2012

Mon, Jun 18

<18:49 EEST> Yesterday's Miljazz turned out great fun, after my hesitations about going out with a rainy weather forecast. In fact, for most of the 3-hour event it was pouring wet, but in a way that just completed the summer festival experience, leaving only the most dedicated listeners. Personally, my party mood was turned on the moment Jarkko Ahola announced some Queen tracks coming up — I immediately thought of Breakthru and Innuendo, the former being one of my favourite songs ever. True to the gut feeling, he started with BT, though the arrangement was not the best possible IMHO. Ahola was backed by the local Air Force Band, and of course you need to be a little creative with such arrangements, but for Innuendo it really worked out. It is likely this kind of musical combinations that inspired my song Kevätolo, for instance.

After this and another professional military band from Savo, it was the final group that really took everything off hinges. It was those young and awkward looking conscripts from Varusmiessoittokunta Show Band that had been hanging around, but they turned out the biggest party power supply ever. Starting out in a true Blues Brothers style, their playing was not always super professional, but the stage presence was overwhelming with the fun and energy of youth. The kind of vigour that Gai Sensei would be proud of, for you Naruto fans out there. I cannot recall a band ever having such fun on stage. Mind you, these are young men around 19 years old, forced to lead a very restricted military life for about a year, so any outlet for the boyish energy must be welcome.

Not surprisingly, this all made me rather miss my days in the wind orchestra — something I could have continued all the way to a full career, but chose otherwise. Despite this, I did partake in an army choir during my military service, and the couple of gigs were an immensely fun break from the usual days. Besides, my musical career does live on in a sense, with all these semi-professional gigs I have mentioned in the past couple of years.

While pondering meaninglessly on my lost youth, I do not recall such a high profile and wide variery of military music from my teenage years. There were Big Bands besides the marching ones, but that was about it. Of course, the entire scene of popular music has changed a lot in these 15 years or so, with Idols being only one of the many TV competitions making stars from the masses. Furthermore, professional music education has exploded — pop and jazz in particular, which is kind of ironic. It is easy to imagine that many of the young conscripts already have years of pro-level instruction and experience under their belts. In any case, they all sounded like they would have dazzling futures in the show business.

Or perhaps not. While I do hope for the best for guys like these, I cannot help thinking where they all are going to find jobs. Not just because I support the political pirate movement, but in terms of real life; how much entertainment do we need, and can afford to pay for?

Of course, culture and entertainment are essential to a healthy society, but the current wave of increased professionalism with its promises of stardom is not so healthy any more. If I may put the pirate hat on for a moment, the development seems to go well in line with the message of the copyright mafia: look at all those starving artists! There is already a false sense of entitlement, and it is not getting any better if we keep making more and more of those professional artists. In the meantime, new forms of entertainment are competing for our attention and money: look at Rovio for example, the aggressively avian saviour of Finnish (or perhaps Irish) economy.

Going back to the Miljazz experience, this feeling of a lost youth and all the fun of yore is probably not so much about the music itself, but creative social activity in general. Amateur theatre has certainly been no less fun than any of my musical gigs, but that is also something for which I have not the time nor the energy, as long as I continue teaching. On a positive note, though, I feel that working with young people helps me maintain a fun attitude — I could not bear working in a stiff office environment with grown-ups.

Mon, Jun 11

<00:17 EEST> "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." I know not of this God, but a beer or two certainly makes me happy. Feel good about myself, as if being a being supreme. Such [eg]{2}ocentrism.

To tie it in with the recent entry, working on these number-theoretical programming problems makes me forget myself. Lost in the work, as many a creative person might testify. In a sense, they are part of a grand tradition of channelling the divine, rather than being a genius/genie themselves.

I have a vague recollection of that talk from a few years back, and indeed IRC logs remind me of this fact. It is, however, refreshing to regard the idea with the more recent eyes of a remixer and a pirate. Instead of higher existential planes, your creative mind is channelling the wisdom of the crowd. In the most hipsterious of ironies, a link to the article Jazz is illegal now points to a paywall, so I guess that is the end of the discussion.

Wait — there remains the issue where the first paragraph left us with a regular expression. In the talk, Gilbert points out how the gods of yore were replaced by the human at the centre of the universe. Whether or not that is an accureate description of the Renaissance, such an idea of 'humanism' has always smelled a little foul to my scientific taste. In the words of another scientist, the book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics. Hence, rather than succumbing to the blogospherical hypsteria of the "wisdom" of crowds, I much prefer the idea of channelling the nature, aka the universe. I guess this also goes back to my preference of science fiction over mainstream: there are weirder and wonderfuler things out there than the collective kitchen sink.

Lost in the work, by the way, is a particularly desirable state if your main activity is presenting yourself to the crowd. Whether working as a teacher, or going out in a fancy dress, there are situations when you are simply too aware of yourself to be comfortable. But when it is just you against the miracles of mathematics, you know which side is going to win, so might as well let go.

Sun, Jun 10

<21:23 EEST> Last night around this time, I found myself back in Project Euler after a couple of years. It has been an intense 25 hours or so, with little time for my usual distractions such as watching videos, or eating and drinking too much. While my past hacking sessions are not too far back, such as the FPGA clustering of September, I had nevertheless forgotten how immensely addictive it is. I spent hours and hours on a relatively easy problem without any apparent success, but I knew my algorithm was right. In the end, the problem turned out a simple Python issue that was making certain memory operations too slow.

(I used a dictionary, basically since I needed a huge, sparse array. The old standard way of checking "if n in dict.keys()" was the problem; now you can simply use "if n in dict" to the same effect, without the overhead of generating a list of keys each time.)

Of course, Project Euler is not just any kind of programming exercise, it involves a lot of math, most prominently number theory. It was a great excuse to dive back into some course notes, even if I knew the basic ideas already — often from the summer of 2007, my first encounter with the Project.

I really should remember to eat something. Actually, I did have a good meal today, but I did not even watch a video with it, as I often do — I was too busy thinking about the problem. I guess this is a sad reminder of how boring and repulsive most of my life must be, with all the need for diversion and entertainment. Not to mention The Entertainer — this week I have also learned my seventh Scott Joplin rag, Elite Syncopations. (There might be a joke in here about the frustrated musician with a piano rage.)

Sat, Jun 2

<19:05 EEST> Looking back at the school year that is just about over, I have probably lost count of fun things I got paid to do, most prominently band gigs. A lof of science demonstrations also count, such as Mentos Diet Coke and a plethora of pyrotechnics like potassium chlorate with sugar. This morning I got to revisit my past as the theatre technician, while managing sound, lights and video for the graduation event. Not much to do in any one, but combining the three was new to me, as we usually have dedicated sound and light guys.

On the slightly more geeky front, my public collection of ebuilds is slowly growing, this time with a kernel module patched for Linux 3.4. The patch was already applied in the official Gentoo tree, but only for the newer and slower driver series. So it was not much of a hack, but pretty useful to me, and likely many a Bitcoin miner ;)

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Risto A. Paju