Lost weekend
With Marisa gone I tried to sleep in Saturday. No go: I forgot to shut down the clock we used to wake us at 3:30 Thursday morning! This broken sleep really messed me up for the day...and I ended up with a headache I couldn't shake until Sunday night (thanks to a couple of headache pills).
Once I was awake Saturday morning I spent about 3 hours shaving, showering and fixing/eating breakfast. I really was a wreck and needed to work a little to get back to some sort of normal.
Finally I got outside to go to the post office and pick up some things from the Goodwill.
I got 4 ceramic popcorn containers and a tall ceramic mug. The mug was just the right size to hold the "homeless" utensils (the ones orphaned in the falling dishes incident earlier in the week).
Tried out one of the popcorn containers when I watched The Matrix for the first time on DVD (the first time was in the theatre). Before I saw the film I viewed a "making of" short which I found fascinating: this film really did some very groundbreaking things and the cast and crew is to be commended for their efforts and innovation.
Just because a film has great effort doesn't mean it is a great film, but the effort paid off. There is not one wasted frame of film and no holes in logic. In the short someone said this was not only science fiction but an adventure. I add two more genres: thriller and romance. Even if it had none of these things, it surely had style and originality.
Well, I guess not that original. It was based on some Japanese anime, which the Wachowski Brothers freely admit. However, they took it to a new level.
As to the popcorn containers: not as good as the huge popcorn ceramic bowl that was made useless in the falling dishes incident. I need a scoop to transfer the popcorn from a big bowl (I used a colander) into the containers. As it was I found it easier to eat right out of the colander, except the colander leaked bits of corn onto my lap!
Also on Saturday broke up some hour-long wav files I had recorded off-air 6 years ago! I got most of two hours split, saved, edited and ordered so that I could enjoy singer/pianist Robert Hicks and clarinetist Mort Weiss in their sets at the 25th Annual Cathedral Park Jazz Festival. The festival was aired live on our local jazz station, KMHD. The announcers had an annoying habit of stepping on the first couple of bars from each song. I had no choice but to edit out those beginning notes: it was either that or leave out the selections entirely.
Sunday morning I did sleep well and did not have contend with cleaning myself up. I just had a relaxed morning with that annoying headache along for the ride.
I was driven to finish off the work I started on the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival and spent a while checking the web for information about the performers from 2005. Google did not help me a lot. There is very little on the web today which talks about the older Festival programs!
Finally I went to the library, well virtually anyway. The Multnomah County Library offers a way to research contents of the Portland Oregonian. Even that was pretty weak, but I managed to fill in a few gaps for the Festival going back to 2001 anyway.
In the end, though, the only way I was able to get musician's names was to listen to the recording and then do searches on what I thought were the spellings. I added up all the little scraps of information and came up with a good list of songs and performers from the recordings.
The web is invaluable for tracing English lyrics for songs! Robert Hicks might say "Gershwin" but then I would have to get partial lyrics before I could be sure of the song title, using Google to find a website with the lyrics. The only one I am still not sure about was a song called "Que Sos, Que Sos, Que Sos." Well, that is my spelling anyway. I know I have heard it before and I know that is wrong, but need more information.
Now I have a good sequence of wav files which I can turn into 3 CDs, one for each set. The Mort Weiss set is a bit short and the Mel Brown show has just two cuts...each more than a half hour each (the quartet does jams of a variety of R & B tunes and various jazz themes and only stop every half hour to come up for air!).
I have to say the performance of my new computer is wonderful. My old computer, which is about ten years old, took like a minute after downloading email to filter and sort. This one takes a second!
Likewise when doing any audio file processing what took a minute to do on my old computer now takes a second!
I did get a late lunch today of spaghetti (yesterday: no lunch, just a banana) and while eating watched the 2nd episode of the 1917 movie serial The Mystery of the Double Cross. It would be nice if David Shepherd, whom I believe owns all of the Blackhawk films original material, would spend some time doing a nice mastering job onto DVD of this serial. However, he is racing against time trying to find and restore other films. This serial, at least, is mostly intact and its original film has been preserved: it just has not made it to a quality DVD or laserdisc release.
As it is, the DVD mastering here is not crisp and the title cards or handwriting (there are a lot of plot points that come from people writing to each other) is not easy to follow. However, there is enough there to grasp the gist of what is going on. The music chosen to accompany the video is public domain performances of Vivaldi (I think): really bad choice and doesn't do much to help tell the story.
The serial involves a will with an odd provision, a mysterious woman and "gangsters". The characters are all high society and the "gangsters" are more like sleazy businessmen, at least so far. There should be more action as we get further into the story, but so far it has been pretty much drawing room conversations with whatever action there is serving to befuddle the main character.
Once I was awake Saturday morning I spent about 3 hours shaving, showering and fixing/eating breakfast. I really was a wreck and needed to work a little to get back to some sort of normal.
Finally I got outside to go to the post office and pick up some things from the Goodwill.
I got 4 ceramic popcorn containers and a tall ceramic mug. The mug was just the right size to hold the "homeless" utensils (the ones orphaned in the falling dishes incident earlier in the week).
Tried out one of the popcorn containers when I watched The Matrix for the first time on DVD (the first time was in the theatre). Before I saw the film I viewed a "making of" short which I found fascinating: this film really did some very groundbreaking things and the cast and crew is to be commended for their efforts and innovation.
Just because a film has great effort doesn't mean it is a great film, but the effort paid off. There is not one wasted frame of film and no holes in logic. In the short someone said this was not only science fiction but an adventure. I add two more genres: thriller and romance. Even if it had none of these things, it surely had style and originality.
Well, I guess not that original. It was based on some Japanese anime, which the Wachowski Brothers freely admit. However, they took it to a new level.
As to the popcorn containers: not as good as the huge popcorn ceramic bowl that was made useless in the falling dishes incident. I need a scoop to transfer the popcorn from a big bowl (I used a colander) into the containers. As it was I found it easier to eat right out of the colander, except the colander leaked bits of corn onto my lap!
Also on Saturday broke up some hour-long wav files I had recorded off-air 6 years ago! I got most of two hours split, saved, edited and ordered so that I could enjoy singer/pianist Robert Hicks and clarinetist Mort Weiss in their sets at the 25th Annual Cathedral Park Jazz Festival. The festival was aired live on our local jazz station, KMHD. The announcers had an annoying habit of stepping on the first couple of bars from each song. I had no choice but to edit out those beginning notes: it was either that or leave out the selections entirely.
Sunday morning I did sleep well and did not have contend with cleaning myself up. I just had a relaxed morning with that annoying headache along for the ride.
I was driven to finish off the work I started on the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival and spent a while checking the web for information about the performers from 2005. Google did not help me a lot. There is very little on the web today which talks about the older Festival programs!
Finally I went to the library, well virtually anyway. The Multnomah County Library offers a way to research contents of the Portland Oregonian. Even that was pretty weak, but I managed to fill in a few gaps for the Festival going back to 2001 anyway.
In the end, though, the only way I was able to get musician's names was to listen to the recording and then do searches on what I thought were the spellings. I added up all the little scraps of information and came up with a good list of songs and performers from the recordings.
The web is invaluable for tracing English lyrics for songs! Robert Hicks might say "Gershwin" but then I would have to get partial lyrics before I could be sure of the song title, using Google to find a website with the lyrics. The only one I am still not sure about was a song called "Que Sos, Que Sos, Que Sos." Well, that is my spelling anyway. I know I have heard it before and I know that is wrong, but need more information.
Now I have a good sequence of wav files which I can turn into 3 CDs, one for each set. The Mort Weiss set is a bit short and the Mel Brown show has just two cuts...each more than a half hour each (the quartet does jams of a variety of R & B tunes and various jazz themes and only stop every half hour to come up for air!).
I have to say the performance of my new computer is wonderful. My old computer, which is about ten years old, took like a minute after downloading email to filter and sort. This one takes a second!
Likewise when doing any audio file processing what took a minute to do on my old computer now takes a second!
I did get a late lunch today of spaghetti (yesterday: no lunch, just a banana) and while eating watched the 2nd episode of the 1917 movie serial The Mystery of the Double Cross. It would be nice if David Shepherd, whom I believe owns all of the Blackhawk films original material, would spend some time doing a nice mastering job onto DVD of this serial. However, he is racing against time trying to find and restore other films. This serial, at least, is mostly intact and its original film has been preserved: it just has not made it to a quality DVD or laserdisc release.
As it is, the DVD mastering here is not crisp and the title cards or handwriting (there are a lot of plot points that come from people writing to each other) is not easy to follow. However, there is enough there to grasp the gist of what is going on. The music chosen to accompany the video is public domain performances of Vivaldi (I think): really bad choice and doesn't do much to help tell the story.
The serial involves a will with an odd provision, a mysterious woman and "gangsters". The characters are all high society and the "gangsters" are more like sleazy businessmen, at least so far. There should be more action as we get further into the story, but so far it has been pretty much drawing room conversations with whatever action there is serving to befuddle the main character.