Emma tells us about herself

Book review

The Blue Moment
Mile's Davis's Kind of Blue and the remaking of modern music

Richard Williams

In High School, I played the baritone saxophone, in both the concert band and the jazz band. I rarely practised. The music the concert band played wasn't particularly hard, at least not the parts I had, and Doc, our teacher, spend countless time screaming at the percussion section and others for not staying on rhythm. (It was kind of comical at times. When I broke my collarbone, I spent some time banging on the bass drum. It was only one mallet, and one drum, but at least I kept it on rhythm.)

Anyway, I can only remember a few of the pieces of music we ever played. "Sleigh Ride" - in the concert band, which we had to play every year, and was very boring for me, for some reason. The one piece of music I remember from the Jazz band was "So What", Doc had written the basic rhythm for everyone out, had us listen several times to it, then tried getting us to play solos in the thing. I took one, or was told I was doing one, or some thing of the sort. Doc wanted me to make a solo up, but I could never really come up with anything. Then Doc wrote me a solo, and I never really stuck to it, and played it a bit differently every time. (I rarely practised, after all.) I think this drove Doc crazy.

Anyway, I liked that song, the way the basses and horns had their little back and forth dialogue, and stuff like that. Years later, I came across "So What", on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which I bought on CD. It's the one Jazz CD I own.

This book, "The Blue Moment", talks about Miles Davis' career leading up to the creation of the album. This was pretty interesting, although the author clearly knows a lot more about music and music history than I do. He talks about lots of different people in the early days of Jazz (at least recorded Jazz, I assume) that he expects the reader to be familiar with. (I am not) It was interesting reading how the album was recorded in two days. It turns out that all recording of the album were inadvertently played slightly too fast until about 1993. (If Doc had slowed us down just a bit, I might have played that solo just like he wanted me too...)

Anyway, I liked the book up to the point of the recording of the album, even though I had to just kind of take what the author was saying about some of the music on his word. After writing about the recording, the author tried to tie the record into lots of other music and pop culture that followed. Some of it was about the artists that contributed to the album, some of it was a little weird, some of it I just didn't know what the author was talking about. He seemed to just be off on his own little tangents for the last hundred pages of the book, most of which just weren't all that interesting to me.

Anyhow, the first half of this book was very interesting. I listened to the album quite a few times while reading the book. It certainly made me appreciate the discussion of the recording session that created the album a bit more.

Dr. Who scarf #2

Emma asked for a Dr. Who scarf early last week. I finished it this morning. She seems to like it.

Are they sure they want me doing this?

I'm the last person that should be writing Performance and Development plans... I was made team lead (chief engineer) last March, and there is no handbook on file that tells you what you should and should not do.

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that I had to write PDPs for everyone on my team. They had a training for it, I went, and they stressed the importance off being careful what you say in a PDP. It's a legal document, and the HR department claims they read them all.

The online tool contains the last 3 or 4 PDPs for both yourself and your employees. I looked through my old ones. "juggling monkeys" is still in there. My 2008 PDP is mysteriously missing. I don't know why. My PDP last year was redacted before it ever got to the HR department. All it says for employee comments is "I have no comment", but that's not what I said in the first place. The first thing I said was "This year I will try to be nicer to people around me. Except for Gale. The honeymoon's over there." Gale would have appreciated it, I think, but he never would have let you know it...

Anyway, I started writing these things three weeks ago. The week after Christmas I did everything I could think of to avoid working on them. I think they are basically done now, at least I hope. I am sure they are not up the the standards that the HR department wants, but that's what they get for making an engineer a manager. They should just be grateful that there is nothing in there that needs to be redacted.

Comics no more!

For over a year, I have been using an app on my phone called "DailyStrip", which is a comic strip viewer program. This is a pretty good app, you can mark your favorite comic strips, and you can read the strips you have marked every day, or come back every week or so and get caught up.

I kept sort of up to date with comic strips like "Beetle Bailey", "Blondie", "Sherman's Lagoon", "Hagar the Horrible", "Spiderman", "Dilbert", "B.C", and "Foxtrot", among others.

That was until a couple of days ago. The author of the app was recently notified by King Feature Syndicates that he was to cease and desist publishing their comics in his app. Two thirds of the comic strips I used to follow are no longer available on the phone. I'm not sure why. King Features Syndicate doesn't appear to have a subscription pay service on their site, they only provide a week's worth of strips for each title, and those appear to be 6 weeks old.

It's not like my not being able to read comics on my phone will drive me to subscribe to a newspaper, just for the comics. I just won't read the comics every week to 10 days like I have been doing. The worst part about it is I'm not going to find out how Spiderman rescues Aunt May!

In other news, I think my boss often thinks today's punch line in the Dilbert comment. He just doesn't say it...



Sorry, King Features Syndicate. I don't know what you are thinking, but your product isn't worth my time now that you have made it incredibly inconvenient to access...

Restaurant reviews

We've (or just I, in one case) have been to a few new (to me) restaurants in the past few weeks that are worth mentioning, so here they are:

The Happy Sumo (Provo)

I went here last week with a vendor for work. They want us to do a reference call to help them sell their product. I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the lunch. (They dropped the reference call possibility on us on the way back, and talked about setting up another lunch for the reference call. I'm ok with getting two lunches out of sharing my opinions. The opinions are normally free anyway.)

Anyway, there were five of us (three were the vendor), and one didn't eat any sushi, but it didn't stop them from ordering 6 sushi rolls. That was a lot of sushi. It was good, but it was a lot of sushi. I used the terms "post-sushi disorder" and "wasabi overload syndrome" on my twitter feed later in the day.

My favorite was the "frida roll" - inari (not really sure what that is), cilantro, red pepper, avocado, that sort of thing. It had a little spice to it, before you added wasabi.

If I ever go back, I think I would like to try what Karl had, a Katzu chicken plate. It looked pretty good.

Thai Village - Provo

This is a restaurant that just opened last week on University avenue in Provo, where Lon's Cooking Shack used to be. Tara's on a Thai kick, which is just fine, except coconut milk kind of upsets my stomach, so when we go to a Thai restaurant, I kind of have to be careful.

Anyway, why not try the brand new place? We almost didn't go in. The place looks incredibly dark from the outside. It turns out that the restaurant is not that dark on the inside, but they had some sort of light brown tinting put on their windows for some reason.

We tried their 'fresh roll', an appetizer wrapped in rice paper. I have say, it wasn't as good as the one at Thai Mango, also in Provo, that we tried months ago. This one seemed to be mostly lettuce on the inside. Maybe the sauce they bring with it is supposed to improve it, but I passed on the sauce, because I suspected it was a sweet sauce.

Tara just the red curry bowl. When it came out, it was enough rice and curry to feed Tara and several of our children. The children were not with us, so Tara took the rest home.

I got the beef waterfall, two star spicy. It was just the right amount of spicy, and was a pretty good dish. They had some sort of crunchy rice bits in with the beef, which gave it an interesting texture.

Overall, it seemed to be a pretty nice place. Hopefully they can stay in business, they basically gutted the place that was there to remodel for this one. I wonder about the new restaurants that spend so much money to get started, and wonder of the owners have unrealistic expectations about their ability to turn a profit quickly...

La Dolce Vida - Provo

Tucked away just off University in Provo is a little Italian restaurant that's been around for 25 years. We've had people over the years tell us to try it, but it's back behind things, and it's got kind of an 'out of sight, out of mind' thing going on. We almost went several years ago, but for some reason on that day, they were closed. The place looks like a store front restaurant from the street, we were a little surprised at how many tables it had in it when we got in there.

I ended up walking by the kitchen to use the restroom while we were there. In the back was a little old lady making the food. I think they were speaking to her in Italian, but I'm not that good. On the back counter were about a dozen loaves of bread, baked and resting before someone sliced them to serve.

I ordered the potato gnocchi. I had never had gnocchi before, but I've always liked the name. I'm sure it means something like 'dumpling' or something in Italian, but I don't know. All I know is that I liked the thing. My gnocchi came on a platter with both white and red sauces, the sauces were one the plate with a perfectly straight line separating the sauces. It was a pretty impressive thing to see. I have no idea how they got the sauces to stay straight like that.

Anyway, my meal was a good one, I may have to try making gnocchi one of these days. It doesn't sound all that hard, really. Maybe they use pastry bags or something to get the sauce to do that.

Additionally, I think I would prefer to go back to La Dolce Vida well before I go back to Gloria's Little Italy, which is on the same block, but facing the main street. The food is better at La Dolce Vida, the restaurant is not as stuffy, and it just seems to be a nice place. I don't know. The food seemed to be a bit better, overall, I thought.

A few goals

Last year, I ignored making goals with the turn of the year. On purpose. I don't know why, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Kind of like majoring in Mathematics in college. The year before instead of making what I called goals, I created an 'unfinished project' list, some of which I never finished. I think it's finally time to get back to it. I've got some things I need to do around here, and need some motivation to get it done. Having said all that, here's the long awaited 2011 goal list:

1. Do something significant I've never done before. Right now I've got my sights on a demolition derby with the truck, but I don't have all the correct approvals in place yet. (More on that another time.)
2. Go somewhere I have never been before. You know, show up, look around, go home. Eat good food in between.
3. Read twelve books. I've got quite a list already, some of the books are really quite big. I need to get back into the habit again.
4. Do twelve small projects around the house. There are more than twelve available, no need to list them here. If I remember, I will try to take 'before' and 'after' pictures.
5. Walk 200 miles. Walking from my desk to the water fountain doesn't count. I figure the walk has to be at least a half mile to count it. Frankly, I'm not even sure I can do this in a year at this point. Every time I try to start walking regularly, I'm thwarted by my ankle. So far this year, I've racked up a grand total of 2.5 miles. At this rate, I'm gonna be a bit short, but then again, it's been cold and snowy as well. My progress can be followed at runkeeper.com
   

I think that's more than enough. We'll have to see what happens.