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Asking For It Dept.

July 18, 2003, by No comments yet

Added a “comments” feature to my blog. Now all you multitudes who slavishly lap up my every word can slather on the fulsome praise. Or not.

Soli Dei Gloria, indeed.

July 16, 2003, by No comments yet

I was ready to turn off NPR this morning and begin work, when the familiar flute movement from Bach’s Orchestral Suite #2 tripped and bubbled from my radio speaker. I expected the announcer to cut in, the way announcers do during the transitional music between news stories, but the melody went on for what must have been a full twenty seconds. At length Bob Edwards introduced a story about the long-delayed restoration of Bach’s original manuscripts in Leipzig. The manuscripts had lain off-limits in the German National Library in Berlin for decades, with not even basic efforts attempted at preservation. But now, with the fragile papers near a state of complete disintergration, a team is finally hard at work preserving them for future study.

According to the report, one of the tasks in which the restoration team at the Bach Library in Leipzig is engaged is to digitally photograph every one of the manuscript pages and make them available online for music historians all over the world to study. The museum official commented on the quality of the digital images, their level of detail, and the information that the erasures, word transpositions, and margin notes could provide to those looking to reconstruct the life and creative mind of Bach. Continued…

Cat hair drama.

June 28, 2003, by No comments yet

The heat wave finally broke and we had a beautiful, breezy, sunny day. I was more relieved for the cats than for myself, especially the older one — she’s over fifteen and doesn’t deal with extreme heat very well.

Normally, on the first really hot day of the season I give Briana her annual bath, a process that I can’t really describe as “fun“, but one she usually tolerates without using either teeth or claws and with only the occasional growl or yowl. She also lets me use the blow dryer on her without flinching once we’re done, possibly because she’s used to seeing me use it each morning on myself. Continued…

Epic Heat.

June 27, 2003, by No comments yet

Well, managed to bungle a ridiculously simple web design test, misreading one of the first lines of code and consequently sketching the resulting screen shot totally differently from the actual answer.

Duh.

In addition, I missed a scheduled lunch date because I couldn’t make the in-class Javascript exercise work even if my very life depended upon it, and by the time I finally gave up and called my friend, he had gone without me.

And the final straw, after a long and hot walk (it’s supposed to top out at over 95 degrees today) to the car, I realized that I’d left my driving glasses in the classroom. So back I went. By the time I returned to my car not even full-blast air conditioning could cool an interior temp that must have easily exceeded 120 degrees. Continued…

What you see isn’t always what you get.

June 13, 2003, by No comments yet

I was intrigued by the talk in class Thursday about the effect of internet browsers upon web page displays, and thought that it might be a good idea to have more than one browser available on my computer so I can check how things look as I work.

So I went to Netscape.com and ordered a copy of Netscape 7 on CD-ROM; it should arrive next week. I then restarted the laptop in OS X and downloaded Mozilla. Fired ‘er up and WOW. It’s like being in a parallel universe. The single most striking example of the change was when I logged on to make this very post–the interface is a lot more sophisticated than the one I use in Explorer in OS 9.2.
Continued…