Whimsy Speaks Again

My little company is usually a bit slow in November and December, as clients slack off and startups delay new projects until after the New Year.  Not so this year, apparently, as we are slowly getting buried in work.  That's a good thing, of course.  With Junie leaving tomorrow, I'll have another 2-3 weeks to get caught up:  no lovely lunches while we work on an old Atlantic Puzzler, no Brewing Market latte runs at 3.30, no movies cum dinner rituals.  I can get pretty easily obsessed in work, so I'm sure the time will fly. 

Meanwhile, I've got Xmas present duties to consider.  I've already ordered Dean & Deluca baskets for clients.  That's the easy part.  My family's Christmas arrangements have become complicated, however.  I've received a couple of emails from my siblings, had two discussions with my parents, and called other family members and I think I might finally understand The New Plan for who buys what for whom, what charities are the preferred alternatives for the Rawlings clan, and which family members still want presents, dammit.  Not that I will follow the rules in any event, an outcome that will come as no surprise to my family, as I have always been something of the maverick (they're all in California, for example, and here I am in Colorado).  I was thinking of switching my charitable gifts to World Vision, as that is one of Junie's long-time favorites.  They have a Christian bent (not that that is a problem for me), but are a well-run organization with a 4-star rating by the major charity monitoring services.  They also will send a goat to a goat-needy individual for $75, which is cheaper than Oxfam and Heifer International, I think.  My sister Lin has accumulated 3 granddaughters in a brief span, and I have to find some gifts for the 1 to 4-year old set (any ideas?).  My nephews and nieces are all in that awkward 18 to 25-year old range, but iTunes cards will suffice for most of them.  Heck, there's always Borders' gift cards.  If I know my brother, he will cook up some crazy new theme for presents.  A couple of years ago, it was Russian paraphernalia:  Cossack coats, flasks with the imperial crest on them, clocks used in Russian submarines.   Speaking of which, I have this Atomic Clock that Dima and I use to figure out if it's time for lunch.  It is supposed to update itself by tuning into the national time service which, by odd coincidence, is actually in nearby Boulder.  It seems however that the clock has recently decided we live somewhere in Ohio.  Or one of those odd states that have regions that measure their time in half-time-zone intervals.  It may always be sunny in Philadelphia, but it's never the right time in Longmont.  I suppose I will have to do something about it.  At least my big Belgian grandfather clock bongs at the right time.  If I remember to wind it, of course, which I occasionally don't.

More mañana. 

Posted by jbahr at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You are all wondering what to get me for Christmas, most likely.  You could get me six months of caviar from Petrossian, which will only set you back $1,695 (shipping extra).  While you're at it, send Dima the Mother Russia Sampler for $265, which includes Tsar-cut salmon, Crème Fraîche, borscht and vodka-flavored tea, all in an "imperial red hatbox".  For those of you on a budget, pick up a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.  I've been very good this year so I'd like:  the voice-activated R2D2 robot that plays the Star Wars cantina song on command;  The Authentic French Absinthe Fountain Set; the ropeless jump rope (works like one of those Wii controllers); The Million-Germ-Eliminating Travel Toothbrush Sanitizer; The Only Adjustable Incline Inflatable Bed; The One-Minute Wine Chiller;  The Runaway Alarm Clock that actually rolls out of your reach when you hit the snooze button; The 40-foot Marshmallow Blaster.  BTW, Miss Emily says she would like the heated cat bed.

My once-expensive Sony DVD player has increasingly been unable to play rented DVDs.  Junie and I stopped by Best Buy and I found out that it's basically impossible to spend more than $120 for a DVD player, and that's for a Sony or Toshiba with HD Upconvert.  Amazing.  Even the DVD recorders are sub-$200, so you can record those House episodes and stop buying the DVD box sets.

More tomorrow.  Supper calls.

Posted by jbahr at 06:07 PM | Permalink

It's always feast or famine in the software consulting biz.  Of course, that's better than the poetry biz, where it's almost always famine.  On our plate right now is:  writing a touchscreen driver for Solaris;  completing this damnable audio slowdown code for My Favorite Client, a task that has been 90% done for a week;  setting up and verifying the GNU tool chain for an ARM-based SoC used on a client's board design; writing a Windows application that assists in the update of a video controller via JTAG; completing test routines to assist in design verification for a 10 Gigabit line card for a large router company.  I've probably forgotten something in there.  It's actually kind of fun having to know dozens of technologies.  A bit wearing, perhaps, but interesting (when everything works).

Junie is busy upstairs fixing some soup for our dinner.  I got her a big new Cuisinart for her last unbirthday and she's quite a whiz at it now.  I'll defrost some sesame pita bread and see how that goes with it.  Maybe make a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, fresh thyme from my hanging garden with the little ceramic birds perched on the edge, and open a bottle of white.  Fat Bastard Chardonnay if I can find it at the liquor store when Junie and I drop off movies and get new movies.  We saw Live Free and Die Hard or something last night (sounds like the NH motto, doesn't it?).  Great action flick if you ignored the obvious, such as the ungodly onslaught of airpower that would have hit the bad guys early on and the fact that there would have been a couple of battalions of Marines guarding the NSA backup server farm.  Willis was never better, particularly if you believe that you can shoot yourself (and in so doing, kill the bad guy behind you) and end up with nothing more than your arm in a sling.

JL informs me that Yusef has picked the MMM Poetry Book winner.  I need to wait until all the formal announcements are made to finalists, but it was a very fine manuscript (I was a first and second reader). 

I received a poetry book for review by MMM, though we haven't been doing that as a rule (we will be featuring a couple of Jeannine's reviews in this issue, and want to make it a habit).  I was astonished to find that I actually liked the book, a first work by a lady whose name I'll have to tell you tomorrow.

So until then.

Posted by jbahr at 05:52 PM | Permalink

Even my sons have asked why my blog is dark.  Well, I've been working and writing and actually I have no good excuse.  I figured I would make like Bill Murray and do baby steps to get back into it.  Baby steps to the office.  Baby steps to the keyboard.  Baby steps to FrontPage 2003.

I did somewhere along the way make Arroz Valenciano with home-made fish stock.  I found three frozen tilapia in a bag at Safeway for $3 and figured that was a pretty good deal, a lot better than driving to Whole Foods and asking if they had any fish heads.  Frankly, that's all that tilapia is good for, in my opinion.  I can't imagine why restaurants think they can substitute this bland mega-farmed excuse for a fish for sea bass or whatever used to be on the menu, but is so fished out that the population is threatened. 

After making the stock, I took the third fish and baked it long enough to get a little meat off the bones.  I had bought a frozen bag of mixed seafood, also cheap, also at Safeway, that contained octopus and squid and mussels and assorted sea goodies.  The fish and the mixed sealife went into the paella in the last 10 minutes, along with some frozen scallops that I stocked up on the last time Safeway had a sale.  The result was reminiscent of the time that Pepe took us to a seaside restaurant in Denia and this was the second course.  I was with a couple of Russian engineers, fresh from the Cold War, who vowed there was nothing they brought that they couldn't eat, no matter the quantity (the quality wasn't in question).  We all petered out about the 6th course. 

I've been reading like crazy for MMM and went to an outrageously well-prepared brunch poetry get-together at Marj's.  This woman actually made pumpkin waffles, starting with fresh pumpkins, dutifully baked and scooped out and folded into waffle batter.  Everyone brought champagne and no one brought oranges, so we had mimosas without fruit juice.   Repeatedly.

The MMM Literary Salon was a great success, as I expected given the talents of our readers, Eli Noah Gordon and Joseph Lease.  The readings were wonderful, the open mike was pretty good, and the wine poured by Cannon Mine Coffee was decent.

Talk at you tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lest you think that I forgot you, I've actually been working.  Well, mostly working.  Sometimes I read technical papers and sometimes I make soup and sometimes I take naps.  I take naps because I get up at 4:30 and I get up at 4:30 because I take naps. 

I've been working on slowing down audio tracks.  As these are primarily audio of someone reading a book, I can take into account both psychoacoustics and human voice modeling.  The former relies upon how our ears (and brain and nervous system, no doubt) work and gets rid of all that pesky aural information you wouldn't hear anyway.  That's why MP3 files can be so much smaller than their CD track counterparts.  Human voice modeling relies upon the knowledge of what your voice box and lips and palate and other soft, mobile parts of your speech apparati can and cannot do.  One thing they do is to create nice waveforms, like the ones below.  The one on the top is Bill Clinton reading from My Life at normal speed.  The one below is the audio file that I have created (algorithmically, I'm not that good a mimic) by the WSOLA algorithm.  That stands for Waveform Similarity OverLay and Add, since you asked.  The basic idea is, if you want to slow down some speech, you walk through the original audio and find a nice little wave, like one of those below.  They're usually quite short, perhaps one ten-thousandth of a second.  If, every once and a while, you duplicate one of these little waves, an amazing thing happens:  you can stretch out the audio without any change in pitch.  It just sounds like Bill is speaking slower. 

Speeding up audio is pretty much the reverse of this process.  You find two wavelets that are next to each other but look similar.  If you get rid of one of them every once and a while . . . voila!  . . . you end up speeding up the speaker.  This actually works pretty well for music, but it takes a lot more processing than I have the horsepower for in the application I'm working on (you have to be pickier about the waveforms and the searches for them take long and so on). 

~~~

I'm doing my own personal version of Slow Food.  I took the potato-leek soup from a couple of days back and added chopped-up kale and red chard (thanks again, Shanna) and a cleavered-off ham hock piece and some more vegetable stock and a few spices.  It's simmering as we speak, so to speak.  I'm going to try to consume it as slowly as Junie eats her dinner in front of House.

That's all for today.  Like I said, I'm pretty busy.  Hope you're all doing well.

Posted by jbahr at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I don't know how I missed this very funny 13 Facts About Bob Hicok.  I can remember reading The Legend of Light the first time and wondering who this wonderful poet was who apparently attached fenders to Chevys for a living.  Or something.  I emailed him at some point and asked him to participate in my Poetry Database project.  The next day I got a call from him.  "Hi, this is Bob Hicok", he said.  "Omigod, THE Bob Hicok?", I asked in my best cool/detached/sophisticated tone.  I was walking through the Chicago AWP book fair and saw someone walk by and yelled, "Bob!".  I was as shocked as he was, but he just looked EXACTLY like his picture and it amazed me.  We ended up reading together at the Swink gig, where he actually put on some sort of jacket to cover his disreputable T-shirt.  He kept his disreputable tennis shoes on, though, and his disreputable black jeans.

Volume VIII, No 1 (our 15th issue) of Many Mountains Moving will be out in a month or two.  Not only will we be featuring a phenomenal long poem by Rebecca Loudon, we're also publishing some mind-bending verse by The Amazing Tricia.  Other contributors include in the issue include Dorianne Laux, Jeffery Franklin, Stuart Greenhouse, Jane Hilberry, Louise Mathias, and G. C. Waldrep.  Oh, and, of course, Bob Hicok. 

MMM will be starting a book review section in our next issue.  If you're interested in reviewing books of poetry or short fiction, please contact us.

I have to take Dima to the airport this morning, as we have a bring-up in Silicon Valley.  A bring-up is when you go and see the birth of an electronic child, the first prototype units of some hardware design.  We do the software part of these things, which make us part midwife and part adoring parent.  I will end the metaphor here.

I think Junie beat me with 50-60 trick-or-treaters, as I think I may have had just shy of that.  On the other hand, I passed out more candy because I always buy so damn much.  I always shop for candy at 3 PM on Halloween afternoon when the really good stuff has been marked down.  Then, I load up with bags of Snickers and M&Ms and Three Musketeers and Mounds and Dots and Tootsie Roll Pops and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Almond Joys and Milky Ways and Hershey Bars and Smarties and I can't remember what else.  This time it was 14 or 15 bags, which just fills this BIG black plastic cauldron from which I let the kids scoop a handful.  I've gotten pretty good at doling out the goodies so that I'm just about out at 8.30.  If I'm not out the last party to show up really gets buried with candy.  The last thing my waistline needs is all that candy hanging around into November.

Honestly, I don't know how Jordan, Joyelle and Ray pound out so many excellent reviews at Constant Critic.  I've been writing a review for a fine literary journal and I'm just short of terrified.  On one hand, I want to be honest, but I also want to be engaging and light on the academics.  I don't want to offend the author because I am a huge admirer of her work, but I don't want that to overly influence the analysis of this book.  I bought two copies of the book to be reviewed, so that I could write all over one of them.  I have circled stanzas and squiggled notes in the margins and put smiley faces in places and big exclamation marks.  Every day for a week I've walked by and written another thought or two on the blank pages at the fore and aft of the book.  I'm hoping that when I collect all of this and start a Word document it will all become clear where I'm going.

Speaking of Bob, here's an excerpt from This Clumsy Living, which a noted poet friend of mine says is very good work:

I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close the door of summer behind them, their heads floating on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds, I saw their hips lie down inside those birds, inside the day of shy midnight, they kissed like waterfalls.

This guy can write.  Here's a recent interview with him.

~~~

I took a cue from Shanna and made some gumbo on Tuesday, which I've been eating for days, as is my wont.  I made a roux with peanut oil and flour, stirring constantly for 20 minutes while listening to Madeleine Peyroux (I know, I should have put some zydeco on).  I'm sure it wasn't as dark as the 45-minute wonderment that Shanna concocted, but if you overcook roux, even for a minute, you can ruin it and I chickened out.  In went the trinity of sautéed celery-green pepper-onions and a combination of low-fat chicken and vegetable stock.  I browned some boneless thighs and threw them in with some spices and minced garlic.  After 30 minutes of bubbling (the gumbo, not me) I took another cue from Shanna and added a mountain of red chard and fresh spinach which predictably boiled down to just the right amount for the soup.  At that point, I added some sliced-up chicken Andouille sausage.  I didn't have any file powder (more's the pity), but I did finish it off with a few shakes of Tabasco and some what's this here sauce.  Two ladlefuls got scooped up and over a big mound of sticky "Japanese" rice and accompanied by a Fat Tire.  Yes, it was yummy.

~~~

I'm back doing a project for Playaway, the digital book people.  Dave P and I did the hardware and software for this project (respectively) and are proud of the product and how well it's been selling.  Sales are way up as the firm has branched out into other markets (such as concert promotions) and product types (such as pre-recorded corporate training).  Sales have also been huge at libraries, where a Playaway version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea may get rented out dozens of times in a year. 

I'll be starting the project today, which is why I'm getting my procrastination out of the way today by blog-writing.  I know as soon as I get into DSP assembler, I will be fuzzy-brained and deep inside the world of code and generally a pain in the ass to deal with.

~~~

Major Duh Moment:  I never noticed that O, Brother Where Art Thou, was based upon The Odyssey.  Here's all the hints that I missed:

George Clooney's character's first name is Ulysses
Pappy O'Daniel's first name is Menelaus
The Sirens
One-eyed Big Dan Teague as Cyclops
Clooney's wife is named Penny (Penelope)

I'm sure there are more, these are the similarities from Wikipedia.  I still haven't figure out who the old man on the rail handcar was, or the singing throngs getting baptized.  Any ideas?

~~~

Anne's comment on CDY's blog:  And if you go to Maui, you should have dinner at Mama's Fish House. I think that's my favorite restaurant of all time, anywhere. You gotta love a place that tells you, on the menu, the name of the farmer who grew the beans for your coffee and the name of the guy who caught your fish.

Wow.

~~~

How do you match the novelty of a Five Aarons Reading?  With Ten Jens (or more).

Posted by jbahr at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)