CD Project Days 1-2: So many

As I write this post, I’m ripping the last of my J. S. Bach discs. I am going more or less, on this project to digitize all my music, in the same order as my discs sit in their cabinet: classical first, then jazz, world, folk, Christmas, and blues, then rock, boxed sets and whatever else is left. I’m actually alternating blocks of classical and jazz so that the library isn’t too overwhelmingly classical for the next month or so.

As I go through the process, I have the opportunity to ask myself questions. Like: why do I have four Anonymous 4 discs? Isn’t one of them enough? In a sense, the answer is yes: they all sound the same if you aren’t listening too closely. Though if I hadn’t kept exploring the group, I wouldn’t have found their sublime Miracles of Sant’Iago, which granted is still four perfect female voices singing Renaissance music but which has much more distinctive material to work with.

But yeah, I have a lot of discs. Why? Sure, I love music, but so do my parents, and they just listen to the radio. Why do I—did I, I guess—buy so many? I read a post recently that talks about the “acquisitive nature of men.” Maybe that’s it, or maybe that’s just a convenient shorthand.

I’ve also had an opportunity to gripe, yet again, about the metadata for classical discs in the Gracenote CDDB. While most jazz data is getting pretty good—even starting to include accurate composer and recording date info, if not lists of performers—I’ve found classical discs that put the name of the composer in the title track, or the piece name in the title track and the movement in the artist.

My preferred order is to use the Grouping field for the work title, as it’s done on the iTunes Music Store, then movement in the track title, performer in the artist line, composer in the composer line (gee, what a concept). Recording date goes in the Year field. I would love to have more dates to play with, but for right now working by composer gets me where I need to go there. To display the information, I made a smart playlist, which simply chooses all music with a genre of Classical, and customized the displayed columns for the playlist so that the order is Grouping, Title, Time, Composer, Artist.

Stats at the end of ripping the last disc of the Furtwängler recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion: 9134 songs; 26 days, 5 hours, 24 seconds total time; 46.10 gigabytes. Of these, the cds ripped for the project constitute: 349 songs; 21 hours, 26 minutes, 27 seconds time; 5.81 GB. The whole library numbers include my existing library, and will probably grow dramatically until I get into the rock area, where I’ve already digitized much of the music albeit at a lower bandrate.

Very, very hungry

NY Times: In Virginia Beach, Restaurants Where the Food Moves Sideways. Probably the first time that a New York Times reviewer has darkened the door of a Chick’s Oyster Bar. Props to Mimi Sheraton (is that a real name??) for finding the restaurants in the list, referencing Beautiful Swimmers, and calling out Hatteras clam chowder, on which I was raised. Boos for missing the Duck-In, which has a lousy buffet but the finest bucket of boiled shrimp, and one of the finest views, money can buy.

Friends for dinner

Lisa and I were lucky enough to get an old friend, Daria, to join us for dinner last night. I knew Daria from my undergrad years at UVA, where she was the roommate of Caroline, a good friend in the physics program. Then I bumped into her at Sloan. In about three weeks we’ll lose Daria to the vast midwest, where she’ll be relocating to join her fianc&eacute. So we were thrilled that we finally got her to join us for dinner, and we pulled out all the stops with three experimental dishes.

Lisa made a version of a broth-based minestrone with cabbage, zucchini, carrots, onions, garlic, celery, tomato, white beans, and herbs. We jointly produced a pollo diavolo — a broiling chicken flattened, covered with crushed black peppercorns and a little salt, marinated with olive oil and lemon juice, and grilled. And the meal ended with a black cherry granita: tasty but not quite right (perhaps a little too sweet—we’ll definitely make it again and play with the proportions).

Now that Lisa is regularly traveling for business, it was nice to have the chance to collaborate in the kitchen with her on a weeknight. My only regret is there wasn’t much chicken left over. Maybe next time I’ll make two.

The CD Project commences

As a result of this past Tax-Free Weekend, I now have the hard disk space necessary to start digitizing all my CDs. (It’s a long story and involves a painful morning spent staring at the SBOD while trying to go over finances with Lisa, and my mentioning that moving my music files off my laptop would greatly free the system, as most of the slowdown appears to be in paging to and from the hard disk when there is very little free disk space. Also involves purchasing some wool carpets for the living room and stairs, but that’s a different story.)

I ended up with more of a solution than I thought, actually. The way I had been laying it out in my head, this was a two phase project with months of separation between the phases:

  1. Move most or all existing music files off the laptop to an external drive; change the music folder location to the external drive; rip CDs losslessly to external drive. Music can be played as long as external drive is physically connected to computer.
  2. Connect external drive permanently to home network, either by placing it in an enclosure that would allow for network access (turning it into NAS), or by connecting it to a new machine that would be connected permanently to the network.

Obviously there was potentially a large expense attached to the second phase, which is why I was delighted when Lisa found a gadget from D-Link that connects USB and USB 2.0 drives to the network via a 10/100 Ethernet cable. It now looks like my second phase is going to consist of taking the drive, once all the CDs are ripped, and plugging it into our hub.

The actual storage part was a 300 GB Maxtor drive and a Venus enclosure from AMSElectronics—previously recommended as a low noise enclosure with both USB 2.0 and FireWire support, and, as it happens, available off the shelf at our local MicroCenter.

I’ll post updates as I go through my collection. I can’t promise that my progress will be as artful or as quick as Fury’s—I’ll be lucky if I get more than five CDs ripped a night, at which rate my collection will be entirely transferred by Eastertime next year. I intend to take the opportunity to fill in performer, performance date, and composer information and cover art as I rip the albums, which (particularly for jazz discs) will probably take a long time.

But the first album I ripped using the lossless codec, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, went quickly—just as quickly as ripping to MP3 or AAC. The file sizes were in line with my estimates too, with the 9-minute-plus recording coming in at about 44 megabytes.

Morning Car-B-Q

Exiting the Mass Pike onto Route 30 in Framingham this morning, I smelled smoke. It was a frustratingly slow rainy commute, so at first I thought I was just smelling cranial smoke. But no: There was a car ahead with a bad smoke problem. Really bad. Can’t see inside the car because of all the smoke in the passenger cabin bad.

I passed the car as the driver was getting out. He was running around to the front of the car, which, I noted with some alarm, now featured flames starting to lick out from around the edges of the hood. And he was trying to open the hood.

I called 911, of course, and went on my way. But it made me think: Darwin Award candidate. If you can actually see flames coming out of your engine compartment, do you:

  1. Run like hell
  2. Stay a safe distance away from the car and wait for the fire department
  3. Risk burning your hands and a fireball in your face to open the hood

I know which one I wouldn’t choose.

—Incidentally, the title is the word that would inevitably be used in the radio traffic report back in Washington DC any time that a car fire occurred, and it always creeped me out. Because on the one hand, I could visualize people hurt and thousands of dollars worth of damage, and then at the same time … barbecue! So I just had to inflict that little piece of mental damage on my loving readers this morning. Happy Monday.

QTN™: Oud Beersel, Oude Geueze Vielle

I’ve been holding onto this one since my first pilgrimage to Downtown Wine and Spirits. My favorite kind of beer on the planet (very broadly speaking) is Belgian, and my favorite Belgian beer style is geueze, the amazingly complex melding of young and old lambics in one wild-yeast-fermented mouth bomb. And, as of this writing, my favorite geueze might be the Oude Geueze Vielle from the Brouwerij Oud Beersel.

What to say about such a complex beer? The nose is peppery with citrus overtones, with deeper notes of earth. The flavor is a little sweet immediately followed by a yeasty sour depth, with the lingering carbonation picking up the flavor and brightening it again. It’s all in perfect balance, and spectacularly tasty. Almost as refreshing as a Flemish red, but with a bready aftertaste that inevitably recalls Champagne—fitting, as Michael Jackson calls beers in this style “the Champagnes of the beer world.”

Lisa tried a little of this and said, “Wow. That’s different. Save me some.” I regretfully complied, though not without severe temptation.

I tasted this with a non-traditional food accompaniment—a platter of burnt ends and pulled pork from Blue Ribbon Bar-B-Q. Somewhat to my surprise, it was a great combination, the sweetness and smokiness of the meat playing perfectly against the breadiness of the beer, and the vinegar in the greens joustling happily against the tartness of the geueze. Belgian beers may not replace sweet tea at Southern roadhouses anytime soon, but they may well at my table from now on.

North End boom

low tech google map hack showing north end buildings reported to be affected by underground explosions. the map pin is where we used to live.

As in “kaboom.” A pretty good roundup of this week’s underground fires and manhole explosions at Universal Hub—three this week—turns up personal observations from Catherine, Marianne Mancusi, Jeremi Karnell, Kristen, and Ron Newman. The Boston Globe article suggests that a fault in a buried electrical cable is to blame.

From the locations mentioned in the article, Lisa and I would probably have been affected if we were still in our North Street apartment (our apartment was where the Google Maps pin is in the photo).

Incidentally, that there were five bloggers who were personally affected by this is still nothing short of amazing to me. I think that three years ago I was probably the only blogger in the neighborhood.

Mmmm, bacon

The Bacon Show. “ONE BACON RECIPE PER DAY, EVERY DAY, FOREVER.” Um, subscribed.

Via Metafilter, where there are some really alarming links in response, including the Baconoff, a competitive bacon-eating contest party. Surely they can’t mean “each round is one package of bacon” each, can they?

New phone, new challenges

My new Sony Ericsson S710a arrived yesterday, after a three week wait (oy—for anyone who’s playing along, this is the drawback for ordering mobile phone service from Amazon). I plugged it in and let it charge overnight, and started setting it up this morning. First impressions: the phone is much shorter but just about as thick as my old Nokia. The screen is better, but the keys feel more sluggish—though online forums suggest that there are firmware updates that may address the latter problem.

iSync works well, though I get a spurious message at the end of the sync that “Device memory is full.” I have all my contacts and calendar info on the phone, though, which is A Good Thing. The Bluetooth range also appears to be much better than on the old phone.

A few drawbacks. I can’t find a way to send more than one photo from the phone via Bluetooth at a time—though given how long it took me to figure out how to do it on the Nokia, I’m somewhat unconcerned about this right now. I also wish that the screen wouldn’t completely shut off in Standby mode; I have gotten used to using my mobile as a watch, since the Nokia displayed the time on the screen at all times the phone was on. To get the time I have to press a button. Not the end of the world, but less inconspicuous. I also hate the animated wallpaper and will be changing that at the earliest opportunity—ditto the startup sounds.

The real test, though, will be the reception. So far it appears that reception is better at our house, but I won’t know for sure until I start making calls.

And you thought “Cluck-U” was bad

Boing Boing: There’s a restaurant in Japan called “Chicken Pecker.” As Xeni says, ’nuff said. Except that these sorts of restaurant names seem to be not uncommon.

From DC up at least as far north as Newark, there is a chain of greasy fried chicken shops called “Cluck-U” that’s frighteningly good (their “traditional recipe” uses honey, which doesn’t concur with any tradition this nominal Southerner is aware of, but it’s tasty, yo). And, further afield from the chicken area, Bellevue, WA sports the charmingly named What the Pho’, which sells Vietnamese noodle dishes.

Vale Audioscrobbler, ave Last.fm

As a sometime user of Audioscrobbler who frequently forgets that the service has a web site, I visited Audioscrobbler.com yesterday and got the surprising message that “Audioscrobbler has evolved,” along with a pointer to Last.fm. Now that the site has gotten over the transition, it looks like the merged site represents an update of the old Audioscrobbler look and feel and tighter integration of the Last.fm functionality.

The new site is still a bit slow, alas (not that Audioscrobbler.com was a speed demon). But it’s usable, and you can visit my profile page to see what I’ve been listening to (newly relevant since I installed the plugin here at the office) or even add me as a friend. Hey, I have to know more than two other people who use the service…

Sun, sand, and sprouts

lisa on the boardwalk with boo

I finally got around to posting pictures from our trip three weeks ago to Cape Cod. For the record, while it was nice to be able to have the dogs with us, we have decided that closer beaches are better. Lisa and I tried out Marblehead two weeks ago and liked it, and she took her parents to Crane Island this past weekend and liked it even better. So we’ll see.

The other pictures in the album are of the flowers that we have finally succeeded in growing where the awful hedge used to be around our house. In particular, I took a bunch of photos of our gladioli, in honor of my mother and her birthday on Monday (the gladiolus happens to be her favorite flower, and I sent a bunch to her—alas, not from our beds!).

The photo album is also accessible from the Gallery.

Beyond the Mozart effect

This joke was current a few months ago—it was even in the chorus newsletter immediately prior to the BSO’s Mahler performance—but it bears repeating:

You’ve heard of the Mozart Effect, i.e., listening to Mozart increases one’s spatial IQ. BUT, have you heard of the …

LISZT EFFECT: Child speaks rapidly and extravagantly, but never really says anything important.

BRUCKNER EFFECT: Child speaks very slowly and repeats himself frequently. Gains reputation for profundity.

WAGNER EFFECT: Child becomes a megalomaniac. May eventually marry his sister.

MAHLER EFFECT: Child continually screams — at great length and volume — that he’s dying.

SCHOENBERG EFFECT: Child never repeats a word until he’s used all the other words in his vocabulary. Sometimes talks backwards. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child blames them for their inability to understand him.

BABBITT EFFECT: Child gibbers nonsense all the time. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child doesn’t care because all his playmates think he’s cool.

IVES EFFECT: the child develops a remarkable ability to carry on several separate conversations at once.

GLASS EFFECT: the child tends to repeat himself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

STRAVINSKY EFFECT: the child is prone to savage, guttural and profane outbursts that often lead to fighting and pandemonium in the preschool.

BRAHMS EFFECT: the child is able to speak beautifully as long as his sentences contain a multiple of three words (3, 6, 9, 12, etc). However, his sentences containing 4 or 8 words are strangely uninspired.

And then, of course, the Cage Effect — child says nothing for 4 minutes, 33 seconds. Preferred by 9 out of 10 classroom teachers.

A few extras from Mangan’s Miscellany:

Schumann Effect: Child develops bipolar disorder.

Lutoslawski Effect: Child becomes expert craps player.

Berwald Effect: Child develops a huge passion, works at it his whole life, then falls into complete obscurity.

And a few more from The Llama Butchers:

Hovhaness Effect: Child grows to be very spiritual, attracted to Eastern religions. Also has pyromaniac tendencies.

Gluck Effect: Child will be brilliant but inconsistent. Probably will be a fortune-hunting party reptile.

Rossini Effect: Child will be lazy as hell but a lot of fun.

Bach Effect: Child will overawe you with the the depth of his self-expression and do a bang-up job balancing your checkbook. Stand by for a lot of grandchildren.

Lully Effect: Please keep child away from sharp objects.

And, finally, from The Muse at Sunset:

Meyerbeer effect: Child says wildly popular things which no one can remember later.

Chopin effect: Child coughs constantly.

Schumann effect: Child speaks in poetry, then tries to drown himself

Gesualdo effect: Child speaks cryptically, dresses in black, carries a bloody axe

Gershwin effect: Child tries to speak Ebonics, is never quite convincing

Hugo Wolff effect: Child speaks about the meaninglessness of life and the futility of love, then goes mad

Prokofiev Effect: Child speaks wildly and brilliantly, with a huge vocabulary. But… was he being serious?

Berlioz effect: Child takes opium and speaks REALLY LOUDLY

Debussy effect: Child can’t talk, but loves pictures

Faure effect: Child’s speech is too refined and elegant to be heard by coarse and insensitive persons

Henry Cowell effect: child speaks in clusters of words.

Harry Partch effect: child makes up all his own words.

Fred Himebaugh effect: All the child’s vowels have umlauts.