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Friday, November 23rd, 2007
After we watched The Red Balloon today, we all went over to Hannah's apartment for us to get acquainted and try playing a few songs together. It went really well, I must say -- I was a little surprised to find out she wanted me to play guitar rather than violin (or "as well as" violin, but primarily guitar), but when I picked up her guitar it felt very comfortable and famliar. The songs she was thinking about playing sound pretty easy to get hold of; we played The Cowboy Junkies' "Misguided Angel" and then I played fiddle along with a recording of her own song "Smile to Pretend" (I might be misremembering the title -- a lovely song it was.) Very satisfying -- when I got home I took out my guitar for what must be the first time in a year or so and though it needs new strings, I was getting some pretty decent sound out of it.
posted evening of November 23rd, 2007: Respond
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So I'm sitting at a desk with a couple of notebooks lying open on it, and with many drawers. Each drawer, when I open it, contains a jumble of books I am reading or have read or am planning to read, papers with partial paragraphs written in my hand -- mostly excerpts from stuff I have actually written or have actually intended to write -- and random junk like seashells, paperclips, lint, etc. I am trying to write, and I scribble a line here and there on a paper at the top of one of these piles, or on one of the notebooks open on top of the desk; but I can't bring myself to disturb the disorder in the drawers. (Rarely do I have a dream so amenable to interpretation.)
posted morning of November 23rd, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, November 21st, 2007
I went by Menzel Violins today to get new strings for Sylvia's violin -- nice! Got the strings, got the bridge rounded over a little more than it was, and when I came home Sylvia sounded way better -- the notes ringing clear and loud -- a really noticable difference. And, Maureen was selling lightly-used CD's for $6 apiece, which turned out not to mean $6 per disc, but $6 per entity. So I got a nice box set of 4 CD's by Flat & Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers, for $6. I have not heard such lovely white gospel music since I misplaced the first disc of my Carter Family box set. (Disc 1 is beautiful, the rest of the set kind of annoyingly cutesy.)
The open mic tonight at Here's to the Arts went really well. I got there just before Steve and Rob were going to play, and I played with them on "Key to the Highway", "Jimmy's Garden", "Friend of the Devil", and "Angel from Montgomery". Mike (he who produces the open mic) called me a few days ago to let me know that Hannah is going to be playing a show there in December and wanted to have me play on a couple of her songs. Great! I got in touch with her today and am going to meet up with her Friday evening to try some tunes.
posted evening of November 21st, 2007: Respond
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Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! (Everybody that celebrates Thanksgiving anyways.) -- I hope your day off is pleasant and free of stress. We are cooking a smallish dinner and carting it out to Great Neck, to eat early with Ellen's parents. Traffic allowing, we will get back in time to go over to Michele's for dessert. (Ooh, and also!: I have Friday off, and we are all three going in to the city and watch a screening of The Red Balloon and White Mane at Film Forum.)
posted afternoon of November 21st, 2007: Respond
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Leave a comment to let me know how you found the site and what, if anything, you thought was useful about it.
posted morning of November 21st, 2007: 61 responses
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Does anybody remember a Pogo strip in which Albert and Churchy and Howland were arguing about verb forms, coming up with ever sillier strings of participles to express a present continuous action? I was thinking of that just now.
posted morning of November 21st, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
You get a lot of stuff in your web server log file that does not have to do with actual human reads of your site. I wrote a script that I think shows all the human page views in an Apache log file. It relies on that browsers get css stylesheets, while robots generally don't. (It will miss humans using Lynx; it could easily be tweaked to fix that enough. Also, I have seen Yahoo getting css files; you can fix that by putting "Slurp" in the list of files you're not interested in.)
grep "blog.css" $logfile | // get all reads
of blog.css
awk '{print $1;}' | // extract ip address
sort | uniq | // only show each ip once
grep -f - $logfile | // now pass that list
of ip's back to grep
grep " 200 " | // only show successful reads
egrep -v (any files you're not interested in)
I believe you could also use "favicon.ico" instead of your css file, but this is less reliable -- I don't know how often browsers request favicon for sites they have already visited. Or you could use the filename of a graphic included on one of your pages and hosted on your site, I think this would work reasonably well.
posted evening of November 20th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, November 19th, 2007
It will not stick, but it made for some exceptionally pretty trees this morning. And a fun walk to the school-bus stop, with Pixie charging around wherever there was a little film of snow on top of the grass. The kids waiting for the bus were equally intrigued.
posted morning of November 19th, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, November 18th, 2007
From Heather, commenting at Art of the Spirit, comes this fine link: Turning the Pages is an online exhibit of manuscripts from the British Library's collection. Elsewhere you can see Historiæ Animalium, an early work of taxonomy with lots of pretty pictures.
posted evening of November 18th, 2007: Respond
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Ellen's blog is online! She'll be writing about travelling with children, and how that can enhance and be enhanced by children's literature. I'm managing her blog's page layout and I don't really understand Blogger's interface too well, so any suggestions you have to make, please direct them my way. Here it is: Teddy Bear in a Suitcase. If you have a blog and feel like linking to her, it would be most appreciated.
posted afternoon of November 18th, 2007: 2 responses
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