Drupal, Drupal, Drupal

Didn’t achieve much today – went for a 20-minute walk to buy groceries in the morning, which totally wiped me out and was only solved by a 3-hour totally-zonked-out nap, after which I still felt a bit woozy, but nevertheless I succeeded in finishing Lego Harry Potter on the Wii (first round – now for the Free Play mode). Wow. Huge achievements.

In the evening, though, I managed to install and start looking at the Drupal content management system, which I need to explore for a website I’ve been asked to quote on. First impressions: Daunting but flexible. Probably worth the effort to get to know it a bit. We’ll see how that goes.

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Family seat

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I know I’ve been a bit quiet over Christmas – and it’s certainly not that I haven’t been creative! I’ve baked (cakes & biscuits), cooked (smoked salmon ebelskivers!), I’ve knitted (finished my mother’s chenille scarf!), I’ve been to the movies (Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, Pt 1) and the panto (Peter Pan, with The Hoff as Captain Hook!) and agreed with Djelibeybi on a new layout for the study that hopefully will work for both of us. In fact I was so busy being creative and looking after guests that I didn’t have time to get anywhere near the computer! Now things are calming down a little though, so back to it…

Today I went to Sussex with my parents to visit the village of Warbleton, where my mother’s ancestors came from. We were hoping to find some of them in the churchyard, but unfortunately, being New Year’s Day, the trains were running to a Sunday timetable, somebody somewhere gave us some wrong information and it ended up taking us FOUR AND A HALF HOURS to get there. When I say that it took a mere two and a half to get home again, I think you’ll see what I mean. At any rate, it was a gloomy day to start with and by the time we got there it was 3pm so we repaired to the local pub for a lovely lunch of sandwiches and salad, but by the time we were done the light was mostly gone. And when we realised there were no ancestors to be found my mama suddenly realised that they were chapel people. I think I saw another graveyard with a building that could have been a chapel beside it, but I think we’ll have to go back in the summer to be sure! Lovely village though, and in spite of the travel dramas, a nice way to spend my last day with the parents.

Lovely too, to come home to hot takeaway pizza and Mary Poppins and I made lemon-curd-filled ebelskivers for pudding – most excellent!

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Catch-up

I’ve been in Lisbon, in Portugal for the past week, hence the quietness over here. I’ve not had a holiday like that in a very, very long time. In fact, I think I could go so far as to say that I’ve not relaxed that much in over a decade. But now I’m back. Away from the gentle Portuguese winter sun, back to snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures. That was a bit of a shock to the system!

I took yesterday off, just a sort of recovery moment. I went and had a massage, did quite a lot of sleeping, finished knitting a hot water bottle cover I started before I left, and started on a new scarf (in crazy-coloured cotton chenille yarn) for my mama.

And today I’m working on getting my brain back into composition mode. I’ve read a little more of The Rest Is Noise and just wrote a blog post, A new approach for composers, on caitlinrowley.com about a new site I’ve found called Meet The Composer Studio – there’s some great content over there – have a wander round the videos provided by each of the six composers, and don’t miss Glenn Kotche’s Monkey Chant – brilliant! For comparison you can also creep off and listen to the original Ramayana Monkey Chant over on Ubuweb. Now I guess I should go and actually look at the quintet and see if I can do anything with it!

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Skip, skip, skip

Well not quite. Today marked the one-year anniversary of my accident, so I’ve been doing some thinking and basically come to the conclusion that it’s been a positive experience. And I’ve had a great day working that out. I started out by writing a blog post about the good stuff that’s happened because of the ankle injury, some of which is pretty huge and even, dare I say it, life-changing. I made a Facebook page for my composition because I’m about to have to make one, I think, for the London New Wind Festival so wanted to know what went into it (answer: not much) and see if I can make it work for me. I bopped (on one leg) around the house a little to the Blues Brothers soundtrack which I haven’t listened to in ages, then made myself a cheese sandwich and finally took myself off to the V&A to make a start on the Diaghilev & the Ballets Russes exhibition there.

And ‘make a start’ was the right term! VERY glad I had already decided to sign up as a member. I suspected it would be big and I wouldn’t get round it in one go. What I hadn’t suspected was that it would be VAST and that I wouldn’t get past the first room of the first section in today’s attempt. I seriously think, with the dodgy ankle, that it could take me eight trips to see the whole thing! So it looks like membership has been a sensible way to go.

Then on the way home, I pulled out the score of the first-ending version of the quintet and did a bit of analysis. Harmonically it’s a bit messier than I can fathom with any degree of musicological confidence but the conclusion I’ve come to is that the nice tail I thought I’d have to cut should actually be able to work. It all depends on what surrounds it and what it goes on to. The figuration comes from earlier parts and the melody there, which I’d thought just wasn’t going to work, also has its roots elsewhere in the piece. What’s new is that the harmony is straight major harmony whereas everything else has had a hearty dose of other-key dissonance. But it’s comforting. Now I just need to get in there and make it work!

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Made a start on starting the new piece

Which is to say, I made a start on research for the new piece. Started the day by listening (not terribly successfully) to Schubert’s string quintet on Spotify (thinking I’ll ditch my premium subscription again – I really don’t use it when I’m not working because I prefer to listen to old-school actual-disc CDs) on my iPod Touch while reading a little more of Hallelujah Junction. Then moved on to getting back to my harmony & counterpoint studies over my morning coffee – I had thought to just re-read the first counterpoint chapter then do the exercises, but I’ve had to take a step back to go over seventh chords again, just to get my mind in the space once more. I had to go out to Foyle’s in the afternoon to get birthday presents for my Da, so I nipped into HMV (well, as much as one can nip with a hobbly ankle) where I discovered that this piece seems to want to be faintly Germanic – I came out with Mendelssohn and Brahms string quintets plus a disc of Martinu and Schulhoff string sextets. I’ve written more about this over at caitlinrowley.com. Listening to the Mendelssohn now – absolute heaven. Still have trouble grasping the solid fact that I’m actually a Mendelssohn fan…

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<video> and <audio>

Read the chapter on the new media tags today – very interesting, and great to see that even though they’re not fully supported there’s a range of fallback options available, both built in to HTML and via JavaScript. It sounds like there’s really a lot of scripting opportunities available (or will be available!) to go with both video and audio, which makes me think that my idea of a mobile piece using <audio> and the geolocation APIs, while possibly not entirely feasible right now, may be in the near future – can’t wait!

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HTML 5 forms & wireframing

I’ve been out for most of the day, so mostly I’ve been reading today – I’m up to the chapter on forms in the HTML 5 book and golly gosh! There’s some serious fun to be had there – obviously there’s minimal implementation of the cutest bits, such as browser-implemented field validation and combobox inputs, but it’s going to be awesome once they are, and at least now we can start using this stuff and just have JavaScript to correct where they’re not yet supported. Brilliant! Getting pretty excited about it all, and also very glad I’m reading up on it now, before it’s widely implemented – there’s a lot to take in.

I want to try out wireframing for this project, so I don’t get too caught up in the designing at the expense of basic structure. So this evening I’ve been looking at web-wireframing stencils for OmniGraffle which I’m going to have a go at getting into OmniGraffle on the iPad. Djeli had a go at this a little while back when he first bought the app, but had some difficulties, so I’ve done some research and hopefully have got files in the right formats now. Crossing fingers…

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Day 1

Started reading Bruce Lawson & Remy Sharp’s Introducing HTML 5 – interesting and engagingly written. This is going to be fun! I didn’t get a huge way into the book yet, but far enough to discover that while most browsers will just treat HTML 5 tags as unknown tags and allow them to be styled with CSS however you wish, A Certain Browser which really doesn’t need to be named, spits the dummy and apparently won’t style them at all without a little JavaScript jiggery-pokery. Which of course means in A Certain Browser, stuff’s going to break. I’m going to have to do some research, I think, into stats on my current site to see if I can find out about anything about what my current users are doing. Really DON’T want to have to make a separate version for IE…

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Started to learn (properly) about Subversion

Maybe not hugely creative but necessary knowledge anyway. And with the immininent departure of our resident command-line guru, it’s sort of a self-preservation measure too. Should know it anyway though…

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Started hunting for a song text

for the choral piece that’s to be my project to begin this weekend. I’m thinking a psalm, but using both Latin and English versions, mixed up together.

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