kayray.org

09 — Experimental New Blog.

07 — We finished our production of The Importance of Being Earnest today! We’ve been working on it since December 2005 but it’s finished now, finished and cataloged. Funny, I recorded my lines so long ago that I’ve forgotten what they were! All the cast members recorded their lines individually. We had people in the US, in Canada, in Japan, in England, and in Australia taking part. Then Paula, darling Paula, spliced everything together, balanced the sound as best she could, and made it sound like a play. If it weren’t for the little differences in room noise and mic quality, you’d swear we were all in the same room together! I think it’s amazingly successful. I submitted the link to boingboing and they picked it up! Yay boingboing, that’s the site that led me to librivox in the first place.

05 — Rockola performed the entire Revolver album, plus lots more Beatles music, at a wonderfully renovated old theater in North Park. Dan and I went down to help out — Dan did tech for the show and I sat around and knitted and offered advice all day. Heh. We got down to North Park at a little after 10am (traffic was not as bad as we expected) so we got some breakfast at the independant coffee place across the street. Clair de Lune, maybe. Beautiful old building. At 11 we went back across to the theater and Dan helped the band set up and everything. I knitted and watched. Much rehearsing happened. We ran across the street and bought lunch for the band and tech crew, and later Chloe and I went down the street half a block to a pizza place and got pizza for everyone for dinner. Nice guy at the pizza place wheeled 7 XL pizzas and 5 6-packs of sodas back to the theater for us :) Pizza was at about 6pm, then there was more planning and rehearsing before the show started at 7:30. It was a sold out show! I got some photos, will post later. The show was amazing. Too tired now to describe further, maybe tomorrow. But, truly amazing. And the audience loved it. And it went oh so smoothly, despite some rocky moments during rehearsal. Good job, Rockola, as usual! :)

03 — Tired tired tired. I’ll let you know when I’m NOT tired, how about that? Took Henry to the dollar showing of Corpse Bride this morning. Meh. But it was fun anyway. Henry’s a delight at the movies, or anywhere, really. He’s so civilized and pleasant. Then I took him to his dad’s house, then bought groceries at Trader Joe’s. Trader Joe’s always makes me feel cheerful :) Got some sliced fresh mango for a Dan-treat, and fresh pineapple wedges for all of us. Also ingredients for beans-and-rice for tonight (easy) and Shephard’s Pie for tomorrow (harder, but maybe I’ll be less tired. Ha.) Now I’ve caught up on librivox and email and now I think I’ll lie about and rest and maybe play some Harvest Moon. Gamechild or Gamecube… hmm, tough choice. Cube, I guess. Oh wait first I have to attend to a sinkful of dishes. But then rest and fun.

02 — Tired tired endlessly tired. At Margaret’s art class today we looked at Jackson Pollock’s work and then did a couple of nice free drippy splashy projects. Henry LOVED it. He says the art he made today is his favorite of the whole summer, along with his Eat Your Fruit poster. He wrapped his arms around me while he was waiting for his painting to dry and said he was having a wonderful day. Dear sweet Henry! When we got home we both collapsed on the couch and watched a Poirot mystery (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). Henry loves both Poirot (David Suchet version) and Miss Marple (Geraldine McEwan version). I think I was about his age when I discovered Agatha Christie novels.

This evening, well, early evening, we went out to the Moonlight Amphitheater for The Sounds of Music. Stopped for mexican food first, then got out to the theater about 6:15 and got in line at the gate. We ended up getting a pretty good spot, just left of center and a few levels back from the front. So we sat and ate and read until the show started. Adorable show, of course. Henry was enthralled. His favorite part was when the Nazi officers came shining their flashlights into the audience, looking for the escaping Trapp family. Heh. My favorite part was when the Trapp family performed Lonely Goatherd at the Festival — with extra harmony bits that didn’t make it into the movie. (Henry always wants to discuss Favorite Parts so I always have to PICK one, heheh) Maria was little too cute-cute, but everyone else was great. The show went really late and we got home about 11:30, utterly exhausted.

The BBC called me today for a little quickie live radio interview with someone named Anita. Here’s a slightly abridged transcript:

Anita: Don’t amateur readers suck?

Me: Nope.

The end. Lol. The intern, or whoever she was, who called yesterday to make sure I’d be home for an interview asked a lot more questions, and more interesting questions :) I’m not inclined to track down the audio online, but it’s probably there somewhere. I was on after a discussion of homeopathy, middle of the night UK time I guess, either late Thursday or early Friday.

Forgot to give you my pandora profile:

http://www.pandora.com/people/kara00

What’s yours? :)

Did I mention that I paid for a yearlong ad-free subscription? Not that the ads were that bothersome, not at all, but mostly I just want to support these guys who, if they’re like any other internet startup, are probably losing money. Go, pandora, go!

Yesterday I decided we should get rid of half of the big blue sofa.  It’s got two long sections that form a right angle but it’s wayyyyy more seating that we ever need.  So this morning I placed an ad on craigslist – “free sofabed”.  While I was at craigslist I thought I’d look to see if there was a nice dining table — also decided yesterday that we need a better dining table if possible.  And there was a lovely one listed, light-finished wood on top with white legs.  Just right for four.  And it came with 4 chairs also, all for $75.  Woohooo!  So I emailed the table lady and said GIMME!

Then I went upstairs to help Sal with her computer.  We had fun with pandora and firefox for an hour and a half.  Then checked my mail, the table lady replied, said the table was still available, yay!  So I sent her my phone number and waited for her to call.  Meanwhile the phone rang and it was the BBC, wanting to do a live phone interview later today.  Yipe.  While I was on the phone with them, the table lady called back so I had to tell the BBC to call me later, heh.  Mom offered to take her car down to Clairmont to pick up the table & chairs, so I had to figure out a time when the table lady would be home and mom was free, but it worked out eventually.  BBC called back and we chatted for a while, story background I guess. Then I ran to the bank for $75.  Henry and Fargo were entertaining themselves with movies and squirtguns all this time, very good children.  Then got back with 10 minutes to spare before my piano student, hopped in the shower, and went up to wait for her. Oh, meanwhile I had three people email me about the free sofa.  I told Guy #1 he could have it if he could pick it up today.  He said he’d come later in the afternoon with his roommate’s truck.  Student didn’t show.  Mom left around 2 to get my table and got back before HER students at 4.  I sat around waiting for the BBC to call, also sat around waiting for sofa guy to show up.  His roommate was late…  BBC finally called at 5-ish, said there was breaking news and could they do the interview same time tomorrow? Ok, sure.

Sofa guy eventually showed up around 9, brought three friends and a truck, was delighted with the sofabed, and hauled it away, YAY!  Now I can put the two rocking chairs where the old sofa was and it’ll be much nicer.

Dan brought us In-n-Out for dinner and we sat at our new civilized table :)  So happy!

Our Island Story, chapter 16:

King Alfred in the Cowherd’s Cottage

Have you tried Pandora.com yet? Have you have you have you? It’s free, it works in firefox, it’s not spammy, go try it! You can listen to my stations and see my bookmarked songs and artists here: http://www.pandora.com/people/kara00

Go!

Forgot to mention that Dan gave me a gift certficate for an ultra-fancy carwash!  I dropped Henry and Fargo (who’s visiting for a couple of days) at Henry’s dad’s house and went down to the carwash place.  It took them an hour and 15 minutes, and my car is super-clean and shiny and nice.  I think I got a teflon wax or something.  Anyway Dan said it was good :)  While I was waiting I walked over to the convenient neaby yarn store (Noble Knits) and felt the luscious yarns.  Mmmmmmm.  I realized I had no cash with which to tip the carwash guys, so I bought a couple skeins of fine cotton/acrylic blend for socks on the debit card, and the nice yarnstore ladies gave me a couple dollars cash back.  There’s a knit-together there tomorrow night.  I might go.  Maybe.

Today Henry got to pick up his long-awaited spacers at the dentist. We got the removable kind, because Henry is responsible enough not to lose them, and to remember to clean them. He gets to take them out for meals but leave them in the rest of the day and night. He has a bit of trouble speaking, for now, but I’m sure he’ll get used to them soon :)

According to Pandora, here are a few of the hundreds of attributes cataloged for Fred Astaire’s “Steppin’ Out with my Baby”:

swing dancin’ style
sultry vocals
romantic lyrics
a well-articulated piano solo
a horn section
light drumming
electric guitar accompaniment
jazz-pop style
a mid-tempo swing feel
interesting part writing
strong melodies
lyric-centric composition
two-step style
mixed major and minor tonalities

Birthday greeting from LibriVox :)

Today is my birthday! It was a great day. I woke up early and set up my new recording equipment. Slid the USB audio interface under my iMac, and set up the mic-stand on the left side of my desk at about mouth level. Tried another sample recording and I think I’ll be getting good results one I figure out what eq settings to use. I think I’m nearly there, actually.

Henry came home around lunchtime and gave me presents, too — a handmade little medallion/bookmark and Super Princess Peach for the DS! I’ve been wishing for that game because reviews were good and it looked not too difficult. I get frustrated with impossibly hard games. One very nice thing is that it saves after you complete each short level. I get stuck in New Super Mario Bros. because you can’t save very often, and I don’t always have the time or energy to make it through a tower or castle, or save up enough coins. Anyway, I love Princess Peach so far.

The guys went out and brought pizza home for lunch, and we watched a couple of Star Trek episodes (Devil in the Dark and I, Mudd). Henry invited me to a game of scrabble, and after that we watched Austin Powers — Henry hadn’t see it before and he laughed and laughed, heheh.

Also I tinkered with my blog a lot. I didn’t want a huge string of archive links in the sidebar, so I set up a special archive index, as you can see. And Kri pointed me to a useful plugin that lets me show only blog posts on the front page, so I won’t clutter up the blog with audiobook episodes and knitting and whatnot.

I just noticed Pandora’s “edit station” function. (click the little triangle on your station name). This screen lists the founding artists/songs of your station. You can remove any that you’ve changed your mind about. You can also see which songs you’ve “liked” and “disliked” — again, you can remove them. (e.g. you told pandora you liked a certain song, then heard it a few more times and changed your mind about liking it!)

I listened to my Pete Seeger station all day yesterday and for a while this morning, and added a couple cds to my Amazon Wishlist! (Would have added more but many of the older, more obscure ones were not available. Sigh.) I just decided it was time for a change, so I made a station founded on Benny Goodman and Fred Astaire. Figured that should give me a nice mix of 30s/40s swing/pop. So far I’ve heard Benny, Fred, Nat, Bing, and John Pizzarelli (I’m not on a first-name basis with him, heh).

Today Dan took me out to buy birthday presents! I decided that I wanted a better recording setup (inspired by the equipment we ferried to Hugh) so we went to Guitar Denter Center. Dan helped me choose a condenser mic and a usb audio interface, so I can avoid my soundcard when recording. I hate Guitar Center. It’s loud and the salesguys are pushy. When we got home and set everything up, it turned out that my mic was probably a returned model (though not sold as such), and the threads were stripped. Nice. So we went back and exchanged it for a shrink-wrapped model, which was suprisingly easy. The whole affair was exhausting, but I did eventually manage to make a couple of sample recordings and I think my new mic is going to be really nice!

Also tinkered with my blog for hours, also listened to Pandora at all times (when I wasn’t recording)!

Oops. Let’s catch up, shall we? :)

Our Island Story, chapters 6 – 15:

The Last of the Romans
The Story of St. Alban
Vortigern and King Constans
The Coming of Hengist and Horsa
Hengist’s Treachery
How the Giant’s Dance was Brought to Britain
The Coming of Arthur
The Founding of the Round Table
Gregory and the Pretty Children
How King Alfred Learned to Read
(though there’s really no need to depend on my memory… you can get the entire first half of the book by following this link: Our Island Story, Part 1)

I tried several different methods of importing my blogger.com posts into wordpress.  None worked.  But there are only 24 or so blogger posts so I’ve started pasting them in by hand.  I’m keeping the timestamps exactly the same as the original posts.  I’d hate to rewrite such important history.

WordPress has this “press it” thingy that lives up in the browser toolbar. Click it when you’re on a nifty page and it starts a wordpress post (in the same tab! beware!) which has the url of the nifty page in it. Like this:

Pandora Internet Radio – Find New Music, Listen to Free Web Radio

I discovered pandora yesterday and listened to it all day! It’s an amazing service. I adore it. Pick an artist or two and it starts a “radio station” for you in your browser. It selects songs by the artist(s) you picked, and adds songs by other artists that it considers similar in style. Every song, at any time, allows you to “thumbs up” it, in which case it knows you like it and it will tend to pay songs by that artist more often, or “thumbs down” it in which case the song stops playing and it remembers that you didn’t like it. You can ask “why did you play this song?” in which case you’ll get a popup something like this:

“Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features folk roots, acoustic sonority, majoy key tonality, melodic songwriting, and acoustic rhythm guitars.”

That was the popup for a Leadbelly song on my Pete Seeger station :) Now I’ll mark it “thumbs up” and I’ll get more Leadbelly in the mix. It already played me some Pete Seeger, a little Dylan, a Woody Guthrie song, and a couple of songs by artists I hadn’t heard of, two of which I really liked (Stan Rogers and Bob Gibson). You can “bookmark” a song or artist, and it’ll show up in your profile where you can listen to a sample of it, or buy it from iTunes or Amazon. Handy for remembering new and cool songs and artists! Bob Gibson’s “Erie Canal” is on right now. He’s obviously heavily influenced by Pete — who better to be influenced by? So I’ve bookmarked him and I can consider acquiring a cd of his later.

Pandora is SO COOL!!!!!! Also, it’s completely free if you don’t mind a few advertisements in the tab (and possibly audio ads later?) or $36/year for the ad-free version. Hmm, it’ll let me add my favorite songs, artists, or stations to my blog. Let’s see how that looks…

i’ve fiddled with this thing long enough.  i’ll try to make it conform to my expectations tomorrow.  also i’m hungry.

working on my own wordpress installation.  while it’s still ugly and unkempt, you can read my temporary blogger blog here: kayray.org/blog.html

So! Now that blogger.com is working again and I can reliably create a post, here’s a link to the NY Times article about LibriVox that was published today:
Public Domain Books, Ready for Your iPod

To misquote Larry David: “Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty cool!”

Dan was up early, went out and bought the paper, and left our story on the bed for me to find when I woke up :)

Interesting. I got fed up with blogger not publishing that last post, and not letting me remove 3 duplicated posts, so I went into the html file on my server and poked it with a stick. Added some plain old text at the top to let people know I knew it was broken. And now it seems to be working again, go figure. But still, now that I know I enjoy the new-fangled blogging experience, with the comments and the feed and the web-based posting, I will install my very own wordpress and not have to rely on blogger.com anymore. Probably work on that tonight.