News from Great Castle Wilson

  • Divertimento rocks!

    Well, actually, they “classics!”, but that’s not so catchy. 🙂

    Two more successful concerts under our belts. Friday was a better space to play in, but Saturday seemed to have better sound (despite my early misgivings about the hall having too much reverb). In particular, it was easier to hear how good the choir was on Saturday. Walter Babiak attended both performances, which was quite an honour. His Movin’ in My Heart was received well, given its complexity, and I do believe we may end up with a CD’s worth of music worth listening to. Well done everyone! As usual, I am in awe of the skills that our players have, and continuously surprised that they haven’t kicked me out for being such a duffer. <g>

    The next concert will be a “Pops” concert, Friday, February 10 and Saturday, February 11, 2006. The program is still being discussed, but there should be lots of nice stuff, just in time for Valentines Day. 😉

    After that, we’re playing Friday, May 5 and Saturday, May 6, 2006. I’ve already got the music for that show. On the program is:

    • Wolfgang Mozart – Overture to the opera “The Magic Flute”
    • Johannes Brahms – Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn
    • César Franck – Symphony in D minor

    Time to start practicing!

  • Divertimento concerts this weekend

    Just a reminder to everyone that the Divertimento Orchestra of Ottawa and the Kanata Choral Society are playing two joint concerts this weekend. The program is:

    1. Franz Liszt – Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
    2. Antonín Dvorák – “Largo” from the New World Symphony
    3. Wolfgang Mozart – Regina Coeli K.108
    4. Walter Babiak – Movin’ in My Heart

    The Babiak is a world premier. It has never been recorded or publicly performed, so it should be quite exciting. Here’s where we will be playing:

    Friday, November 25, 2005
    Orleans United Church
    1111 Orléans Blvd., Orléans
    8 p.m.

    Saturday, November 26, 2005
    St. Paul’s Anglican Church
    20 Young Rd., Kanata
    7:30 p.m.

    Note that the Friday concert is at 8pm, but the Saturday concert is at 7:30. Also, there’s a hockey game at the Corel Center on Saturday night, so you might want to factor in a little extra travel time.

    Tickets are available at the door: Adults: $15.00. Students/Seniors: $12.00. Children 12 and under: Free. I hope to see you there. (Look for me on the third cello desk.)

  • More on the odd Mac behavior

    So the problem occurred again. When I went down to look at the machine this morning, I saw the following things:

    • Backup open with the “I’m about to back something up” dialog visible and the auto-start count at 0 (i.e. ready to go), but not running
    • Backup, Adium and iChat all flagged as “Not Responding” in the Force Quit dialog

    When I’m in this state, if I force quite all three apps, then attempt to shutdown, the Mac shuts down to the “grey screen with progress spinner” stage, then stays there forever. I actually have to power it off and on to continue.

    The thing is, there are several possible sources of the problem:

    1. the 10.4.3 upgrade
    2. switching to use the UA-5 USB sound module
    3. Backup itself
    4. network issues related to backing up to my slug.

    It seems like there must be *something* network related, since all 3 apps would have been using the net stack at the point the backup was going to happen. However, even though those apps have locked up, everything seems fine if I browse the web or crawl around on the remote backup volume.

    I got the combo 10.4.3 update, and I’m going to re-apply that tonight. I’ve also got the latest version of Disk Warrior and I’m going to feed it the main volume as well. Then it’s flush all the caches and maybe the preferences files and then just hope. If it happens again after that, I’ll have to start disconnecting pieces (likely the UA-5 first) and see if that helps.

    sigh.

  • Oh. My. God! I’m the father of a teenager.

    I can’t figure out whether I should be terrified, or just feel old. Anyway,

    WTG D-Man! Woot! Happy Birthday!

    See here for more similar. 🙂

  • Starbucks and Hotspot

    Well, I paid my 7.50 $CAN to get connected to the net at the local Starbucks. The good news is that it worked, it was relatively easy, and I can post to the blog. The bad news is that 7.50 for 1 hour of connection time is bloody highway robbery. I know I could have paid just less than double that for a whole day’s use, but I’m only here ’till Deb and Dennis get out of church, so…

    Here’s the thing though: The service routes through a standard wireless connection. We all know what the limits are on that technology: the bottom line is that the total bandwidth that I can push through this is exactly the same as I can do at home. And in case you’re saying, “But there could be more people there”, no, we all share the bandwidth. More people just means slower transfers for me.

    So the real question is, why am I being charged so much for this? Like everything else in our society, the answer is, because they can (currently) get away with it. The incremental cost to get their service set up at this Starbucks was almost certainly less than $500 over what it cost to do it at home. But for some reason, they think it makes sense to charge me, what, 5 orders of magnitude more or so. It’s insane. Bell, in case you’re listening, I would have happily payed $7.50 for a month of connection time.

    It’s exactly the same problem that we currently have with data plans on cell phones.

    I can tell you though, the first coffee shop that comes up with a fixed monthly usage rate, will get all my business. Think about it guys.

  • Some odd Mac behavior

    Twice now, I’ve come downstairs in the morning, and found Backup open on the desktop, in a state where it looked like it was almost going to start backing up the website, but was just sitting there (not responding). This morning, I noticed that my IM client, Adium, was also not responding. I have not seen anything like this, prior to upgrading to 10.4.3, so I wonder if there may be a correlation.

    Maybe I should get the combo updater and re-run it.

  • WordPress and Gallery2

    As you’ve probably noticed, there is now a picture in the side bar. I’m using the WPG2 plugin to do this, but I don’t have many publicly visible pictures up yet, so if you aren’t a registered user on this blog, you’re likely to see a lot of puppies for a while. 🙂

    As a test, here is the puppy photo embedded in this entry:


    public/File0255.jpg

    The way this works is, if you are logged into this blog, you get admin rights into the gallery2 site, but if you’re not logged in here, you have the same rights as a guest at the gallery2 site. This rule is strict, and you can’t get around it by including direct links to things that a guest normally couldn’t see so, for example, unless you are logged into this blog, you won’t see a picture of Lucky and Sunshine here:


    otherweb/l12.jpg

    Unfortunately, the gallery2 site is no more.

  • Yikes! The Gallery is down.

    My gallery2 site is currently failing with a scary looking database error:

    Error (ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE) :
    … [Edited to remove the noise. McQ]

    If anybody can suggest why this is happening, let me know. (I’m also posting this to make sure that I can talk to MySQL from WordPress.)

  • Deb is travelling this weekend.

    She’s off today to “Mabel Corlett’s annual Needlers’ Retreat”, and will be back some time on Sunday afternoon. I’m sure she’ll tell you all about it on her Deblog when she gets back.

  • Spam and the Disassociated Press

    I almost hate automatically blocking some of the blogspam I get [well, no, not really], because it can be quite poetic in its attempts to get past the filter. Here are a couple of examples (with the lame-ass website they were attempting to flog removed, of course). This one…

    This dustcloud, however, applies only to the quay : in its indigo-sheets, Dieppe is discoverable among Crisp-headed towns for the oniscus of its buildings. system is musik-saal with that of Telesikra

    and this one…

    Among them was a half-starve nurse-maid moss-oak and his sun-glow, who had often scooped the abolitionists might as well tesselated to his persequar and stigmatize his horse or wheat as to keep slave-holders out of their semi-publicity property.

    Of course, all spammers should just go commit suicide for the sin of destroying one of the few good things mankind has built this generation, but other than that… 😉