Hail, Sibelius!
The 20th of September is the 54th anniversary of Sibelius' death. I was 2½.
No, there is no connection, strained or otherwise, but then, I didn't know Bach from Beethoven either.
Since introduced to his music in the spring of 1974, I've come easily to the opinion there has been no more fabulous composer—in every sense of the term. Jean Sibelius was the most lyrically musical mind the world has ever known. His symphonishe Dichtungen or tone poems are magical, his symphonies superb and unpredictable.
Dark and brooding, nevertheless from his music escape faeric themes that enchant against a contrasting even lugubrious background. Suffused with northern light of waning, cold days, majestic vistas, and stern heroes, it alternates from hypnotic to bewitching.
I've often said in jest that Sibelius is often so ponderous and depressing at times that, by contrast, it makes me feel in a lighter mood. But only in jest.
As a treat, the Public Radio Exchange recently included him in a program series,
13 Days When Music Changed Forever, revolutionary moments when music was fundamentally transformed, hosted by musician and composer Suzanne Vega.
Sibelius is rightfully included. Sibelius is the pinnacle of musical Romanticism, the last word before the descent into dissonant Modernism. Which makes him very relevant today.
If you don't know this composer, the PRX broadcast is a fair introduction, but don't stop there. Take the plunge. I particularly suggest the easy introductions, to wit, the Second and Fifth symphonies, and the tone poems, Finlandia, Pohjola's Daughter, Tapiola, En Saga, the Swan of Tuonela and the Valse Triste. If you like organ, the Surusoitto is considered the echo of his never published and probably destroyed Eighth Symphony. There is much more including the magnificent Violin Concerto in D.
What I haven't told you, because Google disenfranchised my blog about the time it happened, is that I was involved in another exciting medical experience this spring. Here would have been my report Wednesday, 8 June had I been able to file it.
The over-all sensation of the last 10 days is one of having been forced to run through a crowd of people all of whom beat me mercilessly with instruments, some heavy and blunt, some sharp and small. Somewhere in the middle of it, my fifth granddaughter was born! (See post for 31 May 2011.)
In more real terms, I began spontaneously to bleed to death just as I began to mount my motorcycle to go to work on the morning of the first day of June.
Inauspicious!
As soon as Julene could ready herself, we departed in the van (rather than sacrifice her nice car) for the hospital. I adopted the bowl I typically use to make pie crusts, baking powder biscuits and other delights in.
It took the EMT surgeon 2½ hours to stem the flow of blood—failing in the case of about 3 litres of it. He admitted to me later he was plenty worried most of the time. He told me he'd never spent so much time in surgery, never had anyone lose so much blood, and never had to transfuse blood to a patient in over six years. I don't know all that he did, but he said he couldn't find exactly what to fix, so he started reconstructing stuff behind my face until it stopped. I think I'm minus some principal artery in my face now (there are a whole bunch with names I don't remember learning in any of my anatomy classes)—small loss. However, I wasn't there: thank small angels for inventions like general anesthesia.
Waking up was predictably very hard and painful and with my refusal to ingest narcotics (as they nauseate more than anesthetize me), I went home to convalesce Thursday afternoon. Very much in pain, very anxiety-ridden, my blood pressure went up to 220 by nighttime Friday. Saturday morning the doctor reminded me that stroke was a very real possibility, so I returned to the hospital immediately.
They found a cocktail of narcotic and nausea-repressant that did not sicken me (a trial that failed some 10 years ago in unrelated event, so there's history behind this). By Sunday morning all sorts of additional symptoms, contributory and substantial in their own right began to stop asserting themselves though it really took them until today to reach the partial conclusion that I'll be okay. At one point there was discussion that despite improvement, there's an unusual autoimmune shenanigan going on and they say they want to find that. I personally am quite done with the whole thing.
Ultimately, I imagine, a nose-bleed from hell will come take me when, just as last week, I least expect it. It's not lost on me that, while traumatic for the family, that door is probably less desirable than, say, languishing for months or years finally to succumb to cancer. At least not for me.
I'm here; I'm on board with sticking around; I'm eager to determine whether I also lost any little grey cells as Poirot would say. I'll return to work at least by Friday if not as I hope tomorrow. I know it will take a few days to reestablish daily habits and finish clearing the mist...
Thanks to all who wished me well. Apologies to those I didn't adequately notify which include many cherished friends who, being so far away, geographically or shall we say socially, seemed like the easiest to abuse in exchange for lessening the burden on Julene and myself. Work colleagues too. As I say, with a keyboard in my hands, I'm a great communicator, but toss me even my Android phone (even with thumbboard) and it takes a lot to motivate me to extend my news beyond my children, parents and siblings. As it is this note's been devilish hard to write (having lost some of the grey cells devoted to typing skills).
Of course, the Sunday after I wrote this, I re-bled, if only less than a pint. Nevertheless, I solidly revisited the hopeless feeling for a short time of bleeding to death. It stopped at the emergency room and hasn't re-bled since (it's been over two months now) and it's taken me about this long to forget the paranoia.
Nevertheless, I saw my surgeon for the last check-up today and he pronounced me fit, but cautioned me to keep squirting water up my nose and humidifying the air around me at night.
Since late April I've been investing in learning Git for practical reasons. A new project my team's begun at work wasn't going to be done using Perforce (because we all hate it) and, rather than use Subversion, we thought it would be a great time to see what the future holds (or pay homage to Linus: you decide which).
Git's got some great features (how's that for an alliterative louange?) including administration via gitolite. Yesterday, I spent 7 hours in a course on it to help wrap up three months of stumbling around in the dark and getting bailed out of dangerous situations by my nephew who's an expert with it.
I think the things I like best about Git are:
- git status
- easy manipulation of branches
- git stash
- speed
- did I mention git status?
After using Perforce for a few months, I can't believe how much I've missed a status-revealing command and Git's not only tells you what's what, it tells you what you can do about it.
I think I'm going to have to replace my Subversion server at home.
Our fifth grandchild is coming. Even as I write this, Erin is at the hospital in sore travail. Julene and I will drive up to Salt Lake City this evening to see what we may.
We're excited to welcome this little munchkin into our lives!
Some time ago I wrote that Defeat is inevitable when dealing with oven manufacturer JennAir.
Last week, I hit KSL-TV's classifieds list and purchased a five-year old, little used GE built-in oven to replace my prized JennAir. I dropped it in last Saturday with my youngest son. It took all of 20 minutes and we were puttering. Four twists of the wire nuts.
The new oven is a couple of inches narrower than the old one. This means I'll have to go back with a piece of maple to close the gap in the cabinet.
The new oven is pretty nice. Other than being narrower than a nominal 27" oven (as was the last one), its features measure up including the (missing) meat probe. I wonder if the one I conserved from the JennAir won't work? Convection, programmable, etc. all the features are there.
As I said last time, I will never buy a JennAir again. And I saw plenty to choose from in the classified offerings.
Of late, I've set up a team source code-control repository from scratch for my work group. This is the first time I've done this for anyone but myself; it's always already been done by the time I joined a team. I haven't been too pleased with the uncertainty at the places I've worked so far--always policy, but never understanding why that policy. Hence my saying something to clear the smoke. There are two camps out there on the web: one for committing the hidden files to source-code control and the other for not committing them. Both are wrong in my opinion.
It seems clear now to me that the following should be the way to do things regarding the “hidden” files in the Eclipse project source base. I'm using Git; the same holds for CVS and Subversion.
.project
It appears you don't want to commit .project to source-code control. You want to create the initial project, then make a copy of this file as .project.sample, and commit that. As each checks out the project source, he or she copies .project.sample to .project, then imports the project in Eclipse.
.gitignore
.project should be marked “ignore” by listing it in the .gitignore at the root of the project. Also in this file are build, bin, etc. since we do not want to include build subdirectories and .class files. I think it’s not a bad idea to include the ignore file, but by doing so, we’d be precluding that anyone maintain a separate, different copy.
.classpath
This is modified by each user's Eclipse, but only when changes such as the addition of a new JAR are made. Therefore, this file should be committed. However, care must be taken not to corrupt this file by adding JARs just any which way.
Addition of new JARs
This must not be done except via copying the new JAR to an internal subdirectory such as WebContent/WEB-INF/lib or other adding via Build Path -> Configure Build Path -> Libraries -> Add JARs (and never Add External JARs).
This ensures a) that the JAR is in the project (there might be a reason not to do it this way with ivy: there certainly is with Maven, but I'm talking old-fashioned stuff here) and b) no full path is added to .classpath.
It's a simple matter thereafter to check out the project (git clone, svn co, etc.), copy .project.sample to .project, then import into Eclipse (File -> Import -> General -> Import existing...) and away you go.
While there are somewhat analogous things going on in NetBeans, and they just may have done it the right way, nevertheless, Eclipse rules. Yes it does.
August 2011 update:
There's little to add except that based on some really bad experiences, I've learned that you absolutely do want to keep the .settings subdirectory under source-code control (in Git or anything else). At very least, the Eclipse Dynamic Web Project is so complex, that gone missing what's in there will make sharing a project pretty much impossible. I tried doing it and not doing it. This is what I learned.
...it will be up to the State Department or someone deeper in the soup to pick the next object on which to focus our attention in order not to see the sleights of hand.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
Our lives would be such bliss were the foundation of such only so simple a thing as to find and assassinate worms like bin Laden.
