You've heard of orthodox Easter, well we had something of an unorthodox Easter, but nothing upsetting or anything. It just worked out that this was the last weekend to do something about fixing the bathroom tub surround before Mom and the Chiltons come to visit, and since I've been putting this off for a couple of years, what better time than Easter weekend to finally knuckle down and do it. Even though I had Good Friday off I didn't accomplish much more than buying the new surround and some other materials, then it was back to the Home Depot yesterday and again today to get other stuff. So it's almost done now, but as of when I started to tear the whole thing apart yesterday the tub becamse pretty much useless for a little while.



Since we were going out for Easter brunch this morning, we thought we should try to look presentable, and as luck would have it the health club was open today, so we threw some changes of clothes and towels into a couple of gym bags and took the kids over to Wayside and everybody had showers courtesy of the locker rooms. By the time we were finished and all dressed up, it was time to head on over to the restaurant, where we had a nice, if a bit early, Easter dinner, and were back home by noon. The kids had already gotten their Easter baskets (Chloe was up and down all night she couldn't stand the suspense), but here the Easter bunny goes more for little tchochkes and less for chocolate eggs and such, so it's sort of like a very small scale, easter-basket-sized Christmas, without having to unwrap anything. If it was just candy I don't think Chloe would get that excited.



Around this time of year I typically sing the Peter Cottontail song to Chloe at bedtime, and we had noticed a while back that while the kids in the song get candy and Mom gets flowers and a hat, Dad sort of comes out on the short end of the Easter stick as it were. So we changed the last line of the gift litany in the song from "and an Easter bonnet too", to "and Dad gets dippity-doo" (not to be confused with that neon colored hair gel from the 70s). This year dad got to spend Easter fixing up the bathroom, but through no one's fault buy my own (or "mine own" as Justin would say, as though he's been reading too many Thor comics). Should be done in another day or two, then I'll be able to shower at home again.

So the Hugo nominations are out, and it's a mixed bag this time around in the novel category. A huge plus is that there is no Harry Potter book nominated (nothing against Harry Potter, but I haven't read the fourth one yet so I was hoping the fifth one would miss the cut, although I'm surprised it actually did). A huge minus is Bujold's "Paladin of Souls", sequel to "Curse of Chalion" from a couple of years ago, a Jane Austen fantasy pastiche if ever there was one. How come her newer Vorkosigan novels aren't getting the nod but this is? "Humans", Sawyers sequel to the Hugo-winning but otherwise ho-hum "Hominids", is in there, and the only one that is or will be in mass market paperback before the voting ends. As with "Hominids" its the only nominee not in Locus's best of the year list. "Ilium" by Dan Simmons should be worth a read (although apparently it ends in the middle like "Hyperion" did), and I would like to read "Singularity Sky" by Charles Stross. And "Blind Lake" by Robert Charles Wilson, who made a splash with "Darwinia" a few years ago. Snubbed are Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and Stephenson's "Quicksilver" (neither of which are really sf but are still supposed to be top drawer, I can vouch for the Gibson as I read that several weeks ago), plus the latest from Baxter and Bear. SF book club has everything but the Stross, but it won't be in mmpb until July, so I may have to spring for a hardcover this time, which I haven't had to do since Ken MacLeod's "The Sky Road" a few years ago.



The Retro-Hugo novel nominees contain no surprises, basically the generally accepted top five books of that year (which was a pretty good year) are all represented. Four of them (Childhood's End, Fahrenheit 451, Mission of Gravity and More Than Human) I've read before, but only the Clement in the last 10 years probably. The fifth is Asimov's Caves of Steel, which is a robot novel that I haven't read before. What's nice about retro-Hugos is that you can read them all in about 10 ten days without trying very hard.



Back to the regular Hugos, four of the five novella nominees are on the Locus list (the exception being Catherine Asaro's "Walk in Silence") and feature some authors I like in Williams and Willis, and the variable Vernor Vinge. Novelettes include a story from the "Writers of the Future" anthology, which may be a first, and a Jeffrey Ford story from scifi.com's Sci Fiction, which is definitely a first. Stross, Swanwick and Kelly are all worth reading, although I don't always understand what Stross is trying to do and I often wonder if Swanwick is trying to do anything.



Short stories include another Burstein entry (big surprise), a story from David Levine (who was nominated for the Campbell award last year and again this year), and the reliable Haldeman, Resnick and Gaiman, although Gaiman's story is only in a hardcover anthology that is not coming out in paperback soon and is not offered by SFBC.



I don't see anything on the Noreascon 4 website about what the voting deadline is, but it may be the end of July, which is good because there are twice as many stories to read with the retro-Hugos in there too (although probably several of them will be hard to find in their original form). As usual when the nominations are announced, I'm in the middle of the next classics book group book, but unlike last year it's not too long so I should be able to get cracking next week. I'll have a page off of the sf subdomain for my reviews shortly.

Well, it's official, I'm going back to Sydney next month, this time without a stopover in Hong Kong on the way back. We're deploying our new app to the friendly folks in the Sydney office, and I whined my way onto the invitation list, and I'm proud of it. Should be a good trip, didn't do the London one last year and that was a big pain (I might as well have gone because they kept calling me all weekend from there when stuff didn't work right), but I'm cautiously optimistic that this one will go much more smoothly.



As luck would have it, there's not much of interest going on at the opera house this time, but it's kind of hard to tell what else might be in town, so I'll have to wait and see. I was there in August of 2002 all by myself for the deployment of our own application, but only for five days, but I made it to both theaters of the opera house, and though neither of the programs in and of itself was that interesting (Carmen in one, Maazel conducts Strauss in the other), it was still fun to do. It's getting close to winter there after all, so they should be at the height of the concert season. This time I'd like to get out of the immediate downtown area at least once and actually see the night sky.



It seems there are really only two reasons to go to the southern hemisphere, to see the night sky and to see the toilet flush the other way. Thanks to modern technology, toilets don't really swirl like they used to (at least in commercial office buildings and hotels), so that leaves the southern sky, and from downtown Sydney you can't see any stars at all. Last time I got a fair amount of sightseeing in, went to the observatory, did a run over the harbor bridge and another along the Circular Quay, had lunch at Darling Harbor, even went to the movies one night, and watched a fair amount of rugby and australian football in the hotel room. I also was on a quest for Wiggles merchandise, which was still extremely rare in the US, but now is everywhere and of course the kids have outgrown it and don't care any more.



This go around there's about 10 other people from work that will be there, but I don't anticipate hanging out with them a lot after hours. Since this is more of a sanctioned trip I don't have to be so frugal either, last time I was buying phone cards and sandwiches at convenience stores to save money for the bank. It was kind of pathetic, but since I was by myself it didn't matter that much. This time the gloves are off, baby. Let's see how I do keeping this thing up to date from 14 time zones away.

There's some sort of fin de siecle thing happening these days. Within the last two weeks, I hit my 15,000th birthday (days, that is), Roy Raja, one of the Chorale's long-standing members, died after a protracted but mostly secret bout with cancer, and Allen, our conductor since the early 50's, announced his impending retirement.



The 15,000th birthday is a milestone because when I first figured out how many days old I was back in junior high, I figured at the time it would be something to shoot for to live to be 30,000 days old, because that was a nice round number that was neither to optimistic nor too soon. At the time I was just turning 5,000, and of course it seemed impossibly far off. But now I'm half way there, and just like an interstellar drive, you start at zero, speedup towards near light speed until you reach the midpoint of the trip, and then you turn around and start to slow down, looking back from whence you came. Of course it could all go pear-shaped (as the British say) tomorrow, but you have to have a goal, and 30,000 (which works out to just past 82 in the more conventional annual notation) still seems reasonable. Neither Dad nor Grandpa Bartlett got anywhere near it, so I'd be one up on them at the very least.



Allen is a good model for clean living, as he's made it significantly past 30,000 and is still going strong, longevity being either a prerequisite or an added benefit of being a conductor. Everyone's known he'd have to retire some day, but at the same time there was no reason not to assume he'd keep going until they pried the baton from his cold dead fingers. So his impending retirement certainly signals the end of an era, naturally for himself but for the Chorale as well, which wouldn't be the august organization that it is today without his long years of service. The transitional period will be difficult for everyone concerned, no doubt, but hopefully things will stay amicable all around. The fact that we've moved beyond community chorus to an incorporated non-profit organization whose reach extends throughout New England I think will serve in good stead.



Roy had been ill for a while but didn't want to bother any of us with it, so he was still singing and helping with the fruit deliveries right up until about six weeks ago. Then suddenly he showed up at rehearsal one night hooked up to a portable oxygen tank, basically to say goodbye. Two weeks later he died. So for all of us it was a sudden loss, made even more difficult to cope with because he was always such a force of nature, and at 69 not really all that old (closer to 25,000 than 30,000). His memorial service was today and, as Rick said afterwards, "Well that has to be the most entertaining memorial service I've ever attended". Several people including Ted, Allen and Ginny got up and told stories about some of Roy's antics, and the general consensus was with someone like him who was immersed in so many things and commanded the presence that he did, you just kind of assumed he'd always be around. We all wrote notes to him a couple of weeks ago at rehearsal, and Ted took them over and read them all to him, and he said today that Roy got a chuckle out of mine, which just said from one fruit-unloader to another "It's lonely in the back of the truck without you". I'll miss his chatting with the truck drivers, swearing a lot and telling dirty jokes, and usually trying to hurry things up because he had a concert to sing in that evening. The Elijah that we're working on now also makes me think of him because the last time we did it he insisted on singing from memory, and there's one particularly exposed spot towards the end where the basses come in all alone with "And when the lord" and Roy came in a measure early all by himself. It was excised from the tape, so it's lost to posterity, but he made no excuses for it, nor would anyone have expected him to.



This all kind of comes together because as I get older I think about the distance between the beginnings of things and the present, and I compare it with the distance from now to an arbitrarily-defined end, and the beginnings get further away, and the end gets closer. You devote more of your time to learning about ways or doing things to cheat death. Every little twinge or sniffle takes on greater potential significance, when in earlier years I would've just shrugged it off without even thinking about it. My pile of books to read is so large now it's quite obvious I could never possibly read them all even in 15,000 days, but it won't stop me from buying more. I could suddenly get religion, or become a hypochondriac, but they both seem like too much trouble. So even though you can't help thinking about it, you can't let it get to you, and instead focus on aspiring to be by the end, whenever that may be, someone like Roy or Allen, polar opposites in many respects but two people who've done well for themselves doing what they wanted to do, and whose absence would be profoundly felt by those around them. Otherwise, you have to think, what really is the point?

A week ago Sunday I schlepped down to Sharon on an overcast afternoon for the latest BPAA soiree. We're experimenting with the format of the soirees these days, after the success of the December one at Robert's house (which he called "very enjoyable", which is positively gushing for him). This time we spent about an hour talking about the pre-selected topic of "making the piano sing", then another hour talking about a pre-selected work (the 1st movement of the Italian Concerto), then the recital part of the afternoon. I stayed for the whole thing, it was quite the marathon, but pretty worthwhile. I'd recently unearthed the lower numbered volumes of the International Library of Piano Music in the attic, one of which contains the Italian Concerto, so I brought it along and was one of a few people who played through it for demonstration purposes.



For the concert part of the afternoon, I'd brought along the Alcotts movement of the Concord Sonata, which I've been playing around with ever since hearing Stephen Drury play it at NEC last June. Eventually I'd like to work up the other movements to the point that they were in 1985, since I never got the opportunity to perform it then, but looking at it now I can't believe I actually had the first movement memorized once. I don't think I have enough brain cells left for that any more.



The rest of the recitalists were a mixed bag, including a couple of people I'd never seen before. One, who appeared to be somewhat autistic maybe, played the most disturbing rendition of a Mozart sonata I've ever heard. From memory and with the repeats, to boot. I felt like taking a shower after it was over. When I got home hours later I pulled out the music to play through it myself to hear what it's supposed to sound like, and I didn't recognize any of it. Another guy who was new to me played from memory the Chopin Polonaise Fantasie practically without ever taking his foot off the damper pedal. I understand wanting to overpedal to cover up shortcomings in one's technique, but this was so overdone it must've been on purpose. Although listening at the time was like having a root canal, it's still kind of interesting how it brought into focus how one's playing can be a manifestation of both personality and psyche.



Obviously some pretty scary inner demons are at work in both performers, and they've chosen to channel Mozart and Chopin through their own unique worldview as an outlet for self-expression (which is fine if it keeps the axe-murdering impulse at bay). The extent to which they both overdid whatever it was they were trying to do still gave an extreme example of imbuing a performance with your own personality, however disturbing it might be. You see that in the greats too with Gould and Horowitz, and lately I've been listening to Julius Katchen, who based on his playing should've been a pretty interesting guy. What's even more interesting is that the personality factor in one's playing can also be evident by the lack of involvement or emotion or whatever. Are boring pianists boring in real life? Not necessarily, but it shows how they feel about expressing themselves and their opinions about things, or their fears over what others think of their feelings or ideas. In other words, boring playing may be more a result of thinking that you're boring rather the fact that you truly are. The soirees have their musical aspirations, but they are also therapy for some, who profess to be able to play something note-perfect in the privacy of their own home but seize up in front of even the smallest of audiences, even with the music in front of them. As I've noted many times after playing for Chorale auditions, there are a lot of high-strung people out there. Other than mood-altering drugs, I don't know of any other cure for those kind of jitters than to keep doing it. But I'll make an exception for those who just lay on the pedal the whole time, or go through bizarre and sudden shifts in dynamics and tempo. They should stop.

Three weeks go by, with no other excuse than sheer laziness. But that's okay, there's lots to catch up on. Starting with this past weekend, when I overhauled the computer from which I type most of these entries. At work we've been going back and forth with the powers that be for the last year about getting new equipment, as the stuff we acquired when we first started in January of 2001 has long since become obsolete. But no, the traders get new equipment as a result of the move last November, and their old equipment, from their previous move, which was about two years ago, is still under warranty and therefore must be used by somebody, so it fell to us to inherit it, even though only some of it is better than what we already have, and that only marginally better. So I have a new (to me) pc under my desk that isn't plugged in or connected to anything, while I continue to pound away on a three-years-and-counting Compaq laptop with a P3 833 processor.



So I thought if I can't have decent equipment at work, at least I can do an upgrade at home. As it works out, my home PC was also celebrating its three-year anniversary and was officially obsolete, so I took a few hundred dollars of bonus money and bought me a 2.8Ghz P4 and a new mobo to go with it, along with an upgrade to Windows XP. Saturday night I finally got a chance to take it all apart and install everything, and was annoyed to discover that my 768MB of memory was now useless, as the older SDRAM memory (of which I could only use 512 MB under Windows Me) has been supplanted in newer mother boards by DDR memory.



As luck would have it, the computer show that comes to town periodically was here this weekend, so Sunday morning (an hour short on sleep after making the shift to Daylight Savings Time) I went down to the Royal Plaza Trade Center and got myself half a gig of PC3200 DDR ram for about $100. Before lunch I was home, popped in the memory, plugged everything in and fired it up and got exactly nothing. The fans were spinning, but no video, no boot, not even system beeps, which was kind of spooky. After poking around for a couple of hours (with the kids hovering around saying "Is it still broken?" and "Have you fixed it yet?" every two minutes, much like management when something goes wrong at work) and checking Intel's website, I hit upon the tidbit that not only had my memory module been obsolete, but so was the power supply of all things. All these extra USB ports mean the motherboard needs more power, Cap'n, with an extra plug that if not used prevents the system from booting.



Feeling somewhat skeptical that this was in fact the problem, but not having any better ideas, I went back to the computer show and bought a 350W power supply from the same vendor for $18, which seemed suspiciously cheap, but I figured for 18 bucks I'd give it a shot. Came back home again, swapped out the power supply in about 10 minutes, plugged everything back in, and the thing booted up like a trooper, even reading the hard drive and installing a bunch of new drivers. I'd sort of figured I'd have to reformat the drive in order to use the new motherboard, and this ended up being the case, since even though I could boot ok it did act a little weird (hang up when trying to delete a file, dir /od wouldn't list the files in date order, etc.).



So I booted the Win XP disk, told it to format C (which is always good for a thrill), and let the XP install do it's thing. Once I got the network drivers off the cd that came with the board, it found my router and got me connected to the internet without any further intervention on my part. Getting used to the XP interface takes a little getting used to (I know XP's been out forever, but it's only recently that it's gotten relatively cheap, and it's such a pain in the ass to upgrade). Word took a couple of tries before it would install correctly. Liked to never got the printer drivers enabled, but finally did. Still have a pile of stuff to re-download and/or reinstall, but nothing I can't live without for a little while.



Once again I'm amazed at how difficult it is to do all this, which is why I suspect most non-computer-geeky types would rather just buy a new (pre-built) system than either install new hardware or upgrade the OS. I kept the hard drive and disk drives, video and sound cards, which are all still perfectly adequate (and not rendered obsolete by upgrading the other stuff), so for around $400 I could give myself essentially a brand new machine with a processor boost from 1200 to 2800 Mhz. I'd like to get another half gig of memory just because with XP I could actually make use of it, and eventually one of them new-fangled flat panel monitors, but otherwise I can sit tight for awhile with this configuration.



But not for too long, since next year the downstairs PC will hit that portentous third birthday, too.