So for Christmas, I got a little computer from 1998 – a Toshiba Libretto 100ct. My son called it my future computer from the past. It’s about the size of a VHS cassette, and from the same era. I was able to load Debian GNU/Linux on it, which was a fun tinkering exercise. Later I’ll write up my experience getting it to work – it was pretty interesting.

More command line madness: I did not load a graphical user interface on the computer, so I have to do everything on the command line. I am posting this using a command called ‘wppost’ that was a bit involved to compile, but seems to work now.

Now it’s time to test some html formatting:

• Here’s an unordered list
• and a second item in the list
• and a third

Bold Text, and then italicized text and underlined text.

More to come on this stuff…

I will be leaving in about 7 hours to drive down to South Carolina. I have been asked to participate in Deuce Theater’s production of “24 Hour Plays – very exciting! Six writers, 6 directors, and 24 actors will write, direct, and stage 6 short plays in the space of 24 hours, and I am going to be doing the music and sound design. If you will be in the Charleston area, here are some details:

The South of Broadway
1080 East Montague Ave. , North Charleston, SC 29405
SHOWTIME AND TICKETS
HOUSE OPENS: 7:00 PM
SHOW BEGINS: 7:30PM
TICKETS: $5 suggested donation at the door- CASH only. Seats are limited, so get there early!

Here is a write-up of the production
http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/the-24-hour-plays-will-wait-for-no-one/Content?oid=1259817

No, I am not talking about everyone’s favorite computer program. I am talking about the 9 pound 11 ounce baby boy Nolan, newest addition to the Renfroe clan, Florida branch. Congratulations to Matt and Pilar on their second child. When you guys have a third, we will finally be evenly matched…

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!

Not sure if it’s just coincidence, but Mac OS X Hints has a full screen terminal hint that was posted this morning. I have to say, I have tried iTerm and I don’t think I am ever going back.

I have been really using the text editor vi lately – in addition to using vi (actually vim, the expanded vi) exclusively for creating my Lilypond music files, I have also used vi to draw up my notes for documents at work. It’s worked really well for me, and I have gotten much more familiar with the vi commands.

However, I have one big complaint here regarding my Mac OS X laptop. There is no full screen option for the Terminal application. Sure, you can log in as >console, but you lose your ANSI colors in the terminal. Useless.

So I have been reduced to starting Windows in Parallels, logging in to my own laptop using Putty, and using Putty in full screen mode. Is this not crazy?

Update 2009-03-10: Alright, I tried out iTerm and I think all my issues are resolved.  It does full screen, and has a ton of features.  I never really understood why people would need features for a terminal emulator, but now that I’m using it more I can see the advantages.

Yesterday was my birthday, and my wife Laura thoughtfully got me a couple of brewing books – “Brew Like a Monk” and “Wild Brews”. Both deal with my current brewing journey – trying to recreate the Belgian style beers I first encountered in college with the Tripel Grimbergen. I love that monk…

How did she know to get me these books? She secretly researched at my favorite brewing blog, The Mad Fermentationist.

For some reason I have really turned into a command line junky in the last few years. That’s one of the main reasons I am switching web hosts. There are a couple of cool command line things I found recently that I would like to share with anyone interested:

1. goosh is an online command line interface for google. I just found this today, but I am very interested. I’ll be trying it out and post here if it works out or not.

2. todo.txt is a unix command line based shell script for organizing your tasks. I’ve been using it at work and at home for several months and it works great for me. Developed by Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani, it was recently updated with a couple of cool features.

3. This doesn’t really count, but I got source control religion the other day. I accidentally erased one of my important Lilypond text documents (that’s how I have been writing music since December – more on that in another post), and decided I would install Subversion and keep my Lilypond files in source control. Luckily I was able to reconstruct my lost file from the vi logs.

I moved nathanbibb.com from inmotionhosting to dreamhost last night. The main reason is a combination of command line access and a discount I got.

I am pretty sure I got everything moved over OK, but if anyone sees issues, let me know. Also, it looks like the users didn’t get moved over properly – not sure why. If you are anxious to comment, you should be able to re-register. Otherwise, I’ll try to find a why to port the users in.