Speaker For The Diodes - June 19th, 2008

05:25 am - QotD

"[...] when I mentioned that Christianity has something to do with helping poor people, he slipped off into a rant about the power of God. Not that the poor were entirely God's responsibility or anything like that, just (as far as I can tell) that he didn't want to hear that his religion might oblige him to do something.

"I was too polite to tell him he had a hobby, not a religion."

-- nancylebov, 2008-06-03 (responding to an earlier QotD)

01:06 pm - Apparently My Subconscious Thinks I Can Write Longhand In My Sleep But Not Type

Woke from a dream ... a dream that I had posted something really long about tech-stuff just before falling asleep, and had just remembered bits that ought to have been included to clarify other bits before folks woke up and checked LJ and saw my post from last night. So I started writing my revisions on a long, narrow strip of paper, using a pencil that started getting annoyingly dull toward the end of the dream, cursing at how much slower handwriting is than typing and that I couldn't type it because I wasn't awake yet. Woke up as I was working out how to quickly obtain OCR software while scanning the pencilled stuff on a flatbed scanner (in chunks, because the strip of paper was about two and a half times as long as the scanner bed) and wondering what time it was and whether everybody else was already awake.

Sufficiently vivid that I had to check to make sure that the "last night's post" was itself part of the dream, not something I'd actually posted unfinished.

Only after that did I start noticing how disjointed the whole text had been, and then it started to fade away in pieces as dream details so often do, so now it's just a still-fading assembly of non-sequiturs involving CDDB lookups and the BatComputer.

---

Contata is definitely out. Felt almost human on Tuesday, felt crappy yesterday and missed rehearsal, currently feel ... halfway between flu-ish and drunk (from the fibro and maybe a bit of pre-migraine aura), which is uncomfortable whichever way you slice it (and dammit, if I'm going to suffer feeling drunk I should at least get the pleasure of tasting yummy booze first -- no fair!). I'm sending a bit of equiment north to lend, so even though I won't be there to enjoy the convention and see friends, I guess I'll have sort of a symbolic presence. (No, I'm not sending the Wall of Instruments; just an amplifier. Not a "folks will see it and think of me" symbol; an "at least I can tell myself I helped a tiny bit" symbol.)

Since I'm staying in town, I may try to get to a Pride event and/or the SEM meeting if I feel up to it on Saturday.

Baitcon remains on the "Maybe at the last minute temptation will overpower my better judgement" list, but is still unlikely.

02:25 pm - Tunes In My Head

In the shower, I got an idea for something I'd love to perform at Pennsic. Problem is, in addition to shawms (which I don't play but I could probably recruit folks who do), the arrangement in my head requires tympani. And tympani are bulky, heavy, and $&#@ing expensive[*][**]. But it sounds so pretty in my head ...

Hmm. I wonder how cheaply I could re-invent the kus ...

[*] IIRC, it's technically incorrect to describe the cost of tympani without an adverbial expletive before the word 'expensive'.

[**] But they're also really fun to play. Ever watched a tympanist and thought, "Gee, she looks like she's having fun"? It's even more fun than it looks like. Really.