Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[Responding to news of shrimper Diane Wilson's arrest for pouring oil on herself in protest at a Senate Energy Committee hearing: ]"It takes real skill to be the oiliest person in a room full of U.S. senators." -- J.D. Baldwin, 2010-06-09, in the newsgroup panix.chat.politics (explicit permission for reposting outside of panix.* asked for and received in accordance with Panix policy)

Dear body,

If I wanted to feel stupid and clumsy, I'd get drunk. Please stop this shit. Also, if I were into headaches, I have my own ball-peen hammer, so you can lay off the pain there, too.

-- the management

Missing recorder group meeting for something like the twentieth or thirtieth month in a row. Three nights of incredibly crappy sleep not helping. Tho' maybe if I'd realized early enough that this wasn't a headache ibuprofen would fix, and had brought out the cocoa powder, oil of basil, and codeine an hour or two earlier, maybe I could've managed to drag myself up there. Still entertaining a faint hope of getting to the Stuff I Really Need To Do Today later on, even if I've missed my scheduled fun-thing. Hoping I can get to tomorrow's scheduled fun-thing.

Consistent use of complete sentences for non-headachy people, m'kay?

Been looking for Galician music on the web. Every so often I should remind myself that just because I looked for something as recently as a couple years ago and found almost nothing, doesn't mean that a buttload of sites won't have popped up -- or have gotten better indexed in search engines -- in what feels like a rather short time. Big difference in the quantity of stuff that's findable since the last time I looked. This has happened regarding several topics recently. Finding Asturian music too, which I'd planned to go looking for next. Creating sheet music from downloaded MIDI files; re-typestting sheet music from annoying-to-read GIF/JPG scans of pages (& retyping some from legible sources to more easily make MIDIs (and make more consistent look)). For may tunes: 2 minutes to type; 1 minute to proofread; done. For others: 2 hours sorting out whether it's same tune as some other title, figuring out how many variations need documenting; 2 hours tweaking page layout & MIDI to both be useful; 45 minutes tracing unclear attributions (name present -- composer, collector, arranger? 1 source says trad., 'nuther gives name. Etc.). So a tune takes anywhere from 3 to 290 minutes to add to library. Heck of a range there.

More and more glad (a) to be using ABC and (b) that some other folks use ABC. Editable format w/ fields for cataloguing info & notes, which instantly generates pretty, legible PDFs and MIDI for me in ways scriptable w/ 'make' and various text-processing tools ... and then I found abc-compare when I started contemplating the feasibility of writing such a program myself (yay for remembering to STFW first!!). Music archive sites that store tunes in ABC often automatically generate JPG and MIDI on the fly when you go to look at web page for a particular tune, and I can grab ABC source & just have to add a line saying which site I copied it from -- or if I need to add or correct anything, or stick two other variants of tune on same page, it's already in handleable/editable/tweakable format. Sites not using ABC as main format have mishmash of legible and difficult images (incl. black-on-dark-grey computer-generated, scans w/ flyspecks that look like notation, illegible annotations, or scans at too-low resolution (one choral piece w/ multi-instrumwnt accompaniment was in a raster image file about 400 pixels across), and MIDI files that (because of the nature of MIDI) have all repeats 'unrolled' and anacrusis often difficult to discern (but at least MIDI is a machine-readable format and midi2abc is a big win when the only source I have for a tune is MIDI (and may or may not be faster than typing from an image of sheet music depending on the tune and how much whoever scored the MIDI tweaked the phrasing to get it Just So)). Some have PDF ... which can just be a wrapper for raster scans (same probs as GIF/JPG/PNG/BMP) or nice vector PDF (no jaggies, scale to arbitrary size cleanly, etc. and yay -- but I still have to re-type to add my own notes). A few have .mus or .nwc files for a small percentage of their tunes. The only free sites that have machine-readable notation for every tune are using either ABC or Scorch (Sibelius).

Already loved the flexibility I have w/ ABC -- stick these tunes on one page / break them onto separate pages, easy; put these two voices on one staff, just add parentheses to the %%score directive; transpose by running it through abc2abc -- but spending several days immersed in using it for what it's best at (mostly-instrumental folk tunes), along with finally having gotten around to learning some useful vi (well, vim) macro tricks (bagpipe grace notes are so much quicker to type now) gives me fresh appreciation for just how fast working in ABC can be. ABC still has its shortcomings, but as an archive-and-share format, it really shines.

Now if we could just standardize the ABC standard so that software developers felt secure in adding ABC import/export to their non-ABC music software, then I could just send ABC files to non-ABC-user folks I'm sharing tunes with instead of shipping the PDF and MIDI (and making them re-type(or mouse) the music into their fave music editor if they want to build a music library all inone file format or make any edits to a tune). It'd be convenient if we had a universal music interchange format that everybody could reliably import/export. The two main candidates are ABC (primarily a human-editing-friendly format that's Almost There as a machine-importable interchange format for sheet music) and MusicXML (not at all human-friendly but designed specifically as a computer interchange format that attempts to preserve all printed-representation and performance details in one file ... but hasn't been widely-enough adopted yet).

Biggest problem I have w/ ABC right now is difficulty of searching web for ABC files not already indexed by ABC collection-aggregators*. "ABC" in search string tends to get sites belonging to, related to, or referring to media conglomerates in the US and Australia, and searching for strings you expect to find mostly in ABC files and not much elsewhere ("X:", "T:", "K:") doesn't work because search engines strip most punctuation.

[*] Such as JC's ABC Tune Finder at trillian.mit.edu, for example.

Babelfish doesn't know Galician. I eventually remembered Google Translate also exists, and that does. But then I discovered what happens when you click a PDF sheet music link on a site you're viewing with Google Translate. (It tries to translate PDF rendering commands/fields/whatever that are in the file, and then feed the result to your browser's PDF-handling engine ... which gets very confused.) I've been spending a lot of time trying to navigate web sites written in Spanish, Galician, Portugese, French, and German. I speak one of those languages, and not very well. At least now I know that a link labelled 'partitura' will usually lead me to an image with a bunch of dots on a staff ...

Had three or four short bits to babble at y'all about but now that the music-related short bit got away from me and turned into a long bit, I've forgotten what the others were. At least the cocoa & basil are starting to work now. Still feel like crap, but more of wrung-out "that was rough" feeling and less acute "brain hurts can't think ow ow ow". Back to the Galician music. Gonna finish up the tunes with titles that start with 'P' or 'R', then start tackling the huge list of tunes with titles of the form "Muiñeira {da|de|do} Somethingorother". I've still got the tunes titled "Collection of so-and-so, tune # __" left to do as well. There are a lot of those. I wonder how many abc-compare will find other titles for when I'm done. When I feel well enough to drive, I'll tackle those other thing on my to-do list.