28-Sept-99 Weekend recap
.
.
.
As weekends go, as they say, it went. Saturday I was almost a total loss with my toothache. I modified the calendar table for my monthly listing of entries and tried to work on a perl script for editing the links to the previous and next day entries into this journal, and surprised myself by actually making some progress on it.
Sunday I was feeling considerably better. My mouth still hurt a lot, but I felt like a well person with a sore mouth, rather than someone with bacterial toxins floating around his bloodstream. I worked more on that journal-linking script and worked through an on-line tutorial on AppleScript in the hopes of having the script tell the HTML editor to read the entries back in after the script had edited them so the text would have its nifty normal syntax coloring. My concentration was a little lower than even usual, so I was reading a few pages of Out of the Crater and playing computer solitaire between spurts of programming. Much to my surprise, by the end of the evening the script was doing everything I had set out to do.
I was feeling well enough in the afternoon to go outdoors and whack away (with a pair of those old-fashioned hedge cutters that look like scissors on steroids) at a big yew in front of the house that was growing out of control and (more sedately, with pruning clippers) at some other shrubs. Now the yew has a nice haircut, the other shrubs have some definition instead of merging right into each other, and in general the house looks as though people live there. And best of all, I felt that I had been constructive enough that I could go back and laze around the computer some more. Oh, and watch the end of the Ryder Cup matches on TV.
By the end of Monday I had finished Out of the Crater. I must have found it reasonably interesting, because when I took it back to the library I got out two other books about volcanoes and earthquakes. I also added some AppleScript to try to upload my entries automatically.
I've been working on processing some Chinese text at work. The Chinese characters are coded with two bytes each, with both characters having binary values hex A1 or bigger (for those of you who care). A lot of accented characters are stored in the same range, so every once in a while when my computer is set in Chinese display mode I'll see a Chinese character in the middle of someone's journal page and realize that it was supposed to be part of "fiancÈe".
A few years ago at work we had a Chinese class that I took. Today I was going over some problems in my output with a Chinese woman who can read it but not write the programs to process the text. I was pleased that I was able to read enough characters to say, "OK, now in the paragraph that starts 'jin tian'", or "Is that the article whose second character is 'mountain'?"
Tonight was the first klezmer class of the fall session. We had five people plus Glenn there; two flautists, a clarinetist, cello, and me on trumpet. I didn't know if I'd be able to play at all with my out-of-commission jaw, but it worked better than I expected. I brought a zourna and gave it to Glenn. He thinks you put the whole reed in your mouth, not just the tip the way you do with an oboe.
One of the pieces he handed out tonight is one we did several years ago, "7:40". It's a Russian song about the morning commuter train in to Moscow. The first strain is all chuff chuff clickety clack stuff. The second strain is beautiful long lyrical phrases; you can picture the train up to speed flashing past green fields or along the river. Or, last night, be reminded of rolling along on the Krasnaya Strela, the Red Arrow, the midnight train from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. In spite of my sore mouth, I played out good and loud the first couple of times through that strain. Every once in a while the trumpet feels effortless, just an extension of my voice, with a full round tone and no buzzy corners on the notes. That's how it seemed on "7:40" last night. I hope it sounded like that to the rest of the band. Getting to that point more consistently is the reason for practicing an instrument.
Well, folks, it's time to stop and try to link this entry into the whole journal and upload.
Rats. The script didn't do the upload. It did the linking with other entries right, and that's a big part of the work. I'll have to use Anarchie by hand now, and take a more disciplined, step by step approach to scripting Anarchie to work it all into a single step.
 | ||||