Exactly one decade ago, my family and I spent the 4th of July watching fireworks from an airplane as we flew across the USA from San Francisco to our new home in Cary, NC. We had moved here from Minnesota first in 1998, and although we enjoyed it very much, by late 1999, the lure of the Bay Area was irresistible for me as a software engineer. Recruiters were hounding me daily with promises of stock options that would allow me to retire in 4 years. A few trips to San Jose and I was hooked. So off we went to California, with our 3 babies in tow.
An exhaustive search of every neighborhood in commutable distance of downtown San Francisco resulted in the purchase of a home in lovely San Rafael. At the time, we thought the place was way overpriced, but to our amazement, our home’s value continued to increase during the next 6 years, while my salary dropped and job prospects in the North Bay dwindled. When a job offer came through that would allow us to move back to Raleigh, we decided it was time to head back to NC.
SilagaraSilagara is the generic medication that efficiently works cheapest viagra in australia to cure the crucial problem of impotency in ladies and men. Girls produced big affect in all most sample cialis every discipline possessing main hazard towards the males. sildenafil cost This problem can be easily tackled with natural remedies. This http://abacojet.com/category/slider/ viagra generika online service as well provides you the FAQs section for your common queries on medicines and prescriptions and reviews. 10 years later, I am pleased to say that I have absolutely no regrets about that decision. Our 6 year stay in the Bay taught us that indoor space is more important to us than outdoor space. Before the move, I was worried about our kids growing up with a lack of diversity, but our neighborhood turned out to be a veritable United Nations. I was also worried that I might have a hard time finding opportunities for music-making, but my cup runneth over with great venues like C Grace and the Beyu Cafe, amazingly talented musicians, and appreciative audiences. The rapid influx of people from all over the country and the world has made the Triangle an incredibly dynamic and exciting place to live. The renaissance of downtown Durham and Raleigh has been wonderful to experience and participate in.
Despite the politically conservative state government, with its world-famous reputation for passing stupid, hateful laws, North Carolina has been a great place to call home. Given that our boys have both chosen to go to college here (did I mention the great schools?), it looks like we’ll be around for a while longer.
This holiday season, my mom decided to start playing piano again after nearly 50 years! (Good for you, Mom!!)
I was naturally enlisted to help with this process.
My parents are snowbirds, and wanted a keyboard they could easily transport between their winter and summer homes. This ruled out an acoustic piano, which I always recommend to my piano students. Despite many major advances in digital keyboard technology, there is no substitute for the rich, vibrant sounds provided by even a cheap acoustic piano. The resonance with the other strings and the sound board are extremely complex. Also, the action of piano keyboard is very sensitive to the touch, and the interaction with this mechanism with a physical string results in tremendous variations in color, which few electronic keyboards can come even close to emulating.
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After a fairly exhaustive Google search, we settled on a Casio CDP-130. We went to the local Guitar Center and tried all of the pianos they had on display. The Casio had the best sound for under $500. The $100 cheaper Williams Allegro we tried sounded terrible in comparison. The Casio Privia ($600) sounded even better than the CDP, but not quite worth $200 more. The CDP had the weighted keys and the sound we wanted, without the bells and whistles we didn’t need. We did have to buy a stand and a bench, but for around $500 total my mom is very happy.
I’d recommend to anyone looking for a digital piano that they go to a store like Guitar Center and actually compare the instruments. The feel of the keys and the sound are the most important features by far. Don’t just get the cheapest thing you can find. In my experience, most people who buy a cheap keyboard with a poor sound and without weighted keys never play it and quickly abandon their aspirations of learning to play the instrument.
The band is warming up as you and your sweetie take your seats at the bar. You order a couple of local beers and kick back as the band launches into their set. You feel your cares melt away as the sweet strains of Muddy Waters wash over you like a cool Mississippi rain. You join the other couples on the dance floor, and the band takes another chorus so you and your friends (some new, some old) can dance your troubles away.
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One of the questions I’m oten asked on job interviewsis, “how did you go from getting a Ph.D. in music to being a software engineer?”
This post is an attempt to answer that question.
Obviously the glib answer would be: I needed to make more money to support my family. While that is true to some extent, it implies that I only write software for the money, which isn’t really the case. I love creating both music and software, and I would do both regardless of the resulting income. Writing software just happens to pay the bills more effectively. Furthermore, I strongly believe that having a fine arts background with an emphasis in technology is a great preparation for a career in software development. There’s a lot more to building quality software than understanding the syntax of a programming language. The links between music and software engineering are well documented, and I won’t delve into them here.
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I began programming at theage of 10 when I took a summer school class in BASIC, and I’ve been writing software ever since. In 5th grade I wrote programs to simulate baseball games and compute the statistical results of school surveys. In 6thgrade I wrote a program that generated crossword puzzles. I took FORTRAN in college, in one of the last classes at Indiana University to use punch cards. In the late 80’s, while working as a professional musician, I wrote a Hypercard stack to keep track of my band’s bookings. In 1989, when looking for a graduate schoolto attend, I sought out programs where I could combine my interests in music and software, and found the perfect match at UC San Diego. Here I took classes in Unix and C with F. RichardMoore, a former Bell Labs employee and author of Programmingin C with a bit of Unix as well as the classic Elementsof Computer Music. A research assistant position at UCSD’s Center for Research in Computing and the Arts led to an appointment as assistant musicale at IRCAMin Paris. During my graduate studies, Dick Moore also introduced me to the NeXT computer and Objective-C, for which I’m eternally grateful. I spent many happy hours in the computer music lab writing C and NeXTSTEP programs, which led to a job in St. Paul Minnesota with a forward-thinking company called Integrity Solutions that happened to specialize in OpenStep application development. This led to a series of jobs related to that technology, which you can read about on my resume.
In other words, software has always been an important creative medium for me, on par with composing music or writing poetry.
I’m certainly no expert on the issues Brand is dealing with here, and not very good at articulating my reactions to this particular piece. Luckily, I have a close friend who is: Zot Lynn Zurgot, who honored me with this extremely well-written response, which I’m proud to present here:
It occurs to me that a city or other urban conglomeration does
not feed itself, and cannot without an organized and
concentrated effort to annex surrounding lands and
derive its sustenance from inside that border. i see
no evidence of even discussion of this crucial
ingredient in making cities sustainable. In this new
century, long-distance shipping of food will be
exposed, by high fuel prices, for the unsupportable
Ponzi scheme that it is. Hydroponics, even in stacked
towers, may be possible, but will need huge imports of
nutrients; from where is that to come? Even if such a
design dream could be arranged, hydroponic produce
shares with its chemical-input Big Ag cousins a loss
of 40% to 60% of its antioxidants compared with
organic produce grown in guess what – real soil
enriched by bacteria and fungi and cyclic return of
nutrients.
Brand, as always, is pleasant and stimulating,
well-informed and well-intentioned, and ready to
challenge us to think differently. This particular
difference is not necessarily clearer or useful, and
betrays a drifter’s sense of ungrounded speculative
contextlessness. The demographics are fascinating,
and who knows what they mean?
i am suspicious of hidden biases against rural people.
In the US, such biases need not be hidden; one can
still proudly denigrate hicks and rubes and rednecks
without fear of being called on it, the way one would
(and, yes, should) be called on one’s racism or
antisemitism. This is ugly and unacceptable, not to
mention ungrateful (with one’s mouth full). The
comparative lists of urban and rural assumptions
rudely chart raw prejudice in Brand, not conditions in
the world.
i do see that urban experience can be very green,
using little resources (particularly for personal
transportation, but also for home heating because of
sharing hive walls) and gaining quick access to
helpful information and allies, though for many the
separation from powerplants and sewer treatment plants
and growing plants can allow them to drift away from
their green focus. It makes a big difference what the
urbanite chooses to eat; an unbelievable bounty is
made available (at least to the capitalized) at all
seasons, and much comes with hidden costs not visible
at point of sale.
Of course, i also think that an enriched,
cosmopolitan, multicultural experience is salutary (at
least for a while). i also am very interested in
squatters and their experimental cultures. Like you,
i take hope from their attempts. Seems like so much
of the real innovation in human social structures that
we so desperately need is now coming from – well, the
desperate. How very inspiring and exciting, really.
The squatter slums i worked in in Guatemala City did
have an impressive level of creativity, cooperation,
solidarity, imagination, initiative, chutzpah, hope,
innovation, and verve. Also, disease, filth, hunger,
ignorance, violence, crime, despair, stench, neglect,
ennui, anomie, and abuse. The same can-do spirit that
allowed people to make shacks out of random detritus
also led to plenty of accidental deaths and injuries
when they collapsed or burned. i saw a cliff edge, a
foot beyond the wall of the shack i was in, that made
a perfect out-of-sight-out-of-mind garbage disposal –
over which numerous people had plummeted to death,
reportedly not all accidentally. Let me point out in
direct contradiction to Brand: plenty of unemployment,
by which i mean not only that plenty of individuals
experienced lack of formal or informal enterprise but
also lack of use of their sparkling human potential.
i did see mothers who turned a small sewing machine or
an orange peeler into a microbusiness, but also those
who’d given up on trying. How many of each? It can
be hard to tell what a lot of people i saw (but didn’t
know personally) were doing with their time; maybe
they were busy when i wasn’t there, but it sure looked
like there was a lot of hanging around and waiting to
die. Some didn’t have long to wait: i did see a
disturbing number of funerals for very young people.
But that was way back in 1987; maybe such places are
somehow different now.
Sure are a lot of people in them.Free-marketeers,
libertarians, and other fans of organized crime must
admire (with Brand) the unregulated economic activity;
while liberals and upholders of labor, safety, human
rights, and environmental standards must be horrified.
i found the comments below the video to be salient.
i can’t imagine taking seriously Brand’s perception
that upon arrival into shantytowns, peoples’
reproductive rates fall “below replacement”.
Of course, i must again insist that any boundary used Is it a certainty that as you age you will experience Ed? No it’s not a guaranteed thing that appalachianmagazine.com viagra 50 mg all men inspect their gonads month to month after adolescence. Contraindications: Users who already take the following medications should not use viagra brand 100mg this herb. There is no need for water as well. cialis without prescription uk Male shop for viagra cheap impotence is a form of sexual dysfunction. to draw conclusions about population level changes be
boundaries that make sense ecologically. Â City limits,
and boundaries drawn around favelas and other ad hoc
urbanities, are routinely crossed by members of the
population, by diseases and parasites, and especially
by food. This means that they are not ecological
boundaries, so no ecological or population-biology
conclusions may be valid based on such arbitrary
delineations. Look at Wilson’s island biogeography:
the borders of nation-states and cities do not
qualify. They are not units. Can you draw a
conclusion about how much blood is pumped by the brain
itself? About the water in a ten-foot section of a
river? About the nutrient flow and leaf growth of a
rootless tree? Feh.
The fact that overfed mammals in cages overpopulate to
the point where many repeatedly leap from the highest
spot in the cage, nervously lick off fur and keep
licking the raw skin, form gangs for violent abuse
unseen in uncrowded conditions, and start to chew off
their own limbs in the presence of excess food (if the
experiment is allowed to continue that far) is an
argument not to create such conditions, even if it
eventually results in an increased infant mortality
rate that, through dead babies, results in a new
equilibrium that holds the population level and its
resulting insanity to a high but finite level. Can
you truly distinguish this from what Brand admires?
MPS: Brand says Cities are “wealth creators”…
it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that urbanization
makes it much easier to educate and employ people?
Zot: It sure can look that way when viewing the city only
on its own, without regard to the systems of which it
is a part, and upon which it depends.
i like the thinking about cities shown in the writings
of Jane Jacobs. i particularly recommend her “The
Nature of Economies”.
The real creation of wealth in cities comes from
import substitution. That is, a colonial settlement
(and let’s face it, every city we know of started with
such a dark, bloody, and brutal history – does that
not give us pause when praising urbanization?) only
begins to generate wealth when it moves away from
importing its supplies from the empire of which it is
an outpost, and moves away from merely exploiting the
natural resources at its new site. Instead, a
settlement only begins to create value when it
integrates itself into the resource flows already
existing at its site in ways that reduce its nonlocal
dependence and reduce the exploitative distortion of
resource flows. This generally must begin by serving
local needs, though expanding this into exports can
benefit the settlement and its balance of trade (as
long as it’s not doing so at the expense of the
natural resource capital).
Such cities become wealth creators. Â The rest are just
wealth concentrators and exploiters. Â Sure, most
cities and other refugee camps are mixes of both.
Pushing the mix toward wealth creation requires
understanding and championing import substitution, not
randomly praising conglomerations of any and all
types.
Tragically, i don’t hear any pop-culture figure (among
which i include politicians) talking about import
substitution, not by any name.
MPS: Another implied benefit that SB doesn’t really mention is
increased available habitat for other species, forests, etc.,
as humans vacate rural areas and cluster together in cities.
Huh? Â How do you figure? These newly displaced
landtenders (might as well call them refugees and
illegal immigrants) are not setting up Nature
Conservancy land trusts on the land they are forced to
abandon (often by the dumping of artificially
low-priced food shipped in from afar, that is, from
industrial countries with farm subsidies). They leave
with lots of observation-based information about that
land and its plants and animals; often that precious
information is lost, and becomes unavailable to those
who “tend” it after that. And just who do you think
that is? Hint: it’s not the World Wildlife Fund or
The Jane Goodall Institute. It’s Dole, and Cargill,
it’s Monsanto, and Shell, and ADM.
Also, it’s water: displacement of people by dams is
just as destructive of habitat as it is of
communities.
MPS: I see reason for hope here, albeit an oversimplified
presentation.
Well, good. i do too. Not in the way you do, i
suspect. Peace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2005/07/seeds_of_suicid.html
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