Relating to my Text Obsession, here is an interesting article from Joel on Software about Unicode and text encoding in general. It’s geared towards programers, but I think anyone could follow it.

I have not written here for a while, not because of a lack of things to say, but mainly because of a lack of time. OK, that’s not completely honest – my wife and I have had time to start watching “Lost” from season one (we are now on episode 8), but not to write here. I guess it would be more honest to say blogging has not been high on the priority list.

But I have taken the day off, the weather here in Hazlet, NJ is beautiful, the kids are sleeping, and I feel like I can relax a bit. So rather than go into length on anything right now, I will simply make some quick notes on the things that I have been thinking about writing about but have not.

• Text Obsession – As some of you may know, I am a little obsessed with text. I don’t play any MMORPGs (World of Warcraft, etc.), but back when I had more time I loved to play text based multiplayer games (aka MUDs), and I do a lot of work on the command line, even when I don’t have to. I prefer to use vi as a text editor, and I have even started writing my new music using it (see below). I had an interesting problem at work with character encoding (curly quotes were showing up as accented “o”s with umlauts and other marks) that sent me on a wild ride through various text encoding schemes (DOS’s Code Page 437, Windows-1252, UTF-8) and I found the whole thing intensely interesting. It made me think I would like to read a good book on the history of text, and I started thinking about writing systems in general, which I am also interested in…Maybe I should write a history of text? With all that free time I was talking about.
• Brewing Beer – I recently bottled my “Abbey Experiment No. 1″ – my second custom recipe after the Christmas Beer I brewed in December. It was highly influenced in the end by the book “Brew Like a Monk” that Laura got me for my birthday. I will post the recipe later, but the process went like this – I started a beer with all Pale Malt extract (4.5 Qts of it) and a pound of candi sugar (which I am replacing with can sugar moving forward, I think). I used White Lab’s Abbey yeast. Original Gravity started at 1.092 and went to 1.034 then hung there for weeks. I pitched a starter of White Lab’s Trappist yeast (which “Brew Like a Monk” informs me came from Chimay) and the gravity went down to 1.021. I then bottled the beer with 8 oz. of sugar (normally you use 5 oz.) and a small starter of Saflager yeast. So that’s 3 yeasts. I think it might be a year or two before the beer is ready – hopefully it will be good.
• The Brewer’s Apprentice – I am not talking about my local brewing supply store. I am talking about my 5 year old son, Dylan. He started a couple of weeks ago helping me clean out bottles, and now he is able to fill the bottles while bottling beer while I cap them. Saves me about 30 – 45 minutes. It is a nice way to spend time together, too. He calls it “Dylan and Nathan’s Workshop” and pretends that we are either making beer to sell to people, or that he is a scientist bottling oil for robots. Either way, pretty fun!
• Writing Music – I have been in a music writing lull for the past few years between working, having kids, etc. All the while I have been writing in my “offline” journal (a blank book I write in by hand) various musical ideas and small snippets, but no full works or recordings. But since December I have been actually writing the solo piano pieces I have started and stopped during this entire time. I am writing them entirely in lilypond, an open source program that uses plain text files (see above – this is why I said “see below”) to generate PDF scores and midi files of written music. I would like to write more about these pieces, but I haven’t finished them yet and I am not sure where they will go. I will say that stylistically and philosophically they are closely aligned with Morton Feldman. I would like to compare my musical relationship to Feldman to that of Berlioz’s to Beethoven, but I’m not sure if that holds water.

So in the process of just listing the things I would LIKE to write about, I spent 45 minutes. No wonder I don’t have time to blog. This is hard work!