Author: Peter

Music now

What is Borderlands?

Barenaked Ladies’ Everything to Everyone is as good as I’d hoped, and better in spots. (It occurs to me that that doesn’t adequately convey my feelings about the album–in so many words, I like it!) I haven’t watched the DVD extras yet, although I did put it in to listen to the 5.1 mix of the album, which sounds great even through my Rubik’s Snake-enhanced left front speaker (a long story).

Go see Borderlands!

At my friend Nancy’s invitation I went to UWO’s Grad Club on Friday night to listen to some jazz. Good idea, poor execution: I somehow managed to miss meeting up with her and her roommates/tenants, and wound up leaving midway through the first set because the sound system in the place was so poor and the audience so loud. That’s $14 for cover, parking, a drink and 40 minutes of alleged music, in case you’re keeping track. (I’ve invited Nancy and friends over to watch the BNL DVD, although past history suggests it’s unlikely they’ll take me up on the offer.) The evening wasn’t a total waste: I managed to make it to Covent Garden Market to see the fifth anniversary show of The Boneyard Man, where I chatted for a while after the show with a teacher whose name I’ve promptly forgotten (but who will be at Borderlands… shameless, ain’t I?).

Borderlands is only a month away!

I received e-mail from Claire Jenkins a few days ago regarding matters I hope to be able to blog soon. She’s going to be in my sister’s neck of the country in December, so if you’re in Winnipeg on the 5th or 6th see if you can’t find your way to the Regal Beagle. Tell her I sent you… she’ll be all Peter who?, which is fine with me.

Have you checked out Borderlands yet?

This afternoon was another trip to The Ugly Mug Café, this time to see Sirens‘ Jo-Ann Lawton do a solo gig. It was interesting to hear the tunes she’s written for the group performed without Amber and Donna, and her new and new-to-me music was enjoyable too. Mandolin Karen joined Jo-Ann onstage in the second set to do a few songs they’ve written together, and in the process qualified for SOCAN membership–congratulations Karen!

Last yet most important of all is a personal achievement: on Tuesday I posted the first major content update to sirens3.com, a mini-site for their upcoming musical/theatre performance Borderlands. This is the first all-out new piece I’ve created for the site, entirely new content hand-rolled in XHTML and CSS based on design and artwork by Laureen Creighton, and I’m quite pleased with the result. I won’t get into more technical details of the site right now because the whole reason for its existence is to plug the show and I don’t want to distract from promoting the November 28 performance any more than necessary. Tickets for Borderlands are $25 in advance and are available now.

Aaugh!

There’s only one thing worse than having your computer crash if you’ve succumbed to the tyranny of tabbed browsing as much as I have, and that’s temporarily losing sanity (or fine motor control over the mouse… six of one…) and clicking the close button on the browser. Knowing that all those long hours spent middle-clicking links that I’ll come back to later have now gone to waste, destroyed in an instant by an itchy trigger finger, is enough to make even the most stoic among us utter a prayer to the patron saint of computers and the Internet… or, just maybe, a (not-so-)silent curse at the inventor of the mouse.

But if what was in those tabs was really important or interesting, we would have read them already, wouldn’t we? Perhaps this is a subconscious way of fighting information overload.

Still, sometimes it would be nice to be prevented from doing stupid things.

Design flaw

A certain website that I frequent recently underwent a total rewrite and redesign. Much of the content that made it unique is gone; it’s now a single page, pared down from seven, and is melancholy in content and plain in style. There’s rebranding afoot here, and I don’t think it represents the subject particularly well.

West thing

The third episode of The West Wing did nothing to disprove my belief that NBC is experiencing a meltdown of its flagship drama after executives forced creator and near-exclusive writer Aaron Sorkin off the show. The episodes don’t have the same snap to them that they had only six months ago.

It’s all about the writing, of course. The current staff can’t match Sorkin’s facility at creating complex but logical dialogue. Sorkin was sometimes vilified for his tendency to write speeches for his characters, but he has a gift for writing dialogue that makes such speechifying a pleasure to hear. Without his intimate knowledge of his characters and thoughtful stories presenting well-considered issues, the scripts have gone from being intelligent to trying to sound intelligent; the interleaving of plots, another forte, is now random at best. The humour–which has had me straining to take a breath at times, I’ve been laughing so hard–is all but gone.

The regular cast is still good, but they come across as being almost over-rehearsed; I’ve read that Sorkin was notorious for being late turning in scripts, and I wonder if that wasn’t partly deliberate to enhance the spontaneity of the performances. Even the production values seem to be weaker: television graphics and newspaper headlines in these three episodes have been less polished and realistic than those in previous seasons, which is odd because (like the actors) there’s more time to prepare them.

The West Wing is still among the best dramas on television, largely due to Sorkin’s residual–and waning–influence. I hope NBC recognizes the error they made by exiling him from the program he created, and doesn’t try to fix it any further in the way they have to date. There’s a single sure-fire way to return The West Wing to its former glory, and that’s to bring back Aaron Sorkin.

NaNo NaNo

Donna wants to know if I’m going to take part in NaNoWriMo in November. Given that one of their mottos is You will be writing a lot of crap I think it’s fairly evident that I meet the (lack-of-)quality bar; it’s quantity I’m concerned about.

(Actually, it’s story that most concerns me. I don’t have anything resembling an idea that will stand up for 5000 words, let alone 50000.)

(Then again, as Douglas Adams wrote, I love deadlines. I especially love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.)

Ping me in a week or two, Donna (or anyone else). The seed’s been planted.

Ornery

One of these days I’m going to put together a series of web pages, each of which is explicitly de-optimized for one browser but looks fine in all the rest. The pages will include graphical banners reading This page looks worst when viewed in browser X.