It’s hard to believe that tomorrow is already the 1st of May. April is like sweeps month when you’re on the semester system. A few updates:

I haven’t forgotten about the posts I’ve mentioned writing, re: WordPress, and even that episode from Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! from a few weeks ago. They’re in the queue.

Went to the L.A. Times Festival of Books on Sunday (the site’s already advertising for next year); made it to four panels. I’ll try and write more about that soon.

I haven’t watched any television programs in a while…same goes for movies. I did switch the set on for a Dodgers game last month. That’s another thing that happened since I last wrote: baseball season is here. And the Dodgers run out ahead, 12-2 — their best start since 1955 — but in the next seven games, they’re 1-6. Welcome to the Show.

I’m listening to Anne Litt and Weekend Becomes Eclectic as I write this. I haven’t been able to properly tune in to the show for a number of weeks now, for one reason or another. I’ve had to miss it or listen to a small portion for a while now — I did get to catch some of the repeat broadcasts, which air from 7 to 10 a.m. on KCRWmusic.com, KCRW’s all-music MP3 streaming music station. Last Saturday, I finally got to hear most of the show live and felt at home right away: there was no lack of the magical WBE quality (that keeps causing me to marvel over the selection of songs). Among the playlist then: Chet Baker, Keren Ann, Mogwai, Laura Cantrell (the first time I’ve heard her on the show), new material from Aimee Mann, Willie Nelson, and the Jayhawks (first time I’ve heard them on the show, I think). Last last weekend, I was able to listen for a bit, and heard Richard Buckner’s "A Chance Counsel" during the set!

The last set that Litt just played (today): Spoon, Bob Marley, Keren Ann, Patti Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, Nancy Sinatra, and Anne McCue. Excellent.

I read the news about Paul Hester‘s suicide last night on MetaFilter and couldn’t believe it. He was probably best known worldwide as the drummer for the Neil Finn-songwriting-driven band Crowded House, one of my all-time favorite groups.

I was just listening to the album Woodface for the gazillionth time the other day. It’s a great CD — my favorite CH album, and I highly recommend it. Hester wrote perhaps one of the most fun tracks, "Italian Plastic." The title for this entry is a line from his wonderful lyrics. He also wrote/co-wrote a few other songs during the band’s history.

If you’re not too familiar with the band but you at least have its self-titled debut album (i.e. the one with "Don’t Dream It’s Over" as shown here), Paul Hester is the winged man flying away on the album cover art (painted by the third core Crowded House member, bassist Nicholas Seymour).

I’m going to listen to some Crowded House now.

I just noticed that a few of you trying to access musings from your RSS readers may have run into a 403 error and a message about being detected as a referrer spammer. Whoops. There should have been a link, at any rate, allowing you to click into the site, but still — I’m sorry about the mix-up.

The reason for this happening: I installed Referrer Karma last week and didn’t add FeedBurner to the list of approved referrers. I’ve just added the domain, so you shouldn’t have a problem getting to the site from your feed readers now — but please let me know if you do. If weird things like that happen, just keep in mind that I’m still playing with WordPress and I might unintentionally do things that break the site every now and then.

And yes, Referrer Karma is one of the subjects on my list of WordPress-related items to discuss later. (If you don’t have the tool, I recommend downloading it. It works even if you don’t use WP, as long as your pages run PHP.)

Well, sort of. In a way. Okay, this post has very little to do with The X-Files except for the David Duchovny connection (but I will mention something about the show in a sec). He wrote and directed his first feature film, House of D, which premieres next month. And for the promo push, Duchovny is writing a blog (Flash required). It’s interesting to see his writing style and his typing style (very few caps; single paragraphs), especially since — as hardcore XF fans will remember — he pursued a PhD in English literature before leaving Yale for an acting career.

I’ve been out of the entertainment industry news loop for years — I remember reading something about him writing his first movie, but didn’t think about it after that. Anyway, I just now happened to catch the link to his blog while on the Blogger site — his name was at the top of the list of "blogs of note." I figured it was a fan site, but nope, it’s really him. Check it out. There are audio posts, too, although I haven’t listened to them as of yet.

(Note: Clicking on the orange banner for the movie at the top of his blog leads to the wrong site! Oops. I wonder how long it’ll be before someone fixes that.)

Based on the two X-Files episodes that Duchovny wrote and directed ("The Unnatural" is still one of my favorites), I’ll definitely put his movie on my to-watch list. (I haven’t done much XF web browsing in a really long time, but Fox TV has apparently replaced its excellent resource at x-files.com with product pages for the DVDs.)

Okay, here’s the news about The X-Files: in Duchovny’s entry for March 23rd, he says at the very end:

speaking of x files, i think we’re getting very close to getting a start date on the x2. my guess is we’ll be filming early next year.

Cool. I know absolutely nothing about the sequel other than that, but I hope it’s better than the first movie. That reminds me, though…the last two seasons of the series…weren’t my faves. I wonder what the story will be about? I’m already a little sad that the Lone Gunmen won’t be in it. Who knows? Maybe they could be.

I just posted about the Ask MeFi thread — I actually read it a while back, but wanted to post it today, before this entry. Oddly enough, the MeFi thread got me thinking about today, and about music and audio.

Today is my father’s birthday — he would have turned 66. Aside from other cool fatherly things, such as taking the family on trips and teaching his kids how to ride a bicycle, he provided an extremely rich musical background. There was always music on in the house, or in the car. As a kid, I listened to Tchaikovsky and Chopin; Jim Reeves and Nat King Cole; Verdi and Bizet; the Platters and Marty Robbins; Neil Diamond and the Kingston Trio…and lots and lots of other folk music, children’s songs, and Disney movie music, courtesy of those orange Disney cassettes for kids, and albums by the Chipmunks and the Smurfs.

My father gave me my first tape recorder when I was in the first grade. It was a new red Panasonic model, shaped like a cube, with a telescoping antenna and a headphone jack. I could listen to AM/FM and play my cassettes, but I remember being more excited to be able to record sounds and music. Most often, I used it to dub favorite songs from the radio. (One of the first tunes I taped: "I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues" by Elton John.)

Once, I tried to record the theme to The Smurfs by placing the recorder up to the TV speaker, and trying to shush anyone who made noise around me. I think I was disappointed by the results of the recording — since the Panasonic had an omnidirectional microphone, it picked up a lot of the ambient sounds.

Sometimes I’d record myself playing piano or singing. I remember the first time I listened to my voice on playback — speaking and singing — and being shocked by how I sounded nothing like what I’d thought (aren’t we all?). I also quickly discovered that if I set the recorder a few feet away from the piano (rather than right on top of — or too close to — the instrument), the recording sounded better.

I was terribly shy as a child, and never let anyone else listen to the tapes of me playing or singing; they were just for my ears. Once on a road trip somewhere, I started singing along to whatever was playing on the car stereo — I don’t remember what it was. Except I just sort of sang it quietly, under my breath. My aunt noticed, and she smiled and told me to sing louder. Frightened and flustered, I just clammed up. And one time at home, my dad found an unlabeled tape and played it — it was me singing along to either a Phil Collins or Genesis song. I was embarrassed beyond all doubt (embarrassed by my singing, not by the song…or maybe both 😉 ). I may have grabbed the tape and run away, red-faced.

In fourth grade, my class got split into groups that had to write and produce original plays. There were two phone calls scripted in my group’s play, and I used the red Panasonic cube to record the ringing of the phone at home. I recall putting the recorder near the phone in the living room, and waiting for a call to come in. I didn’t have anyone call purposely — I just waited for someone to ring. Back then, we had rotary phones — you know, with actual dials (I know, the stone age!) — and the ringer was a real analog bell that clanged. Phones don’t sound like that anymore. Anyway, so I got home from school, and set it all up, and waited for the phone to ring…and waited…and in the evening, it finally did. I ran to the phone in the living room while saying, "Don’t answer it!" and then hit the play and record buttons (a blue arrow and a red circle) to start taping. And I let the phone ring…and ring…and ring. I finally picked up on the fourth one, I think. I waited for another call, for safety, or at least to get another take (of course, back then I just thought, "Just in case"). I ended up using those rings for the play.

Years later in high school, I was the assistant sound designer for the school production of Our Town, and did sound tech throughout high school and, even later, in college.

As a kid, I never dreamed of being a musician, or that I’d write and perform songs and put them on a CD for other people to hear. And yet, here I am, doing exactly that. It’s still hard for me to believe.

My dad bought me my first guitar when I was a junior in high school. It turned out to be his last Christmas gift to me. He never got to witness my playing ability progress, or hear any of my songs, or see me break out of my apprehensiveness about singing.

I still listen to Jim Reeves and Nat King Cole, and Marty Robbins and the Platters, and Chopin and Tchaikovsky, and Verdi and Bizet…

I still have that old Panasonic tape recorder. And it still works.

Happy birthday, Dad!

Last month on Ask MetaFilter, jeremias asked:

Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?

The result: one of the most engaging and interesting pages I’ve read on the Web. It’s quite a long thread, so don’t expect to digest it all at once…but it’s worth the read.

I don’t normally read Ask MeFi — I usually just skim through the MetaFilter XML feed. I happened to visit MeFi’s front page a few weeks ago; it had a link to the thread above (it still does). I happened to click on it, and I’m glad I did.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s finally done. It took me long enough, but I have switched this, my main blog, to WP 1.5. The installations of WP have been fairly simpler than my experiences with Movable Type. I had no problems upgrading from 1.2.x to 1.5, or installing a fresh 1.5. The time consuming aspect is having to re-learn a completely new system. The tags are different, the protocol is different (I didn’t know anything about PHP), and the templates are different. I’ve played with earlier versions of WP before, but Strayhorn has many more features. It took me a very long time to figure out how not to break the PHP (which I did a few times while I modified the templates), but I’m still not sure how to do certain things.

Wrestling with the templates and getting everything to look right on the pages with CSS and the WP tags took me a few days. I couldn’t have done it without the scattered help out there — thankfully, there’s a ton of more documentation (official and otherwise) now, compared to when I first installed WP about a year ago (a very empty Wiki). As time progresses, I hope to post more about this latest migration experience, and to specifically mention the blogs and other sites that helped me along the way.

Some things post-migration:

The site still has some display quirks that I need to iron out if I want to make the blog more user-friendly. Some of that involves the PHP end of things (figuring out how to modify some navigation, for one thing), so it depends on how long it takes me to learn. The most obvious thing you may notice will be the weird line breaks on some of the archived posts. MT had an auto line break toggle, but WP does not. So the posts that did not use the auto line break feature in MT — well, now they have breaks in strange places. I remember reading about this a while back. I hope I can find some way to fix those posts without having to go through each one manually…then again, that may be my only option. It shouldn’t take that long. We’ll see.

The URI for the XML feed has changed, so if you subscribe to musings that way, please update ( http://www.musicandmeaning.com/site/musings/feed/ ). I’ve set up redirects for the old link. For now, the new feed is enhanced through FeedBurner, and apparently will be compatible for all readers.

That’s about it. Comments should work, although I’ve shut off trackbacks for now. Let me know if something doesn’t work.

So my brief review so far: WP 1.5 is pretty nice — there are some very cool features, e.g. non-date-based pages and the new templates. It just took me a while to figure everything out. I’m sure I’ll have a better idea of the WP vs. MT aspects after I’ve spent some more time posting and managing.

In case you missed it…WordPress "Strayhorn" is now available for download. Like all WP users, I’ve anxiously waited for version 1.5 and it’s finally here!

At the end of last year, I announced that I’d switch this blog from MT to WP. I purposely waited for 1.5 before starting the conversion of musings. I’ll install 1.5 here later this week and play around with all of the settings and permalinks before making the switch official.

While waiting for 1.5’s release, I’ve stayed with Movable Type 3.1x and recently opted to render the archives dynamically. I really should have done that sooner — it’s pretty nifty. MT-Blacklist running in the background is also very cool. I’ve been getting a lot more spam hits in the past month, so it’ll be interesting to see how WP fares with comment and trackback spam. (In the WP blogs I have set up, I disabled comments, so I’m not familiar with WP’s anti-spam arsenal.)

Think you know your accents? The BBC has a nifty language lab where you can listen to people’s speech and try to identify their regional accents or the language they’re speaking. (This being the Beeb, "regional" refers to the UK.)

In three attempts (ten questions each), I scored 70%, 80%, and 70%. I apparently have an ear for the Swansea accent, since I got it right both times it came up (and I’ve not been to Wales). Actually, I’d never heard a lot of accents that came up as a choice…e.g. I’d never heard a Bradford accent before (not that I know of, anyway), so I missed that one. And, like The Fat Man of Criticise.me (from whom I found out about this quiz — cheers), I apparently found it difficult to identify Turkish.

I love British accents, and always enjoy learning more of their characteristics. So it was a treat listening to the sound clips and answering the questions. It was also cool listening to people speak in Irish (Gaeilge) and Welsh. One of the choices I saw was Gaelic (which I’m guessing was Scottish Gaelic). I was curious to see how I might do if it came up as a sound clip (I’m more familiar with the Irish Gaelic)…alas, it didn’t.

On a side note, it was also interesting to listen to the content of the speeches. My favorite one was a boy discussing poetry (I won’t mention his accent, in case you take the quiz and get the same sound clip).

Google Video Search: searches transcriptions of television programs.

I tried to think of a distinctive episode title of a TV show. I entered "tunguska" into the search box. What does it mean when the first distinctive title I can think of is of an X-Files episode I haven’t seen in over eight years?

The search results: nothing. Then I actually read the text of the Google video search page: "Search recent TV programs online." No wonder. 😉

So then I searched for only+connect and the first result? The ER episode from last week, natch. (No results for the same-titled episode of Joan of Arcadia from September. That’s not recent enough, I guess.)

Clicking on the page for the episode currently displays five screen caps and portions of the transcription at various points of the show that include the words "only" or "connect" — and this is the funny part: the transcription includes commercials! So in this case, three of the results are from adverts.

Yes, I searched for "Forster." It brought up a mention from 24‘s episode "Day 4: 12:00 Noon-1:00PM"…and no, it’s not a reference to E. M. (Turns out that it’s a part of a company name, apparently.)

I also searched for one of my pet peeves regarding (written) dialogue. [rant] I hear this bit of dialogue all the time on TV and in movies, and it’s so repetitive now that it’s distracting and takes me out of the story. Please, writers, I know people really talk like that in real life, but could you please avoid scripting it? If not a moratorium, then how about a "use sparingly" rule? [/rant] 🙂

The search results display images, but as of now, no video files. It’s an interesting new tool, in beta. I’m not sure how it works; the About page does not specify the transcriptions’ sources, but they may be the same ones used for closed captioning (which is not always accurate). The page does say that there’s currently a limited amount of programming available online, beginning from "late December 2004." I don’t know if I’d use it often.

(Found out about video.google.com from Metafilter.)

It must be the television season of E. M. Forster. In September, I wrote about Forster being immortalized in the pop culture that is prime-time television (specifically, Joan of Arcadia and Gilmore Girls), and apparently it’s not over: last week’s new episode of ER was titled "Only Connect" and opened with Abby (Maura Tierney) waking up in the morning; then her eyes drift to a nearby book titled Howards End! (In case you’re new to this blog, this site, and/or me, Howards End (written by Forster) is my favorite novel. It’s also one of my favorite films, but that’s a different topic.)

Admittedly, I haven’t been watching ER regularly in a while, but of all the characters to be reading Forster, it’s my favorite character from the current cast. Abby just got even cooler by a gazillion points. (And to top it off, her clock radio alarm was set to NPR’s Morning Edition! If she ever starts listening to Richard Buckner, I may go into shock.)

Mucho thanks to madbard for taking the time to relay the happy news to me. 🙂 I missed the show on Thursday, but I’ll try to keep an eye out and catch the repeat.

I’m still waiting for the first TV show to mention E. M. Forster’s name (positively would be good).