yes, we'll gather by the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river

i'm in a groove now, so i'm listening to recordings of the cleveland orchestra youth chorus from when i was in it -- four years of high school, every saturday from september to february, which seems like a lot of my time, now, but i suppose wasn't anything compared to what the swimmers or various other athletic types (or, even, more serious musicians) put in.  anyway i'm lucky to have recordings of the concerts, and it's interesting to compare them.  in my freshman year, we did dvorak's te deum, and we did it well enough; but in the following years, you can hear us getting more mature.  which is strange, because it was by definition a high school chorus, so it couldn't well be maturing, could it?  but as it happens my first year was the first year, so by my senior year the group had been in existence for four years, and some of us (five or six out of 100+) had been in it the whole time, but others had been in it for two or three years, and it was a more mature group in terms of relating to one another chorally.  possibly also the director was choosing music more appropriate for us, but the thing is even in my sophomore year, when we did durufle's requiem, we sounded better and better together than in the first year.

anyway, i'm listening to copland's old american songs -- long time ago; simple gifts (in complete unison, appropriately, and still quite impressive); i bought me a cat; at the river (which makes me all goosebumpy); and ching-a-ring-ching, that one that's meant to sound like a banjo -- from the concert my senior year now, and ten years later i'm all impressed by the sensitivity of the performance they got out of us.  w00t!  and also, that year we prepared an a capella encore (shut de do', and the first sopranos went up to high C#, i tell you what), which pleased me very much.  :-)  goosebumps, man.  good times.

update on the chorus Director Guy who was so funny

this guy!

(he's a Tab, but we can't all be right all the time, now, can we?)

sure, i'll meme that

lifted from a whole bunch of people by now:

Go here and choose the following:
1.  One icon that makes you automatically think of me.
2.  One that you think I should use more often.
3.  One that you don't get/needs more explanation/you have no idea why the hell I have it.

i could go on all day, but this is the item bugging me at the moment

My Fellow Americans:

Please don't spell color and other such words with a 'u' -- colour -- because you think it makes you look smarter, differently educated, more cultured, richer, or any of that.  It doesn't.  British and US English have different ways of spelling things and that's okay.  If you use colour and honour and whatnot and say "oh, that's how I learned to spell it, I can't spell it the other way", you are exposing yourself as little better than ignorant.  Of course you can spell it the other way.  You know how I usually type all in lowercase around here, capitalizing only in instances of special emphasis, Pooh-style?  It's not because that's how I learned to type and I can't use the shift key, yo.  It's a choice I'm making -- just, I submit, as you are making a choice to spell flavor with an extra letter that doesn't have any place in the written representation of your dialect.

Which -- okay, choices are choices, and I should back up a step and admit that your choices are your own and you do your own thing.  I'm sure the fact that I don't customarily use capital letters (although I do spell things correctly, eschew netspeak, use punctuation, and so on) must cause some people to think of me as ignorant or selfish or pretentious or a variety of other things.  But I want you to be aware that your habit of spelling things in the British style makes some of us -- me, at any rate -- think you are aiming for a level of haughtiness you can't quite reach.  It's the written equivalent of a really bad imitation of an accent.  If you write colour but not centre, I mean to say, the game is up.  You're exposed.  (I give special dispensation for theatre, because I -- and I know there are others like me -- make a distinction between theatre and theater.)  If you don't know a license from a licence, or spell organization with an 's', or eat biscuits instead of cookies, or recycle aluminium instead of aluminum, etc., etc., etc., then for the love of god get the 'u' out of color.

Because the thing is this:  there's nothing wrong with American English.  Nobody looks smarter or more cultured or any of those things I mentioned up top for spelling things in the British style, because there is nothing inherently stupid or uncultured or any of that about things spelled in the American style.  There's no earthly reason to try to pretend to be something you're not, and fail, because there's nothing in the world wrong with what you are.

signed,
Fox

People actually educated in British schools are exempt from the above rant.

serious techie question(s):

so two things have happened recently:

1.  a friend of mine lost almost an entire chapter of her dissertation in a freak reverting-overwriting incident.  (fortunately, it was the most recent thing she's been working on and she's been able to reconstruct it, so it hasn't knocked her too far back.)  she has now learned the virtue of Save As rather than simply Save, and is in good enough shape that this comic strip made her laugh rather than cry.

2.  various networking things have changed here, meaning we're all required to go get our computers checked out, registered, examined, and installed with some additional software and whatnot by the end of the month or we won't be able to get online on the college network at all.  my appointment is the day after tomorrow.  this would concern me a lot less if i hadn't heard that the IT guys had managed to -- in another overwriting mishap, but you'd think they'd know better -- completely delete something like three years' worth of one guy's files, in addition of course to all his settings etc.

with these things in mind, i'm about to go out and buy an external hard drive, but i also wonder what everyone thinks about remote backup.  recommendations, etc?  thankee.  :-)

i could have pretended i was a mendicant peasant

so having walked halfway to goddamn swindon and back, i have a hard drive.  160GB, which is, yeah, more than enough.  i may move music into one folder and The Hard Drive From The Laptop into another.  :-)  but, dudes, i got 160 GB for £89.99, and i could have had 40 GB for -- wait for it -- £129.99.  same brand.

yeah, the guy at the store didn't know either.

hi-diddle-dee-dee --

-- i voted absentee!

ballot's all sealed up and ready to go.  i think i may send it back with my parents when they come visit -- no real idea how long things take to get there from here, by air mail.  [ponder]