Graduated from Marlboro!

Graduation was Sunday. Though the weather people were calling for rain all day, it actually turned out to be beautiful weather throughout the whole event, and only spattered a little rain in the late afternoon as everyone was heading home. I was lucky to have a nice assortment of family and friends present, and the whole ordeal seems kind of a blur. It was also my Grandpop's 80th birthday that day, and we took him out to the Chelsea Royal diner for late lunch and a surprise birthday cake.

I'm in Maine now, at least for the next week or so. Plans for the summer are starting to develop, and it's looking like a good time. It feels quite nice to be done with school!

I'm almost done

I had my concert last night, and it seemed to go pretty well. A fair number of people came, and the sound was good in the theater space. It was more difficult than I thought to play computer generated tunes alongside those I've been playing for years. Some were downright awkward. But others were actually quite believable, and to test how believable they really were, I would play set without mentioning what the tunes were, and then ask the audience for a show of hands to see what was composed by whom (or by what). Out of the six CG tunes I played at the concert, alongside a dozen human-composed tunes, about half of them evenly split the audience's opinion. One tune, which I played alongside a hornpipe called The Wren, actually got mistaken for being "fake," and Tune #4 was thought to be "real."

I'm being pressured, now, to make a CD of my computer tunes. That might happen some time this summer.

Concert date: Friday, May 9 @ 8:30 pm

I'll be giving a short concert of Irish fiddle music at Marlboro College on Friday, May 9, beginning at 8:30 pm and probably running just over an hour in length. It's open to the public, so please come. The repertoire will include traditional fiddle tunes, and some computer-generated tunes thrown into the mix -- see if can you guess which ones they are.

Tune generator up and mostly running

I've been working on a "celtic" tune generator for the past several months as a project withing Marlboro's Computer science department. It's a lot of fun, though is has consumed quite a bit of time in the making. This is only a preliminary version of the web site, and showcases just a few of the features my Common Lisp program supports. I'll post links to the code at some point as well. An updated version of the web page should appear by the beginning of May.

http://cs.marlboro.edu/~astimson/tune-generator.

Now it's back to paper-writing.....

-Abe

Crickets

Oooh. . . I'm full of spicy Thai food and feeling rather fine. It was a nice evening out and about with friends, and now I'm getting ready to relax for a while with some reading, music homework, math, and a little chocolate before going to be. But first, our trip into town was worth recounting, mainly because our first errand was to the "One Stop" pet store in Brattleboro, where a kindly fellow sold us one dozen crickets.

"Small, medium or large?" asked the man behind the counter, as if we were ordering coffee. We told him that we had a leopard gecko; a hungry one. "How old?" One year. "Then medium should do it. A dozen, you said? OK, I'll go catch them now." We also bought a little plastic "critter carrier" to improve their quality of life -- as well as social possibilities -- for we still had to pick up another friend, go out to eat, and then do some grocery shopping. In the car, we took turns holding the crickets under our coats to keep them warm. "How is it being pregnant with all those babies?" asked Lisa when it was my turn.

We picked up Lucy at her house and then continued on with our stomaches to guide us. "What if they start chirping in the restaurant?" somebody asked as we pulled up to the parking lot.

"I think they only do that when they're mating," was the reply. Since we didn't want them to get shivery in the car, the crickets spent the duration of the meal perched on an empty chair at the table, neatly concealed in a brown paper bag. After we ate and paid the bill, the crickets moved from inside one jacket to another until we reached the co-op. They became a large lump, with an edge of brown bag poking out, in the front-left portion of my down vest. At the checkout counter, I explained I was not shoplifting but instead carrying something I'd already purchased, conveniently, under my clothes.

Our gecko -- who still doesn't have a name -- was very pleased with us when we came home with crickets. It was quite entertaining to watch him go after them with quick yet calculatingly lazy hunger.

I don't think I've had such a fine evening in quite a while!