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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Can’t believe it. After weeks of quietude, suddenly my social life has taken off. Tansy’s launch on Thursday, my concert on Friday, friend for lunch tomorrow – and then the World’s Best Ex-Boss pings me this morning to say would we like to go to a movie! So we did. Sort of slobbed around the house a bit, then went into town for dinner (nothing flash, just Pizza Express, but it was nice – they do a great Sicilian still lemonade) and (eventually) met up with the WBEB. We went to see I Am Number 4, which I’d never heard of, and it turned out to be OK. Fun in a kind of “I left my brain at home, but that’s alright” way. It had a cute puppy in it. And of course it’s always lovely to see the WBEB.

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Came out of my shell a little today – we had a friend for lunch & Djelibeybi made roast turkey with some of the trimmings (turkey was excess from Christmas that we’d had to freeze because we ended up with such a vast amount of meat!) and for afters I made ebelskivers with homemade passionfruit curd – VERY fine, if I do say so myself.

In the evening we ventured out to St John’s Smith Square for a concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of Australian composer Percy Grainger’s death. And what a great programme – marvellous Grainger and some great Grainger-inspired works by other composers too. A really excellent programme and topped off with an encore of an all-out Sousa version of Country Gardens. The only version I’ve been able to find online is this one from YouTube where they all sound quite bored. Consider this, but with enthusiasm and then with the brakes totally taken off, everyone playing with gusto and vibrancy and you’ll get about half an idea of how good this was.

Anyway, came back after the concert and I needed to put up another sound file on SoundCloud because I applied for a composition job for a film score today too, so I pulled out the laptop, attached my audio disk and started Pro Tools. Everything was going well until Pro Tools froze, as it does. After that it started glitching a bit, so I closed it down and reopened it. At which point it started giving me errors and wouldn’t play the file. So I rebooted the computer, at which point the system decided my disk could not be read and telling me I needed to initialise it. Which of course would wipe all the data. This is a big deal because this particular disk contains all my scores. Everything I’ve done for the past ten years. And with the recent apparent failure of my grand plan to back everything up online (where 90% of the files just vanished out of the folders they were in for no apparent reason) this disk now contains my most complete backup. Which I now can’t get at at all. Going to attempt to sleep on this problem…

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This week has been getting progressively worse and worse. Today I struggled in the morning, went out for a meeting which my meetee had forgotten all about, so I bought myself a muffin and came home. I did get to the post office in the afternoon to post a friend’s birthday & Christmas presents which I should have sent back in September. I think that’s a win even while being a massive fail. And then I came back, found something on the internet which made me massively angry and wrote a huge ranty blog post about it (not posted, unlikely to be, on reflection) which then made me late for the evening appointment for which TFL made me even later and the bus driver not knowing if he went anywhere near Putney Railway Station made me even later than that. Dinner was nice. Nice friends, nice food. Overly long walk at speed to pub not so nice resulting in achey unhappy ankle and achey unhappy insides. Gig was not to my taste and resulted in extreme boredom (but thought up some ways to improve the beginning of the violin piece).

But, like I say, I got to the post office.

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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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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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Tonight was the Philharmonia Orchestra’s memorial concert for Sir Charles Mackerras. I have to say, I’ve rarely been to such an awesome concert. To start with, it was HUGE. A massive programme – 2 intervals – and everything was just perfect. Add to musical perfection the vast numbers of Mackerras family who turned up – Djelibeybi’s sister worked out that there were representatives from every branch of the family there, which is really saying something, including several who had come over from Australia just for the concert. So lovely to see everyone. And great to see Alex (Briger) conduct in a concert hall again – I’ve only seen him once before (conducting Mahler, and actually making him plausible, which in my book is a vast achievement as usually I’m bored witless 5 minutes in) as mostly we see him conducting opera. And he did a fantastic job of Charlie’s Cunning Little Vixen suite, the final scene of the same opera and then an absolutely sparkling rendition of the overture to Pineapple Poll as an encore. A very fitting memorial. Charlie would have loved it.

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then coffee with another friend. Good conversation, and nice to be out and about on such a glorious autumnal day. Now at home and snugging in – just watched The Thin Man. Not sure what’s next.

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with djelibeybi and pocketsteve to hear the awesome Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain. Even better live than on YouTube, and just hilarious. Well worth it, even though we did get *rather* wet! Also picked up the pattern for the little hats innocent solicit from willing knitters for their charity campaign later in the year – thinking I might have a go at one or two.

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I wouldn’t normally include dinner with friends here, but this was dinner with pocketsteve, who is very encouraging of both my creative activity and my dayjob and we compare notes on webstuff too, so it was all very uplifting and really made me feel I’m doing OK. Therefore, encouraging of creativity, if not creative activity in itself. And no, I didn’t really do anything much creative on Wednesday – I took a book and read at lunchtime because the laptop’s just too heavy to carry every day and the pain in my shoulder told me to take a break…

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