Hot Wednesday Linkage
Less morose today… almost eight hours sleep helps, plus a dab of Cointreau as a not quite nightcap. To ease back into regular blogging, here are some links which don’t quite deserve their own entries:
- Extremes of conventional music notation – Despite my hatred of world-record type crap (which seem to just require tacking on extra clauses to get in on the action: the highest jump while drinking egg-nog!) this is actually pretty distracting. For example: Highest written pitch runner-up: D8 in Scriabin Piano Sonata no. 6, Op. 62 (1911, Dover & Schirmer eds.), last page (an editorial footnote in the Schirmer edition comments that this note “did not yet exist” on pianos)
- The piano roll is over – The last mass-produced analog piano roll, partly put together using a shoe-making machine from the 1880s, has come off of the production line in Buffalo, NY. Yeah, I was also surprised they were still churning these out. Apparently all the cool kids use digital player pianos these days. Or digital player violins.
- Apple is finally going DRM free – As long as you don’t mind paying $1.29 per song. Man, I’m such an anti-fanboy. I just can’t say anything nice about Apple throwing in a bit of criticism can I?
The 25th Hour
In Red Mars, the first Martian settlers deal with the slightly longer, not quite 25 hour long day by having all the clocks stop for forty minutes at midnight. Free time. That’s what we need right now — about a weeks worth. It’s not fair that immediately after all the xmas and new year celebrations it is actually the start of a new year. We need recuperation and adjustment time. Well, the royal we do, anyway.
Instead of an orderly descent into the year, my supervisor eMailed the lab during the last, glorious weekend of the break to tell us that we will start the semester off with eight meetings during the first week. Four of which are at 9am. Euugh.
At least getting back into the routine seems to get me back into writing. It seems like I’m not alone: the total blogging output of the web seems to drop off significantly during the end of December.
But for now I think I will go and pass out. The first 8am morning is the worst.