Author: Peter

Hot town, Sunfest in the city

Sunfest is one of the great free festivals in London, and this year’s 11th edition had as good a world-music and jazz lineup as I’ve seen. Alfredo Caxaj and the rest of the organizing committee deserve a lot of kudos for bringing in acts as diverse as The Mighty Popo (fresh from his Live8 performance in Barrie), stride piano virtuoso Michael Kaeshammer, madcap circus jazz group L’Orkestre des Pas Perdus, and Scottish-Latin mergers Salsa Celtica to name but a few. Apparently Saturday’s performances generated the largest attendance for any event in Victoria Park ever, no small feat when you consider the draw of the ten previous Sunfests, 30+ Home County Folk Festivals, and events like Queen Elizabeth’s 1997 visit.

Another indication of the wide-ranging audience the festival brings in: I actually saw people I know at a London festival. (In the crowd, that is, since I’m friends with several performers who show up at the Home County Folk Festival.) I ran into at least four people from work, plus always-friendly Stephanie G. (with her boyfriend) and Jessie S., a once-close friend who I last saw two years ago almost to the day.

With the bouquets come some brickbats, unfortunately. The first is for the sound tech at the jazz stage (a well-known local musician whose name I won’t print) who gifted the amazing Michael Kaeshammer trio with not one but two full non-consecutive sets of constant, loud, high-pitched feedback. (That also led to the funniest moment of the weekend, though: bassist Marc Rogers doing some subtle editorializing with a vamp on the theme to The Mickey Mouse Club during the second set’s extended sound check.) The same tech also neglected to turn on the trumpet mics for at least two sets that I was present for; with Duane Andrews’ group the problem was fixed by the third song—too late for the folks at the back to hear the nice muted solos, sadly—but it took at least half of l’Orkestre’s set to give Maxime St-Pierre sufficient volume to hear him at all over the rest of the brass group.

The second big raspberry is for the total disdain the administrative body for the city of London has for the arts, shown by two facts:

  • City council sponsored the festival with $7000, which happens to be the exact amount they charged for renting the park.
  • Council issued a permit allowing the Pride Parade to encircle the park in the middle of today’s festival performances.

Just as the François Bourassa trio was starting into a nice, quiet piece, around the corner of Richmond and Central came the deafening noise of a gay pride anthem from the lead float… and when it passed, another blaring song from the next float… and again, and again. Only after a full third of the trio’s alloted time had been wasted were the streets quiet enough to continue, and even then there was a constant stream of people walking through the area in front of the stage while the band played. Emcee Barry Woodey apologized profusely to the trio and exhorted the crowd to express their displeasure to the city councillors who approved the obvious conflict. Mayor Anne Marie DeCicco, Deputy Mayor Tom Gosnell, and Councillors Rob Alder and Joni Baechler are going to get a few well-deserved earsful tomorrow morning.

(In case it’s not evident from the above, my problem is with the stupidity of council’s approving a parade route that brought the parade by the park, not with the Pride organizers having a parade in the first place. There’s more reason now to celebrate gay and lesbian freedom than any time in the country’s history, so good on them!)

Harmony and Sarah

I suspected this would happen, and now after seeing them at the Alex P. Keaton pub tonight I can now officially say that I’m a fan of both Harmony Trowbridge and Sarah Siddiqui. It’s too bad I can’t make it to the Rivoli for their big show Tuesday night… would love to, but well, let’s just say I’ll be making up my trip-to-Toronto quota next month.

(Unrelated to music—well, not completely, but let’s not get philosophical—the evening started off great as soon as I walked in the door to the pub and saw an unexpected face. But, as the narrator always says at the tantalizing bits, that’s another story….)

Dilbert vu

Dilbert vu, n.
An illusory feeling of having previously experienced a situation parodied in a Dilbert comic strip

Every once in a while, but more often in the last eight or ten weeks, I think to myself that jwz had the right idea: throw in the towel and go do something more interesting. I read his essay a couple of times this evening while pre-composing this entry and recognized a lot more similarities than I thought I would.

What would I do? One, or both, of two options: music and the web. I think the former—specifically, producing and promoting concerts—would be the most enjoyable, and it certainly holds the most interest, but it’s the one in which I have no experience whatsoever. (Despite my attempts to make things otherwise.) The latter is something in which I have an interest and a modicum of talent in certain respects, but not enough of either (to my way of thinking, at least) to make a go of it on my own.

What’s gotten me pondering more than anything, I think, is that my friend Nancy recently completed her Ph.D. in a subject area that’s too complex to explain here, except to say that it will help save lives and improve the quality of life. The best result I can hope for from my current job is that it will make more people watch TeeVee longer. That’s not to say that either of the options above has the potential to have as wide-ranging and positive an effect as Nancy’s chosen profession; from what she’s told me about the technology she works with, applying the quality assurance experience I’ve gained in the last decade to some of her tools would be of much greater significance. Still, either choice would be a step in the right direction.

Considering options for the future despite there being no real chance of doing anything to change the status quo. Yup, that’s Dilbert vu.

Time keeps ticking… faster?

Does anyone know why otherwise-sane Windows boxes—four separate installs of 2000 and XP across machines from different vendors—would advance their clocks by up to 30 seconds every 4-5 minutes? This doesn’t happen all of the time, only when they’re running builds; when the boxes are idle their clocks don’t diverge from NTP by more than a fraction of a second each day. It’s really starting to tick me off, since Tinderbox relies on its build providers having accurate time and complains loudly when someone’s out of sync. (While I was composing this post I received five e-mail notifications of unsynchronized updates.)

None of the Linux or Solaris tinderbox builders under similar load have this problem, so it’s got to be a problem with Windows itself. Maybe there’s a magic registry incantation to fix it… anyone? Please?

Microformat microupdate

I’ve just updated the Robots Exclusion Profile on the brand-spanking-new microformats.org site. (I didn’t even need to move it myself, because a nice guy by the name of Ryan King converted it to Wikipedia for me… thanks Ryan!) There’s nothing earth-shattering about the revision, just some clarifications on precedence with respect to other microformats.

I’ve also started a mostly-private-use microformat for the <cite/> element, which Joe Clark has explained as being meant to mark up titles (of books, films, plays, television programs, court cases, possibly even ships) and words and phrases quoted for themselves. (The microformat extends Clark’s definition to include names.) I’ve been using the classes for a long time, probably starting back in November 2002, but only now can I actually specify what it is they mean.

Oh, and unrelated to microformats: On Sunday I marked ten years at my job. It’s been with four different incarnations of the company, mind you—Cableshare, Interactive Channel Technologies, Liberate, and now TVWorks—but I’ve been in the same office with the same people and the same manager (who hired me in the first place) for the entire time so I think it counts.