The Update continues

and it would have continued sooner, had i not just spent so much time trying to figure out what was wrong with my stoopid airport network. the base station had to be restarted. of course, it took a long time to figure that out, because my old base station only had to be restarted once in a blue moon. i’ve barely had the new one for a week and already it’s crashed. my old hub (which admittedly, doen’t have nifty features like wireless) which is so old that it pre-dates 100baseT, has never needed to be restarted. New technology is bad. Upgrading is a myth. If you get new software, your old hardware can’t handle it. If you get new hardware, your old software can’t handle it. anyway, i now can connect to the internet (again) in OS9. huzzah! You may wonder while I’m still partly on OS9? Well, apple didn’t put any sound drivers or MIDI support that was good enough for audio processing into OSX until 10.2.3. Now that this update is available, software is struggling to get caught up. I’m not on Jaguar yet. It’s $129 extra dollars and I’m not spending it until all the software I want can run on it (which is also a bunch of extra money). I’d stay on 9 forever, but this machine has head room to upgrade. It was built with OSX in mind, but the hardware was ahead of the software. If you buy the fastest computer you can get your hands on, it lasts twice as long. the upgrade it until it’s at optimum performance and never upgrade it again.
Anyway, when last we left off, it was night time and the 12th was turning into the 13th, a most unhappy birthday, as the other person most intimately connected with that occurance is no more.

February 13, 2002

I am now 27 years old.
We had breakfast with Christi’s parents and then they left to drive their car back to Portland. they dropped us off at University of Washington and we walked around campus looking for the teachers of the Digital Arts department. We left phone messages for them, but to no avail. the digital Arts department is located in the basement of an International studies building. the building directory does not list the department. The building secretary doesn’t know about it. The department head’s office is through a secured door, in the basement, across from the biolder room. He wasn’t there. The whole center was hidden, windowless and strangely hip. It is obviously not the pride and joy of ther University. the music building, which is not connected, is next to the ROTC building. There were a lot of uniforms walking around campus. The architecture is nice though. It reminded me of Copenhagen.
after failing to contact any faculty members, christi and I walked 1.3 hours over to Capitol Hill, the gay neighborhood, where we met Ellen F. for coffee. I had too much (way too much) caffeine, but thelatte was excellent. Better than Gaylords even. We talked about the arts scene in Seattle. Joan wants us to move there. Ellen says it’s boring, but wants us to move also. She left the coffee shop breifly to get a scheduled haircut and then came back and we got lunch. We went over to the international disctrict. On the way, she showed us a building that she wants. It’s a former candy factory. She had a candy factory when she lived in texas and would like to have one again. The former factory (now for sale or rent) is in or around 23rd in the International district. At lunch we talked about lack of arts funding. I’m trying to figure out what to do about this. Ellen is internationally known and her work is really good, but she can’t quit her day job as a graphic designer. The Seattle Times called up Christi’s cell phone to interview her about her piece in the Klavier Nonette. Ellen said that never happens. Joan is trying to make it look as if it’s exciting, but it really isn’t.
After lunch, Ellen gave us a lift back to Capitol Hill and said goodbye to go do some work. christi and I went to a revolutionary bookstore there and asked about the state of the far left in town. (It’s now an open question: relocate to Seattle or no?) The bookstore clerk said it was healthy in the region and reminded us of the anti-WTO protests. Also, we saw anti-war signs everywhere. More than I’ve seen in Berkeley.
we walked back to the uniersity District. Mitch called up to sing happy brithday. It was very sweet. I got the phone number of his sister, but didn’t hook up with her because I was pooped from not sleeping the night before. It’s hard to sleep in hotels. I tried to remember how I slept while travelling for the summer in 2001, and I think it was sheer exhaustion plus a few respites of nice places to stay, like the flats we had in Copenhagen and Amsterdam. anyway, we headed back to Jack Straw where Joan tried to plead exhaustion to get out of our dinner plans, but christi wouldn’t let her, because we are the featured composers for the April composer forum thingee and we needed to know more about that. So Joan agreed and while she finished up for the day, Christi and I popped more coins into the juke box and listened to several more pieces. I think we’ve heard about half of them.
we went to a himilayan restaurant on University Ave. It was excellent. We talked to Joan (actually, christi did almost all of the talking, since the caffeine spring has finally wound down… I must have acted like a maniac around Ellen, being so wried and miserable at the same time…) about war and peace. She hates bush as much as Christi does. as an aside, Ellen said earlier that she was in France during the 2000 presidental elections and the newspaper headlines there said “Coup D’eta.” Joan and Christi also talked about the state of public transit in Seattle (bad but looking up) and the April thingee. We made plans. We are going to write some pieces for Cello and tape (where tape = CD with some niose on it, which Renne will accompany on her violincello). We will also write audience partcipation pieces with boomwhackers (which are long plastic tubes you wach into thhings, like the ground. They’re tuned to different pitches. It’s like low budget handbells). Joan will be in the Bay Area in March and we will meet back up then.
And then we walked back to our hotel room and passed out quite early. Christi was being super-sweet. It would have been a very happy day, had the date not been making me so sad. Alas. woe. poor me.