New York Times Reader

I've been using the Times Reader application on and off for a couple weeks now, and overall it's very nice, though there are some annoyances. I first read about the reader in an article on Slate, which raved about the readability of articles inside the reader. I agree that the text rendering and automatic columns in the reader make a huge difference, especially for long articles. Also, being able to read offline is really nice. On a recent flight, I was able to read most of the Sunday Times without having to flip pages on a crowded plane.

There are some problems, however. Although the Slate article claims that a week of the paper is stored, I've found that articles are deleted within a day, which is actually really annoying. Also, I've found that certain articles just never appear in the reader; I assume this bug is fixable. For some reason, the reader consumes an obscene amount of memory, often more than 100MB. This isn't a deal breaker, but if reading 5 papers through similar readers requires 500MB of memory, then that will be a big problem. Finally, it's annoying to be separated from the web while reading the articles; I don't see the most-emailed articles list, and it's harder to quickly search for something on Google or Wikipedia.

Anyway, if you have Windows, the reader is definitely worth a look.

You Know

It's yet another web site on The Wire that sucked up an hour of my time. The Q&A sessions with David Simon are especially worth reading.

Clothes on The Wire

A behind-the-scenes feature was just posted on clothes in The Wire. It's cool how much thought goes into these things.

GOP Contract Tanking

The Tradesports contract on whether the GOP will keep the House has gone way down in the last few days, as you can see above. Let's hope this holds up.

The State on iTunes Store

MTV has just released Season 1 of The State on iTunes, and supposedly if it sells well, it will eventually be released on DVD. The members of The State even did a new skit to promote it. I bought an episode to give it a try, and overall I'm not impressed with the experience. First, playing the video back on Windows maxes out the CPU on my laptop, and it's not a slow machine; apparently this is a problem with Quicktime for Windows. So, I can't even watch the thing in full-screen mode. Second, they took out the copyrighted music from some of the skits. In the "Pants" skit, it's a little strange to not hear "Cannonball" during the pants shopping scene, but it's not a big deal. However, "$240 Worth of Pudding" is now missing "Sexual Healing," and they did a terrible job of sticking in another song. The skit was originally done in front of a live studio audience, with Showalter and Lennon responding to the crowd. Now, they dubbed in a fake laugh track over the new song, and it's just not nearly as funny. Anyway, I might still buy the DVDs, but for me the episodes on iTunes aren't worth it.

Props to Sudoku Slam

Sudoku Slam, the best Sudoku site on the web (and free!), is ready to go. It's also getting lots of attention, both on digg and del.icio.us. Congrats to splag and Bill for a job very well done.

More on The Wire

There is way too much to read about The Wire these days:

• Heaven and Here is a blog dedicated entirely to the show. Watch out for spoilers: they sometimes comment on episodes before they've aired (they are available early on HBO On Demand).
• Tim Goodman has been doing episode breakdowns on his blog.
• Slate has a TV Club feature breaking down the episodes.

I found a couple of these links via Matthew Yglesias, a fellow addict.

The Wire will be completed

I just saw that The Wire has been renewed for a final 5^th season. Hooray! Now I just hope they actually make those two two-hour Deadwood movies to give some closure; the end of Season 3 was satisfying, but definitely not as an end to the show.

David Remnick profile

It's here (via Emdashes), for all you fans of The New Yorker.

calendar for Cal home football games

I made up a calendar on 30 Boxes with all the Cal home football games, so I know when to not move my car :). It's here (ICal file) if you'd like to use it; I successfully used that link to import into Google Calendar. Let me know if it doesn't work.

Gillian Welch on Pandora

I've been using Pandora a bunch lately, and I'm starting to really like it as a radio alternative. I made this Gillian Welch station with just a few of her songs, and it seems to generate a really nice mix. The only downside is (as usual) you can waste a lot of time, tinkering with stations and reading about bands.

Only a couple days left...

Tim Goodman seems to like the fourth season of The Wire, which was provided to critics in its entirety; it almost makes me want to change careers.

investing tidbits

I've been reading a lot about investing lately, as I need to make some financial decisions in the near future. I started with The Intelligent Investor, which was very interesting. I then sought out a discussion of index vs. actively-managed mutual funds on the web, and at first couldn't find much useful, impartial information. Then, I hit upon a great resource: Google Scholar. I found a bunch of interesting papers, both on actively-managed funds and on market anomalies, i.e., phenomena that, at least on the surface, seem to contradict the efficient market hypothesis. Here are some of the more interesting things I came across (you may need various subscriptions to actually read the papers):

• Another Puzzle: The Growth in Actively Managed Mutual Funds shows that many investors consistently choose mutual funds that beat the market, later termed the "smart money" effect.
• Profitability of Momentum Strategies: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations is a recent paper on an anomaly termed "stock return momentum": briefly, a portfolio that buys recently-rising stocks while shorting recently-falling ones is consistently profitable (ignoring transaction costs, I think).
• Does Stock Return Momentum Explain the "Smart Money" Effect? answers the question posed in its title in the affirmative.

I also found this page, which documents various stock market anomalies.

So, what did I conclude? I'm now fairly convinced that a smart person that devotes a lot of time to research can beat the market, in the long term. I'm also pretty convinced that I don't want to spend that kind of time on investing, and even if I did, I may be too risk-averse to be successful. So, for the most part, I'm sticking to index funds.

Vaguely related: this Business Week article on adjustable-rate mortgages is worth a read. Looks like a lot of people made bad decisions with these things.

hedging the election

TradeSports is a cool site with futures markets for all sorts of events. I've been following the markets for the GOP keeping control of the House and Senate in this year's elections for a while. Just recently, I decided to buy some contracts in the House market, meaning I would make money if the Republicans keep control of the House. I figure that if they lose, I'll be happy enough to not care about the lost money, and if they win, the money I gain will be some small consolation. It's a fun experiment. Right now, the market is predicting only a 46% probability of the Republicans winning, so things are looking good (except for my small investment)...

San Francisco Symphony Mahler recordings on eMusic

I was browsing eMusic the other day, as suggested over at The Abstract Factory, and discovered that all of the recent Mahler recordings of the San Francisco Symphony are available. Talk about a sweet way to use your 25 track free trial! Anyway, I grabbed Symphonies No. 1, 2, 4, and 9 (I already owned tbe 6 recording). All are really good, but I highly recommend Symphony No. 2, if only for the absolutely stunning singing of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. The recording of course can't reproduce the live experience (one of the best concerts I've ever attended), but it's still very nice. I'm pretty seriously considering staying on as an eMusic member; with the entire Naxos catalog, they have quite a broad classical selection, and the price is right.

couple classical music things

First, Joshua Kosman, the classical music critic for the SF Chronicle, is also now blogging (via Alex Ross). Second, the BBC Proms is now happening, and you can listen to a bunch of recent concerts for free. Finally, Bayreuth is also going on. Anthony Tommasini is keeping a journal of his experiences, and Operacast has a schedule of online broadcasts.

Behind the Scenes for The Wire Season 4

So...it's been a while. Those who know me know I've been busy. Anyway, here's something that whet my appetite for the upcoming season of The Wire: they've started a behind-the-scenes feature on the web site, with lots of interesting information. I can't wait until the season starts. In other HBO-related news, The first 4 episodes of Season 3 of Deadwood have been great. I also went back and watched some episodes from Season 1 a while back, and found them even better than when I watched the first time. I definitely plan to re-watch the whole series when I have time.

Incidentally, Tim Goodman, the television critic for the SF Chronicle, has a nice blog on television. He has lots of interesting tidbits on HBO shows in this post, and posts on the The Sopranos here.

Re-reading books

I just finished The Metaphysical Club, a very interesting book that I recommend. Apart from its main tale of the evolution of pragmatism, it has many fun side stories, including the beginnings of some universities (Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago) and some background on academic freedom. Anyway, good stuff.

After finishing, I was thinking about what to read next, and decided on Portnoy's Complaint, which a friend bought for me a while back. It's a new read for me, and for a while I've been wondering what the proper ratio should be between reading new books and re-reading old ones. For many good books, I imagine I would get much more from a second read than from the first; this certainly holds for film. On the other hand, I always feel that there are tons of good books that I haven't read yet, and I should be working on those. I guess the same dilemma holds for movies, but since I can watch a movie much faster than I can read a book, I haven't given it as much thought.

Anyway, any thoughts on a good ratio? Or is going with your gut the best thing to do?

FreeNX rules

I just got FreeNX installed for remote access to my school Linux computer from my home Windows machine, and it is amazing. I used these excellent instructions for Fedora, which worked almost perfectly. The only kink was that my existing installation of Cygwin interfered with the Windows NX client; Cygwin does not enjoy having two versions of its DLLs loaded simultaneously. To fix the problems, I renamed the DLLs in the NX client bin directory, so that the DLLs from my standard Cygwin install were used. Everything works great now, and the system is far more responsive than just using a local X server.

"Swine of the Times" in Harper's

I wanted to recommend the May issue of Harper's, which includes a great article "Swine of the Times" on the pork industry. All I can say is, these ain't no charmin' motherf***in' pigs (through no fault of their own, of course). The author is Nathanael Johnson, a friend and a very good writer. So, grab the magazine off the newstands and check it out.

Personality Feedback

Check out http://realpersonality.com, a web site AJ wrote to allow anonymous feedback on your personality traits. Cog has some interesting thoughts on the site. And, of course, if you'd like, rate me.

Complete New Yorker Blog

For those of you that own The Complete New Yorker, Between the Squibs is a new blog that tries to dig through the mountain of articles and find some of the great ones. They just accepted a submission from me, and I'm looking forward to having time to read the other posted articles. Oh, and if you don't have the collection, think seriously about getting it or asking for it as a gift. The software sucks, but the content is amazing.

Thelma Schoonmaker

I heard this interview with Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's editor, a while back. It had many interesting anecdotes, and it sparked my interest in Michael Powell, to whom she was married. I just saw The Red Shoes last night, and it's a wonderful film.

Various logs

Inspired by Abstract Factory, my filmlog, musiclog, and booklog, all with RSS feeds. I'll do my best to keep them up to date. I might cheat and write about old stuff once in a while too.

A Thought for Graduate School Admissions

I was discussing the admissions process for the EECS department with a friend at lunch today, and a question popped into my head. Why is there nothing similar to "early decision" for applying to grad school? Actual early decision probably would not work, as we have no admissions office reading applications, so the extra work of going through applications early would be too much. My idea is instead to have a checkbox on the regular application, saying something to the effect of, "If admitted, will accept offer." This should probably actually say something like you won't accept an offer from another school, whatever the early decision form says for undergrad admissions.

According to my friend, this information would be useful during the admissions process. There are lots of qualified students that get rejected for essentially arbitrary reasons, and with this information, it might be slightly less arbitrary, as certain students could be accepted to guarantee a certain yield. The very top students would be admitted regardless of whether they had committed or not, but for others, checking the box may provide their application with a little boost. Of course, applicants who don't check the box may be at a disadvantage compared to those who do. But, some applicants who would definitely come to Berkeley may be at a disadvantage now, since they can't communicate this information to the admissions committee.

Anyway, I'm curious as to what others think about this proposal.

Wikipedia shock

I had a bit of the "Wachet Auf" Bach cantata stuck in my head earlier today, so I went to seek it out on Rhapsody, but couldn't find it. Then, as I often do with random things in my head, I looked up its Wikipedia article. Lo and behold, the article links to a recording of a full performance of the piece...done by the MIT Chamber Chorus, when I was singing. Yikes! I realized that if they had our Wachet Auf recording, they may also have the Schubert Mass performance from the same concert, where I sang in the trio in the Benedictus, having never taken a voice lesson in my life...yup, it's there. Well, we gave it our best; enjoy, worldwide Internet listeners.

The Met. Opera and Levine

Here's a nice article on James Levine, showing him geeking out about some Mozart. Incidentally, I've been making fairly decent quality recordings of the Met. Opera broadcasts this season; check out this site for the schedule, and Operacast for where you can listen online. Wozzeck was really good, and An American Tragedy grew on me after a couple of listens. Let me know if you want the recordings.

Music Rights for TV DVDs

I just read this article on securing music rights for DVD releases of TV shows. The difficulties particularly annoy me since I imagine they are holding up the DVD release of The State and make releasing the Beavis and Butt-Head music videos almost impossible. There has to be a better way.

Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody

I wrote a Greasemonkey script for Rhapsody that shows full album names in the album lists. The truncated album names were really getting on my nerves. Hooray for Greasemonkey!

Anti-aliased Emacs on Fedora Core 4 (and 5)

I managed to build Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on my FC4 machine. I mostly followed these instructions (ignoring the Debian-specific stuff), with the following extra steps:

• I had to install the libpng-devel RPM (I used yum). The lack of this library was not detected by the emacs configure script.
• I had to install setarch to use during the build process. The exec-shield functionality and randomization of virtual address spaces in Fedora Core 4 messes up the emacs bootstrapping process. I ran ./configure ; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to build emacs.

The build seems to run fine, and the anti-aliased fonts make a big difference.

UPDATE (10/27/06): I just did a re-build on Fedora Core 5 using these instructions, and everything went fine. Now, when compiling, you need to run ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft; setarch i386 -R make bootstrap to make things work. Hopefully soon this code will be stable enough that someone releases an RPM.

Wall Street Journal through ProQuest

I found a fairly decent way to read the Wall Street Journal (which charges for online access) through ProQuest, which I can access through the UC Berkeley library proxy. Go to this page to see issues by date. Then, after choosing an issue, sort the articles by page number rather than alphabetically. Finally, skip all the articles listed as being on "p. 1", as they are just short blurbs; the long articles start on "p. A.1".

Vlissides

I just read on Lambda the Ultimate that John Vlissides, co-author of the well-known Design Patterns book, just passed away. I talked to John a few times when I was at IBM, and ended up co-authoring a paper with him. I remember him giving me good advice on grad. school the first time I met him; he told me how he worked insanely hard (16 hours days) as a grad. student, and how (not unsurprisingly) it turned out to be a bad idea. He also gave me a free copy of Design Patterns, which I thought was really nice of him. Anyway, he was a really good writer and a very nice guy, and I was sad to see the news of his passing.

"I'm da boss"

I just finished watching Raging Bull for the first time in a while; what an incredibly powerful film. The very last moments, where La Motta repeatedly mutters "I'm da boss" while shadowboxing, reminded me in some remote way of the ending of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Both endings take a small piece of thematic material, emblematic of the work as a whole, and fade away while repeating it more times than one would expect. When the work finally does end, the audience is left with a sublime echo that resonates more deeply as one reflects on the work as a whole. Anyway, just a random connection that popped into my head.

"I Come From Lake Titicaca, Nicaragua"

Slate has a nice review of the new Beavis and Butt-Head DVD release. It's too bad they couldn't get all the music videos, though, as they often had the most brilliant observations.

Microloans

I just saw this site Kiva, which looks really cool. It allows you to loan money to small businesses in the developing world, and get paid back if/when the business succeeds. It looks like all their businesses are funded now, but I put myself on the mailing list for when they find more.

TV on DVD

This sounds familiar. And yet again, one must ask: why no mention of The Wire, which is at least as marathon-inducing as any of these shows?

Rosen on Recording

Here's an interesting book review by Charles Rosen of Performing Music in the Age of Recording. It made me feel bad that I don't perform music nearly as much as I used to; I really need to get a piano.

Catching Up

It looks like Alex Ross is catching up on episodes of The Wire, and he comes to the same conclusion I did a few months back. Yet another confirmation of his good taste :)

Doctor Atomic reviews

I thought I'd collect links to reviews of Doctor Atomic as I find them. I'll try to update this list as I see more reviews. Maybe I'll add my own after I see it :). Alex Ross has some cool stuff up on the opera too.

• Los Angeles Times
• Bay Buzz
• SF Chronicle
• New York Times

Best-Of Compilations

When I used to watch a lot of television, I can remember seeing certain commercials for "best-of" compilations (like Ultimate '70s or Piano by Candlelight Platinum) so many times that the little song excerpts would merge in my head into a new song. Even now, I can still remember chunks of songs from some '50s love songs compilation commercial I saw in elementary school, and I cringe when I think about it. I always found it jarring when I'd here the full version of some song that I only knew through an excerpt from one of these commercials. It was almost always disappointing; my brain was so used to the commercial that the real song seemed worse than a chunk of it in the context of the commercial. Or perhaps the song had been built up too much by being associated solely with a "best-of" collection. Anyway, not sure if others have experienced this; just a random thought.

A Little School Pride

It looks like MIT came out first in the new Washington Monthly college rankings, which emphasize both academics and service to the community (also covered in The Tech). The statistics used to compute these rankings are not ideal, as acknowledged in the article, but it still seems like a good idea to me. Hopefully they'll be able to find better ways to measure service in the future and MIT will stay close to the top.

I've been meaning to write a couple of other posts; I'll hopefully get to them soon.

Saul Bass Titles

You can view stills from a bunch of titles done by Saul Bass here. I posted on Saul Bass before (but the link in that post is broken). Cool stuff.

More on Diet Coke

Here is a page that breaks down the various diet versions of Coke, vaguely related to a post of mine from a while back.

Poor Guy

Check out the White House press briefing [RealPlayer link] where Scott McClellan tries to dodge questions about Karl Rove. He's not very good at it, and it's just kind of sad to watch.

On del.icio.us

After hearing about del.icio.us for a while, I decided to get an account, and it's pretty cool. Now I can easily access links to my online bills / accounts and technical papers that I check from time to time. I've also been trying to bookmark things I think are worth reading; it's for cases where I don't feel like writing a blog post about an article or posting it on NewsDog, but I still think others may want to take a look. There are RSS feeds on all the pages, although the only one I imagine anyone else would want to track is the last one. Anyway, good stuff.

ForecastFox and Berkeley library proxy

Here's something that about 0 of you care about. I use the ForecastFox extension in Firefox to show the upcoming weather, and I also use the UC Berkeley library proxy to access certain web sites from outside school. Unfortunately, the proxy configuration script lists AccuWeather, the site ForecastFox uses, as one that needs to go through the proxy, thereby necessitating a login to the proxy server every time I want the weather forecast to show up. To fix this, I changed the script to not access AccuWeather through the proxy server; here is the altered script. Just use that link as your proxy configuration URL instead of the standard one, and you should be set.

Obligatory Stella Review

I just watched the first episode of the new Stella show on Comedy Central, and given that my blog is called Raking Leaves (Quicktime link), I figured I should comment. To put it briefly, it's funny, and still weird in that Stella way, but it just didn't have the impact that I was hoping for. Stella's lunacy just doesn't work as well over 22 minutes as it does in 2 minute sketches. And, I agree with this Dana Stevens review that this stuff might be too weird to get big ratings. But, don't get me wrong; the episode had really funny moments, and I'm definitely going to watch whenever I can. And, I know from experience that Stella gets funnier after a few viewings, so maybe I'll take another look at the first episode sometime soon.

The Wire Season 3

I just finished watching it, in spite of my current massive workload. I'd say that in the end, it didn't quite match Season 2, mostly because it was a bit too sprawling. To really appreciate Season 3, you need to remember Season 1 and some of Season 2 in a fair amount of detail. The amount of mental effort required to try to track all the plot connections detracts from the impact of the episodes. I imagine that upon a second viewing of all three seasons things would connect in a deeper way, but that's 37 hours of television, which is beyond even an addict like myself. Also, I didn't find the running theme of politics in the third season to be quite as compelling as the inside look at union workers from the second season. Nevertheless, Season 3 is definitely worth watching if you've seen and liked the first two.

Cable Choice

I heard this interview with Tim Winter, director of the Parents Television Council, yesterday on the radio. From the things I had previously heard and read about the PTC, I assumed this guy would be some sort of nut, but he was actually fairly well-spoken and reasonable. I was pleased to hear that his group wants to deal with objectionable content on cable by allowing consumers to only pay for the channels they want. This solution would also solve my problem of wanting HBO, but not wanting to pay $50 for the other 200 channels on digital cable that I'll never watch. Anyway, even though some of what he said was BS, he seemed thoughtful, which was a pleasant surprise.

New Tristan

This is funny. It's related to this earlier post.

PDF e-books

You can get free e-books in PDF format here. Normally these things are a pain to read on a computer screen, but the typesetting in the PDF helps a bit. And, on my Tablet PC it's actually pretty comfortable to read longer documents, so this site should come in handy.

Lens Flares

Here's a nice, insightful essay on Punch-Drunk Love that talks about the lens flares that appear throughout the film. These flares always caught my eye, and the essay does a nice job of linking them in to the film's overall use of color.

Busy

I'm getting hammered by the end-of-semester workload, as usual. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll be pretty busy through the end of July...so posting may be sparse. Couple of random things. I saw Romeo and Juliet at San Francisco Ballet last week. Being somewhat unappreciative of dance, I went primarily to hear all of Prokofiev's wonderful score. The orchestral playing was good, but not great, and as a friend pointed out to me, I was probably one of the few audience members that really cared. You never see music critics reviewing how an orchestra plays for a ballet, and the dance critics don't seem to write much about it either. I guess you can't have everything, but it would be nice if the standards were higher, since some of these ballet scores are rarely if ever played in full by a top orchestra like the SF Symphony.

Second, Backpack is a pretty cool service that I started using. I always thought that done right, this type of web-based organizer / scratchpad would be really useful. That's all for now.

Sandow on Indie Rock

Another nice post by Greg Sandow, this one on indie rock. It's great to see a another "serious" classical music person understanding this stuff (like Alex Ross). Hopefully people like Sandow and Ross can help classical music find ways to be more relevant and accessible.

Running Numbers

I've often wondered what it means to "run numbers," something that Harvey Keitel's character does in Mean Streets; this article answered the question.

The Sleeper Curve

I just finished reading this article on a topic near and dear to my heart, television. I instinctively recoil at the hand-waving arguments made in the piece, but I do agree with its overall gist that television drama has become more complex. Couple things, though: Johnson doesn't mention film at all, and I can't imagine that trends in television are unrelated to what's going on in movies. I know that David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, aspired to bring the complexities of film to a television series, and that his vision for the show was deeply influenced by the intertwining of domestic and mob life in Goodfellas. Given the similarity of the media, it just seems like an obvious point to address. Also, as a nitpick, Johnson left out discussion of two great shows that would fit nicely into his arguments. The first is The X-Files, which used all kinds of obscure terminology and was really fun to watch until it jumped the shark. The second is The Wire, which I blogged about recently. In terms of plot complexity, it's probably harder to follow than any of the shows mentioned in the article.

How To Do a Film Festival

So I was looking at the schedule for the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival, and I was completely overwhelmed. Tons of films, lots of which could be good, and few of which I'll actually have time to attend. Does anyone have a strategy for picking out films to see in a situation like this? If so, I'd love to hear about it. For now, I used this GreenCine Daily post as a sort of filter. Perhaps the interface on the film festival web site is not ideal; I remember the web site for the Seattle International Film Festival being better last year.

Sandow

Greg Sandow writes a great blog on the state of classical music. Reading this entry made me wish I had been in Pittsburgh at the time. There's lots of other good stuff there; check it out.

The Wire Rules

I just finished the second season of The Wire today; wow. It was even better than the brilliant first season. The show doesn't have the same hype as The Sopranos, and it's not as good, but it's the closest I've seen another HBO show get. So, when you have some time, get the DVDs; you won't regret it. But, seriously, wait until you have some time. I have the 3rd season too, but I need to wait a couple of weeks to start watching it to avoid the distraction. Anyway, it's past my bedtime.

GreaseMonkey

GreaseMonkey is perhaps the coolest Firefox extension I've found yet. You can do all kinds of cool web page modifications with it, as listed here. Right now, I have all links to New York Times articles going to the single-page format, and a script that fixes some of the crappiness in allmusic. Once you've installed the extension, to install the linked scripts just right-click and select "Install User Script...".

WHRB

Just wanted to give a quick plug to the online stream of WHRB, which is the best classical music station I've found online since Andante Radio, which is no longer free. I just heard a fantastic performance of Das Lied von der Erde on there the other day, and you'll rarely find a station that plays pieces like that in their entirety anymore.

Speeding Up Windows

I just managed to speed up my parents' computer a huge amount by disabling indexing in Windows, as shown here. Seriously, it's like having a whole new computer; for people who don't use the Windows search feature often, this thing should definitely be off. And Google Desktop is better for searching anyway. I went pretty nuts for a paper deadline before break, and now I'm relaxing; my usual pattern, which hopefully I'll be able to break and actually do work ahead of time. I know, unlikely, but one can dream.

OKCupid

I must admit, this test was kind of fun. What I won't admit is the results of the test :). The last thing I need is another web site to waste time on, but maybe you need one.

It's a Retirement Community!

I was reading this article about an F.B.I. agent who infiltrated the New York mob, and this part caught my eye:

The agent infiltrated the crew of Gregory DePalma, who was charged yesterday as an acting capo, or captain, in the Gambino family. The agent discovered that the DePalma crew held planning meetings at the United Hebrew Geriatric Center in New Rochelle, N.Y., at the bedside of Mr. DePalma's son Craig, law enforcement officials said.

David N. Kelley, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said Craig DePalma had been comatose and in a "vegetative state" at the home since he tried to commit suicide in prison several years ago.

The elder Mr. DePalma and his crew had the "lack of grace" to plot strategy in a nursing home, Mr. Kelley said, "and we were right there with them."

Here the parents have the child in a nursing home, but it still sounds a lot like the first season of The Sopranos.

Also, check out the cover of "Creep" by these guys (via Alex Ross).

Listening to CD's With

Here's a cool article where Pat Metheny explains why he likes some of his favorite CD's . Hopefully the Times will do more of these; the Watching Movies With... series was great.

Woyzeck and Wozzeck

Here's a nice writeup on Woyzeck the play and Wozzeck the opera.

Rambling

First, go here to opt-out of getting pre-approved credit card offers (via Lifehacker). I find that these offers are most of my junk mail, and I've heard of problems stemming from others getting ahold of your pre-approved cards and signing up. Good riddance.

I bought a bunch of CDs at Amoeba today: Peter Grimes, Quartet for the End of Time, Miles Smiles, and Mingus Ah Um. Total cost: $8, after the use of a gift certificate. Thanks Sylvia!

While I'm sort of on the topic, I just put together a semi-decent stereo. I got a Technics SA-DA10N receiver (thanks to AJ), the JMlab Chorus 706s speakers (used from Craigslist), and a Sony DVP-NC875V 5-disc CD/DVD player. I'm really happy with the whole setup. I found the AudioReview and Audioholics sites to be very helpful. Oh, and my speaker wires were created exactly as described here, same parts and everything.

I visited the Legion of Honor for the first time a couple weeks back and loved it. The views are amazing, and the art collection is solid too, with a lot of great Rodin. It made me want to watch Vertigo again, as did this thought-provoking writeup (via GreenCine Daily). And this page, which contrasts shots from the film with the current appearance of the same San Francisco locations, is also worth a look.

To conclude, Elephant is a powerful and disturbing film, and The Wire is a good show through 8 episodes of the first season. Enough for now. Wait, one last thing: Alex Ross has more on applause.

Electronic Dance Music Guide

Check it out. A bit biased, and not really clear on the differences between the genres. But very fun to play with.

Package Tracking RSS

If you have a UPS or USPS tracking number, you can use this page to make an RSS feed to track your package. Sweet.

Lifehacker

I ran into this site Lifehacker that "recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time." Then I wasted a bunch of time surfing the site. Something is wrong here.

Random Friendster Idea

I had an idea for a Friendster feature the other day. Sometimes I'll click on the link that shows all the ways I'm connected to some person who isn't a friend, and the list will be really long, with many paths of length 2 to the person. This is someone who I should in some sense already know; he or she is connected closely to a lot of my friends and is likely to be in my social circle. It'd be cool to see a list of the people who are not your friends (on the site) but who are most closely connected to you in this way. They might be people who you know and want to add as friends on the site, or if you don't know them it might be fun to wonder why. It would also be interesting to see some score representing this closeness measure on the person's profile, instead of just seeing one path to the person like the site shows now. Anyway, of course I can't work on this, and it might just be a dumb idea, but why have a blog if you can't post possibly dumb ideas and see what happens?

KCRW

I saw this article in the Times last Sunday on KCRW, a radio station from Southern California playing all kinds of cool and eclectic music. Then I remembered hearing about the station before in this Frontline documentary. Anyway, I finally took a listen online, and I really like what they've played in the last 40 minutes or so. And, they've got a reasonably high quality MP3 stream; good stuff. Incidentally, I read the Times article while flipping through an actual print version of the magazine, and I doubt I would have read it otherwise, a phenomenon discussed before.

Well, He's Left

I just found out that Robert O'Callahan, a mentor and friend while I was at IBM Research, has moved back to New Zealand and is now working full-time on Mozilla. My time working closely with Rob was really fun and an incredible learning experience, and I know others who have interned with him and feel the same way. Anyway, he's got a blog now that definitely looks like a worthy read. I'm looking forward to seeing how much better Mozilla will get now that Rob is devoting all his work-related energies to it.

Real Quick

Not much posting lately, as I've been busy moving to a new pad; it's slowly becoming habitable. Some random things: first, check out the Lichtenstein exhibit at SFMOMA while it's still there. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot about his work. Second, the Renée Fleming recital today was awesome. I think that with her voice, just about any song would sound incredible. Third, check out this crazy story about a fallen doughnut king that a friend sent me. The writing seems a bit melodramatic, but it sort of matches the guy's life. And finally, go Eagles!!!

Applause

Two interesting posts by Alex Ross on applause at classical music concerts. It drives me nuts when people are out of their seat and heading for the exit as the last notes of a piece are still echoing through the hall. It'd be cool if the applause etiquette was relaxed a bit eventually; maybe people who get turned off by the stiffness of a classical concert might start attending performances more often.

Endings

Here's a nice article on endings in films, books, symphonies, etc. Some random films with outstanding endings that come to mind: Magnolia, Decalogue 10, Manhattan, Charulata.

Watching Movies With...

There was this great series of article in the Times a couple of years back where a movie person would sit down with reporter Rick Lyman and go through one of their favorite films in detail. The articles aren't in the free part of the site anymore, but they seem to have opened them up through a link from the page with all of their Brando articles. Here are a few good ones or ones I want to read:

• Barry Levinson on On The Waterfront
• Barry Sonnenfeld on Dr. Strangelove
• Nicole Kidman on The Shining
• Wes Andersen on Small Change
• Woody Allen on Shane
• Julianne Moore on Rosemary's Baby
• Michael Bay on West Side Story
• Quentin Tarantino on The Golden Stallion

I'm too lazy to link to all of them, but from this one you can access the rest through the Related Articles box. Hopefully these links will keep working. Oh, and Sideways is awesome; go see it.

UPDATE: The direct links don't seem to work anymore, but going to the Brando page and then clicking through to the On The Waterfront article works, and gives working links to the other articles.

Disaster Relief

Check out this page if you'd like to donate to the American Red Cross to help with disaster relief for yesterday's tsunamis. It looks like they'll need all the help they can get.

Cool Directions Site

I randomly ran into Map24 yesterday. It gives you this cool scrollable and zoomable map when you look up an address. The UI is a little confusing at first, but it's really fun to play with. I hope everyone is having a good holiday (or at least those who have holidays now).

Life in the Peace Corps

Check out an insider's (ie., my brother's) view of his life's hardships. There are some jokes that I imagine only make sense to other El Salvador Peace Corps volunteers, but it's still pretty funny. Actually, I'm curious as to whether others find it funny, or whether I just laugh harder at it because my brother wrote it.

Free

My crazy travelling and semester obligations are finally past, and it feels great. I really should get back to research soon, but for now I don't want to think about it. Tannhäuser was performed really well; I had forgotten just how amazing the Metropolitan Opera was, or maybe I had just never realized it before. Too bad the opera is so damn boring after the singing contest in the second act. Oh, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is an awesome, awesome movie; see it if you haven't already. Finally, if you're looking to burn some money on CDs, Alex Ross posted some top 10 lists for 2004. I was tempted to buy the Lieberson Handel arias CD, but went for the earlier Bach cantatas disc instead; incredible stuff. I would buy the just-released SF Symphony Mahler 2 recording for her rendition of the 4th movement alone, but the price is a bit steep.

The 'Tute

This article about a high school student working in the M.I.T. Media Lab put a smile on my face this morning and took me back a bit. Check this out:

When I first came there I made the assumption -- just to set myself straight -- that everyone at M.I.T. was smarter than I was. What I realized later is that everyone makes that assumption, and it allows everyone to learn from one another, which is really cool.

That's a little naïve, but a good attitude I think. I'd love to hear from this guy again in 4 years if he ends up at M.I.T., to see if he's still so positive about the place. He still needs to learn a bit about web page design; yikes.

Random Reviews

Some stuff I saw in the last few weeks:

• Deadwood: I finished watching the first season a while back. It's not a great show, but it's very good. There is a lot of cursing, and in general the show is very raw and dirty, which apparently is appropriate for the setting. Ian McShane is fantastic as Al Swearengen, and I enjoy William Sanderson as E.B. Farnum (I always think of J.F. Sebastian from Blade Runner when I see him). Sometimes the show is a bit too melodramatic or full of itself, but after seeing all the episodes, I was glad I watched.
• Le Grand Macabre: This was weird. But, it wasn't completely unapproachable; I actually sort of got into the music in the second act. It was a good experience, but I doubt I'd pay to see it again.
• Carnegie International:I actually saw a writeup on this exhibit in the Times a few weeks back, and I was eager to check it out. I thought the whole thing was great. I'm pretty ignorant about modern art, but it's still fun to see new and challenging works and spend a little time trying to make sense of them. Actually, for some reason looking at modern art reminded me of this random quote from Hansel in Zoolander: "Sting. Sting would be another person who's a hero. The music he's created over the years, I don't really listen to it, but the fact that he's making it, I respect that. I care desperately about what I do. Do I know what product I'm selling? No. Do I know what I'm doing today? No. But I'm here, and I'm gonna give it my best shot." Don't ask me why. Anyway, there were some really cool video installations and neat sculptures. If you're going to be in Pittsburgh sometime before the end of March next year, check it out.

Coming up next week: Eugene Onegin at SF Opera and Tannhäuser at the Met. Life is good.

Morris on Fallujah Prisoner Shooting

Here's a nice op-ed by Errol Morris on the recent video showing a prisoner being shot in Fallujah. This paragraph in particular got me thinking:

Pictures force us to collect our thoughts. They make us think about motivation, intent - they make us think about how we interpret our experiences, how we think about the world, how we try to understand the motives of others. (Maybe it's in our DNA. We look at pictures of other people and we want to know: what were they thinking?) And when it's a photograph of a crime or of violence, we think even harder. Such images make us care because they make us part of the mystery of what happened. We are not merely spectators; we are investigators. We are involved. What do the images mean? What do they show? What led up to these events? Are there mitigating circumstances? Is it as bad as it looks?

I wrote before about reading faces in pictures, and I think Morris is making the same point about how pictures make you work to understand what's going on. And Morris's points about denying reality are good, too; as I was watching this video on television, I couldn't believe that a camera crew was actually willing to follow the soldiers into such a dangerous situation. Anyway, good stuff.

Back To Concerts

My deadline finally passed on Thursday, and I've been enjoying doing very little productive work ever since. Also, I'm finally starting to get back to concerts. I saw Michael Schade in recital on Sunday. He had quite a good voice, but it was a bit overwhelming from where I was sitting, fifth row from the stage. He did some really nice Richard Strauss songs that I hadn't heard before. On Thursday I'm finally seeing Le Grand Macabre, which should be interesting. Hopefully I'll be on track to catch the rest of the operas this fall. And...that's about it. Oh, this is one of the funniest things I've seen in quite a while.

Bravo!

Great post at The Rest Is Noise on shouts of "Bravo!" in recordings. My favorites are both on piano concerto recordings, the Argerich Rach 3 and the insane recording of Evgeny Kissin playing the Chopin piano concertos when he was 12; I used to listen to both a lot back in my virtuosity worship phase during freshman year of college. 16 hours until my deadline; I can't wait.

Election

Since everyone seems to have weighed in on the election results, I thought I'd do my part. On Monday night, I arrived at the Hyatt Newporter hotel for a 3-day conference. After a couple of drinks, I was getting ready to crash, and I went to use the toilet in my hotel room. I lifted the lid, and saw the bowl nearly filled with what looked like dried "material," as Ted so tactfully called it. There was no water at all, just incomprehensible amounts of "material." There was no smell either, which only made the situation more surreal and disturbing. The quantity of "material" clearly placed this disaster beyond the work of any one man; it was plumbing gone horribly, horribly wrong. I've seen some nasty stuff before, and I'm not easily shocked, but lifting the toilet lid to be greeted by this astounding monstrosity shook me to my core and made me question all I hold dear.

It was the second worst thing I saw this week.

Josh Rushing

For those who saw Control Room, go check out this interview that the Marine captain Josh Rushing did on Fresh Air. He was a military press contact for Al-Jazeera and one of the most interesting people in the movie. The interview has lots of interesting tidbits, including how Fox News sets up interviews (like we didn't know).

Music Criticism and Politics

I'd been reading sounds & fury occasionally, as the author had some interesting things to say about music criticism, and he seems like quite the hardcore Wagnerian. But, then he posted his "contribution" to the debate on this year's presidential election; yuck. Now I can't read his writings on other topics without cringing. I sort of wish he had kept his politics to himself.

Naïve and Sentimental

I'm yet again rethinking my opinion on words in music after listening to my new Billy Budd recording, where the diction is for some reason much clearer than it was live (maybe the hall?). But I won't ramble about it any more for now. I just got back from SF Symphony, where they performed John Adams's Naïve and Sentimental Music. It was the first piece by Adams that I've heard, and I was very impressed. The coolest part was the percussion score, which called for just about every percussion instrument I could think of and more. There were almglocken, which I hadn't seen before and can't seem to find any information on now; I guess they're basically pitched cowbells, but they almost sounded like woodblocks. The vibraphone and crotales were both bowed in the second movement, and I finally heard what it's supposed to sound like (really weird overtones), as opposed to how it sounded when I tried it. And of course there was the standard mix of cymbals, gongs, and loud drums to round things out; good stuff. Also, Adams was in attendance, and he came out and gave a 5 minute introduction to the work, with a few excerpts from the first movement played by the orchestra. It helped me a lot in figuring out what was going on with the piece. The second half of the concert was Beethoven's Violin Concerto played by Midori, which honestly was a bit of a letdown after the Adams (the orchestra was about half the size). It would have been better to program the Beethoven first, but I guess the worry is that people would leave before hearing the modern piece.

It's crunch time for research, so if you expect to hear from me but don't for the next couple of weeks, you know why.

Sunday NY Times Arts Goodness

Real quick, there were two particularly interesting articles in the Arts section of last Sunday's Times. The first discusses a sexual harrassment suit against writers of "Friends" for making crude jokes during writing sessions. I must say I'm familiar with the phenomenon of trying to out-do someone's gross-out, although I'd never, ever participate in such a contest :). I'm kind of curious to see if these comedy writers are better at it than other people. The other article is on the use of beta blockers by musicians to control stage fright. There's no mention of whether singers use these things; I've always found nerves to affect me more in singing auditions than on other instruments. My take is that the use of beta blockers is no big deal; they don't seem to be harmful healthwise, and I figure that if their use was really decreasing the quality of the music, you'd see it in audition and competition results (with the non-users winning more often).

Song Language Reconsidered

Thinking more about my last post, I'm realizing that the words to a song or their language really make very little difference to me in terms of how much I like the music. I can "appreciate" clever lyrics and good fits with the music, but I don't think those things alone would ever make me like a song. But, I think the "sounds" of the words matter. A standard vocal exercise when learning a song is to practice singing only the vowels, to emphasize the sounds and sensations you should be focusing on after the consonants are added. I'm guessing that for most music, hearing only the vowels sung, which would preserve most of the "sounds" of the words while obscuring what they actually are, would be basically the same for me as hearing the full words.

Language of Songs

I was listening to Die schöne Müllerin for the first time in forever last night, and I got to wondering about how much more I would enjoy it if I actually understood German. For English songs like Aimee Mann's, listening carefully to the words adds another layer of enjoyment for me. On the other hand, there are great English songs where paying close attention to the words really doesn't do much extra for me; Radiohead fits more in this category. That's not to say that Radiohead lyrics are necessarily worse, but they just don't add much to my personal experience of the music. And then, there are the songs in languages I don't know, whose words obviously have little to no effect on my experience (I can sometimes recognize a word here and there). I can't imagine that I would like a German song less if the words turned out to be uninteresting, since whatever it was that I liked about the song before would still be there. But, if I could notice that the words really matched the melody or accompaniment well at some points in a song, I'd probably enjoy anticipating those moments in future listenings. I guess it all breaks down to how I appreciate music in general, which is some mixture of gut reactions and geekiness for detail. I better save digging into that for a future entry, though, since I'd probably spend the rest of the evening on it otherwise.

Billy and Gillian

Some quick thoughts on concerts from last week. Billy Budd was great, even though I had really never heard it before and it's not an easy listen. I really liked the Wagnerian structure of the acts, with long orchestral interludes between scenes. And the lead singers were once again amazing; SF Opera has been on a roll this season. It felt like a work that would grow on me with more listenings, and I've got a recording on the way. I also saw Gillian Welch at the Fillmore with AJ; he already wrote a bit about it. I'll just add that she did a wonderful cover of Radiohead's "Black Star." You wouldn't think at first that the song would be suited to a laid-back, folksy interpretation, but it worked surprisingly well. It was my first time at the Fillmore, and it's a really cool venue.

If you're looking for a large chunk of interesting reading, this series of articles from the Boston Globe gives details on how the House of Representatives is being run these days. I've only gotten through the first article, and it's stuff that I've heard or read before in bits and pieces, but seeing those pieces put together was still eye-opening.

Bush Earpiece Rumor

I just saw on NewsDog the rumor that Bush was wearing a wire during the last debate. It does look pretty suspicious to me, although there's no incontrovertible evidence. Nevertheless, in the spirit of blogging, I'm linking to help spread the rumor and plant doubts in as many minds as possible :).

More Feed Hacks

I fixed some bugs in my Andante RSS feeds, and added a feed for classical music articles in the Chronicle. I also changed the links for the feeds; they're now here. Sorry for the change to anyone who was using them.

A Couple of Music Links

Here's a blog that lists 101 great works of 20th-century music, and will eventually discuss more of the pieces in detail. And here's a great review of a new book on Glenn Gould.

I am learn

If only my posts were half as interesting as these.

Concert Thoughts / Plans

Some thoughts on concerts I attended this month:

• Cosi Fan Tutte: This was a great production, and I feel like I appreciate the opera more now that I've seen it live. All the singers were stellar, and the two male leads especially did a great job with the humor in the roles.
• The Pixies: A fun show, and my first time at Greek Theatre. I wasn't super familiar with the band's music (certainly not enough to sing along with all the other fans), and I can't say I was blown away by the songs, but a few tunes were pretty catchy. It made me wish I spent more time on the drumset way back when.
• La Traviata: Wow. It's hard to beat seeing a wonderful opera with three amazing singers in the lead roles. Rolando Villazon was especially impressive. This was probably the best performance I've seen yet at SF Opera.
• Mahler 9: I had high expectations for this one, and they were pretty much met (just a bit of first-performance sloppiness). How lucky am I to be in San Francisco while the orchestra is recording all the Mahler symphonies? Anyway, not quite as good as this past summer's Mahler 2, but still really good.

Concerts for October, if all goes well: Billy Budd, Tosca, Gillian Welch, Midori plays Beethoven, and Rach 2 (maybe). Oh, and not quite a concert, but I'm seeing Stella! It should be a good month if I'm not too overwhelmed with research.

Missile Defense

The debate is getting covered pretty exhaustively all over the place, so I'll just point to this New Yorker column on the missile defense system that Bush made a point of bringing up last night:

Between 1999 and December, 2002, a prototype anti-missile interceptor did succeed five times out of eight in hitting a dummy warhead in space. However, it was given information that the North Koreans would be unlikely to provide, such as the time and place of the launch and the missile’s trajectory. Moreover, the tests were purely preliminary. They did not show whether the system would work at night, or in bad weather, or against multiple warheads, or against a warhead of relatively crude design that would tumble instead of spin. At the time, the Pentagon’s chief of testing estimated that it would be a decade or more before the system would be ready for operational tests, and, like many other weapons experts, he questioned whether the system would ever be able to distinguish between warheads and decoys as simple as Mylar balloons.
...
Owing largely to the costs of development and deployment, the missile-defense budget has doubled in the past four years. The appropriation for next year is more than ten billion dollars—about the same as the Army’s entire R. & D. budget, twice the budget of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security, and nearly twice the department’s allocation for the Coast Guard.

Spending so much money on this totally unproven system shows as well as anything the relationship between some of Bush's policies and reality.