chrishansenhome: (Default)
Thanks to Ron's Log, I have heard the Ride of the Valkyries played on a magnificent pipe organ in St. Andrew's Lutheran Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota, which is northeast of Minneapolis and obviously a rather wealthy community, judging by the pipe organ. The quality of the video is a bit grainy: sometimes it looks like there was water in the lens. But the most interesting factoid is this: the organist confessed that, as it would take three organists at the console to play his transcription, he merely fed the MIDI scores into the organ console and used it as if it were a player piano…er…organ.

I enjoyed it; there is something of the plodding of a herd of horses mechanically galloping down the road in this transcription—not hysteria, or wildness, just the inevitability of the march of time and calamity that is to come.



Looking at the church's website, it seems as though it wouldn't be very welcoming to the likes of me, and the offer of contemporary worship makes me shudder, but at least they have an organ suitable for the highest worship style.
chrishansenhome: (Default)
Our friend Chaz went to the Metropolitan Opera to see a production of an opera called La Somnambula by Bellini, and has transcribed a review from the Associated Press. I thought you'd be amused.
chrishansenhome: (Default)
We've been using Opera for a few years now. It was a real revelation (real tabbed windows, intelligent browsing, etc. etc. and so on) but had some deficiencies. For example, HWMBO and I read a variety of websites in varied encodings (including Chinese for him and Classical Greek for me) and Opera never seemed to be able to reliably auto-detect the encoding for a website. This may have been due to deficiencies in websites, but it resulted in a lot of gibberish, lost pound signs (I mean real pounds sterling, not octothorpes), and assorted weirdnesses around quotation marks. Our online banking website also didn't work with Opera, nor did my BT webmail site. It was a pain having to revert to IE all the time.

So, I decided to try Firefox for a while. It imported all my Opera bookmarks (an important point), and it seems to reliably auto-detect everything. My banking website works well in it, and it seems to be a bit easier to use than Opera. HWMBO reports that his Chinese websites also render correctly.

I think that unless someone tells me how to fix Opera (and I don't imagine anyone will) we'll be uninstalling it and using Firefox as our default browser.

See ya, Opera. Nice knowing ya (most of the time).
chrishansenhome: (Default)
I am a devotee of this program, and have been listening to it, on and off, almost since its inception. First it was in New York City, a hiatus in Chicago, then back to listening again in San Francisco, then a hiatus until they placed their program archive on the Web a few years ago. I subscribed to unlimited access, and have been able to hear the programs over the 'net since then. Getting broadband has made it even better.

So imagine my surprise last weekend when their website changed formats and, all of a sudden, I couldn't get access (which I had paid for). I emailed their helpdesk, and got a reply back on the weekend itself (commendable). The old service was hidden under the new interface, but, surprise surprise, it doesn't support Opera. When queried, their support person said: "Thanks, Chris. We do intend to keep the current service active for the foreseeable future, and will most likely integrate the RealAudio streams into the new service. We cannot guarantee support for Opera, however, as it is losing the browser wars. Safari yes, We intend to support Firefox, and of course IE."

I suppose this means that no matter which browser one picks, losing "the browser wars" means that websites will stop supporting it. I am getting a bit miffed with Opera, mainly because it's not very resilient when it comes to detecting site encoding. If the site isn't specific on how it's encoded, Opera doesn't do a good job of discovering what it's encoded in and showing it to the punters as well as it can.

So my options are:

  • Go back to IE. I want to resist this; if I have to, I'll save it for Hearts of Space and other inflexible providers.

  • Try Firefox. I was not cheered when I read this week that it has more open security problems than IE does.

  • Stop listening to HOS. I don't want to do this.


What a pain this all is! While I don't particularly like RealPlayer, I've come to an accomodation with it such that it doesn't intrude on my "computer experience" and only docilely appears when I want it to, and is free.

I suppose I could get a MacMini...but HWMBO isn't keen until I get a new job.

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