climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
All matters musical
This has been a crazy evening. Everything I said before about the exceptional friendliness of NOLA deserves to be amplified.
A chance encounter led to a long night of excellent free music at a place I would never have found on my own or through a guidebook. I am invited back to the same place tomorrow for the Rebirth Brass Band.
At nearly 3am, my hostel is still a hive of activity. I should try to sleep, however.
Not only is Apple’s iTunes application constantly crashing, stealing focus, or crashing my entire computer – it just erased all my podcasts and iTunes U files for no clear reason. This is especially maddening for someone who is careful to catalog their media well.
Given that I was about to go on a long bus journey, this is unbelievably annoying. All of a sudden, university courses I was in the middle of listening to are just gone. Podcast collections that I had assembled with some care are deleted. All my audiobooks have vanished as though they never were. Much of the content I had in there cannot simply be re-downloaded.
It is all extremely frustrating.
Starting tomorrow, the Clay and Paper Theatre Company are performing their original show “The Pedaler’s Wager” in Dufferin Grove Park, Toronto. It sounds like quite a lively experience:
This original comedy features puppetry, live music, and our very own CYCLOPS: Cycling Oriented Puppet Squad. Each weekend audience members are invited to cycle from act to act alongside performers, literally following the troupe to the show’s conclusion.
The show runs from July 20th until August 14th, and all performances start in Dufferin Grove Park.
Stationary performances are happening Wednesday through Sunday at 7:00pm and Friday at 2:00pm.
Traveling performances start on Saturdays and Sundays at 2:00pm and require that you bring your own bicycle to follow the performers from Dufferin Grove Park to Fred Hamilton Park and Trinity Bellwoods Park.
The show is $10, or pay what you can.
Those in Toronto may appreciate knowing that my friend Rebecca is performing at Tranzac tonight at 10pm. She is promising to “play viola and sing songs to keep the bears away”.
At 11pm, Lowlands is performing, featuring Doug Tielli, Tania Gill, Heather Segger and D Alex Meeks.
I have finally processed some photos that had been too-long ignored:
Now I can go get some new images – maybe some indoor portraiture, or still life stuff. Or some more ‘spring emerging from the Ottawa freezer’ shots.
[Update: 1 May 2011] Bonus: Enriched Bread Artists – Open House 2011
A friend took me to a concert yesterday, with Wilderness of Manitoba opening for Bastia Bulat. I am always nervous about asserting what musical genre something is, but both had distinctly folky elements.
I would recommend giving both a listen, if you get the opportunity.
I mentioned before how my friend Andrea Simms-Karp is producing a new album. This past weekend, I got some photos of her in the studio working on it.
This is pretty neat: the City of Ottawa has created an iPhone app with information on events and activities ongoing in the city. Versions for Android and BlackBerry are forthcoming, later this year.
Having a lot of this kind of information centralized in one place seems useful, particularly in a form tailored to be accessible from smartphones.
One really annoying bug exists in iTunes 10.1.1 (4). When you buy a track from the iTunes Store, it doesn’t go into Apple’s default ‘Recently Added’ smart playlist. This makes it so you have basically two different ‘inboxes’ for new songs, podcasts, etc. You need to remember whether you bought a song on iTunes, ripped it from a CD, or downloaded it as a free podcast, etc.
It would be better if songs you purchased appeared in ‘Recently Added’ along with everything else. It would be especially useful when traveling and listening to previously-downloaded podcasts.
My brother Sasha is getting very good at playing the piano: Chopin – Waltz No. 19 in A Minor. The music starts at 1:53.