Locate the new blog here

This blog is done - technical difficulties.

New blog is Sybling Deux.

Re join the party

I'm not sure what has happened but just to be sure that everything is working, I'm going to send have the blog re-invite you to participate. That way, all the recent drama (I accidentally deleted the blog, converted it to the new google stuff, blah, blah, blah).

You don't have to be a 'member' to see the blog. But you do have to be a member to post an entry. If you don't want the added overhead of joining then you can still see the blog whenever you want. You can also subscribe to the syndication (so you see any new stuff).

So don't be surprised to get an email.

Big Brother a.k.a. "le boulot"

Marc's class is on TV

http://www.king5.com/business/stories/NW_061107WABseatacparisnonstopTP.393ef96b.html

Close up on Marc!

Blog was gone

I foolishly deleted the blog over the weekend. Not intentionally. Actually I was deleting (I thought) the dumby blog I set up. I was quite surprised how easy it was to delete the blog especially when you consider that there are two other administrators whose permission wasn't even needed ("the favorite" and "le boulot" [le boulot is Big Brother again so that I have two ways to access the blog]).

Anyway, all is back to normal. I hope. And I hope never to do that again.

On the other hand, all it took to fix it was a brief email to tech support. Nice going, Blogger.

Music Heroes

Victor Wooten - has played with Dave Matthews - dude kicks ass

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9a4ThBNacY&mode=related&search=

Also, I've been listening to the jazz singer Ian Shaw.

Check out Alone Again, Naturally. You'll have to find it on Rhapsody or something.

Lack of Appreciation

I recently had this exchange with Dad. I ain't telling you what to do but...

Hi, Dad. Now that I have a (nearly) teenager, I want to apologize for all the times in my life when I was ungrateful.

Nathalie is fundamentally a good kid, but there are times now when when she doesn't appreciate anything we do for her. Boy, that is really getting on my nerves. I know that we weren't spoiled as kids, but I can also imagine that there were times when it wouldn't have hurt us to appreciate all the things you and Mom did for us.

So straight up, thanks for doing all that stuff and making sacrifices when I was a kid. Would it have killed me to say thanks? No.

Getting Old

I've shied away from talking about getting old because it always sounds whiney. I remember certain aunts and uncles doing complaining. I thought it was a lot of crap. Dad, for one, does not complain about it. I like his attitude toward age. He's just 29. Maybe that's a little bit of denial but it seems like a more positive view than just getting old.

However, sometimes it's good to share these things for the sake of broader health concerns. I lived with my own denial that I wasn't a tub of goo. I didn't have any other health concerns when I had the heart surgery. I was made aware of my weight in a very real way for probably the first time in my life. At the end of my stay in the hospital, I weighed 248. You track your weight every day after surgery like that to make sure that you are not retaining fluids, which is a sign of something bad. By the end of that summer, I weighed 208. Prior to that, we didn't even have a scale so it was easy for me to think I weighed 195 - but clearly that was denial.

Since then, my weight has been around 215 but it started creeping up again this year, according to my cardiologist's records of me. Also, since then, my doctors have been tracking my cholesterol. You should all get yours checked. Mine appears to be getting worse. In particular, the HDL (good, or Happy) is low, which tends to be genetic and not easy to change.

My overall numbers were not bad, until this year. I hovered around the top end of normal, at 208. This year, they seem to be creeping up. I think it was 224 with elevated triglycerides. Not good.

Worse yet, I changed my diet this year, in January. I'm turning over a new leaf, I told myself. I didn't like the trajectory of my weight and neither did my doctor. He says, "because you have already had an invasive heart procedure, we might give a little more weight to some of these numbers." Translation, we already cracked you chest once so don't be an idiot.

I changed my diet in accord with the realage.com guidelines. I eat more fruit and less starch. My gut (measured at my navel) has gone from 45 to 40, I'm happy to say.

You, siblings, should get some base line numbers, if you don't already know your numbers. We could be genetically okay with below average HDL. The fact that our grandparents did not have heart problems is very good news, too. And while you don't want to overreact and get anorexic, you don't want to live in denial like I did. Facts can be just facts, I suppose.

Yamaha tuba

Every once in awhile you find out that a myth is actually true and it changes things for you. I thought it was something of a myth that better horns are easier to play and sound better. I got a better tuba from my supplier and it is definitely easier to play. I'm not sure you could hear a difference between my old Miraphone and my trial Yamaha on easy, flowing material. But because it is easier to play, the Yamaha would sound better when pushed in its range. I've always known this with guitars but I didn't want to believe with the tuba.

One of my co-workers and fellow brass players sold me a Miraphone tuba last year. I love it. It re-kindled a lot of good feelings for me. In a strange way, it even offered me another way to connect with Dad because he used to take me to my tuba lessons and always thought I was pretty good. You can't beat that. You do something you love and you get to have a moment with your father. Rare, precious.

My co-worker, Matt, sells instruments as a sideline. He is a tech writer like me and has even written a book on programming. He went to Oberlin where he studied trombone. Matt and I are very different in some ways, but I've grown to like him despite the fact that he pushes instruments like drugs.

I've waxed about the Yamaha tuba before I didn't have much of a lip and sounded pretty thin last year when I played a big Yamaha tuba. Sounding thin is a cardinal sin in my own training. Hank used to stress (like other teachers of his ilk) that sound is more important than anything, e.g. technique, range. He said if someone walks in a room and you sound crappy, nothing else matters. Yhey are going to think that you sound crappy.

He stressed "air through horn" as the cure all and mostly, he was right. Arnold Jacobs, the great tuba player of the Chicago symphony, would have loved Hank for that reason.

My problem at Lowell was that not all teachers are like Hank. I didn't get along with the guys who were all about technique and repetoire. I had very good tone. I had good technique, but it was in a narrow band of music. I smoked any kind of march or circus music. Most orchestral music isn't that challenging so I was content with my ability. I had a closed mind.

The closed mind led me to to distrust the idea that the horn itself does matter that much. It isn't only the quality of the player. I never played a lot of tubas.I didn't want to experiment that much. Perhaps, I knew in the back of my mind that we could never afford a high end instrument so it was a convenient bit of denial.

That led me to the contrary belief that the horn didn't matter that much. I was wrong. I'm playing a CC tuba today, thanks to Matt, my pusher. It is a Yamaha 5 valve tuba. Now that I have my lip back I can really appreciate the difference between this horn and my Miraphone. The low notes sound especially good and are remarkably easy to produce. The horn does matter.

This is a more expensive horn. Most players would expect it to sound/play better. I want to be wrong because I used to make fun of guys who had really expensive tubas - just like guys who have really expensive golf clubs. I was right to make fun of them - most of them were idiots - but they probably did have easier horns to play and I was just holding myself back by not having a more open mind about it.

Whining on Saturday night

Couple random things -

It is sssooooo much easier to play the tuba than it is to record anything with the computer. I'm sure it's easier on a Mac. blah blah blah Where's my mouthpiece? Oh. there it is - see? I'm playing already. My computer is still booting.

iPod is a great tool. iTunes on the PC is a pain in my ass. I'm getting used to it. Yeah. Yeah. sooo much easier on the Mac. I know. Note to self - think like a Mac user - just click and drag everything. Don't even think about something as pedestrian as a directory.

Call me crazy. xcopy still kicks 'cut/copy/paste drag or the elusive right-click move any day.