Might as well kick this thing 
off with a few explanations. Why am I doing this again? What is Graceful Chaos? What is that weird green logo? What’s with the photo of a photo on a wall? And where did that stupid URL originate?
Have no fear. I shall endeavor to provide satisfactory answers for each of those questions. If I can’t, then sue me. It’s my website, and I can do what I want. I’m an American. I have the right to be an idiot if I so choose. Says so right there in The Constitution or The Bible or The Catcher in the Rye or one of those books that starts with the word “The”.
So why am I doing this again? Why not? I told Dad I was thinking about firing up a blog (or revisiting one of the old ones) to entertain him and myself. And I’ve had a spare domain just sitting out there on a server in Arizona doing nothing for the last year, so I thought I could kill a couple of birds with one sniper-like shotgun blast. Anyway, I started playing around with the unused domain a while ago – and recently renewed it for a few years as a kind of catch-all for my stuff – so I installed WordPress on it.
And then I reached my limit for reading political garbage on Facebook and nuked my account there. Sorry. It was just making me angry all the time and I saw no need for that. Maybe I’ll sign up again after the election. In any case, I’ve got a blog again. And I’m not wasting time on Facebook, so maybe I’ll keep it updated.
Graceful Chaos. Believe it or not, I put some thought into that, and I’m still not satisfied with it. It might change if I can come up with a one-word description for something which I can’t believe doesn’t already have one. See, my favorite style of music, by far, has no name. It’s a combination of styles, really. Paul Lovatt Cooper writes a lot of it (I’ve considered both Lovattetto and Cooperando) as did Paul Hindemith (maybe it’s a Paul thing??). Basically, a simple theme is stated somewhere, gets lost for a while, and then comes back as the central flowing theme layered over the top (or underneath) a riot of technical, usually presto, counterpoints. This type of thing happens a lot in brass band music, which may explain why I love it.
Example (indulge me): Philip Sparke’s Tallis Variations is based, not surprisingly, on a very simple theme by Thomas Tallis. Yes, I know that Ralph Vaugham Williams used the same thing for his Fantasy on a Theme by Tallis. Focus, people. I’m talking about brass bands, not orchestras. Moving on. It’s an extremely simple theme (it is, in fact, Tallis’ Third Mode Melody, which you can see here if you’d like: Third Mode Melody).
Sparke takes this hymn, states it early, and then goes about doing what Sparke does, which is blowing up brass players’ faces for 10 minutes. “Cornets, play lots of 16th notes. Horns, go fox hunting or something. Euphs, play etudes. Snare – I need shock accents! Tubas, oompah your guts out. Flugel..are you drunk again? Play like you’re drunk. Now, everybody do all of that together. Oh yeah – bones, take the melody and make it pretty.”
The result winds up being something like this (courtesy of the Yorkshire Building Society Band):
https://youtu.be/svI-wYQ6lpY?t=770
You see how that works? Simple melody. Played strongly. On a bed of spaghetti.
I love that shit! And there isn’t a term for it! It is, therefore, my duty to come up with one. Also, since it is widely known at my workplace that I am able to remain calm when everything is falling apart, Graceful Chaos seems like a decent interim name for my blog.
Understand that the reason I remain calm is because I really don’t care about the things that are falling apart. It’s just a job, after all.
The green logo thing (an original TWD, entitled Rawr!) also fits the theme. It is a monster. It’s lifting weights. It’s on a fluorescent green background. It’s got pointy teeth. It’s wearing a sort of argyle/plaid sweater. It’s chaotic. But I drew it during an outage meeting at three o’clock in the morning a few years ago and the act of doing so kept me calm.
It was at around the same time that I superimposed the glamour shot of myself into an art gallery. Why did I include that picture in this post? No idea. I wanted a picture to break up the text and that’s the first one I found on my laptop.
Lastly, what’s up with the funky address for this page? Migration? What’s that all about?
Long story as short as possible. I got TheUFFP and wrote stuff for it. It was on a Windows server. Then I wanted to upgrade lots of the stuff and put everything on Linux, so I got UFFP2. I’d planned to move everything back under TheUFFP name at some point, but as more and more went into UFFP2, that became a bit of a hassle. Logically, I should have dumped TheUFFP. Except that I’ve had @theuffp email addresses for nearly 20 years and doing away with the domain name would have been amazingly painful. So I kept it with nothing on it. Until I was informed that the hosting account tied to the TheUFFP domain was moving to a different server and I had to move everything.
Well, there WASN’T anything in the hosting account. It had all been moved the UFFP2 or deleted. But, since it was such a huge hassle for other domains on the same server – the ones that had websites attached to them – I got a free hosting account for a year, and all I had to do to make it work was name it something other than TheUFFP.com. So I named it Migration.TheUFFP.com.
Because it was, you know, migrating.
Since this is just an experimental site – a place where I can test code, store databases, post photos, etc. – I don’t really want people to just stumble into it. Sure, some robots will find it eventually; but, realistically, if I don’t give out the domain name, normal people won’t find it.
And if they do, I’ll just delete all of their comments and lock things down. I have the power.
I like that.
Anyway, welcome aboard. I guess this thing’s live now.
TWD