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Haven't talked about music here in a while

2026-05-02T18:10:44Z

I love making up my own music and have since I was in high school. I suck at writing stuff down, but I try to build out a basic structure from what i was improvising. Sometimes it would coalesce and a piece that I could play or sing would come into being. I did a lot of that through high school and university, but I was also playing a lot more then. Pretty much every day and picking up new sheet music to learn as well.

I don't play every day anymore and I know perfectly well when the last time was that I picked up a new piece of music because it was a duet C wanted me to learn with him. So, that was more than a decade ago. I play a very limited set of my own stuff when I do sit down and one or two of a handful of personal favourites I learned back then.

I rarely sing anymore. And somewhere on this path, I stopped writing things to sing. Or rather, I needed to level up what I was doing with my writing and stumbled when trying to get there. That aspect of my voice* I learned to distrust as it's effectively in a rut. These days, I probably write about one song a year, but sometimes you end up skipping a year. Or the thing you write doesn't stick, so it fades. That feels normal to me. Even back in high school, there would be pieces that sounded fine, but I just wouldn't go back to them. Without repetition, the muscle memory and the music go away.

But for some reason the last year and a bit has had more new music in it. Back in January 2025, I banged out something would probably have annoyed my mother when I was a kid and just hitting the keys in the same order repeatedly. But it gradually changed into something that I don't mind. I have a recording of it part way through the process that still has things I've forgotten how I played that I should pull back into it. And then in September, I started something else, although honestly I think it sounds like a riff on a part of Max Richter's Sleep. Both of these are...ok. There's things I like about them. So far, they're sticking to me. But right now they don't engage me as much. We'll see. This phase sometimes results in variations that will be better or an insight into what drew me in the first place.

I also don't name things much anymore. In my head that first piece is just (and you have to imagine this as both a physical sensation of playing it and the sound of it) "Cm Abmaj7". Because that's how it starts. And I know I'm not writing this to sing, but the process of writing something to sing is still in me, so. The one thing I really like about the structure here is that the piece starts with the chorus and ends with the last verse after skipping a repetition of the bridge on the third round. I think there are some cool lyrical things that could be done with that. You could really nail a particular theme or phrasing if it were done carefully.

The second piece (again the physical sensation and the sound) is "Em pulse". The left hand is just chord modulation in 3/4 playing the first two beats, but not the third. And slowish. It should probably be much slower than I'm currently playing it, but I'm trying to avoid Sleep. The right hand leans into playing in the spaces this creates and a slight syncopation. I'm avoiding certain resolutions in the chord progressions, but this leaves room for the right hand to pass through those and the ear to hear them. It's not novel. Richter uses a similar approach on some parts of his piece and it's not original to him either. The melodic line is sort of settling, but I'm not sure it's doing what it needs to.

And then I plinked some little thing back on Mar 14 that starts out with a kind of Dsus/F# bass thing and goes into a nice syncopated 4/4 beat. Vanilla Dsus, Em, Cmaj7, G, Am7. And then I twisted it a bit to go Amaj instead, then Amaj/B, C9, D, Em, which sounded nice, but doesn't arrive at a place where I can circle around to repeat the motif, or find a motif really. Twisted it a little more so that bit moved Amaj, Amaj/B, C9, D, Emaj, Emaj/A, Emaj/B, C9, D, Em. Still didn't feel like it could repeat, though. But I sat down today and moved from that Em to Cmaj7, D, Am9, Em/B, C9, D, Em. That small repetition, largely done with 4ths and 5ths, not full chords, sets up a sort of colour where the motif can go back to the beginning. I dunno, it's ok. Needs a tad more structure, possibly a variation from rhythm piano to something melodic or a rhythm change or who knows.

For now, there's that pleasure in having something the ear and heart call out for that's not known yet and open to possibility. Have to hold onto that feeling as long as possible.

* I'm using voice here to mean what makes a song or a lyric sound like I'm the one who wrote it.

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Those words mean something

2021-05-12T14:01:00Z

Looking at a recent post on this site from buhrger , I was reminded of something that came up in an online course I'm taking about Google's Cloud Platform (basically, their service that competes with AWS). In a video about reliability and service level objectives, the lecturer makes the point that 100% availability is impossible. He does this by saying, "Because we live in a quantum mechanical world..." The implication is that the world is a place where random events happen so you can't control for all modes of failure. I groaned and rolled my eyes and was grateful this wasn't an in-person course because I'd have had to speak up, I think. It would be more accurate and more germaine to point out that we live in an entropic universe where states of order will fall into disorder over time.

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Box of nails rev.1

2021-02-07T00:06:34Z

I need to think about this opening. The use of 'association' is bugging me, but I'm trying to connect the two sections together differently. Felt like the best I could do at the time. I like moving "eventually memory" up into the second last line. Maybe less emphasis, or at least different emphasis.

A broom and boxes of 60-penny galvanized nails

His house tidy, vacant and waiting
We swept out my father's garage
On a warm autumn day with all the doors open
Wearing masks against the dried mud and road grime
The slightly oily lint and bench litter
The mouse droppings and insecticide
Dead magpie and somnolent black flies
Rust, old bolts, washers, nuts and nails
So many nails
Working nearly clockwise around the floor
Workbench to shelves to cupboards to corners
Sweeping out dirt and past association
Barn to fields to hay shed to road
Back up the lane to the garage
Now neater anyway, recycling and trash sorted
Ready for the new owners to park their truck
Fill surfaces and drawers and spaces
With parts and needful pieces
The house with chairs and beds and cutlery
The stalls and pens and eventually memory
With living

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Box of nails - thoughts

2020-12-25T18:30:50Z

It's been long enough now since I wrote that last entry that I have thoughts about it.

The first two lines feel clunky together. I was avoiding the obvious grammatical structure, but maybe it needs to be there for flow?
The reference to widdershins is actually a lie. The order I present is the order I went in, but that order is also clockwise. I felt like I wanted to imply a sensation of turning both ways, but the more I look at it, the more it bothers me. It might be sufficient to just...gyre.
The reference to the house, and especially its pre-occupied state comes from out of nowhere, which feels like sandbagging the reader with a detail I know and they don't. The earlier reference to the barn sets up the later reference to stalls and pens, so something similar is needed for balance.
- Arguably, a line breaking up the first two with a reference to the house would solve two problems.

I signed up for Master Class this spring in order to get my mother-in-law a gift of membership for her birthday (buy one, get one free). Recently, I've been taking Reading and Writing Poetry with Billy Collins. I haven't read any of his material previously, as far as I know. The most recent video had a bit about keeping a notebook where first drafts, notes, and just basic scribbling can happen. I did this all the time in junior high and high school, but it was a clipboard with a cover that held a pack of paper, the kind with the glue strip across the top and the cardboard backing. But it also became a folder of other bits of scrap paper and notes, marginalia on other printed things, even bits of music notepaper. I stopped packing it around in university. It was practically in tatters by then, the blue plastic covering tearing away to expose the heavy cardboard underneath, and bag space for class notes and materials was at a premium.

Those notes above would have been probably a few quick lines in a different ink (like actual boxes or brackets drawn around the words, possibly an arrow from "house" to the top two lines) and maybe two actual words: clunky (maybe spelled klunky) and No! This is a lot more elaborate because it lacks topological context. And, in some sense, I feel like I have to describe it for whoever might be unlucky enough to read about it.

I've had other notebooks I carried around since, but I keep thinking of them as journals, which has made it hard, mentally, for me to write in them. The thing about scrap paper is that it's transitory, recycled or reused. It's obviously not the finished thing; it's only not trash by virtue of being kept. A weird bit of ordering in my world I hadn't pulled up into the light before.

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It's been a while

2020-11-29T19:37:54Z

since I posted, much less since I wrote anything new. (Edited: small word change to avoid a needless repetition.)

A broom and boxes of 60-penny galvanized nails

We swept out my father's garage
A warm autumn day with all the doors open
Wearing masks against the dried mud and road grime
The slightly oily lint and bench litter
The mouse droppings and insecticide
Dead magpie and somnolent black flies
Rust, old bolts, washers, nuts and nails
So many nails
Working nearly clockwise around the floor
Workbench to shelves to cupboards to corners
And widdershins the farm after
Barn to fields to hay shed to road
Up the lane to the garage
Now neater anyway, recycling and trash sorted
Ready for the new owners to park their truck
Fill surfaces and drawers and spaces
With parts and needful pieces
The house with chairs and beds and cutlery
The stalls and pens
And eventually memory
With living

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Multi-year diary

2019-02-16T22:11:17Z

A long time ago (well, years anyway), M asked me about the possibility of setting up a 5 year diary. These are kind of a common concept in weather journals and gardening. Each page of the journal is for a specific calendar day and month, but you can put in different entries for each year. This is useful for recurring activities like gardening because you can see how the weather has been at different times of the year across multiple years or what you planted on the May long weekend each year.

The first example web application I found didn't work for me (for a bunch of reasons -- mostly that the code hadn't been touched in several years and the newer versions of the various coding frameworks used weren't backward compatible). However, a year ago or so I found another example with a much smaller and simpler code base. I've been tweaking and rewriting it now and then and have finally reached the point where I felt I could let M start playing around with it.

Along the way, I've been keeping notes of different kinds on the various bits used to build the site, what objectives I have, and what things I've done so far. There's still a sizable to-do list, including to rewrite this from scratch now that I have a clearer idea what it should do and how. For now, it supports multiple users, so M and I can use it at the same time and have our own entries. It also supports backdating entries and longer text entry than the original version. No formatting of content (yet) and no search function. Also, I'd like some additional security controls on the diary content at rest, like some kind of encryption at rest -- although how search would work with that is a question.

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What does it take to make him post something?

2018-08-30T14:46:41Z

You may have heard about the recent breach at Air Canada. Because Air Canada recently purchased Aeroplan, it turns out that I have credentials stored in their service. I don't use the app, so I'm not even likely to be part of the subset of users affected. And that's not why I'm posting anything here. Instead, it was a tweet from Ann Cavoukian stating that the breach wouldn't have happened if Air Canada had encrypted all of their customer's data at rest. And maybe I should tweet something about it? But my response is not a short aphorism.

Encryption of data in a case like this is about instituting an additional measure of access control, supplemental to existing controls. But applications are built of components that are in a sense layered (at least conceptually) on top of each other. So where we provide encryption affects what access is protected and how the system overall is affected. This is meant to be a quick tour, so I`m going to make broad, sweeping generalizations. This is based heavily on my own experience.

( Application anatomy 101... )( Encrypt the file system... )
( Encrypt the database... )
( Encrypt individual data elements... )

( Attacking the application... )

( Working with your hands tied... )

I do think that some of the content stored by Air Canada could definitely have been encrypted and protected to a level similar to credit card numbers. Passport numbers and Nexus card numbers, for example. But to encrypt everything? That runs the risk of seriously hampering things. My main point is that encryption isn't magical security dust that protects against everything.

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