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I’m not sure that choral singing is something that most people would classify as an adrenaline sport, but my experiences on Sunday have lead me to believe that it might be. I went along—with about 1,100 others—to participate in the ‘Blockbuster Choruses from Scratch’ day, held at Symphony Hall in Birmingham. The idea is that you get some rehearsal with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) and Chorus during the day, then perform a short concert in the evening.

My love of listening to choral music is well known, but I also enjoy singing, despite not having done it seriously since being in the choir at school. I don’t sight read well; I can tell if the notes are going up or down, and roughly estimate the duration of notes, but I’m heavily reliant on listening to others and picking the tune up as I go. As Eric Morecambe famously told André Previn: “I’m playing all the right notes, pal, but not necessarily in the right order”. Despite this, I had an absolute blast. The conductor, Simon Halsey, was wonderful¹, and it was brilliant fun.

I enjoyed all the pieces we did (‘Deep River’ from Tippett’s ‘A Child of Our Time’ was unexpectedly beautiful, and a treat for altos with low voices like me), but perhaps the biggest buzz came from doing Handel’s Zadok the Priest. This music must be the biggest musical tease in history. You get about 24 bars of gentle orchestral introduction, which ebbs and flows and keeps fooling you into thinking that the big choral sonic boom is about to arrive, when it actually isn’t due for another few minutes. This is an approximation of my thoughts during the concert, while waiting for the big moment to arrive:

diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle, are we nearly there yet? diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle, wait for it… diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle OK, getting closer, diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle, on your marks diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle, get set diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle, GO! [sound of 1,100 people collectively taking a deep breath]

ZAAA-DOK THE PREEEEIST… [flamin’ heck, that’s good…]

And a huge adrenalin rush was had by all. With so many people, I’m not sure that our timing was spot on, but I don’t think we could be faulted on amplitude!

¹ His explanation of how choir boys achieve a trill was hilarious and not easily forgotten…

Some time ago, Pete (an occasional commenter here and an Applescript Ninja) pointed out a new application for writing your own Service menu items. At the time, it was called Concierge, but due to a clash with an existing application, they have renamed it to Bellhop. The idea is that Bellhop provides you with a scripting interface to the Service menu (currently you can use Applescript or Ruby), so that you can write scripts in your language of choice to take data (usually text) from one Cocoa application, do something to it, and pass it to another Cocoa application. I think it is possible to integrate services into Carbon application, but very few developers do it.

It’s quite nicely set up, with the ability to group your scripts together in submenus, and also rebuild the service menu so that you can see the changes without logging out. It’s certainly worth a look if you know either Applescript or Ruby, and would like to integrate your applications better, or just add a new feature to a Cocoa application. However, it seems that they will eventually be charging for the product (at least for some of the functionality), and there is no indication yet as to what that price will be. So don’t get too hooked before you find out how much you’ll have to fork out to feed your habit.

It seems appropriate—on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—to talk about a film I watched the other night. Holocaust - A Music Memorial Film from Auschwitz interspersed interviews with people who had been forced to play music while imprisoned in Auschwitz and photographs from the time, with performances of various pieces of classical music within the camp and buildings themselves. It might sound like an odd idea, perhaps even rather disrespectful, but that isn’t the way it came across. Mr. Bsag commented at one point that it was like a musical exorcism, and perhaps it was. Certainly, music was corrupted and perverted there; people were forced to play marches and jolly little pieces while their fellow humans were marched off to the gas chambers. Playing beautiful pieces of music—some of which were composed in response to the Holocaust seemed a good way to remember and pay respect to those who died or were scarred by their experiences there.

As you might expect, it was unbearably moving at times. I’m ashamed to admit that I couldn’t watch it all in one go. I had to look away, which is terrible. It isn’t much to ask of us that we should be witnesses, 60 years on, but I still couldn’t do it.

I don’t believe in ghosts (or life after death for that matter), but it was difficult when Cantor Steven Leas was singing a Hebrew lament for the dead (El Male Rachamim) in the women’s barracks not to imagine that he was singing directly to the spirits of the women who had once lived in that bleak and dank room. Similarly, when Iva Bittova played the violin and sang a Gypsy Lament in the ruins of one of the many huts where Roma people where housed and then massacred, it felt as if she was sending a message of condolence and hope back in time. The programme ended in a very symbolic way, with Maxim Vengerov playing Bach’s Chaconne on the violin while walking out of the camp. Liberation.

One of the design features I’ve always really loved about the current series of PowerBooks is the sleep light. The slow cycle of brightening and fading of the white light—at the same frequency as the breath of a sleeper—is oddly reassuring, and encourages you to think of your computer as a character.

I realised the other day that I may have gone a little too far down the road of computer anthropomorphism. Ever since I installed the last batch of system upgrades, the PowerBook goes through a period of the sleep light being very dim and irregular when it is first put to sleep. When I first noticed it, I caught myself wondering if my little ‘Book was having a nightmare. Do PowerBooks dream of electric Tigers?

Behold the PetsMobility PetCell (justifiably sceptical review by Gizmodo):

The PetsMobility PetCell is only a concept for now, but the patent-pending collar could be great—if you don’t mind spending a lot of extra cash on your pets. The idea is simple: it’s a cell phone and GPS unit on a collar, with its own private number. Using caller ID, it automatically picks up when an approved number calls, allowing you to speak to your dog or cat (but probably dog) from wherever you are. And with the GPS service enabled, you’ll even be able to yell at them when they’ve wandered too far from home.

Ignoring for a moment the ridiculous concept of equipping your pet with a mobile phone, just how badly would this freak out your little non-human companion? Rover or Fluffy is out and about, happily doing doggy or catty things, when suddenly, your disembodied voice comes from the region of its neck. It knows darn well that you’re nowhere near, as it can’t smell you. My guess is that it (and the expensive PetsMobility PetCell) would disappear over the horizon in a cloud of dust, never to be seen again.

[via Gizmodo]

I’ve decided; Bill Bailey is officially my joint favourite living British comedian (with Eddie Izzard). I’ve enjoyed him a lot as an actor in ‘Spaced’ (as Bilbo, the comic book shop owner), and of course as the cheerfully opressed Manny in ‘Black Books’, but I’ve just seen some of his ‘Part Troll’ tour on TV, and I’m still giggling.

Trying to explain what makes someone funny is a sure way to kill any humour, but I must just give a few examples of some of the many things that cracked me up in the show¹.

1. He wondered why the pages of the catalogues in Argos are laminated, and came to the conclusion that it was to stop the tears of joy from making the pages wrinkly. [In a voice a little like Gollum, and turning the pages reverently] “So many beautiful things, but I cannot possess them all…”
2. He related talking to a Buddhist in Indonesia. The man asked him what Britain was like: “It’s OK I suppose. [Brightening a little] We’ve got Nectar Points [mimes showing the Nectar card].”
3. He performed the Hokey Cokey as Kraftwerk. This was absolute genius—imagine the Hokey Cokey in expressionless German, complete with Kraftwerk robotic actions.

Of course, it might all be in the way he tells them.

¹ A warning to non-UK readers—the first two points listed contain some highly culturally-specific material. You probably won’t find them funny, but trust me, they are.

Partly because of my own project, Tracks, I’m interested in seeing how other people implement todo type lists. So I signed up for a Ta-da list to see how they were doing it. I was pretty impressed. It’s intended to be a fairly simple system to tempt people into signing up for a full Basecamp account, so there are no categories, due dates or anything like that. However, they do have some really neat ideas.

Much of the interface is implemented using XML-HTTP Request and Javascript, so that the whole page doesn’t have to be refreshed for each change. Actions like adding an item and checking an item off as completed appear to happen nearly instantaneously. They also have a nice visual indicator of how many items a list contains on the overview page; each list has a blob icon next to it, and the size is proportional to the number of uncompleted items. You can share selected lists publicly, subscribe to an RSS feed or get the contents of lists emailed to you. It’s all pretty nice—simple in the good sense of elegant and sufficient.

One thing it and Flickr showcase is the power of XML-HTTP Request to narrow the usability gap between ordinary applications and web-based applications. I’m going to look into the documentation for it to see if I could use XML-HTTP in Tracks.

One of the things I really enjoy is watching people who are very skilled do something difficult, making it look simple and graceful. It doesn’t matter if it’s filleting fish, laying bricks, forging iron or singing polyphony—I find it all fascinating. We went to see The Tallis Scholars at Symphony Hall last night, and quite apart from the sublime sound they made, I was fascinated by how effortless they made the difficult task of singing Renaissance music seem.

They are only 12 singers (at a maximum—for some of the pieces, they used fewer people), and yet they sing intricate unaccompanied and un-amplified music in parts. I used to sing in amateur choirs, and it was always a disaster when I found myself on the outer edge of the other altos. I would start listening to the sopranos part, and find it really difficult to stick to mine.

They sang a number of pieces by John Sheppard which were exquisitely beautiful. You can lose yourself in the shifting harmonies, and then suddenly find that some of the voices are soaring away, and you get lifted up with them. We were in the second row of the stalls (the cheap seats, as it turned out), and the whole thing was thrilling and quite emotional¹. I have a few recordings of the Tallis Scholars’ work, but—particularly with choral works—there’s nothing quite like experiencing it live.

¹ I think I’ve mentioned before that while I’m staunchly agnostic, I’m unusually interested and moved by all kinds of religious music: Renaissance polyphony, Gregorian chant, Russian Orthodox Christian sung liturgy, Qawwali/Sufi devotional music, and so on. If religion only involved music, I’d be pretty keen about it.

Thanks to a kind ‘heads up’ by Saltation, I managed to catch Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars on Sky One. We both got all excited when it was announced that the mini-series would be shown on the Sci-Fi channel, only to find that it wasn’t shown on the Sci-Fi channel in the UK.

Thanks to a VCR-Telewest related bodge up, I didn’t catch the first airing on Sky One, but managed to watch (and tape it) on Tuesday. I’m very happy to say that it didn’t disappoint at all. The plot is as twisty and gasp-inducing as ever, and the dialogue and characters are as sharp as a scalpel. Despite all the prosthetics and animatronics, all the characters seem like real, bickering, affectionate, selfish people/frog-creatures/tentacled things. Even the effects are far better than anything I’ve seen on a TV sci-fi series. The people at the Sci-Fi channel must be blithering idiots to cancel such a great series.

If you haven’t seen the first episode and want to, you might not want to follow the ‘Read more’ link below, as there might be mild spoilers within. And I’ll probably watch part 2 next Tuesday, so if anyone else sees it on Sunday, don’t give the the game away!

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I have a question: does anyone know of good resources for adults to improve their handwriting? I don’t mean calligraphy, but everyday fluent handwriting. I used to have really neat handwriting when I was at school, but as I’ve used computers more it has gradually degraded to the scruffy, illegible scrawl I use today. When I look back at my old school books, and even my undergraduate notes, it’s hard to believe that it’s my handwriting. I’d really like to neaten it up again.

I think part of the problem is impatience. I’ve got used to typing very quickly, so when I try to hand-write at the same speed, I get frustrated and the result looks like a stoned spider with inky feet reeling across the page.

Reading The Fencing Master reminded me of what I miss about doing martial arts. I studied TaeKwon-Do for several years, and also had a brief bash (if that’s the right word) at fencing. I must be the world’s least sporty person, but I really enjoyed both—perhaps because there was as much emphasis on just doing and enjoying them as on winning a competition or match.

The Fencing Master is full of wonderful descriptions of the experience of fencing, and of the curious mixture of analytical planning and instinct it requires. On the one hand, you need to react and act instinctively towards your opponent because the action is so fast that if you wait for your brain to catch up, you will already be beaten. On the other, there’s a lot of strategy involved. You need to feel out your opponents weak points (acute observational skills are useful here), and then exploit them by employing a feint which will make them react in a certain way and allow you to make a counter-attack.

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I’ve nearly finished the book The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford¹. It’s a very involving book, and beautifully written. Francis Spufford manages to explain some rather complex concepts in a simple and engaging way, without ‘dumbing down’, and he captures the characters of the people involved very well.

The chapter on the British Rocket programme (‘Flying Spitfires to Other Planets’) was very interesting, and I won’t quickly get rid of the image of Ray Dommett—one of the main people involved in Britain’s nuclear defence programme—taking part in Morris dancing in his spare time:

Another of the rocketmen I talked to spotted him by chance in Bristol. ‘These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladder—and I said to my wife, “Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”’

I also liked the chapter on the Human Genome Project, ‘The Gift’. It’s also an important story. For those who don’t know the background, in 1998, a consortium in the US (later to be called Celera) fronted by Craig Venter announced that they would be forming a private company to take over the sequencing of the whole of the human genome—a task that had been started by various labs funded by the National Institute of Health in the States and by the Medical Research Council and The Wellcome Trust in the UK. They were going to throw huge resources at it, and aimed to finish the sequence two years or so earlier than the projected public effort completion date. The real stinger was that they weren’t going to make the results freely available to scientists, but to charge a subscription fee for access to the database.

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For those of you following the development of my GTD web application, Tracks, I’ve written a long and rambling article (I’m really selling this, aren’t I?) about features I’m thinking about including in the next major version here.

Commuting at the moment is really irritating. There’s a limited strike on the trains, so while they are still running a service, there are cancellations and delays every day. Instead of taking me less than an hour each way, for the past week the journey has taken more than 90 minutes for a distance of about 12 miles as the crow flies.

Last night, travelling home, I was feeling like it might be my lucky night. The train left on time¹, and I settled back enjoying the feeling that I might actually get home at a reasonable hour. Obviously this was a bad idea, and I was enraging the gods of the railway. We waited for ages at New Street station, until the conductor came on the intercom to explain that the train didn’t have a driver. I’m no expert on railway systems, but I’m guessing that having a driver is a big help. There followed a period of a fun game of ‘train musical chairs’ in which people switch between trains because of a rumour that there might be one on the adjacent platform which might be leaving sooner than the one they are on. They then find out that there’s a different problem with that train, and come back again (rinse, repeat).

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I missed not being able to watch the Keynote live this year, but it always was a bit of a hit and miss affair as far as bandwidth goes. I often found that the video and audio dropped out just before Steve-o announced something insanely cool. Streaming or no streaming, there seems to be some juicy stuff coming out (mostly leaked beforehand, but it’s still nice to see the reality). I think the product I’m most excited by is the iMac mini

I missed not being able to watch the Keynote live this year, but it always was a bit of a hit and miss affair as far as bandwidth goes. I often found that the video and audio dropped out just before Steve-o announced something insanely cool. Streaming or no streaming, there seems to be some juicy stuff coming out (mostly leaked beforehand, but it’s still nice to see the reality). I think the product I’m most excited by is the iMac mini—that wee thing is adorable. It looks like someone has stepped on a Cube and squished it in a cartoon accident kind of way. The specs look pretty good for the price, and since I might be in the market for a replacement for my ageing iMacDV, I’m certainly interested.

The iPod shuffle is a bit more of a puzzle. It looks nice in a fairly bland way, but I’m just not convinced that even 1 GB of space is enough. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from owning an iPod (a 10GB 2nd generation model), it’s that having a big reservoir of music is an enormous plus. I hardly ever sync up my iPod, and I listen to it everyday, but I never feel like I’m hearing the same old thing again. But people will no doubt snap them up like hot buttered toasted teacakes. Actually, Apple seems to be a bit worried about potential food/MP3 player confusion; there’s a footnote to the caption “Smaller than a pack of gum and much more fun” which reads “Do not eat iPod shuffle”. The headphone cord will get stuck between your teeth.

I use Keynote quite a lot¹, and the changes included in Keynote 2 within the new iWork bundle look good (and somewhat overdue). I don’t think I can really form an opinion on the word processor, Pages, until I try it out. The shots make it look like a ‘home’ product, rather than something you could use for academic writing, but that might be just the way they’ve presented it. I’ve always liked the idea of being able to integrate all kinds of frames on a page (text, image, graphs etc.) without worrying about what kind of document you happen to be writing in—it was a good thing in AppleWorks, and other office suites like KOffice also have it. I’ll probably give it a go.