thanks for not being a zombie

Ok, MovableType 3 has been installed, and Palimpsest is back up and running on the CHLT server. Those of you who had accounts under the old installation should be able to log in as usual; if you have trouble, please let me know. Those of you who would like to contribute to Palimpsest, send your preferred username and password to my wordherders address. Please help spread the word of this site's existence where you can.

And if you'd like to volunteer to help out with the design, let me know about that, too.

Posted by at 1:39 PM | Permalink

All previous Palimpsest posts have been imported right here.

I'm working on getting this site going again. Maybe it will be back up on the CHLT server, and maybe it will be somewhere else. I'm doing a test run of TypePad.

The downside of TypePad is this: in order to have multiple authors, you need to get the "pro" account, which costs $14.95 a month. If I could get 11 participants to each pay $14.95 along with me, then we'd have a year of edu-blogging ready to go. What do you say? Alternately, do any of you know of other hosting solutions that would be cheaper?

Regardless of where Palimpsest ends up, I hereby solicity additional participants. It does not matter how experienced a teacher you are. It does not matter if this is your first semester teaching as a grad student, or your 30th semester teaching as a full professor. Let me know if you're interested.

Posted by at 6:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

UMKC voice mail is now automatically emailed to the recipient in the form of a WAV file. I'm not thrilled with this, but they say it can't be changed. So...

...if you want to collaborate in some of the ephemeral toybox projects that Weez and I have been doing, call my office phone at 816-235-2559 and leave whatever sounds you like. Please wait until after 5 p.m. Central Time so my phone's not ringing off the hook while I'm in the office.

Posted by at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thanks to everyone for your input on the past two entries. My career as an amateur musician has memorable peaks:

• Age 10: Playing banjo, solo, in front of the entire school at a talent show in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
• Age 20: Playing guitar in a band in front of a crowd of drunken sailors from the sixth fleet inside an inactive volcano in Naples, Italy.
• Age 23: Playing bass in a band in a small club in Nashville, Tennessee.

And now: ephemeraltoybox, which is another kettle of fish altogether.

Posted by at 7:00 AM | Permalink

...pick a tuning, please.

And head over to Weez's and offer your thoughts on her questions.

Let's get this show on the road.

Don't make me talk about eighteenth-century Methodist sermons...because you know as well as I do that I'm not afraid to do it...

Posted by at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Weez and I are collaborating on another audio project, and we need your input, dear reader:

1. How long should the track be? Choose any value between 120 and 300 seconds.
2. How should the guitar be tuned? Choose one of the following:
   • E G D G E D
   • G G C G C D
   • C G D G B B
3. How many guitar tracks should there be? Choose any value betwen 1 and 4.

Pick one question and answer it. First come, first served.

After we have answers to these questions, I will record guitar parts in small enough chunks that they can be looped and arranged in a variety of ways. Weez will record voice tracks in a similar fashion. Then we will share GarageBand files of what we've recorded and, independently, come up with two final mixes, arranging the guitar and vocal (and possibly percussion) parts as we see fit. Two sound files. Many collaborators. Game on.

Update: Weez has posted questions, too.

Posted by at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Collaboration with Weez. Game on, indeed. Wanna play?

I got home from school, spent an hour with the Telecaster and the Powerbook, and came up with this: 20040929.mp3 (mp3, 2.6M). The GarageBand files are stuffed at this location (3.4M).

Posted by at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

We went out to see Silver City on Saturday night. This film has received unfairly negative reviews. It's not John Sayles' best work, but it's quite good. Check out Chuck's review from last week. Afterwards, we went to the Plaza Art Fair which was fun--big crowds, good food, good beer--but not that interesting. When I got home, I stayed up late adding some music to a sound file of Weez reading the first stanza of The Goblin Market. Neither one quite works. Weez IM'd me to say she thought something like a carnival organ grinder on crack would be appropriate. Here's where I ran into a limitation of GarageBand: it has a paucity of loops and beats for 3/4 time. (You know, 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3) Experimentation will continue as time allows. This creative collaboration is loads of fun and helps keep me sane. If anyone else wants to play along, all you have to do is ask. (Actually, you don't even need to ask, unless you want the GarageBand files; then I'll send them or post them.)

• Goblin Market 1a (mp3, 1.8M)
• Goblin Market 1b (mp3, 1.6M)

Sunday, it was back to work at the office. It's nice and quiet there on the weekends. Wrestling with the article. Working up towards putting various proposals and applications together. Listening to the cicadas through the open windows. Above is a shot of what my desk looked like right before I left for home. One laptop is mine, and one is the school's. My notes are displayed on the one in back, and the draft of the article is on the one in front. I love a small laptop, but I have a hard time tracking my way through a big piece of writing by looking at a small slice of it on a 12" screen, so I'm trying to expand the 2-D space upon which the article is represented: two laptop screens and an entire (real) desktop. It's easy enough to move the cards around to rearrange chunks of the argument, and I can stand up and get a picture of the whole thing, see what's missing and what's there.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the cards are lined up like the little bits of data in a GarageBand file. Here, take a look at what "Gimme Gimme (Angry Chicken Remix)" looks like visually (warning, big pdf, 430K). I've been trying to figure out why I'm so drawn to the GarageBand interface (no firm conclusions, yet) and I'm trying to mimic its form in writing this article. We'll see.

Posted by at 6:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Blogging enriches my life.

Note, something weird is going on with the links in this entry. I'm not sure why, but Safari did something to them when I was editing... I'll try to fix later.

Exhibit A: I had a few drinks with some KC Bloggers on Thursday night: M. Toast, Patrick, Joe, Jen, Eric, and two other folks who either don't blog, or whose blogs aren't listed on KC Bloggers, so I won't mention them by name. We talked about music, good books read recently, and computers.

Exhibit B: I ran into my favorite local comic artist, Parrish, at Muddy's Coffee yesterday morning, and we talked for about ten minutes on the magical creature known as cat. The only way I know Parrish (and Bonnie, who works at Muddy's) is through his blog (and through his comic "Sparrow's Fall"). This was the first somewhat extended conversation we've ever had, and yet I felt like I already sort of knew him, and had a sense of his personality.

Exhibit C: I've never met Weez, except through our blogs. We IM from time. She's recording blog entries as audio posts, and I've remixed one of them with music (MP3, about 2M).

I feel like I'm finally finding a voice. I love my job. But my life is much larger than my job.

Posted by at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Here's another entry in an occasional series of distributed cookbooks. Now this is what I call comfort food! Simple and yummy:

Macaroni & Cheese

• One cup elbow macaroni.
• One cup shredded cheddar cheese.
• One cup milk.
• Butter, salt, pepper, paprika.

Directions: Boil the macaroni until tender. Butter a small baking dish. Make three layers of macaroni and cheese (noodles, then cheese, then noodles, then cheese, then noodles, then cheese). Salt and pepper at each layer, too. Paprika on top. Pour in the cup of milk. Bake at 375 degrees F for 45 minutes.

What's your favorite comfort food? Post an entry to your blog and send a trackback my way.

Posted by at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've given voices (mp3, 2.2M) to Matt's cicadas . This sound file is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Posted by at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via Liz, Michael Froomkin, Norman Geras, and Jewschool: here's the Wikipedia entry on the word "jew" and the Judaism 101 answer to the question, "Who is a jew?"

Posted by at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Check it out:

The September Project. On December 18, 2001, Congress designated September 11th a national holiday named “Patriot Day.” We believe the most patriotic gesture citizens can make is to gather locally in public libraries across the country and contribute to a national conversation -- on this day and beyond.

Posted by at 1:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here is a question asked in the face of way too many Google hits: if I want to create an online, collaboratively built, bibliographic database (mySQL and PHP), do I have to come up with the schema myself, or are there something like "plug-and-play" templates out there much in the way that there are for CSS and HTML?

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink