(no subject)

According to this article, the text of the so-called "patriot act" (the law that revokes many civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism) wasn't even available to congressmen before the vote. And according to this opinion piece, the abuses go even farther than I had thought. (Thanks to khaosworks for the links.)

Darkover addendum

This year On the Mark got one concert instead of our usual two. I figured this was an effort on their part to cut back; I noticed that the total time allocated to concerts was shorter than in the past by a few hours. A bit disappointing, but shrug. And it could be, I figured, that they're trying to tell us something. And one concert is the norm; we've been special that way.

It turns out that it wasn't any of that. They goofed, and didn't realize it until Friday night. And at that point we decided not to try to slap something together, because (1) it would be last-minute; (2) Andrea was sick; and (3) Kathy was heading back to Pittsburgh to work on her thesis.

But next year, they said, we should slap 'em around if they make that mistake. Ok. :-)

hardware

Sometimes -- randomly, we think -- our file server goes catatonic. Its video card has been flaky for a while, so we don't always know what's going on when this happens. I almost never turn the monitor on, and VNC only works for the first few days of a boot, it seems. (So a reboot consists of a blind power-cycle.) This is the machine known as "hub", because once upon a time it was, but it's since been replaced with a Linksys box. I bought Hub (new) in 1997 as my desktop machine and downgraded it to network hub/firewall in 1999. Good thing we have a replacement file server in the works.

It's not really a file server in the traditional sense of that word anyway; nothing important exists only on that machine. We had the machine lying around, and it's cheap insurance against disk failure in a desktop machine. And it's a way to pass files back and forth.

Dani has been having trouble getting that replacement machine to see the network when booted under Linux. Tonight he put Win98 on it and that sees the network just fine, so it's not a problem with the card. This is pretty much his project, though, so I'm mostly staying out of it until it's ready for users.

Dani's desktop machine has been having network problems for the last few days. Through trial and error he determined that it was probably due to things being booted in the wrong order. He almost never reboots his machine, so he probably got hit with one of the random power flickers that motivated me to go out and buy a UPS for *my* machine. (My theory is that we got a flicker and his machine came back before Linksys did, and Windows probably isn't smart enough to detect a network that comes into existence post-boot.)

Or maybe he accidentally jiggled something on his router box while plugging in the Linux box a few days ago. Shrug.

There's probably an easier way to run a home network than the maze of routers and cables and stuff that we have, but what we have works so I'm not motivated to change it. When it comes to hardware configuration, I follow a hill-climbing algorithm and settle for the local maximum. I am not a perfectionist.

Rossi music

The Salamone Rossi music collections I ordered arrived today. This will be nifty to explore. I love Rossi's liturgical music and am looking forward to singing some of it.

There were some surprises, though. First, I thought (from the catalog description) that I was ordering two books that together make up the set of liturgical music called "Songs of Solomon". (There are 33 pieces in the collection, according to the recordings I have.)

What I actually ended up with was one book containing 30 of these pieces (haven't gone through to identify the missing ones yet) and a book of his *madrigals*. The madrigals are in Italian, not Hebrew, and there are no translations. I'm sure they're musically lovely; I'd like to know what they say. I'm not unhappy to have the music -- more Rossi is good! -- but I'm a bit puzzled by what I'm holding.

The other surprise, though, is that these appear to be reprints of editions originally written in *French*. So while the music itself has transliterated Hebrew (not actual Hebrew), the transliterations have occasional funky accent marks and things that are presumably meaningful to speakers of French. (I can fix this because I know what the texts should be, but I'll probably have to re-type pieces that the choir is going to do.) The other effect of the French edition is that there is a long introduction to the book, including a discussion of notation and (I suspect) a discussion of decisions made by the transcribers, which I would very much like to read, and *it's* in French, too. There are also two pages of material in Hebrew (almost certainly not the same text as the French), but sans vowels. (My odds of comprehension go from slim to very slim when you take away the vowels.) Dani should be able to puzzle that out for me, at least.

I'm still very happy to have the actual music -- or rather, some apparently-scholarly transcription of the music -- but I'm frustrated that I can't read the supporting materials. I'm a music geek; I actually read those parts of books.

Hey Fianna or Ray, how's your French? :-)