By this dude.

So. Tor has written a fancy page and it is really quite impressive. I can do all kinds of things and have already spent altogether too much time tagging things and retagging them and then changing the tags about. Still, all good.

Except, deep in my heart I know the page is ORANGE to all newcomers, and while a splash of orange can be a delightful thing, an entirely orange page is disturbing at best. Our colourblind readers may not care about any of this, but since I am the type of person who chooses operating systems based on what they look like ....

On Tor's request I have therefore spent a couple of days now, suffering through the unexpectedness of the random colour scheme, all to find pretty colour combinations for your benefit. I hope you appreciate it.

1. This one is the one I am currently using (background CC1100; columns FAFAFA):

2. I am thinking about changing it to this (background 80100D; columns FAFAFA):

3. For the more mellowly inclined (background 9DA963; columns FAFAFA):

4. For the slightly less mellow (background 559012; columns FAFAFA):

5. For the blue (background 237492; columns FAFAFA):

6. For the bluer (background 234868; columns FAFAFA):

7. For the blue, but mellow (background 45748E; columns FAFAFA):

8. For the bluest (background 234868; columns 45748E):

9. For Mary? (background 562C55; columns FAFAFA):

10. For the yellow (background E9CF40; columns FAFAFA):

11. For the grounded (background 794524; columns FAFAFA):

12. For the somewhat insane (background 559012 ...

In line with the new tradition, the jazz festival provided us with a free concert early in the morning on Saturday. Tor and I headed off about half an hour before the rest of my family (we got up at half past five). If you have freakishly good memory, you will notice that that is about the same time we got up last year, when we were all alone, excepting two sleepy (sleeping?) people on the fringes, for ages and vowed we would get up at a more sensible time next time. But last year we used a car to get there (we had reasons), and this time we had bikes. And I haven't used one of these contraptions in about two years.

It turned out our planning was justified, as the slight incline up from the Catholic Church to the park almost killed me. But that is a side point.

The concert is, and always was, an excellent idea. Especially on a day like yesterday (and all the Saturdays of the Jazz Festival have been days much like it during the three years of this tradition). The weather was wonderful, the surroundings were suggestive. But.

I don't mind these morning concerts starting soft. I think we might all have died from the shock of it if Red Baraat (whose cd I fully intend to purchase) had pounced on us this early in the morning. But at least we would have been awake. Molvær's concert did not ...

As most of you have probably noticed, something has happened to this page. What has happened is that the old code, which was written by Are and Anders, in php, has been replaced by new, shiny code, written in django by me. While it would in principle be possible to switch to different code without changing the look of the page, it would take some extra work, and because I am lazy, the page clearly looks somewhat different now. All of this can change, though, and I am very open to suggestions. I would also add that I have asked Jørgen, who made the most popular style for the previous page, to make an adapted version.

Colours

In the mean time, you can all play around with different colours if you want, by logging on, and going to "Edit my profile". There you will find two fields for colours. In each of these, you can enter six digit hexadecimal number*. The first two digits control the amount of red, the two middle ones control the amount of green, and the last two control the amount of blue. The higher the numbers, the lighter the colour. Hence, this number



would be a dark gray. Gray because all the numbers are equal, i.e. equal amount of all colours, and dark because the numbers are relatively small. Feel free to experiment, just remember the numbers must have six digits.

Tags and categories

There are also some new features. Firstly ...

London 1968: Folk-rock group Fairport Convention are invited to Bob Dylan's British music publishers to hear some unreleased songs, in case they should want to record any of them. An unmarked vinyl record is placed onto a deck, and the needle is set to the groove …

‘And this strange, kind of mishmash of styles and drawled lyrics came out of the speakers. It sounded kind of subterranean; there was this strange cloak of weirdness covering them. We loved it all. We would have covered all the songs if we could.’ ¹

Damage done. They went home with three songs for their Unhalfbricking album; one of them, ‘Percy's’ (left over from Dylan's 1963 sessions for The Times They Are A-Changin'), being the end product of a process more than three hundred years in the making. (Cue the strings and tune the banjos.)

The two sisters
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Harvard professor Francis James Child collected a canon of English-language ballads and numbered them from 1 to 305. Although he found a lot more than that in his years of research, many were variants of the same story and therefore classified by the same Child number (though not necessarily variants of the same tune).

Child ballad 10 has an interesting story. It's a murder ballad, and it gets worse.

A girl is drowned by her sister; an act that does not go unnoticed, even in 1656, when ‘The Miller and the King's Daughter ...

The fact is, both Tor and I have a strong aversion to Alexandraparken as a concert venue. You cannot sit by the stage, because there the volume is too high for those of us who are still not deaf (I have theories about why that area is always primarily peopled by the over-50s); and you cannot sit in most of the rest of the park because the sound either has to pass through bushes and trees, or even tents, getting more and more distorted along the way, not to mention the modest desire many might have of seeing the stage. The remainder are a couple of unsociable tables with unpleasant chairs.

We were therefore fairly surprised to find ourselves, not only in Alexandraparken, grasping our tickets at 200 a piece, but also there an hour and a half before the concert actually started. It was all down to all those people telling us Farmers Market was something we shouldn't miss. I decided to disregard the missing apostrophe (is it the market of one farmer or several farmers? The suspense is killing me) and pretend it is just a random constellation of words, convinced my self that the festival was sure to have changed the stupid stage arrangements of last year and dragged Tor along to get tickets earlier in the day.

Unfortunately, the park looked exactly as it did last year, and we decided on seats away from the stage, but still in view of it (albeit far away ...

The 50th Molde International Jazz Festival is officially up and running ... in bright read underpants!

It all started grandiosely, but soberly and official-like, in the beautiful surroundings of the outdoor museum (brilliant idea, that; I hope they repeat it next year) with speeches from the usual suspects:

Mayor Jan Petter Hammerø's speech was pleasantly and unusually short and not packed full of figures for a change. He may have been touched by the moment. He referred to the history of the festival, plugged the new book on the festival and the new Theatre and Jazz House, and shortly after left the stage to the infinitely more deserving Jan Ole Otnæs (the festival director).

His credentials are indisputable, having hitch hiked here from the dark depths of Northern Norway at the tender age of 15, and having spent the last 10 years leading the festival to ever greater fame and fortune. Strangely, he was the one to mention money, but that is allowable when he does so in order to inform us that the very first festival, on 3 August 1961 had at their disposal the astronomical sum of 15.000 NOK. He also spent some time demonstrating the centrality of this festival in the development of key international musicians, including (but not limited to: I started taking down the names half-way through the list) Nils Petter Molvær, Daniel Herskedal, Hayden Powell, Ola Kvernberg, Ytre Suløen and Jan Garbarek.

The third speaker, who officially declared the festival opened ...

Siden ingen (utenom Tor og Silje og jeg) benyttet seg av den handy duppedingsen har jeg nå skjært gjennom og tatt en avgjørelse.

Fest + launch av nye Calcuttagutta (available for your viewing pleasure her) blir
torsdag 22. juli 2010 fra 18:00 og utover.

Dere kan altså herved anse dere for inviterte (men jeg kunne godt tenke meg å vite hvem som kommer litt i forveien slik at jeg vet hvor mange jeg skal regne med hvis jeg skulle finne det for godt å lage kake eller noe slikt). Ta gjerne med vin og/eller noe annet dere har lyst på.

Hvis vi føler oss spesielt eventyrlystne kan det hende vi tar oss en midnattstur på fjellet eller noe i den dur.

Ta med vin og/eller snacks. Tor baker boller.

Jeg gleder meg til revolusjonen kommer. Etter revolusjonen skal det kun finnes et standard tegnsett, nemlig unicode, og da kommer alt til å bli bra. Ingen skal igjen måtte banne og rive seg i håret over en fil full av \xc3\x83\xc2\xa5 og lignende. Tenk så mye lengre vi kunne kommet som sivilisasjon om ikke hundretusenvis av arbeidstimer hadde blitt kastet bort på å prøve å konvertere tekst fra et ubrukelig tegnsett til et annet. Det er nesten like ille som slike forskere som skriver "This equation is easily solved" når dette åpenbart ikke er tilfelle bare fordi de ikke vil gi fra seg triksene sine.

I morgen: En ekte artikkel.

-Tor Nordam

So, a while back Tor and I bought the new version of Aperture (Aperture 3), a little because Tor drooled a lot when curves were mentioned, and a little because we couldn't find any of our old e-mails containing the codes for various updates. There should be a simple database where any Apple customer could find information on what they have purchased over more than the last year. But that is another rant.

Aperture is great. I love Aperture. And usually a new version is an improvement. This has generally been a concept that Apple has understood (unlike, say, certain other massively big software companies that shall remain nameless here). I have therefore been quite baffled to run into one new problem (well, "problem" is the wrong word -- "annoying quirk" might be a better one) after another. Hence this post.

Let me first say, Tor is right. Curves is a good tool, and I am sure that once I master it it will make my pictures immensely better. Yes. Thank you, Apple people.

BUT.

Why oh WHY does Aperture have to leave full screen in order to export an image? It is driving me crazy. I never (never ever? well, hardly ever) open Aperture to edit and export only one image, and images really have to be in full screen while you edit them (that goes without saying, I feel). More importantly, the old version of Aperture DIDN'T leave full screen when you pressed the keys for export ...