I’m writing a final-year paper, much like most finishing undergraduates, and I find the following tools for Mac to be very useful:

BibDesk – a free, open-source bibliography manager which supports importing annotations from .PDF file. Outputs citations in BibTeX format (more on this anon). It permits searching JSTOR and library catalogues from within the application, meaning adding bibliographic records for books and articles requires little or no data entry, where existing records exist. It is even possible to connect to your local university’s catalogue, if they provide this service – that would mean you’d get local shelfmarks in your local reading list, which can be useful if you are offline.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqsIiGulf-CIdGxZNi1wSHhIemxCVnpvV2k4RUFPR2c

Guide to use:

‘Concerts’ tab includes all concerts, dates and soloists.

‘List of works’ tab allows filtering by composer, to select dates.

More features to come, if there’s a demand.

I turn my focus to a concert I had the pleasure to attend in the Hawkswell Theatre, Sligo. Just over two weeks ago, The Bad Plus performed – to a house of less than 30 – music which each time it is performed, betrays the dependence of so much of western art music on the figure of Igor. Stravisnky, of course, penned the Rite of Spring for a large-sized orchestra with a swollen horn section and The Bad Plus are (just?) a lowly jazz trio. A super small canvas for an expansive work with iconic timbral hallmarks.  The ultra-high bassoon opening was tackled by the sustain-deficient piano, perhaps marking the territory of this arrangement - impactful, and attack-heavy. Drummer Dave King seemed to create a world of his own, filling the gaps between the (already metrically heady) beats with illogical and virtuosic digressions. In toto, however, bass and piano reined in the beast and delivered a compelling slice of 1913 to the backwaters of Ireland, in the backwaters of Europe. 

Right, so we’re jam-packed with content. Being a viewer or a listener is as much about the process of triage as it is about the experience of the work itself. Gone are the days of piped content, decisions made in Montrose, Broadcasting House or further afield have decreasing influence on the media that we take the time out of our day to consume. Surely this is a liberating experience, what with the autonomy of selection firmly granted to the individual.

One of the tenets of the productivity oik David Allen’s philosophy of, well, productivity is that one should clear the mind of all tasks that are floating within by committing them to paper, thereby freeing up valuable brain cycles that were previously spent on worrying about what to do, and spending them entirely on doing them - or at least, slaking through a prioritised list and doing such things one by one.

Vimium

Vimium is a Google Chrome extension which provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.

I’ve started to learn Python. It’s notoriously quick to protoype ideas for apps (we are told) and my experience this evening is that it is. My end goal is server-side web app development and to this end, I’ve also been investigating AppEngine. More on that anon, perhaps.

My main reference was a little bit jurassic class in Python offered here:

http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/index.html

Interest in aviation rekindled by stumbling upon some impressive home-built flight simulator decks, I recalled the METAR standard for meteorological reports. This short-coded form of forecast, I thought, was perfect for SMS – I’d like to have the one for Dublin Airport sent to my phone every 6 hours, I thought. Python, I thought.

Using Google Chrome, it’s possible to search the TCD library catalogue by typing your directly into the URL bar.

Click the wrench icon, head to Preferences…, click Manage Search Engines… Then, add a new search engine titled TCD Catalogue (or similar), choose a short memorable keyword (I use ’lib’) and copy and paste the following URL into the rightmost form field (saving your changes):

http://stella.catalogue.tcd.ie/iii/encore/search/C__S%s__Orightresult__U1?lang=eng&suite=cobalt

Now, in any new window or tab, type your keyword into the URL bar, hit tab, type your search terms and hit enter!

Once upon a time, I was inclined to imagine the development of musical thought and expression as taking place in a strictly linear fashion. It was irresistible to conceive of the Renaissance masters as primitive musical actors in relation to those of the Classical period, and likewise to construe the Classic school as worthy of merit, sure, but technically inferior to that of the late Romantics. The argument was simple: harmonic complexity seemed to me to reach its peak at the turn of the 20th century (we’ve all heard this claim in one guise or another) and given both this purported pinnacle and the correlate “development” of civilisation, it was no great step to extrapolate a continuum of decreasing complexity right back to the primordial element of western art music, chant.

If you are a little bit creeped out as you trawl through your shiny new Timeline, I sympathise. There’s something unsettling about a chronology of your putative ’life’ as a linear sequence of events, starting with a cheery event marking your birth, that is, your entry into this planet and your subsequent coalescence of consciousness. Thanks for reminding me, Mark.

The interesting thing about all this is that, more or less, all the information displayed in the timeline has already been collected about you. No-one has asked for anything additional, supplementary. Here we see a re-presentation of information in a more visually compelling/visceral manner, one that in its directness, will cause more users than ever to consider the implications of posting so much about themselves online. The problem is, that if you dislike the cut of your timeline - tough. Sure, you can hide ’that awkward moment when…’ from the more sensitive souls on your friend roster; unfortunately you can’t unforget the fact that for nearly five or so years now you’ve sought to construct an online presence and the path of that artificial development is now indexable, by year, by month.