I wonder if non-musical persons get infected with banal tunes that stick in your head for days at a time? I wondered this the other day when the BAS called me up the other day and asked whether we had copies of "We Rise Again" to loan out. Turns out we didn't need to loan the copies but I was infected with that tune for a while. At the moment, though, a couple of fugue subjects from the Mozart Requiem are in my head — certainly a more worthy usage of the spare CPU cycles in my brain. Just to get you started, here are some tunes to stick in your head:
And, of course, there's always those TV commercial jingles you learned when you were a kid!
As the Bell'Arte Singers have a dress rehearsal and concert on the same days as the Oakville Choral Society has their concerts, I have decided to leave my bass section leader post for the time being until 2003. There are now about 15 basses most of whom can sing, many who can read music and some who can even count and watch the director! I will miss that great bunch of people in the OCS and their director — a man who refuses to treat them as "just" a community choir. They are performing Beethoven's Mass in C at Christmas, no trifling work there my friend. He believes, rightly of course, that every one can express muscianship by simple observation of dynamics, letting the part with the melody sing out, blending your sound with your neighbours', emphasizing and de-emphasizing syllables of words, and so on. Good luck to them.
From A.Word.A.Day. Of course I don't think anyone reading this humble blog could be called this. I remember an elderly neighbour who I might have described this way when I was a kid; perhaps those kinds of people have died out.
agelast (AY-jel-ast) noun
Someone who never laughs.
[From Greek agelastos (not laughing), ultimately from gelaein (to laugh).]
"Between the obscene, crude buffoon of the old comedy and the boor, the dour agelast who takes offense at everything ..."
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Playboys and Killjoys, Shakespeare Quarterly (Washington, DC), Autumn 1988.
"An hour of stand-up which the audience absolutely loves. I don't spot a single agelast."
Deborah Ross, Interview: Sandi Toksvig - I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Hairdo, Independent (London), Jul 16, 2001.
Today's concert where ourselves, the Bell'Arte Singers, and some of the Hamilton Philharmonic were hired to sing and play with the Bach-Elgar choir this afternoon. The star attractraction was the Mozart Requiem which went very well indeed IMHO. As music librarian for the Bell'Arte I was glad to not have to collect music at the end of the concert since it's all ours and we have a rehearsal next Saturday anyway. The Bach-Elgar had a short presentation at the beginning of the concert announcing they will receive a $76,000 grant over the next 3 years. Lucky ducks! The Bell'Arte face much stiffer competition in Toronto for grant monies with all the choirs the GTA has.
Our dress rehearsal for the concert tomorrow took place this morning. All told it was almost three hours of standing on risers. As usual, in the choir, you can only hear the few voices around and some of the instruments when you are singing in the chorus. However, "producer" Ian Sadler said the sound was "lovely" in the pews of Christ's Church Hamilton. We'll probably take the 407 from Mississauga to Burlington tomorrow so that we don't have to allow an extra half to full hour just to account for possible delays on the QEW on the Oakville to Burlington stretch. It took us a half an hour longer to get home this afternoon than it did to drive there at 8:30 this morning.
While my wife was getting her hair colour lightened I went to the local lumber store to buy the additional 5/4"x6"x16' board I need to complete my deck surface. While I was there, I looked for a particular type of clamp to help straighten out the warped boards while I screwed them into the Deckmaster brackets. I finally decided to buy a pair of Powerpress pipe clamp/spreaders. I bought a 10 foot length of black pipe and had the store cut it in half to I could have two pieces. Later this afternoon I worked well into dark (which comes about 6:45 EDT now) and used the pipe spreaders against the end header of the deck to coerce the deck boards into place. Since these Powerpress clamps don't require pipe threading I can slide them along at any place along the pipe. This was far easier than clamping a piece of wood and driving wedges, the process I had been using hitherto. I also bought hard plastic knee pads so I could kneel directly on those warped deck boards as I screw them in. By the time I am finished this deck I will be ready to do the deck properly and much more quickly. (Insert smiley face here.)
Now to set the clocks back: for a while it will be light in the morning when I walk to the train station around 7 a.m. but it will be almost dark when I get back home around 6ish.
My son, he's so observant! I used the van to pick up the lumber and pipe this afternoon. I guess while I was gone he came home from work (just a block away at the grocery store) to have lunch and noticed the van wasn't in the driveway. Just now (this evening) he asked to borrow the car since the van wasn't around. I guess he must have been deep in thought when he passed the driveway earlier this evening after work. The van has been parked there since I returned in the afternoon. No use hiding Christmas presents from him this year — I could just put them casually in a corner of the living room perhaps. He'll never notice.
My dad remarried (his fourth wife but who's counting?) recently to a woman a few years younger than me. Factlet One:I am older than my step-mother! She has a couple of kids from a previous relationship who are older than ours and I believe one of those kids has a child. Factlet Two:This makes me a step-grandfather. Seeing as how he lives with his new family in Vancouver and I am here in Mississauga, these are pretty insignificant familial factlets if you ask me. Just thought I would point them out though.
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To have a little fun.
Stupid Jill forgot the pill
And now they have a son.
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,
Her clothing all tattered and torn.
It wasn't the spider that crept up beside her
But Little Boy Blue and his horn.
Simple Simon met a Pieman
Going to the fair
Said Simple Simon to the Pieman
"What have you got there?"
Said the Pieman unto Simon
"Pies, you dumbass!"
There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good, she was very, very good
But when she was bad,
She got a fur coat, jewels, a sports car...
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the King's horses and all the King's men
Had scrambled eggs for breakfast again.
Hey diddle, diddle, the cat did a piddle
All over the bedside clock,
The little dog laughed to see such fun
When it died of electric shock.
Georgie Porgey Pudding and Pie
Kissed the girls and made them cry.
When the boys came out to play
He kissed them too cause he was gay.
I had some time today to screw down more deck boards. I seem to have more of a system going now so I am now 3/4 of the way. Unfortunately it seems the 16 foot boards weren't a uniform width at either end. Half way along I found I was out a almost 3/4" on one side. Now I have added a gap at the shorter side and reduced the difference to less than 1/2". I should have the difference down to effectively 0 with the remaining 5 boards. I am not all that worried as I need one more 5/4x6"x16' board to complete the deck so I will rip (or routerize :-) that one to fit. Speaking of routing I am thinking of using my trimmer bit to trim those bits of overhanging deck boards. As I am using pressure-treated wood I will have to be sure and use a dust mask. The trimmer bit has a wheel which will ride along the joist underneath. If I used a circular saw I would have to carefully follow a chalk line and I'm not sure that my hand would be steady enough.
Other events this weekend included the last Bell'Arte rehearsal before the concert dress rehearsal with the Bach-Elgarians (see right side), picking a bushel of Ida Reds at the Williams' orchard north of Milton, visiting friends in Guelph and even finishing up a bit of "work" work.
As you may or may not be aware I "blog" and preview with Mozilla, a very capable browser "suite" IMHO. Lately, the browser (only) part of Mozilla has been extracted and called Phoenix . Its claim to fame is that it starts up much faster and runs "cooler". I have found it so. Though it might not have all the fancy toolbars and plugins, it is ideal for firing up a quick connection to your blog when you don't have time for the Mozilla monster to start up and your not intent on general web browsing, too. You just want to jot down a note and post it. Like so.
My large Ontario electricity market simulation would "hang" occasionally and I couldn't determine why. Sometimes I would be lucky and the program would hang while running with the debugger. All that would show when I "broke" into the program was that some DLLs were running including msjet40.dll. So, I figured it was an ODBC or MS Access database problem. Nope. Today I installed the program on another box and now it consistently hung. This was good as I could now finally track down the problem. What it boiled down to was an uninitialized class member variable. This variable was used in a Windows API call to Sleep(value). On my box apparently value was always small but on this other box it was a large number so the program was "sleeping" all the time at a certain point. It's disappointing that the debugger couldn't have given me this information. Anyway, it was quite satisfying to squash this bug.
I have a Laserjet IIIp, now about 10 years old I guess, which I bought with a zippy 33 MHz PC (!). I don't use that PC but the Laserjet was working fine until recently when it showed a "52 Error". A little 'net surfing brought me to Fixyourprinter.com which diagnosed the error as a scanner motor problem. An 'net order and around $90 later I had a new scanner board and a CD video. (Aside: Canada Post charged a $5.00 handling fee and Canada Customs added PST and GST to the order. How nice!) I played the video this morning and followed the detailed screw-by-screw instructions. Now the laser printer is working again. As my wife has lots of stuff to print for her courses and teaching, she'll be glad to hear that.
Today we'll be having my in-laws, our family, and, perhaps, a couple of friends, over for a turkey feast. The bird's about 9.6 kg so we should be stuffing it and putting it in the oven soon. I recall the first time we had everyone over (usually about 20 or so), we got up early Sunday morning and started cooking the large bird before heading off to church. It was cooked by the time we got home around 1 p.m. and there was still 4 hours to go until supper time! Well, it will be fun to have family and friends around for a couple hours though, being the hosts, my wife and I don't end up having much time to talk to anyone. And, before you know it, the meal is done and everyone leaves again &mdash something like a church choir party.
There's lots of things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend including family, friends, good health, etc. An inspirational witticism eludes me at the moment so I will conclude by hoping that you, also, have many things to be thankful for.
Installed all the Deckster brackets. I had to buy 5 more from Rona to complete the job. As my wife and my son had the two cars I went by bicycle. Fortunately I had velcro stretch bands so I attached the 5 brackets to the crossbar. After that I laid out the 21 PT 5/4 x 6 x 16' deck boards. Not too much warpage though I'll have to make spacers so I can screw down the boards with even spacing and straighten out the warpage.
I roller-bladed to Mosto Vinho and added yeast to a Merlot which should be ready to bottle in 6 weeks. It is worth the extra money to pay for juice rather than the concentrate as the taste is far superior. I have been given wines from others and it has been acutely obvious they went the "cheapola" suitable only for cooking wine route.
I finally got through to the call centre at 407 ETR and lo and behold they "found" my two payments. So, this month, I just sent what is owed for last month. I didn't pay the $0.11 interest on my supposedly overdue payments.
Brother Tom phoned (from Victoria) last night with some questions about installing some more "hockey puck" halogen lights. He'd done OK with the first set but hadn't had much success with installing two more. Hopefully, my over-the -phone explanation helped.
It seems that, though the 407 toll highway here in Ontario has a modern licence photo and transponder system in place, it can't seem to handle mundane billing or call centre work. I have paid my last two bills electronically though my Credit Union and these credits have yet to show up three months later. Now they are threatening further action on my overdue account. So, I tried phoning. First one has to dial up several times before your call is not disconnected or busy. Second, there's an extremely long message before they give the touch tone keys to press. BTW, press 0, then 1. Finally yesterday I talked to a so-called customer service rep. who put me on hold while she got my bill. What! they just can't show it on their screen. Perhaps they have to print your bill on the one printer on the floor. Oh, you want to look at the one two months ago — please hold. Anyway the phone connection broke so I have to start all over again. Where's all that fancy technology for customer service?
I spent some time at Rona today looking at hardware for my deck. Eventually I bought 1x6 joist hangers, 4x4 post to 2 x 2 brackets, "hurricane" ties, Deckmaster brackets and 21 16' deck boards — probably spent around $500. I decided on 5/4 PT deck boards this time screwed from underneath with those Deckmaster brackets. Hopefully this will help this deck current version of the deck last for at least a decade. The old deck was made of 2x6 cedar just nailed to the joists.
This afternoon I replaced the rotten cedar double 2x6 header. The chain saw was handy for this job. First I supported the deck frame and joists with some scrap lumber, then I sawed the through the header in several places and removed the pieces. I smeared lots of preservative on the tops of the 3 4x4 posts (and was very glad I didn't have to replace these). Using the 4x4 post brackets it was easy (well relatively so) to slide in two PT 2"x6"x16' boards. Nailing up the brackets and adding some nails to the header made everything secure. I removed the scrap lumber and attached the joists to the header with "hurricane" ties. Not that I am expecting a hurricane; but, it is far easier to pound in a few short galvanized nails at right angles to the board then trying to toenail some much larger nails. I expect this version 2.0 of the back deck will be stronger and more rot resistant.
Tomorrow I will "hang" a few joists and attach the deckmaster brackets and then it should be ready for the deck floor.
While I was working outside I heard a loud "thump" and then some more thumps. A short time later I heard sirens of all sorts. I figured there was an accident but thought it strange that I hadn't heard the screeching sound of brakes, too. Much later (an hour and a half?) I went for a run and found that the local main 6 lane street about 1/4 km from the house had been closed to all traffic. A minivan was on its roof and partly covered with a tarp and another van was partly crumpled in the engine compartment. Emergency vehicles were everywhere. This was serious. My son, who was working at the nearby grocery store, said he had heard there was death at scene. Very sad.
Whew! I have some time to sit in front of the computer and write something! My large program for work has gone alpha so now it's on to testing. Tomorrow it will be back to Perl in order to process some 50 to 80 Mbytes of the client's text files into a suitable database form for my program.
In other news my sister bought a "new to them" car, a VW Jetta. She's says the 5-speed transmission is FUN (her capitals) to drive. I guess I have been public transitting for so long I don't imagine I would ever find it "fun" to drive. How would I have any time for recreational reading or my daily walk and run, to and from the train station?
Last night an old friend dropped by on the pretext of asking us our opinion on the business he'll be starting on his retirement from being a church minister. Well he brought a young lady, his "boss", and it turns out they are representing Primerica. They certainly raised a red flag for me when she asked to see my life insurance policy. Then she talked at length about a mutual fund and about a home equity loan. I did a little research on the Internet and found this company is in the business of (surprise!) selling life insurance, mutual funds and home equity loans. And, of course, there are fees involved. She also talked a lot but being part of the CitiGroup of companies with "trillions" in assets. This brief look on the Internet also revealed investor class-action lawsuits against some of the companies and on-going investigation by U.S. regulators. Unfortunately for them, I already have life insurance and a home-secured line of credit which is much better than a home equity loan, IMHO. Oh yes, they also asked us for 15 referrals. Could you imagine a roofer guy coming to my door, showing me shingles, asking me for 15 referrals? All this before he did my roof or supplied me with a list of other satisfied customers. I hope our old friend doesn't call back as a sales person.
Copyright © 2002-2006 James (Jim) R. R. Service (@gmail.com - jservice)