Parity Violation

Well, this is a happy story. Students at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. had been in a hunger strike for nine days fighting for higher wages and benefits for primarliy the university’s custodial staff, but also other contract workers. They ended their hunger strike last Friday after the university agreed to raise the worker’s wages.

Catholic teaching calls for social justice but implementing social justice is a lot harder than teaching it, especially when funds are tight. It’s wonderful that these twenty something students, all of whom are priveleged enough to attend Georgetown, put themselves on the line for their faith and their belief in a working wage for everyone at their school.

The Chronicle for Higher Education has the best story on the matter, but it may be difficult to access. You can also access the Chronicle via lexis-nexas academic universe. Also try Inside Higher Ed, or the Georgetown Voice for other stories.

So with the end of lent, I made chocolate chip cookies for Wednesday Night Potluck. It turns out it is possible to use too many chocolate chips. I believe I used 33% more than the recipe called for. This made the cookies rather non-cohesive. It’s also possible I had a bit too much shortening as apparetnly a stick of shortening is twice the size a stick of butter, and I had to scramble at the last minute to remove some of the shortening.

In any event, the cookies do taste good so I suppose that’s what matters. :-)

There’s a good post today at Playlist on how to tag classical music in iTunes. It’s pretty good read. Personally, I put conductor/performers in the artist tag, the composer in the composer tag, and the work in the album tag. So, the album is Mahler Symphony No. 5 – Shipway and the artist is Shipway/London Phil and the song names are all the movement names. It’s less clear what to do with the album tag when it’s a one shot track … say something bundled with a larger work.

Apple introduced a new “grouping” tag that could possibly be useful, but it’s not discusessed in the article. I think the idea of grouping is if you have a album Best of Mozart or whatever you can leave that as the album but assign “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” as the grouping. This is probalby most useful for Apple when they sell partial classical works from larger albums.

There’s another older article at playlist on classical music on iTunes that’s also worth reading. I concur with the assesment than 160kbps AAC files are very well impossible to distinguish from the originals. I did a blind listening test with a selection from Bruckner 9 in four formats – MP3 160kbps, AAC 160kbps, MP3 128kbps VBR and AIFF. It was very difficult to tell them apart but I managed to consistently pick out the VBR MP3 as the “worst” sounding one, and I think 3 out of 4 times I’d say the AAC was better than the MP3 at 160, but boy it’s not easy. I think I need some monitor headphones.

So, this was inevitable and totally predictable. Apple has locked out this new pyMusique program from accessing the iTunes Music Store. Pymusique would presumambly let you buy iTunes songs but the files would not have any DRM (digital rights management.) So, you could buy a song but then give it to a friend, put it on Kazaa, whatever. Shocking really that Apple would move to close this, isn’t it?

It’s not Apple or Microsoft’s fault that we live in a DRM-world. The music industry is paranoid about piracy (and who wouldn’t be after the old Napster in its hey-day), so they insist on DRM. iTunes has pretty liberal DRM rules anyway, but the record companies aren’t going to let Apple or anyone sell music without DRM, and that’s just the way it is.

What’s amazing is that all the stories about pymusique last week should have said “Apple will undoubtedly shut this down in a few days” but I didn’t find any articles that bothered to say that.

So, occasionally my friend Kathryn will quiz me on my own classical music collection that’s on my iPod. I have a first generation 5GB iPod, so there’s maybe 4 gigs of classical music on it, and the music I put on there is usually stuff I like and know well, so it’s usually not too hard a challenge.

Now, my new music server that I have connected to my stereo has 7.4 gigs of classical music and is growing as I rip more of my CD collection. It also includes the occasional CD I am lent, and thus presents far more tracks that with which I am unfamiliar.

Last night I began listening to my classical smart list in iTunes, shuffled, and would guess the track and then take a look and see if I was right or not. Sometimes, there’s really no need to check – it’s not like I won’t recognize any track of Mahler 5 or Bernstein’s Mass.

The original idea was just to get a feel for how many I would get right, but then I started writing down the ones I got wrong, so I could make a playlist of my own music that I don’t know well, and then make a point to listen to this “new music” more often.

However, I just became more and more interested in my dueling lists of what I knew and what I didn’t know. I started keeping reasonable records of each track and how I guessed. I got 26 tracks wrong to some extent, along with about 75 ones right. My definition of “right” went through an evolution though. I usually listened to just the first 15-60 seconds but sometimes Ionger if I wasn’t sure.

So here is a summary of the stuff I didn’t recognize. Keep in mind, some pieces had multiple movements pop up in the random songs, so I’m combining those so it’s less than 26.

These I had no idea really

• Stravinksy – Symphony in C – Finale.
• Verdi – Requiem. multiple tracks of this one befuddled me.
• Verdi – Quattro Pezzo Stazzi. likewise.
• Verdi – a traviata aria. I can’t remember what I guessed, I may have guessed it was Verdi opera and if so this should be down in the other list.
• Ravel – Daphne Et Chloe – Pantomine. I guessed “french music”
• Phillip Glass Symphony No. 3 I guessed Gorecki, I forgot I had any Glass
• Prokofiev Ivan the Terrible – Finale
• Debussy – Printemps I guessed strauss – VERY sad, didn’t listen to enough of it
• Mahler Five Ruckert Lieder, No. 3. I knew it was Mahler, maybe? I have no note to that effect though and can’t remember.
• Brahms 4 – 3rd movement
• Rachmaninoff 2nd piano concerto, 2nd movement (very sad I got this wrong)
• Bruckner 1 – Finale Sigh. I don’t think I even guessed Bruckner.
• Shostakovich 9 – 2nd movment
• Mahler 3rd symphony – sehr langsam don’t know what happened here.

These I kindof got wrong.

• Mozart Great Mass in C – Que tollis peccata mundi I don’t have written what I guessed. I think Requiem.
• Grainger song – Widow Party I did know it was Grainger but not the song, I should have waited for the lyrics. I count this as correct later on.
• Strauss waltz. I knew it was a Strauss waltz but didn’t which one. At some point I started counting guesses like this as “correct.”
• Bruckner Symphony 7 Finale I knew it was a bruckner syhmphony finale, but I guessed number 3 or 5.
• Sibelious 5, last movement But I did guess sibelious.
• Brucnker 8 opening movement (I guessed bruckner 5 finale, didn’t listen to enough probably)
• Shostakovich 6 – 2nd movement (I said prokofiev, so I knew it was russian – guessed too early)
• Shostakovich string quartet in F major (I guessed c minor and it’s f major though, sad)
• Khachaturian Ballet – Gayane? I guessed Spartacus. ( should have listened longer)
• Khacaturian ballet – Spartacus This time I guessed Gayane. sigh.
• Mozart symphony no 38 finale – (I knew it was a Mozart symphony at least)
• Vaughn-Williams Folk Song Suite I guesed Grainger, I should have waited longer. It was a band piece.
• Shostakovich 5 second movement (I guessed Shostakovich 10 finale)

So, there’s an even easier way to get the GIMP than through Fink. Gimp.app has all the code you need to run the Gimp with a double-click. It still requires X11, but there’s no need to worry about dependencies or libraries – it’s all in one big .app application bundle. I used it to try out Gimp 2.2, which has a much nicer interface than the Gimp 1.2.5, but is not available through Fink anyhow. One thing about the Gimp 2.2 though, it doesn’t seem quite as fast as 1.2.5.

Oh for those of you who don’t know, GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program – a free photoshop like program for editing images. It’s not quite as polished as photoshop, but it is free. Alas, it’s really a unix/linux program so it runs is X11.

Every Windows users should download Firefox right away and escape the nightmare that is Windows IE.

Mac users, however, should stop gushing about the dumb program. Safari is an excellent browser in its own right. I don’t have any benchmarks to prove any of this, but I don’t see Firefox as faster. I just tested a couple of pages and they seem pretty much the same speed.

Firefox, however, does not behave like a Mac program should. Or at least, its interface widgets are not Mac widgets. Look at the two google boxes below:

and then google in Safari. The buttons are ugly. And notice there’s no indication the field is active. Ok, so this is not a problem on a from where there’s only one form space, like google – but when there are multiple fields, OS X’s cocoa widgets tell you which form is active. Firefox’s don’t.

Most egregious are the pop up menus, Firefox is on the right below. They are totally non-Mac-like and to me unacceptable,

Fortunately, the Mozila folks seem to know this. Josh Aas has been appointed as a new developer on Firefox specifically to improve the Mac version and the interface widgets.

Well, somehow this slipped under my radar until now. Apparently, the next feature film from Aardman that they are doing with Dreamworks is going to be Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. You may remember Chicken Run was done by Aardman for Dreamworks.
I had been told the next film they’d do was some kind of Tortoise and the Hare thing, but apparently not. October isn’t too far away – it’ll be awesome to see Wallace and Gromit on the big screen.

I watched the trailer last night in between Fox’s The O.C. and Point Pleasant. Alas, my DVR was recording both shows (don’t ask) but the trailer fell right in between them so it’s impossible to watch continuously on my TV. However, I just found a torrent of the trailer and am downloading the avi file right now. It appears to be divx 5, so I’m downloading the component for quicktime.

Bittorrent is really amazing, btw – the more people download a file, the faster it goes. What a concept.

Oh, so the movie looks awesome. I mean, I was not a big fan of Episode I and Episode II was only blah, but this one really looks amazing. They say it’ll probably be PG-13. It’s going to be kind of depressing, I mean Jedi after Jedi are going to get taken out, but wow – the trailer is kick-ass.

I got the torrent for the file at digital entropy, but it includes the unfortunate O.C. intro and isn’t cropped properly for letterbox and is divx 5 so most Mac users will have to do yet another download to get it to work in quicktime. I’m recompressing with the appropriate mask right now, we’ll see how it works. If I post it publicly though, my server will get slammed, so I’ll have to keep it on the q.t. for now.

So as most everyone knows now, Scott, Dan and I went to Sam Houston Race Park on Saturday night and bet on the ponies. I had a pretty good time, maybe a little too good a time. I came tantalizing close to hitting a trifecta twice, and similarly with an exacta.

I’m not sure which trifecta (pick the top 3 horses in order of finish) was more frustrating to miss. In one race I had picked horses 5,4,9 in that order – they finished 4,5,9. I actually had “4,5,9″ written down in my book but I scratched it out and bet on 5,4,9 instead. What’s amazing is that I did not bet a quinella (pick the horses that’ll come in in the top 2) on 4 and 5 even though I was struggling to choose between them on who would win.

Losing the exacta and the other trifecta were maddening because I was literally a nose away from winning on both of them. I had 2,1,6 for my trifecta but horse #3 came out of nowhere and there was a photo finish for 3rd place, the final order being 2,1,3. Similarly, my first very bet of the evening I had an exacta, with a photo finish for 2nd that again had me miss the win by a nose.

So, I probalby dropped $18-20 on wagers during the course of the evening. Way less than I lost in my one trip to Vegas and I think this was much more fun, and I came so close to winning. (I think the trifecta I missed would have paid $60 on a $2 bet.) Maybe I can go back one more time before thoroughbred season is over. I need to take binoculars next time. I think my friends are worried I’m addicted to gambling or something. I’m pretty sure I’m not that far gone. But I should definitely wait at last a month before going back, just to be on the safe side. :-)