cce blog

latest

Another two weeks without a single blog entry. I'm sure this has devastated any sort of regular readership I had. Oops. Everytime I get busy, blogging is the first thing I decide I can't make time for. In the future I should just do a quickie 10-minute short entry every few days. So, what's new since I last blogged:

Last week I got all gussied up and went to see Stravinsky at the Met. They did three pieces by Stravinsky, not all of them operas, but all with beautiful sets. In the picture above, on the left you'll see their modern-ballet choreography for Rite of Spring; in the middle, an uncomfortably super-orientalized but still wonderful production of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy-tale opera Le Rossignol; and on the right (with 50-strong Greek choir seated along the bottom) their set for the oratorio/opera Oedipus Rex. The best part of the night, of course, was when Oedipus tore out his eyes.

In other news, Elliott Smith and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek died. I strongly recommend a full reading of Madame Chiang's NYTimes obituary -- a really interesting personal look at Taiwan/China/US relations that makes me want to read more about the Soong sisters. Of course, now there's political hubbub about Taiwanese president Chen (political enemy of Chiang's party) coming to NYC to pay his respects, whether draping an ROC flag over the casket would anger the commies on the mainland, etc. Even Bush paid his respects: "Laura and I were saddened to learn of the death of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Madame Chiang was a close friend of the United States throughout her life and especially during the defining struggles of the last century."

I sometimes watch the Chinese-language TV we get in NYC -- usually state-owned CCTV4 (where I saw a Barbara Walters-style interview with the Chinese astronaut), or the privately-owned Phoenix TV (hipper, with cute presenters), or other local & Taiwanese news -- but I digress. I heard about a memorial service to be held in Manhattan on Nov. 5. Hmm, I wonder if it's open to the public and if my Mom, a stalwart KMT supporter, would want to go. Luckily the current Taiwanese president won't be present: "the family did not want to invite Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian to the memorial because of their deep political differences."

Back to me: today at work I was asked to go to the Supercomputing Conference in Phoenix, Nov 15-21. They're demoing the new hardware with some pretty molecular simulations, and need someone who knows the system software to be around in case something breaks. So that person happens to be me.

Sounds like fun, except that was when I was planning to scheduled my GRE general test. So I registered today to take the general GRE on Wed, Nov 12 -- a few days after I take the CS GRE on Nov 8. Apart from vocabulary, there's not much to study for on the general GRE so a few days of all-out studying at work should be fine (combined with my pretty-good GRE verbal score from two years ago -- can you submit combined "best of" scores on your apps?). If I don't feel prepared perhaps I can reschedule the test for Phoenix...

woop woop

let's see ... last weekend i saw lost in translation. it was good. the neon-hued asian metropolis stuff reminded me of hong kong.

... so i made some frozen shanghai soup buns (汤包）. i steamed them in the little steamer tray in the rice cooker. i dunno how they did it -- but when i bit into one there was actually soup inside, just like at the restaurant! they were quite tasty.

breaking news alert from michael: nbc is currently the only site reporting on this crazy general in charge of terrorist-hunting who also gives sermons proclaiming bush was ordained by god, and that islam is the enemy, and that we're under attack because we're a christian nation, etc.

okay, i'll stop blogging and just do some mindless link propagation:

• the recently-returned chinese spaceman in a great set of photos.
  
• arab cartoons (or just today's).
  
• salon's the world press on..." and right hook have really saved me time scanning the guardian, national review online, & right wing, foreign media sites for opinions.
  
• put a bluegene on your desktop.
  
• watch frontline and frontline world
  

city weekend

friday night i saw: the hong kong in the lower east side somewhere. i was sorta dreading being stuck in a room full of hipper-than-thou indie rockers, all decked out in silly hipster attire. but despite all that, the show was okay. they made up for their (what i'd diss as) simple songwriting it by rockin' it tight and LOUD. plus they had a singer both looked and sounded like blondie. they made it seem really easy to throw together a popular indie-rock band, given some 4-chord songs, good amplifiers, and a chick singer. oh, plus a usually-one-hand-only keyboard player and a manic dude with a tambourine.

saturday night i saw two great alt-country acts at the bowery ballroom, jim white and handsome family. both brett sparks of handsome family and jim white would make great contenders for the next johnny cash, with their dark songs about death, religion, and the like. brett and rennie sparks -- a real-life married couple with a cute spousal half-bickering on-stage patter -- even did a cover of a duet johnny and june (mr. and mrs. cash, that is) used to do.

one odd thing about that evening was the complete absence of real drums. jim white played solo, backing himself up with bass lines on a keyboard, pedal-activated samplers and a drum machine occasionally; handsome family was without a tour drummer, and had only brett sparks' apple powerbook providing the drum tracks. the songs were still great, though a little lifeless in comparison to the loud, live rock the night before -- this was especially evident when sparks had to restart the drum track after a false start, or when the drums kept robotically pushing on after the live players had finished the song. the two acoustic numbers they played sans powerbook as encore felt most expressive to me, possibly because they had the freedom to add rubato as they wished, instead of being pinned to the laptop's metronome accuracy.

all that having been said, i still want to get a powermac g5 and make crazy "laptop pop" with it. panther is finally shipping with new g5's, leaving my largest obstacle to getting one the price. anyone work at apple? i'll trade an IBM discount for an apple discount ...

an evening with don byron & paul auster

last night i was lucky to see a wonderful concert almost by accident. as my co-worker pedro was heading out the door, he mentioned he was going to see don byron. i jumped at the chance and tagged along.

don byron is an amazing jazz clarinetist and composer whom i've admired ever since high school when i first heard him in the klezmer conservatory band. he's performed and composed in so many numerous styles from free jazz to classical, funk and hip-hop to the kronos quartet -- he's always doing something exciting.

the show, part of cooper union's cooperArts series, also involved paul auster, the guy who wrote the book of illusions, leviathan, timbuktu, that movie smoke (harvey keitel and william hurt), and a couple more for harvey keitel and mira sorvina.

it was an evening of "short pieces." paul auster read some funny short pieces he'd written about death, etc., and then don byron played several short pieces with a string quartet and piano. at the end they got together, with byron & co. laying down a whirling background vamp while auster read a final piece. it seemed like byron hadn't counted on the story being so long, and during the middle he got bored, cut off the strings, and began noodling atop what were unmistakably the changes to john coltrane's modal-jazz tune "impressions" on the piano.

again, another great concert. it kept me in rapt attention all throughout -- one of those concerts that triggers that "if i only would practice more..." response, and makes you want to become a better player. perhaps i'll find the time someday.

bad blogger

so i've been a bad blogger lately. like tom chi noted in his blog (8/26/03 entry), ironically i'm least likely to blog when my life is even just a bit interesting. plus NOT updating one's blog is much easier than updating it. as the list of stuff you've been meaning to write about increases, so, too does the groan factor -- "oh, man, i have to write about so much crap! i can't be arsed" -- and it feels more like a chore.

so let's review! the week before last, i was superbusy worrying about & practicing for a gig at the gallery of wearable art. guitarist-designer-painter-friend peter -- i used to be in his band the continental (mp3's) -- had recently graduated and moved down to the city, and rang me up for the gig, a red-carpet-and-models gala for the boutique's 20th anniversary.

however, unlike beijing, i didn't end up playing much trombone in hong kong. worse yet, because the gig was on the sidewalk (at the end of the red carpet), they wanted just two players, a trombone-and-guitar duet, leaving just me to carry the melody with my rust-encrusted chops. i suppose that's when i stopped blogging and started practicing.

after practicing a couple times with peter, i got restless during his solos (plus he had to keep playing periodic downbeats to keep the pulse from dying), so i borrowed a bass from my buddy elana in the army (who recently got married, btw) and walked some bass lines when i wasn't on the horn. instantly a whole new range of nice jobim bossa grooves (note: easy bass lines) & funk songs opened up for us. i'd play the head to, erm, jobim's "how insensitive," take a solo, then quickly switch to bass while peter began his solo.

note my head & tbn in the foreground

and that was the gig (photos)! it ended up being a lot chiller than i expected, and lots o' fun, free champagne, juggling instruments, etc. in all, it was a big wake-up call from my long-dormant inner musician -- "hey, you like this! do this more often!" jeff came up to inwood and sat in on the sax during one of our practices -- after not having played sax in a year -- and had his inner jazzman similarly invigorated.

since then i've been worrying about the CS GRE. it looks like i'm going to take a more serious run at applying for PhD programs than i did last year, so i registered for the upcoming november 8 test date. i took the practice test for self-diagnosis and got a 760 (82 percentile). now i have to review all the undergrad CS stuff (computability, complexity, architecture, languages, grammars, etc) that i thought i'd never need to remember. argh. i also will probably want to retake the regular GRE sometime in december.

so that's what i've been up to, apart from furnishing the apartment and slowly unpacking/rearranging (still). roommate michael wants to have a big halloween party. whee.

quick-n-dirty comment spam fix

over the last few couple of weeks i started getting a LOT of comment spam on my blog, mostly for prescription drug websites. i began to vigorously delete them each day after reading this guy's blog entry, "spam begets spam". but they just kept popping up, all obviously from a robot doing web searches for movable type blogs.

movable type doesn't have a mass-comment editor, though, so it was a major pain to delete all the comments one by one. i looked at a couple of comment spam prevention systems but they were all too much trouble to install, or required you to add crazy regexp filters to your MT templates, or personally approve every comment ... basically, more time than my busy/lazy self was willing to invest in my blog.

so i just renamed mt-comments.cgi to mt-c0mments.cgi (and changed the appropriate line in mt.cfg) to keep the robots away. i haven't received any comment spam since then, and i used to get several every day, so i suppose it must be working. publicizing my quick hack of a fix in a blog entry probably isn't the best idea though. oh well. if it gets worse i might do what this guy is doing.

addendum: ahh, what i did probably doesn't work. i got a (hand-entered?) comment spam today. argh.