I had planned to update this blog tonight – something which is long overdue, considering that I managed to update it just about every day in January and a good many in February – but I got home from work, practiced my tuba (something else that was long overdue), started watching some Netflix, and generally lost track of time.

I’ve got rehearsal tomorrow night, so don’t expect much in the way of an update then, either.  Maybe Wednesday.

By way of catching you all up, I played with the band at the closing ceremonies of the Southeast Regional Tuba & Euphonium Convention in Chattanooga on Saturday – I’ll try to get some pictures up (maybe even a video) when I next update this.  The main story from that event was – who else? – Bob.  He decided near the end of the dress rehearsal that the band was taking too much time rehearsing….so he walked out, and took one of his minions with him.

You heard that right.  He left 10 minutes before we were done rehearsing because, according to him, “it didn’t look very professional” for us to be having a dress rehearsal so close to the start of the closing ceremonies.  Apparently, it looks more professional to the few people who had straggled into the auditorium to see 50% of the band’s tuba section walk out of rehearsal.

Betsy Jones and I floated a petition around to see about having him officially censured by the board or made to apologize to the band or something.  Maybe nothing will happen, but I’m bound and determined to have the board at least discuss the incident so that it will be written up in the minutes.

Walking out of a dress rehearsal?  Are you kidding me?

The concert itself seemed to go okay, though we had a near-disaster during the first number – Candide (had it lasted 5 more seconds, I fear that we would have had to stop in the middle of the piece).  Interestingly, that was the piece that Bob decided not to rehearse with us….

I also spent some time at the confederate cemetery while I was in Chatty, and will hopefully get some of those pictures up here, too.

And now, friends and neighbors, I’m going to shut off my light and try to get some sleep.

TWD

“A-ha moments.”

We’ve all had them, right?  You’re trying to figure out the answer to some problem, usually a difficult one, and the answer will suddenly come to you in a flash of insight.  I’ve had my share of those types of “difficult” solutions, usually in the context of trying to figure out a particularly brain-draining piece of code.  Many times the answers came to me in dreams; which I’ve learned, from talking with other programmers, is a fairly common occurrence.  There’s even a website out there named Dream In Code that I visit fairly regularly when looking for answers to problems that I’m having.

I also have very different, incredibly stupid, “a-ha moments.”  What I mean is that I am prone to suddenly realize things that should be completely obvious to a person who has paid any attention to life.  These are the moments in my life that make me want to come up with a new word, somewhat like “bittersweet,” but not quite.  It would be a word that expresses incredible relief and excitement while at the same time evoking the spirit of “Dammit!  Why didn’t anybody tell me this?”

The most amazing moment of this type that I’ve experienced is probably one that I’ve told to a lot of you who are privy to this blog.  It occurred at the end of my junior year in high school.  It was when I learned what a valedictorian is.  It was when I learned, for the first time, that that “permanent record” that everyone was always talking about was an actual thing.  Prior to that moment, when my friend Mark suggested that he and I go to the school’s career counselor and find out what our class ranking was, I had absolutely no idea that I was actually being ranked against my classmates.  I was familiar with the concept of Grade Point Average, but I’d never dreamed that it was a cumulative thing and that people actually kept track of it.
Prior to that moment, I carried about a C- average in high school.  After I learned about it, I pretty much blew the minds of everyone who’d ever known me by blasting through my senior year with about a 4.5 GPA – the highest of any senior in the class.  All because of an “a-ha moment” that I probably never should have had.

I majored in sociology because of another fantastically stupid oversight on my part.  I’d wanted to major in anthropology – preferably physical anthropology (the cool kind where you get to dig up skeletons and stuff), so I took every anthropology class there was.  When it came time to declare my major, I matter-of-factly told my faculty advisor (who was also the guy teaching most of my anthropology courses) that I wanted my B.A. in anthropology.

He then matter-of-factly told ME that Furman didn’t have an anthropology major and that all of those classes that I’d taken fell under the sociology umbrella.

So I got a B.A. in sociology.

Well, today I had another mind-blowingly stupid “a-ha moment,” based mainly on a conversation that I overheard between Betsy Jones and one of her euphonium students last Friday.  I’m not sure exactly what they were talking about, but at some point she mentioned that she didn’t like to teach “don’t puff out your cheeks” when you play, but preferred to teach “keep the corners of your mouth firm” (the end result being that your cheeks can’t really puff out).

In retrospect, I guess I must’ve known – on some level – that maintaining firm corners on my embouchure is important; but until this afternoon, when I was once again struggling with that insipid flutter-tone, I’d never thought about it or concentrated on it or really felt it.

And in 40 years of playing brass, nobody’s ever actually said to me, “Keep the corners firm.”

So while struggling today and getting more and more frustrated with my inability to consistently play a D without flutter, that remnant of a conversation between Betsy and her student inexplicably swooped through my head, and I concentrated on the corners of my mouth.

And, voila!  The flutter went away.

It went away on the D.  It went away in the high range, the mid range, the low range.  It went away regardless of whether I was slurring or tonguing.   It went away at fortissimo and it went away at pianissimo.

It.  Just.  Freaking.  Went.  Away.

I noticed that when I stopped concentrating on the corners and started concentrating on the notes, it came back.  And when I stopped concentrating on the notes and started concentrating on the corners it went away again.

I realized that my face looked exactly like the faces of other people who I’ve watched playing their horns, and I realized that my face had never looked like that when I was playing before.

And I noticed that, after about 20 minutes of really focusing on maintaining firm corners, the muscles around my jaw were aching.  But I still wasn’t fluttering.

When I was growing up, I pretty much taught myself how to play, and I did it in a way that worked for me.  I guess when I was younger, I had enough natural ….. what?  Talent?  Flexibility?  Luck? …. to play pretty well without knowing the fundamentals.  Over the last 10 years, I’ve figured out that that isn’t working for me anymore.

In a nutshell, I’ve got to learn a new way of playing…..but now I know what I’ve been doing wrong.

I’m hoping this is like my senior year in high school all over again.  Time will tell.

Thank you, Betsy.

TWD

Isn’t that how March is supposed to make its entrance or something?  If so, it’s a fairly sated lion.  The weather has been remarkable over the last few days, with the exception of a few hours on Monday evening, when basically the entire southern United States was under a tornado watch.  We got some nice wind and a few strong rainstorms, but it blew over and everything’s been pretty perfect since then.

I made some progress at rewriting queries on Monday and then took the day off on Tuesday.  Not for any particular reason other than the fact that it was a nice day and I didn’t want to go to work.  I spent the day watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on netflix and cleaning up around the house.  Also made some macaroni and cheese – and had brass band rehearsal, of course.

A squirrel outside of my bedroom window on Tuesday afternoon

The rehearsal went fairly well, although the baritone section  – minus Betsy Jones, who was auditioning in Virginia – left a lot to be desired.  One thing I’ll say for playing in the tenor horn section: I can hear a lot more of the band from its center than I could from the back row (in the tuba section).

Speaking of tubas, I figured that I’d neglected mine for long enough this evening and practiced  – mostly scales, long tones, and a few etudes – until my face was about to fall off.  I still haven’t figured out what the deal is with the 3rd-line D (I may never figure it out, as the insipid flutter-tone has been going on for over 10 years now), but I spent the last 20 minutes of my practice by slamming into and around the D as hard and fast as I could.  As things transpired, I began to get very solid on the D….and the flutter-tone crap moved to the B and C.  There has to be a physical reason for this, but I just don’t know what it is.  I never had this problem before I put the horn down for 5 years in the late 80s, and I never really noticed it until it began to become a liability in some quintet literature in the mid-late 90s.

Had my annual review on Monday and received, as expected, a rating of “Meets and May Exceed Expectations.”  That has got to be the stupidest rating ever devised, and I’ve gotten it every year for the last 12.  Either I *did* exceed expectations or I did *not* exceed them.  What is this “May Exceed” garbage?  At any rate, it was good enough to merit a 3.09% increase in my salary, which is by far the biggest raise I’ve gotten since I started working at BellSouth in 1999.  I’ll take it.

We also got our bonus figures on Monday, and I’m not complaining about mine at all.  The economy may be in the toilet, but apparently ATT did pretty well last year.

TWD

Sunset Hill Cemetery, Valdosta

So I spent last Friday in Valdosta in order to catch Betsy’s faculty recital on euph and baritone.  I started off the morning by sitting in with her studio class and trying to do 45 minutes or so of “The Breathing Gym,” which is a video put together by a couple of really good tubists and consists of exercises designed to teach musicians how to breathe effectively.  Seems like a good program if practiced regularly.

Sunset Hill Cemetery, Valdosta

After that, Betsy had to teach her regular lessons, so I took off to entertain myself in the rain.  I spent a bit of time in a cemetery near the school, then grabbed some lunch, waited for the sun to come out (it did eventually), and went back to the cemetery.  The stones weren’t all that interesting, but the trees – dripping with Spanish Moss – made for great photography.

Sunset Hill Cemetery, Valdosta

The recital itself went really well for Betsy, but no so great for her student quintet.  Apparently, the guy playing the 1st trumpet part doesn’t do a lot of practicing (or at least didn’t practice his part for the recital piece much), and it showed.  Overall, however, the performance was worth the drive; and I had a great time listening to a wide range of euphonium music and taking pictures – stills and video.  Once I’ve had a chance to synch my video up with the official audio recording, I’ll put some of the tunes up on YouTube.

Yesterday, I drove home and basically did nothing.  I took a nap immediately upon arriving at home, then went grocery shopping, had dinner, and went back to bed.

As you might have deduced, this was during the rehearsal for the recital.

I took this during the recital by shooting through a crack in the acoustical shells.

See that mute on the chair?  It got used for about 2 measures.  I think the composer just wanted to mess with the performer’s head.

This shot was from just off-stage.  The bottom half of it is obscured by the piano top.  I like it.

Looks pretty proud of herself, doesn’t she?  I guess she’s entitled.  Well done, Betsy.

Today is beautiful – high 60s and sunny – and I feel somewhat guilty for still being in bed (it’s 11:30 am).  I’ll probably try to get out and about at some point.

I successfully dealt with a coding problem today that had me completely flummoxed for about 24 hours.  In a nutshell, I was asked to take an existing report, which contained a chart, and break it down into 5 separate reports which would add up to the whole.  It was requested that I put each of the separate reports into tabs on a single page, such that the user could click on a tab and see, for example, all of the information for “Group A,” and click a different tab for “Group B” and so on.  Each report was to be laid out exactly as every other report.

Gravestone near my Sylco, TN, campsite

No problem, right?  That’s what I thought, too.  I just added some url variables to the existing report so that the underlying queries would be limited by that variable.  Took about 10 minutes, and I could call any of the 5 reports and they would display perfectly.

Until I put them into a tabbed framework.  At that point, the chart – which is about 85% of the report – stopped showing up on any except the first tab.  I fought with this stupid problem for just about all of yesterday and a good portion of today, trying different tab layouts, different variable combinations, different underlying pages, different chart libraries…

I spent a lot of time on Google.   I was about ready to just give up and tell the client that I couldn’t do the tabs.

Then I got a brainstorm – I changed the name of the underlying query based on the variable that was received in the URL.

Bingo.  It took some additional tweaking to make things work out, but in the end I figured out that the chart, which is created by javascript, had to have different names for every variable in every instance of itself.

Success is sweet at times.

Saturday night campfire, Sylco, TN

After work, I got home and realized that I’ve more or less neglected my tuba for the last week; so I practiced, on and off, for about 2.5 hours.  When it got to the point that I was physically unable to play anything above a 2nd-line F, I decided that I’d worked myself enough.  That was about 30 minutes ago.

Tomorrow at work, I’ll just be rewriting some old queries for my PM (the data was coming from an Oracle database and it’s been moved to a MySQL one, so all of the reports have basically stopped working).  That should take up most of the day and be a fairly relaxing, non-thinking, type of thing.  If I get time, I’ll watch a couple of the stupid training videos that I have to watch.

I’ve taken Friday off in order to go see Betsy Jones give a faculty recital on her euphonium at Valdosta State University.  I’m not sure about the rest of the weekend.  There’s a possibility that I’ll stay in Valdosta on Friday and head to Savannah on Saturday, but nothing’s really set in stone.

Rehearsal with the band went okay last night (on alto horn).  I spent some time last week working with the horn, playing Arban studies and long tones and generally not looking at the actual band music at all.  I’m more concerned with tone and intonation than anything else at this point.

I like playing.  Wish I’d figured that out 25 years ago.

TWD

Campsite at Sylco

It got quite cool last night.  I don’t know exactly what the temperature was, but I was forced to actually zip up my sleeping bag – which I hate doing – at some point during the night.  I woke up at around 7:00 this morning, cleaned up my area and drank coffee for about an hour, and then made the trek back to Duluth, arriving home at about 11:00 this morning.

Waterfall near Jax Creek, on the GA side of the mountain

The weather in Atlanta has been beautiful for several days, and I decided yesterday that I haven’t gone camping in far too long, so after work I threw some basic supplies – and my long-unused camp kitchen – into the car and hit the road for one of my favorite car-camping spots, Sylco Campground. After a few hours on the road (and my trip was made about 15 minutes longer by the police department of White County, GA…54 in a 40), I arrived at my chosen spot and set up my tent in the dark.

It’s currently about 9:30 Saturday morning. I woke up at 4 this morning and the moon was so bright inside my tent that I thought it was about 8 and overcast. Once I figured out that it was still the middle of the night, I went back to sleep (and sleeping was wonderful), not to wake again until 8:45.

So far this morning, I’ve gotten things organized, gathered a bunch of firewood and made a pot of coffee. The sun came up over the mountain about 30 minutes and, by all indications, including my weather radio – it is going to be a glorious day to be in the middle of nowhere by myself.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

1:30 Saturday afternoon. I just got back from an easy 2-hour walk along the Sylco trail, during which I discovered an old graveyard that I never knew was here. The stones were mostly from the late 19th and early 20th century, though there was one from the early 1800’s as well as a number of uncarved markers that might have been older. The residents seemed to be members of three or four families – probably those who farmed the land around here 100 years ago.

Also found some bear poop, which is always fun.

I first discovered Sylco on a Memorial Day weekend in about 2003. During that weekend, I’d planned on going to a large campground nearby called Chillowhee, but it was completely packed. I spotted a sign near Cleveland, TN, for Sylco; and after what seemed an interminable drive up a twisty, bumpy, scary mountain road, I nearly drove past it.

Sylco is a fairly primitive camping area – in fact, I’ve often opted to just pull off the road and set up camp rather than stay at the campground proper – which is comprised of about 8 picnic tables and fire rings spread over about 2 acres along Old Highway 2 between GA and TN. In addition to the tables, there’s a pit toilet, which – I don’t care who you are – is a nice amenity.

At any rate, before my walk, I watched as 3 folks parked across the street and unloaded 3 horses. While they did this, I entertained their two dogs, Laser and Hobo, who brought me a stick and insisted that I throw it for them. Over and over and over.

Cute puppies, but they left with their owners, who rode off on the horses shortly before I went on walkabout and who have yet to return.

As I’ve been typing this, a family of three has started to set up camp about 100 yards away from me, and one if them is scrambling around looking for wood. Glad I took care of that this morning.

More later.

Got a nice fire going after typing, then made some hot dogs and munched pretzels while reading. The folks who’d come in near me were just here to roast marshmallows and they left after 45 minutes, but another couple showed up shortly thereafter and set up a tent across the road by the horse trailer.

A few minutes ago (it’s about 4:45), the horse people rode back to their camp, loaded up the horses and dogs, and summarily left. So now it’s just me and the new folks.

It has gotten chilly now that the sun has gone behind the mountain. I’ve had to put the legs back on my pants, roll down my sleeves, and I recently put on a jacket.

Still, it’s very quiet and peaceful here, and my fire is doing a great job keeping the chill away.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone



I bought the cats some new toys a couple of months ago.  This is where they decided to keep them.



This is common sense stuff.  I used to laugh that anybody would actually have to be taught something that’s so blatantly obvious.  If I’m going to reboot a server, I tell everyone who uses that server what’s about to happen, and I make damned sure that I can route everyone to a backup server if, for some reason, the original one doesn’t come back online.

Damned if it didn’t work.


This dog sits on the roof of the sextant’s office at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon

Making this particularly annoying for me was the fact that my football website has been experiencing a lot of spam traffic and other problems and I really wanted to install some new security patches on it and tweak some of the code. My office has FTP services locked down, so I was counting on working on the website from the house.  Instead, I had to keep responding to emails (on my iPhone) about how the website was getting slower and slower and logging people out and yada yada yada, and there was nothing that I could do about it before last night (which is why I didn’t get a blog entry typed up last night).

I managed to get everything working okay on the site last night and today (I can do some things from the office) – which is a good thing, because, for reasons that I have not been able to determine, my iPhone’s battery went completely dead this afternoon.  So dead that, when I plugged it into my computer to charge, the computer didn’t even recognize it for about 20 minutes.  Now, this phone was fully charged when I left the house this morning – as it always is – and for it to totally die like that in less than 6 hours is troubling.  I just got the stupid thing about three months ago.  So, I’ll be keeping an eye on it.  Maybe I accidentally had the camera running while the phone was in its holster.  I just don’t know.

At work today, I got basically nothing done.  Oh wait – I got this blog entry typed up.  That’s something, right?

Today’s pictures are things that I have on my work laptop.

Near the summit of Myrtle Hill Cemetery

As the title of this entry would suggest, I got out and about this weekend and had a nice time playing with my camera while exploring some new (and some familiar) places.  Both yesterday and today were beautiful days to be outside, and I took advantage of sunshine and warm temperatures and had one of the nicest weekends I’ve had in quite some time.

Yesterday, I left early and headed up to Rome, GA, to visit Myrtle Hill Cemetery.  A quick Google search of this place yields the following, accurate, summary:

Monument to (I think) Nathan Bedford Forrest at the top of Myrtle Hill

One of the most beautiful cemeteries in the nation sits atop Myrtle Hill at the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula Rivers. Offering an unimpeded view of downtown Rome, Georgia, to the northeast, the Etowah Valley to the east, and the Appalachian foothills to the south, the cemetery boasts spectacular vistas and historic significance which combine to make it one of the most unique in the world, and a “must see” stop on the Blue and Gray Trail.

As promised, the views from the cemetery are incredible.  Good enough so that I almost didn’t feel terrified while looking through my viewfinder at graves and realizing that there were 200-foot drops immediately behind me.  The monuments in the cemetery are also quite interesting, and the sky – an amazing cerulean color boasting a very bright morning sun – added some great contrast to my shots.

I spent probably three hours at Myrtle Hill before heading back towards Atlanta.  I took a roundabout way home, stopping first at the Georgia National Cemetery (a truly boring place), after which I took a side road looking for the Sweetwater State Park.  The campground was closed, but I found an interesting little cemetery near it and spent another hour looking for shots there.  It is called, I believe, the Fields Chapel United Methodist Cemetery, and one of my favorite shots from yesterday came from there.

Betsy and I test out my wireless shutter release

Got to bed fairly early last night, but woke up for no reason at around 1:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep.  I must have been giving off vibes, because Chris called me about 5 minutes after I woke up and we talked until close to 3:00 this morning.  I finally fell asleep at around 4:30, then got up two hours later to tend to the cats.  At about 9:00, I decided that I wasn’t going to sleep, and so went grocery shopping and had a massive breakfast at a buffet near the grocery store.

Euphoniumist extraordinaire.  You wouldn’t believe the sound this horn made coming off of that crypt.

After I got home, I got an invitation from Betsy Jones to join her at Rose Hill Cemetery and take some shots of her with her euphonium – she’s headed back to school this year and needs some publicity shots, I guess.  Since it was a gorgeous day and Rose Hill is one of my favorite places, I headed down to Macon and spent all afternoon goofing around there before Betsy treated me to sushi and hot chocolate (not at the same time) and I ended up getting back home at around 9:00 tonight.

Not sure what’s planned for work this week, but I’m actually sort of optimistic about it.  I made some good strides with jQuery last week and am looking forward to seeing what else I can do with it.  Also hope to jump back into Android development, which I’ve pretty much abandoned for the last month.

We shall see how it goes.

TWD

Yes, indeedy.  We got a dusting of snow around Atlanta last night – enough to be noticeable when I left for work this morning, but it was mostly gone by mid-afternoon.  Work today began with a lot of promise – I finished up a couple of projects that had been shoved at me Tuesday – but ended with a whimper when I completely lost interest in coding and started reading about how to build a tilt-shift lens using an old medium-format lens, a plunger, and some glue.  Then I spent even more time reading about tilt-shifting in general – how it works, what happens to depth of field, etc.  Fascinating stuff, but I got nothing done in terms of work.  Maybe I’ll have more energy tomorrow.

New Hope Cemetery Dunwoody, GA

I practiced my tuba tonight for the first time in close to a week.  Sounded okay.  I’ll take it.  Now I’m looking around for a trumpet method book so I can dig into the tenor horn a bit more seriously.

I’ve been trying to figure out something interesting to do this weekend.  Chris and Betsy are pretty much booked, and I’m really jonesing to go someplace where I can take some decent photos.  I’ve read that there’s a pretty cemetery in Rome, GA, so I could drive up there and check it out; but I’ve also got this weird idea in my head to find some “ghost towns” around the state and visit them.  I know where a couple of them are between where I live and Dahlonega, GA (site of the country’s first gold rush), and I’ve read about a couple more within a 2-3 hour drive.  I’m just not sure how interesting they’ll be.  I mean, if there are actually abandoned building there are stuff, that’d be completely cool, but if it’s just foundations, well…

There’s also the possibility of going to a beach somewhere.  Savannah has a cemetery that I’ve wanted to see for years, and the weather down there on Saturday is supposed to be amazing.  Jekyll Island, GA, is always a fun place to visit.  The coast of SC is only about a 5-hour drive.

Or I could grab a tent, a lantern and some food and go find myself a nice quiet piece of forest somewhere – though it might be a bit chilly in the mountains this weekend.

Nothing’s going to happen anyway if my renter doesn’t give me some cash tomorrow.  I got carried away on my bills earlier this week and overpaid a few of them – effectively leaving me broke until next payday.  Oh yeah – my property taxes went up again last year, so my escrow payments also went up (about $75 more a month).  Oh, joy.

Am hoping to get to bed pretty early tonight, so I guess I’ll slap a picture in here and call it good.

TWD