so it’s genuinely useful for making changes offline, unlike using any other random text editor. Overall, I’m pretty impressed – it’ll be very interesting to see how far future updates take this one.

Review done, now back to the Creative Pact stuff. Today on the Eurostar I was working mostly on getting templates ready so that I can forge ahead this week dumping content from the old site into the new and tweaking it to be new and improved. And the result is two templates ready to go, plus the sub-items of the main nav all in place, styled up and working. At the moment the show/hide for these is CSS-driven, but as it’s going to break in IE6 (ah! Adjacent siblings!) I’m thinking I’ll replace this with a PHP-driven approach to include or remove sub-sections according to the section the requested page belongs to. That’s going to have to wait till I get back to London though, as will turning the nav, footer and header into PHP includes, because I’ve not done any PHP in a while and I don’t trust my brain to get it right without a book (plus if I do that, it’ll look broken while I’m previewing the content locally, which would be annoying). I did find a PHP class yesterday to import tweets from my @caitlinrowley Twitter account which I’ve dropped into place in the homepage today, using the demo files as examples, but it seems to be throwing an error and rejecting my login, so I’ll need to look at that a little more closely too.

In unrelated news, today I ate my first mirabelles! I believe they’re a sort of plum, but they tasted more like tiny unfurry apricots. We also indulged and bought some girolles for our evening omelettes. And some awesome cheese. And yummy bread. And Beaujolais. Looking forward to breakfast now!

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VERY excited today. I’ve been playing round with webfonts when I should have been doing any of the ten billion other things on my list, but it’s been such fun I haven’t wanted to stop. Anyway, the short story is that it’s working! Thanks to the marvellous super-easy generator at Font Squirrel (which also has some great fonts, all of which are free for commercial use) I’ve got these up and running really quickly and now have two different fonts working on the page.

First up is Scriptina, the curly one I’m using for the site name (although I think I’ll leave this as an image so that where the webfonts don’t work at least the site won’t be totally plain), which I’ve used as a webfont for the headings in the right-hand column. I don’t know that this will be used anywhere else much on the site, but I think it gives the homepage a bit more of a sense of occasion. It’s not a very easy font to read though, which is why I’m not using it for the content headings.

The second font I’m using is Bebas, which is on the navigation headings and for the blog post title. I like the feel of this – makes the whole nav feel kind of 50s/60s businessy but I’m having some problems with it with spacing between words. Between characters seems OK, but it’s not really leaving enough of a gap between words for it to be clear where one ends and the next begins. Not sure if there’s a fix for this in CSS. If there isn’t I may go hunting for another font along similar lines.

I’ve also dug up a PHP class which apparently will pull tweets in from a user’s timeline, so I’m hoping to be able to pull the last 3 tweets from my @caitlinrowley account to go on the homepage. I’ve not really used anything like this before, so not sure if I’ll be able to get it working for the launch, but I guess I’ve got to try. It doesn’t look too hard to implement. And I’m about to save down some reading about whether it’s possible to import a WordPress blog post into a normal unconnected PHP page (because the blog is separate, for the time being at least) so I don’t have to manually update the homepage every time I post something.

I’m likely to be a bit quiet here over the next week as I’ll be in Paris and I’m not sure what the wireless situation will be like, or even if I’ll be able to find enough time to get some solid work done on this, but I’ll have the iPad with me and will write posts in the WordPress app, ready to post when I get access to the internet. Crossing fingers I won’t have to spend a whole 7 days without access….

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… because we’re about to go and pick up a van and go out to Ikea. Probably won’t be back until the depths of night. Probably will be completely exhausted by the time we do get back. I’m loading up the iPad with lots to read because Djelibeybi wants to look at some stuff for his new (renting) flat in Scotland, so I’m expecting to be a bit bored.

Today the iPad came into its own for this project. I had to go into town to get my hair cut, so I loaded up Gusto on the iPad with the files I needed from my FTP server and did some editing and tweaking and made up the basis of the two-column template, so barring font thingys and side margins and getting it all to work in IE6 of blessed memory, this is pretty much ready, I think. YAY! Gusto’s actually pretty good. Limited at the moment, but really it’s quite useful. I wouldn’t want to code everything on it but for the moment it’s meeting my limited needs, and of course the iPad is SO much lighter and quicker to turn on than the laptop (also doesn’t have a DVD stuck in the drive which keeps trying to start itself up).

Did discover a slight issue with <audio> which I hadn’t found yesterday though. The gurus of HTML 5 online have been saying things like this:

you need to be careful about the order of the <source> elements. Because of a bug in Firefox, if you list the MP3 first (which Firefox doesn’t support), it will silently fail and refuse to render that particular <audio> element. The trick is to list the Ogg Vorbis file first and the other formats after. Webkit (Safari and Chrome) handle unsupported formats just fine.
HTML5 Doctor: http://html5doctor.com/native-audio-in-the-browser/

This seems to be fine and dandy (although I should say that it seems to be fixed in Firefox 3.6)… until you try to play it on the iPad. I haven’t tried the iPod Touch yet, but I’m guessing it’ll be much the same – with the Ogg file first, the iPad’s version of Safari chucks a wobbly and won’t play anything. With the MP3 file first, all is fine and dandy. Except of course, that it isn’t because by the sounds of things earlier versions of Firefox may break down and cry. I think it’s a case of JavaScript to the rescue here. For my current website audience, Firefox seems to be more important than the iPad, and I think (warning: gross generalisation ahead) that iPad users in general are less likely to be thinking about or switching off JavaScript than desktop users who may be constrained by workplace policies or mostly unfounded fears that their files may be attacked. At any rate, even if this isn’t the case, there are way fewer iPad users currently visiting the site and the proportion of those who may have JavaScript switched off is probably microscopic, so I’m planning on leaving the code set up for Firefox and using JavaScript to (probably) remove the offending ogg file source tag from the DOM at the first available moment. Hopefully this will work.

And now to face the horror that is Ikea…

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This evening I’ve been cleaning up some bits and pieces with the design – capitalisation, the background graphics making the connector lines between the heading and the nav, spacing out and recolouring the navigation links and so on. I’ve also added in the audio to the Featured work box, as my first attempt to get this working.

I should say before I proceed that I’ve done a bit of thinking and I think that I’m not going to have time to re-prep all my web audio in two different formats and have the site ready to go live by 30 September – not least because I’ve discovered that some of the original (ancient) files have got corrupted and barely have a note left intact in them, so I’ll have to see if I can dig out clean versions from the CD copies my mother brought over last time she visited, re-rip, re-make the extracts, re-encode (in two formats) and so on. So I’ve made an executive decision that while I want to get proper HTML 5 audio working on the site for launch, it won’t, alas, be for all the sounds on the site, but just a very few to start with, with the rest being upgraded from their incredibly ancient Flash players (I built those myself! Way back in… um… 1990-something) gradually after launch.

But back to today’s work. The good news is: IT WORKS! Some niggles, but overall I’m very pleased with it – Firefox, Chrome and IE6 all find the sound files and play them nicely (IE6 using the fallback link but really doing quite a nice job of it. Shame it’s not doing such a nice job with the site layout… that one’s on the to-do list). Things to be fixed:

1. Safari’s not playing back the MP3. It’s the same file IE6 is playing without problems but I don’t know if I’ve specified the wrong codec or there’s something off with the encoding (could be, it’s not a recent encoding), but it shows up the controls with a play button but when you click the play button nothing happens [Update: My MIME type was wrong - the problem with everything on HTML 5 apparently thinking that video is more interesting and the two are more or less interchangeable, so not providing MIME types for audio... Anyway, it's working beautifully in Safari now]
2. I’ve been able to resize the controls with CSS so they fit neatly in the ‘featured’ box but Chrome is losing display data when I do this – it’s playing back still and showing the progress bar, but it’s no longer displaying the total track time. Suspect this might have to do with font-size – it was pretty generously sized when the player was using its default size, so maybe it’s just slipped into a hidden overflow or something. Safari’s also not showing much data, but this seems to be because it’s having a problem with the file – setting the width for this browser actually seems to lengthen the control box

I think I need to do some more reading on this topic. Might print some stuff off the web tonight – big Ikea trip tomorrow night. Bound to be bored at some point…

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So after chatting with Broken Haiku last night about baking, bread and cinnamon rolls in particular, and after he introduced me to a Japanese Animé series called Yakitate!! Japan, I figured that perhaps now was the time to have a go at making my own cinnamon rolls. I’ve always avoided them because of the high sugar and fat quotient – really not great for someone with no gall bladder who has an insulin resistance – but I’ve been wanting to get into bread baking a bit more while I’m off work and it seemed a fun place to start.

So this afternoon after my physio appointment, and craving a little sweetness after the agony of having her remove a TON of tension from my feet and calves (apparently I store tension in my feet. My masseuse says I store tension in my shoulders. My osteopath says I store it in my back. The scary thing is that I think they might all be right!) why not give them a go?

I was quite surprised to find that Rose Levy Beranbaum actually doesn’t have cinnamon rolls in her inimitable The Bread Bible – shock! horror!! – but Nigella Lawson came to the rescue with the Norwegian Cinnamon Rolls in How to Be a Domestic Goddess. And they were surprisingly easy, really. I mean, bread is a lot easier than a lot of people think, but this was super-simple. And with a limited rising time (25 minutes, then 15 minutes) the whole thing was actually pretty fast to produce. The main surprise was just how sticky the dough was. Nigella talks about “kneading” it, but really it’s a case of prodding at it and wondering how the hell you’re going to get enough off your fingers later to actually be able to cook! But the result was well worth it and with the judicious application of plenty of flour when rolling out, it all worked a treat.

I do suspect I may need an oven thermometer though as the tops burned quite quickly. Not totally charred, but darker than preferred, and definitely darker than the ‘slightly caught edges’ Nigella indicated may happen. But the inside was quite perfect – light and buttery and not too sweet. Scarily moreish. I have packed up most of them and deposited them in the freezer to prevent instant snacking…

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So I think I finally got a grid sort-of working. It’s not fab, but I’m running out of time and – as I’ve probably mentioned before – the important thing for me here is to get the wretched site off my to-do list and onto the web. Once it’s up there I can always start thinking about redesigning it, but the big hurdle is to send it out to the world. So I’m trying to keep it simple, both in look & feel, and in approach to coding. And I think I’ve now got designs for the content pages of the site – one for pages with attached media, such as composition detail pages and my composer bio which will have the Tate video embedded in it; and another for pages which are simply text, or possibly text with embedded media such as blog posts and my artist’s credo.

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I tried to start some sort of design yesterday in Photoshop, and it was all a bit of a disaster, really. I don’t know how anyone works with text in that programme. And obviously, this was a very text-and-line-heavy concept – and I find lines difficult in Photoshop too, so today I thought I’d have a stab at it in Illustrator, which was much more successful.

It’s still got a way to go – it feels too cluttered and is still missing a couple of things I was going to put on the homepage – but I think this is a fair start to the concept I’ve been playing around with in my head.

Started reading the <video> and <audio> chapter of Introducing HTML 5 on the train today, but didn’t get terribly far with it, really (exhausted after a stressful day and napped most of the way home – nothing wrong with the writing!). Oh well. Will have another go tomorrow. I’m pretty sure I’ll have enough time while I’m standing around waiting for public transport in the middle of a Tube strike. Heigh ho. There has to be an upside, right?

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