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Elegy for English Horn by Jack Stamp

Yesterday I performed the Elegy for English Horn by Jack Stamp with the Star of the North Concert band. We played at Edinborough Park in Edina, MN. There was some drama, as the venue was double booked, and the Golden Valley Orchestra was already on stage, decked in their finest tuxedos when we arrived. But unfortunately for them, their concert master was unable to come, and so they canceled their performance! So we flew on stage and performed!

Anyhoo, here’s the recording of the English Horn Solo by Jack Stamp:

Elegy for English Horn by Jack Stamp

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Computers Geekery

Monitor Progress of dd Command

If you ever use the “dd” command do duplicate a drive, you’re probably familiar with the unnerving wait that accompanies its use. The command generally takes on the order of *minutes* to complete, and gives no feedback.

If you read the MAN page, you’ll see you can monitor the progress by sending a SIGINFO signal.

Open another terminal window, and do

kill -SIGINFO <dd pid>

Where <dd pid> is the process id of your dd command. For example, when I was formatting the SD card for use in my Raspberry Pi via dd on the command line, I was able to monitor progress this way:

sudo dd if=~/Downloads/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=2048k
193+0 records in
192+0 records out
402653184 bytes transferred in 314.132226 secs (1281795 bytes/sec)

UPDATE: OMG! I just realized that the moment in time when I sampled my software installation on my Raspberry Pi was 100π to 4 digits of precision. What a wonderful omen!

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How to Transpose a Viola part for English Horn

Here is how to transpose a viola part written in “C” clef for English horn.

Summary: To make an English horn produce a concert pitch, play the note that is 7 semitones higher. Often you want to simultaneously go down an octave — in which case play 5 semitones lower.

Viola plays in “C” clef. It has it’s notes written one semitone lower on the staff. Oh, and one octave. So “middle c” is on the center line of the staff.

Armed with those facts, here is my recipe for tranposing a viola part written in “C” clef on the fly for English horn. First, look at the note as if it were treble clef (realizing it’s actually an octave less one line lower than it appears) then move it down TWO spaces or lines, and add a sharp to the key signature.

E.g. Suppose it looks like a ‘b’ and there are no sharps or flats in the key signature. (In viola’s “C” clef that isn’t a ‘b’ — the middle line is really a ‘c’ concert.) EH plays in “F”, so we must transpose down. The clef already moved it down one line, so we go down TWO more from ‘b’ to arrive at ‘G’.

Let’s take another example: Suppose the note looks like ‘a’. To a violist who knows the “C” clef, they would say, no, that looks like a ‘b’ — and they are right. To play a concert ‘b’ on an English horn, go down three and add a sharp. So it’s time to play an “F SHARP”. Simple!

A related, helpful shortcut: The same number of fingers rule!

When transposing a “C” part in TREBLE clef for English horn: If the note looks as though you’d play it with 1/2/3 fingers of the left hand as written, simply finger 1/2/3 fingers on the right. E.g. ‘b’ is one finger down. So is F#.

EDIT: The first time I wrote this I got thoroughly confused between how to transpose from Treble Clef vs how to transpose from “C” Clef. I think it’s correct now.

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photo

Hello, handsome…

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…who’s your friend?

A buddy of mine took this panorama shot with his iPhone. As he panned to the right after he passed me I ran around behind him and waited for him to pass again.

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Eclipse Tonight!

I’m taking my camera to work, to try and catch a few shots of a sunset / eclipse that’s scheduled for 4:11 this afternoon.

(Later) Strike that … it was only visible from Australia. Sigh.

(Image courtesy of WikiPedia.)

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Happy Halloween!

“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
“500 Internal Server Error”

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Watching #drhorrible was reall…

Watching #drhorrible was really fun. Unfortunately now it will be stuck in my head for a few hours…

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Geekery

Server All Furbished Up with Ubuntu 12 LTS

This weekend I installed the latest “long term support” (LTS) version of the Linux operating system “Ubuntu” on my server in the cloud. With any luck, this won’t affect the sites hosted here (Becka’s and my blogs, the band, my pa-in-law’s architecture website, my family mailing list…) But if you notice something awry, please let me know.

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Test Data

I wrote a test at work today that verifies that dates that go in are the same when they come out. Stuff like this gets a little boring sometimes so I picked some more interesting dates to put in the test. Probably nobody who reads this code in the future will know the significance of these dates. But I bet you can!

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Life is a (bat) highway

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Added some 1/4″ hardware cloth and this bat entrance to my attic is closed. Ah the joys of home ownership.

Yes an entire blog post of sentence fragments. The year 2012: not enough time for verbs.