Baltimore Consort at the National Gallery

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I’m a big fan of The Baltimore Consort and their faithfully researched renditions of early music played on authentic instruments, and their performance at the National Gallery Sunday concert did not disappoint. With lutes, citterns, rebecs, flutes, recorders, a crumhorn, and richly-voiced countertenor Jose Lemos, the Consort wove a lovely, mellow tapestry of polyphony, evoking images of Middle Age Europe, sometimes rural, sometimes royal. In the spirit of Elizabethan-age improvisation, however, they make it a point not to adhere too rigidly to convention, and introduce their own brand of modern variation into the music — especially while playing toe-tapping excerpts from Playford’s Dancing Master. The result is a lively, almost country-music-like counterpoint, whose rhythm resonates with both the traditional and the contemporary.

Program Notes here (PDF format).

(Now, of course, I find myself wanting to get my hands on all their albums.)

Military on the Mall

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Looks like the armed forces was having some kind of expo on the National Mall today; there were tanks, F-16s, and various other cool hardware out on the grass. They were already packing up as I passed by on my way to the National Gallery, but I got these photos:

Tanks and Fighter Jets on the Mall

Tanks and Fighter Jets on the Mall

Tanks and Fighter Jets on the Mall

Update: A note from Tim; those aren’t real F-16’s, just collapsible mockups for shows such as this.

Windy Planespotting

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Planespotting at Gravelly Point

I hiked over to Gravelly Point yesterday to do some planespotting. It was rather windy and overcast, and unfortunately the planes were taking off in the direction of the park rather than making their landing approaches over it, so the photos weren’t quite as dramatic or as close as I would have wanted. But if you want to see them, see the “gravellypoint” tag in my Flickr photostream. I’ll try for better planespotting shots some other weekend.

Also, a little ladybug that landed on me:

Ladybug on my jacket at Gravelly Point

Duck On the Sidewalk

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This bold mallard was about to cross 1st St NE outside Union Station earlier today.

Blogger Mobile

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Blogger Mobile: Blogger introduces mobile-phone-to-weblog posting. Send an MMS/email message from your cellphone to the specified email address, and Go.Blogger auto-generates a new random blogspot URL hooked to your contact information. (The URL can be changed or merged with your existing weblogs when you “claim” your number on login.) More from Blogger Buzz (with jingle), Blogger Help, Bizstone, Youngpup, and GoogleBlog. What do you think of this compared to “moblogging” via Flickr? (Crossposted to Metafilter.)

At this time, I’m still using Flickr to post from phone to weblog, but since I got my new phone, I’ve been running into minor layout issues with Flickr: issues I will detail later. Blogger Mobile could potentially help to fix these with some MT/Blogger template mashing. The question is, am I willing to spread myself that thin, posting photos between two competing services just so they display properly on one website?

For now, moBrownpau on Blogspot is my dump for mobile experimentation, holding stuff posted via the long-defunct AIM Bloggerbot, Flickr, and now Blogger Mobile.

Cassini Coolness

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I haven’t been paying much attention to NASA’s current Saturn mission, but I should be. Even after the Huygens landing, there’s still a lot of amazing science — and photography — coming out of Cassini as it swoops through Saturn’s rings and moons. Right now Cassini is starting an extensive survey of the rings, and has confirmed that the rocky moon Phoebe is closely related to Kuiper Belt Objects.

More cool photos from Cassini:

And speaking of Mars Rovers, Opportunity is set to try getting unstuck from the deep sand it’s currently bogged down in. Best of luck to the JPL rover team on that.

Dear Fedex.com:

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I just wanted to let you know that I recently found it easier to walk to the nearest staffed Fedex office, visually confirm its street address, and ask for the phone number, than it took to to use your website to find said office. The following problems were encountered in attempting to use your search form:

  1. The Find Locations page is hidden away in a slideout menu which does not work in Opera 8.
  2. In Firefox, the search form does not work. The button refuses to submit until the page is reloaded. When it finally submits on reload, the form returns a “please fill out the fields commented in red” error, while showing no comments in red. This is because the form requires at least one of the “Type of Location” checkboxes to be selected; they are prechecked in Internet Explorer, but said checkboxes are empty in Firefox, a real web browser. One wonders why you could not have just used more semantically correct radio buttons rather than checkboxes, using HTML’s “checked” attribute rather than whatever Javascript is doing that work. (I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that thing about the radio buttons, but checkboxes are perfectly semantic for this.)
  3. By the way, that search form also breaks the Enter key, forcing advanced users to suffer the tribulation of moving a hand off the keyboard to click a mouse button just to submit the form. Unacceptable!
  4. And finally, the Fedex locations search results page does not show phone numbers.

Please, Fedex, hire someone like 37 Signals or Happy Cog or something to get your site properly fixed, because right now, store-searching is a mini-disaster.