Older blog entries for MichaelCrawford (starting at number 141)

bytesplit, I'm afraid I'm still confused. It doesn't help that you were deliberately vague in your response. Recall that I asked you to spell out for me clearly why you are so angry with me. I'm not one for catching on to subtle hints. Please try again to explain it to me, in such a way that I can understand what you mean.

Music

I've been persisting with my piano practice, sometimes more than two hours a day. I'm afraid my real piano (a Baldwin Howard upright, inherited from my grandparents) didn't help Bonita's sinus headache any, so I set up my electronic keyboard so I could play with the volume turned down low, or with headphones.

It also means I can practice late at night without bothering the neighbors.

I got through book one of Hanon's The Virtuoso Pianist. That's the first twenty exercises. At the end Hanon says to play the first book once or twice a day for a while until you know it well, so that's what I did, playing it twice a day for about a week.

Previously I only had book 1, but I ordered the complete edition from the local music store, with all three volumes in one physical volume, with sixty exercises. When I got it yesterday, I looked ahead at some of the later exercises and felt very intimidated.

But today I played the first volume and then exercise 21, the first of the second volume, and had a pretty easy time with it. Each exercise is generally a little harder than the last. I figured today that by the time I got up to the exercises that I find so intimidating I will have spent so much time playing the earlier exercises that it won't be so hard. Hanon takes you in little steps.

I can tell from playing my own pieces that it is making me a better pianist. I used to improvise all the time but after a while I stopped making up anything new, and then quit playing entirely. But I feel more skillful now, and when I try to improvise, I am able to play new things.

I prefer my real piano to my electronic keyboard, but the reason I got the keyboard (a Fatar controller, which I selected because the keyboard feels like a real piano keyboard) was that I wanted to record MIDI files when I improvised, so that I would have a record when I created anything new.

Sometimes I would come up with new stuff, but unless I memorized it, I would forget it. Writing down the notation is such a pain, so I was never willing to do so. Having a MIDI file means I don't need to worry about losing stuff.

I'm going to record the MIDI files on my iBook, and have been looking for a simple MIDI recording application that works on OS X. I'm going to try the demo for Metro 6 SE, and maybe buy it if I'm happy with it, but even that is fancier than what I need.

All I want right now is to be able to play into a MIDI file, and play back and see the notes for selected sequences. I'm not looking to create sequences in an editor, rather I want to keep a permanent record of all of my practicing in the event I ever come up with anything worth keeping.

I'm not the only one who prefers a real piano to an electronic keyboard. I have a young beagle named Jacob, who likes to sing. He is really quite musical. But he is very traditional. He totally ignores the Fatar, even when I have it turned up loud. But when I play my upright piano, Jacob starts to sing. I worry about ever trying to record my piano again, that I won't be able to play without a canine soloist accompanying me!

Why do you hate me so?

I am one of the few people on Advogato who has consistently taken your side. Your angry outbursts haven't won you many friends here, but I have always felt that all should be welcome here, and have tried to make you feel welcome.

And yet you post diary entries like this:

Michael, feeling a bit egotistical these days? Who gives a flying fuck that you can play a piano? Who gives a flying fuck that you feel compelled to state that you can improvise your own learning methods? Perhaps a re-visit to your local Psychiatrist is in order?

Please explain. Say it slowly so I'll be sure to understand.

I am looking for eCommerce sites that carry computer hardware and software products that are physically located in Canada. Extra credit if they also carry products for the Macintosh.

Right now I'm specifically looking for an ethernet card that will work under both Mac OS 9.1 (not OS X) and Linux. I run Debian PowerPC on my Mac 8500. It has built-in ethernet, but I would like a second port, and I want the card to work under both OSes so I don't have to reconfigure my network when I switch systems.

There are very few ethernet cards with Mac OS drivers available these days. The only one I could find on Apple's website was a fiber optic gigabit card for $749. A little fancier than I need.

The AsanteFast 10/100 NIC 690 looks like just what I need, and it's available for a mere $25 from Asante's online store, but they are only willing to ship to the US.

That's a very common problem these days. Because of widespread credit card fraud, and because retailers have to eat the cost of disputed credit card transactions, many (if not most) US eCommerce sites are no longer willing to ship internationally.

I'm sure there are many eCommerce sites that are physically located in many other countries around the world. The problem is how to find them? My wife tried to find some Canadian eCommerce sites by using Google, but she could not find any keywords that would yield useful results.

There are a few I know of in Canada. For hardware, probably the best is FutureShop. Their eCommerce site actually does carry some products for the Mac. They have two brick-and-mortar stores in Halifax, but they don't stock any mac products. Their eCommerce site doesn't have the card I want, or any cards for the Mac that I can find.

Amazon.com carries Asante products. I think they might be willing to ship to Canada. I want the card in a hurry though, and express shipping would likely cost more than the card. I was very excited to check out Amazon's Canadian site, but they don't carry any computer hardware products, just software. They do have Mac software though.

There is Insight, and they carry a lot of stuff. Futureshop doesn't carry anything unusual or high-end, but Insight does - I bought an Adaptec 39160 SCSI host bus adapter from them when I lived in St. John's.

However, a few months after I received my scsi card, Insight charged my card $1500 for a product whose order I had canceled because it was out of stock. About five months after I placed, and then canceled the order, and had moved out of that house to a different part of Newfoundland, Insight shipped two large SCSI Ultra160 hard drives to the house where I used to live. My bank authorized the charge (it was a "check card", or debit card) even though the account that backed the card only had a balance of $50. I only found out when I got a frantic phone call from my bank's security department.

That's when I learned one should only use actual credit cards when ordering online. You can't dispute debit card transactions. Insight only refunded my money when I threatened to have the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigate them.

A good project for someone wanting to start some kind of web portal would be an index to eCommerce sites that are either physically located within, or at least willing to ship to particular countries.

Thanks for your help.

The cheap sound card I use in my PC picks up a lot of electrical noise. Digital circuitry emits a lot of RF noise, and this is picked up in the analog circuitry of my sound card as a crackle and buzzing sound. Also, if I try to digitize sound input, the audio files will have a lot of the same kind of noise.

The noise on playback didn't bother me when I used speakers, but tonight I switched to using headphones, which make the noise much more obvious.

I'm looking for a new sound card that will have as little of this noise as possible, and ideally will be of very good audio fidelity. It turns out that one can get sound cards as fancy as one cares to pay for, that are mostly used for professional audio production or for home recording studios by musicians, that have as much as 32 bits per sample and many channels, but those are expensive and require special application software.

I'd like a good 16 bit stereo sound card that I can use for playing Oggs and MP3s, maybe do some Voice over IP, and for playing CDs on my PC. But I want this card to be as good as possible given that it's just 16 bit stereo.

Ideally it would have an external pod containing all the analog circuitry, so the audio circuits would be isolated from the electrical noise inside the PC case. All the professional sound cards do this, but I don't know if any consumer sound cards do.

My hopeful new sound card will need to work with Linux, BeOS and Windows 2000. Extra credit if the card's vendor provides complete hardware specs to Free Software developers.

If you'd like to email me your recommendation send it to crawford@goingware.com

Thanks for your help.

I've been playing piano again. I've played since 1984, but haven't practiced regularly for about five years. For the last week I've played every day, and now I'm playing for an hour a day.

I taught myself to play the piano. I think I did so in the most difficult way imaginable - I would just hit keys randomly and listen to see if the combinations of notes sounded nice. I had studied clarinet and drums in school, but never much liked the way I learned, and had such a bad experience with a cruel music teacher in eighth grade that I stopped playing music entirely until I was 20.

For some reason, although I could play well when I was a kid, I never could read sheet music. I always had to get someone to show me how to play a new piece. I could play a song well once I had it memorized, and then the sheet music helped as a reminder, but I never could just pick up a new song from the music.

I didn't mind this random way of learning the piano back when I started. It didn't bother me that I didn't know how to play, just banging on the keys was one of the few things that gave me any peace back when I was crazy. That and drawing.

A nice thing about it though was that after a while I learned to improvise, and I could play at some length coming up with new stuff all the time, and actually have it sound good. I even composed a few songs. I've met a lot of piano players, who could play much better than I, who expressed envy that I could compose. They only knew how to play music someone else had written.

The problem was that I stopped improvising much after I had a few songs I could play really well. Not knowing how to read music I couldn't learn anything new. The last time I really put much effort into the piano was when I recorded Geometric Visions in the Spring of '94. I stopped abruptly when I got really depressed and didn't play much at all until 1997.

In '97, I decided the best way to start composing again would be to finally learn to read music, and to learn some music theory. I took lessons - the first in thirteen years of playing - from a wonderful teacher named Velzoe Brown, back in Santa Cruz.

I was just starting to figure out how to learn a new piece from its music when I got this really bad cold and stopped my lessons, and just never took them up again. Not too long after that I started my business and didn't have time for much of anything for quite some time. When I lived in Newfoundland my piano was in storage, and even after I got it moved to my place in Maine I only played occasionally, sitting down maybe once a month to play my old pieces.

I think maybe because I've been really stressed out for a while now I finally got the idea to calm myself by playing the piano again. At first it was really disappointing, as I made lots of mistakes, forgot sometimes how my pieces went, and my fingers didn't have the strength they once had. It made my right hand and forearm hurt to play my piece "Recursion".

Happily, I persisted and in a few days the strength returned to my fingers. This couldn't have been from exercise strengthening the muscles, I think it's more that my fingers have got limbered up and used to moving that way again. Maybe all the typing I do has kept my fingers strong.

I have a book of exercises called The Virtuoso Pianist by Hanon. The author says the purpose of the exercises is to give one's fingers strength and agility, and (importantly) strengthen all the fingers equally. If one learns by playing songs, some fingers will become better than others at playing, so it will be difficult to learn to play songs that use other fingers. But Hanon promises that if one practices each of The Virtuoso Pianist's exercises regularly, one will be able to play anything well.

There are sixty exercises total. I think I had learned to play the first fifteen of them before I stopped practicing regularly. I could only remember a couple at first, so a few days ago I dug through my stuff until I found my book, and yesterday I played the first ten.

I've decided I will learn one new exercise each day until I know them all, and learn to play them well. They're not all that interesting to listen to, being designed just to exercise one's fingers, so I never learned to play them very fast. I could tell yesterday that I had trouble playing several of them, so I would stop and play them again slowly until I could play them well.

Today I played eleven of the exercises, repeating a few of them several times, and after I played them I played them again in reverse order. That took an hour.

Tomorrow or maybe the next day I'll start using my metronome to improve my timing, and over the next few days I'll speed it up. Hanon says one should be able to play all sixty of his exercises in an hour.

My timing has never been very accurate or steady. That's never bothered me. With my own pieces I slow down or speed up as I feel like while I play, but with most pieces others have written that just sounds really bad.

In a month or so I expect I'll be as good again as when I stopped my lessons in 1997, and then I'll start looking for a piano teacher.

As I write this I'm listening to Philip Glass' Metamorphosis. I would like very much to learn to play it. I heard Glass play it live, back when I lived in Santa Cruz, and I think it is my favorite piece of all the music in the world. I would be thrilled to learn to play it, but I have a long way to go. I still can't read music, and Metamorphosis is about a half hour long.

You'll find Metamorphosis on Glass' album Solo Piano. I think it's out of print now but perhaps you can find a copy used.

I am looking for someone who is fluent in Romanian to proofread a translation that someone very kindly made for one of my articles.

I have every reason to believe he did a good job, but as I don't know a word of Romanian, I have no way of knowing what his translation says. It would make me more comfortable to have a proofreader check it out before the translator and I publish it.

The article is under a Creative Commons license.

Hopefully it wouldn't require more than a couple hours of work.

If you can help, please email me at crawford@goingware.com

I have received 260 megabytes of email in five days. 80 megabytes was received just in the last day. Almost all the email I receive now is the Swen virus. Please help me find a way to deal with it.

Because I get a lot of email in the best of times, I read my email with elm while ssh'ed into my hosting service. Once a month or so I copy my mail spool file to my home directory, truncate my original spool file, compress my copy, and scp it to my home computer.

There is a limit to how big a mail spool file elm can open. I already use elm because it can handle larger mailboxes than any of the other mailreaders I know, but elm will fail to open a mailbox if a new mail is received while it's in the process of opening my mailbox. Bigger mailboxes take longer to open, so after I've been collecting mail in my spool file long enough elm can't open it.

That used to be a monthly occurrence. This last time it took four days before elm stopped working. I fear I won't have that long.

I can't just download my email with POP and filter it on my own machine because I am stuck on a modem connection. I need to have my connection free for other work.

What I need is the source to a command line virus filter that I can compile at my hosting service and install in my home directory. It would be sufficient to have a tool that filtered out any messages that had attachments, but it would be best if it could distinguish virus attachments from attachments that people legitimately sent to me.

My hosting service just installed spamassassin, but it seems spamassassin is not catching the virus. It's not just me, they're discussing it on the spamassassin-talk mailing list. I tried to train it by running sa-learn on a mailbox containing nothing but viruses, but it didn't help.

Also I don't think I have spamassassin configured well enough yet that I can just have it automatically delete spam. I need to have it moved into a seperate mailbox file, but to my knowledge elm doesn't have filtering. All spamassassin is doing now is adding "***** SPAM ******" to the subject lines of every spam except the virus.

Please help me before my hosting service's hard disk explodes.

Thanks,

Mike

Yesterday I completed an eight month embedded programming project. It has put me into a bad position financially because I submitted my fixed bid with the expectation that it would take three months.

I will get the largest check of all from the project once the client is completely satisfied my work is finished. Because I'm so behind I won't be flushed with spare cash as I thought when I started the project, but at least I will be able to breathe easy long enough to get some new projects done.

My client has been evaluating my code all this afternoon. It's pretty involved, a port of the Apple FireWire Reference Platform to the TI DSP/BIOS real-time operating system. I had to write a device driver for the TI TSB12LV01B FireWire link layer chip. It's really a pretty complicated chip.

The code was testing reliably for me before I sent it, or I wouldn't have sent it. While I have every reason to believe it will work well for my client too, I have been tormenting myself with all the things that could go wrong.

If he finds any problems, I'm sure I could fix them, but I'm in such a bind financially that a delay of even a few days would be disastrous.

I've been climbing out of my skin since yesterday. My wife was feeling good that I'd finished, but now I'm making her anxious too.

So now I just wait to hear my client's report, and try to find someway to avoid going out of my mind.

Lorraine Sullivan got sued by the RIAA. She says she would fight the lawsuit if she were able, but she is just a poor college student. She is asking for donations to pay her $2500 settlement, but has raised only $184 so far.

Traffic to the copy of Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads that I have on my own website has increased significantly since RIAA filed suit against 261 file traders on September 8th. I'm reporting some statistics for the article on this page. Notably, my article has been #1 at Google for the query legal music downloads since the middle of July, and the number of referrals I get for that and a lot of other queries has been rising steadily since the 8th.