Author:
Lenni times ten
From the beginning of February through the end of April, I had the pleasure of attending ten—count ’em, ten!—Sunday evening performances by the captivating Miss Lenni Jabour, four of which also featured the extraordinary Miss Alex McMaster on cello, vocals and glockenspiel. Know what? Life is gooood.
Buffy
On Monday evening I went to the Aeolian Hall to see Buffy Sainte-Marie. I was surprised to discover earlier in the day that people at work had never heard of her: those of similar age I figured would at least be familiar with Universal Soldier and Starwalker, and the youngsters for her six-year stint on Sesame Street. Oh well… confirms again that my musical tastes are substantially different from just about everyone else I know, and in the end it didn’t affect the amount of fun I had at Buffy’s show one iota.
Other stuff
As well as working on what I’ve started calling REx I’ve been messing around with syndication, both in Atom and iCalendar forms.
Not quite satisfied with Dave Jacoby’s RSS feed for Roger Ebert’s movie reviews, I decided to roll my own that also includes the summaries from the website. It’s the first thing I’ve written from scratch in Python—that is, with the help of Steve Jenson’s atomfeed.py and the built-in SGML, URL and regex libraries—and while it’s not pretty, it suits my purposes. If I thought it would be anything less than extremely fragile (mainly due to the wonky markup on Ebert’s site than anything inherent in the code) I’d probably post it… still might so people can point and laugh.
Also took some time on the weekend to write an iCalendar translator for Allison Brown’s performance calendar. It’s a simple little bit of Perl but took a lot longer to write than it probably should have; the RFC isn’t the easiest thing to read and there doesn’t appear to be a validator anywhere. The converted file appears to work in Mozilla Calendar, though, and that’s good enough for me.
Finally, I’m considering converting the Sirens’ tour calendar to hCalendar format. I’d probably still generate the RSS and iCal feeds, since the XSLT is there already, but I’d love to deprecate them in favour of a single human- and machine-readable page.
REx as a microformat
The robot exclusion microformat is still on its way; a large part remains in point-form notes and there’s a long (and growing!) inline example that I think needs to be split out to its own page to be effective. Stay tuned.
Milestone
Congratulations to my sister Anne, who is now officially the most educated person in the family. One might say she’s a jack of all trades but master of one.
Having, like, a killer time
The people I met tonight who helped make this evening at the Drake one of the most enjoyable so far:
- Erica, who chatted about Africa despite her laryngitis
- Cameron, who has some pretty sweet T-shirt ideas
- Siglara, who reminds me of Genevieve Gorder
- Glen and Jenn, who resemble each other in absolutely no way
- Craig, who I actually met a few weeks ago [hey, my list, my rules]
- Lawrence? Wallace? Drat… I had it when I started this note, sorry! (Alex, please help me out!)
To Lenni and Alex, the two people for whom I was in Toronto in the first place, special thanks for introducing everyone above while we caught up during the unexpected delay. You (glock) rock!
Job description
When asked what I do for a living, my standard response should be making sure things like this don’t happen.
Blog. Play. Enjoy.
…if you really like a particular artist and want to support them… the very best thing you can do is tell other people. Swap those MP3s, burn those CDRs, blog about them, play those tunes in your podcasts. Bring a friend, two friends, ten friends, to a show. Anything you can do to put the art in front of ten more potential fans. Get involved in the quest for fans and help make it happen.
Oh, and by the way, Lenni Jabour and Alex McMaster are playing at the Drake Hotel on Sunday night at 8. Just in case you’re interested or anything.
This is where it all begins…
I touched the ocean before I left up this old dirt road that was impossible to run on.