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

It’s still ridiculously cold here in New Jersey. I don’t get it. I took all three kids to the Beers St. School’s Father Day Social – it was outside with Italian Ice. I don’t think they planned for this weather when they scheduled it.

Cory Doctorow reviewed a book recently that I am really interested in – Mind Over Ship. My favorite quote – “…it trembles on the verge of breakdown, acrobatically walking on a tightrope over the pit of too-weird.” I haven’t read anything really weird in a while. I wonder if Cory would consider books like Story of the Eye or My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist as falling into the pit of too-weird or not.

On another note, Laura and I recently (6/15) celebrated our 10 year “dating anniversary”. By celebrate, I mean I changed my Facebook status. Our seventh wedding anniversary is coming up next week, and we will quietly celebrate that by opening the first bottle of wine that I made last month.

Speaking of making beer and wine, I have two beers in the hopper right now – a summer “ginger” ale and Abbey Experiment #2 – a lighter Trappist that I hope will be close to a Trippel.

I call this my journal, so I guess it’s about time In treat it like one. You know, all the mundane stuff that I do during the day, what I eat, etc. I suppose if I could shut up at 140 characters, it would be good for a twitter, but I still haven’t bought in to the twitter thing yet.

Yesterday was unbelievably cold, foggy, and dreary for June in New Jersey. After work I took Dylan to soccer practice – it seemed like he was playing on the Scottish moors or something. Miserable.

Jason mentions he is interested in getting back into field recording. We have been discussing equipment – there are a lot of interesting new option this year for recording equipment. We’ve come a long way from the mini disc days of the late 90s.

This makes me think of my own musical endeavors. I am trying to get some momentum back after a few years of musical hiatus. I need to push through the untitled piano pieces, and eventually clean them up for performance. I recently started playing parts of them on guitar – I would like to write a guitar arrangement for them as well at some point. Then there are all the sound files I have, and the cleanup work on all my previous works I’d like to do. Plus learn Pro Tools.

Speaking of Pro Tools, although I love the program and the hardware, I have started to become a little uneasy with it the more I get interested in open source software. I have recently been reading a little bit of Eric S. Raymond, and getting involved in the open source Lilypond project (just by subscribing to the mailing list, but it’s a start. I am tossing around some ideas on how to incorporate the open source ideas into my music. I am still on the fence as to whether I will release my music on a creative commons license, but “releasing” music is something I still have to put a lot of thought into.

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…

I have been really frustrated with my 160GB black iPod for the last several months. For some reason, whenever I changed the volume or searched through folders while a song was playing, the song would skip horribly, sounding clipped or just plain messed up until I stopped messing with the thing and left it alone. In the last few days, it started skipping even when I wasn’t touching it. I was bemoaning my iPod purchase. My 60GB iPod never did this. I already gave it to my wife and there is no way I can get it back now…

I searched the internet for any indication that someone else had this problem, but I came up empty. I was almost to the point of taking the thing in to one of the Apple Store “geniuses”, even though I make it a personal rule never to talk to anyone who calls them self a “genius”. Then this morning, after months of dealing with what I thought was a piece of crap iPod, I stumbled on the fix….

Restart the iPod. Press and hold the middle button and the menu button for 6 seconds.

Darn my fool brain! This is always the first course of action for any techno-problem. How could I have overlooked this???!!??!?!?

Anyway, the iPod is fixed and it took a total of 10 seconds. I’m glad I figured this out before I sold it on eBay.

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.