Search engines are amazing - if you post anything online, you can almost count on it being indexed fairly quickly and you may never be able to take it back - it may live in a cache folder for a while or something like that. It's a fact that Google visitors account for 99% of the traffic to this site. I know that every word on here can potentially become a reason for someone to stumble upon this website. Summary: You can't post anything, good or bad, about anyone without them finding out - eventually someone will google that name and come across it. I basically don't put anyone's full name on here unless they're already famous. Probably want to watch out for keywords that may be too close together too, like "Jey" and "Ladue" in the same page will definitely make it obvious to me and the search engine that you're talking about me, and I'll find it, hehe.
And with all the blogging that people do nowadays, it's probably made it really easy now for a person to find out what other people think about you - just google yourself. How interesting it is that we have two simultaneous trends - one of increased personal opinions through blogging, and one of increased searchability of online content with Google. Summary: Don't post any personal opinions that you wouldn't be comfortable giving a speech about to thousands of people!
I know some times people excited about their little soap box and start talking. So I've set up two simple rules that area easy to follow without ruining the soap box moment. Here they are again: Don't use full real names, AIM screen names, email addresses, etc., unless that person is already famous. Don't post personal opinions that you wouldn't feel comfortable speaking about to a large group of people. The first one being the most important, and conveniently the most straightforward.
Thursday, 28th of April, 2005
Saturday, 23rd of April, 2005
The convention was a nice side of strolling strings to experience - definitely the very show-business side of things. The high level of energy and enjoyment in performance was probably good for all the groups visiting Lindbergh's style to see.
I can definitely see a place for the show-business style in a strolling strings program. The high level of musical repetitiveness and the ease at which one can enjoy performance makes it fairly easy to put something together with students, especially down to the younger players. The question I have to ask, though, is as with real show-business, it's tiring. One probably has to look at the number of shows and the types of audiences a group performs for, and think if they can deal with how more tiring it can become.
One eventually has to move beyond simple lessons, because they can grow tiring once they've learned it, and move on to further steps of learning so there can be continued learning. But as with any other learning, it is necessary to revisit old simple lessons that may be forgotten. In the end, I was very inspired this weekend, and it's definitely turned up my excitement about things like strolling strings.
Friday, 8th of April, 2005
These minimalist pieces were played in the 2-orchestra formation - perfectly symmetrical orchestras down the center. The Reich was definitely interesting, with 2 pianos in the middle and the percussion section duplicated and displayed up front - I like the program notes - "a large percussion battery". The Bolero continued the interesting arrangement, replacing the percussion's front-stage area with 2 harps.
Happen to have a borrowed pickup attached to my violin tonight so I got the great idea to just plug it into the computer and see how it sounds for recording purposes. Not bad, even without a preamp, I found. Started playing the Ciaconna, and got about 8 minutes through it before I realized I am definitely not at a point yet where I have the stamina to play even half of it through without stopping. I put it up on the streaming server so you can listen to a stream of the first 8 minutes of the Ciaconna.
Friday, 1st of April, 2005
My brother and I spent a morning or so at the NASCAR SpeedPark at the Mills today (after a failed attempt to visit Six Flags - it was closed, hehehe). There weren't a lot of people there, especially in the morning, so the $26 all-day unlimited pass worked out really well. The "SlideWayz" track was a winner - one of the most fun go-kart tracks I've been on, actually, especially when it started raining. You become familiar with oversteer, how to correct it, and how to use it to your advantage. And then, if you're getting bored, you can learn to drift around turns just for fun. They let us pretty much drive on there as long as we wanted, since there was no queue. Eventually they told us to come in for a break - for our own good, cause I definitely had a hard time standing up after 20 straight minutes of go-karting.
The pass actually doesn't include the "Mini Motor Speedway", which is just a 1/4-mile oval with a 5/8 scale NASCAR kart. Only 1 car was available for driving, but I did see someone give it a shot, and it looked really really slow... The pass included laser tag too, actually, which turned out to be kind of fun. The daily pass also gets you discounts on things, like 40 arcade tokens for $7.