Another season in the bag
Our music group had the last concert of the season 2 weeks ago. It went well - it wasn’t packed, but attendance was decent, and a lot more people who came donated this time, so we made a sizable profit. I have no idea what is the difference.
The music itself was nice. There was a wide range of musical abilities among the performers, and I was definitely on the low end this time: I played Ludwig’s Waltz no. 1, which was a piece Alma Deutscher wrote with the intention to perform on Beethoven’s 250th anniversary. It’s a Viennese waltz, with all the themes were originally written by Beethoven. Since Beethoven’s 250th was 2020, she ended up performing a solo piano version of it at home and posted it on youtube. That meant I could then transcribe it and play it at the concert. It was one of the easier things to play. But even till now I can’t figure out where one of the themes came from.
We had a board meeting afterwards, mostly devoted to ideas about soliciting more donations. Now that we are more responsible about spending money on the orchestra, we’re getting on more and more secure financial footing, so now it’s harder to articulate why we need the donation other than we want to get onto even more secure financial footing. But just vague notions about “growth” is hard to get people excited - I think we need to spell out the programs that are at risk without us securing financial footing.
But, I don’t have to think about it for a month.
- S
Back on the saddle
After our data migration project was launched last quarter, I floated an idle thought about writing up our experience in an academic paper. My manager liked it a lot and has been following up on it.
So, I dug around for similar papers - I haven’t been in touch with academia for decade. And it turned out, a team in New Hip Company that also did a data migration project published a paper from last year - our teams even have the same Director. So I’m very happy to find that because they’d make our lit review easier.
One of the authors’ names sounded familiar. I did some digging, and it turns out he was in the same research group I was in when I was an undergrad research assistant in Berkeley… Small world.
I haven’t told my collaborators on the project yet, so it may still not happen if they’re not interested. But, having filed a patent last year, it’d be good to add a publication.
- N
Into the white
We’re leaving tomorrow for our summer trip to Alaska. Technically we’re flying out the day after tomorrow, but our flight is so early that we decided to stay at the TWA hotel at JFK overnight so we won’t have to risk missing our flight due to messy traffic at JFK.
Packing is hard this time. At least when we went to Antarctica we knew it was going to be cold, but this trip we have to prepare for anything - we could be seeing two weeks of T-shirt and shorts weather or two weeks of winter coat weather. Luckily there’s laundry on the ship, so I can just pack one week of warm clothes and one week of cold clothes, and hope for the best. Part of it is getting old too - five years ago I wouldn’t have needed to add “reading glasses” to the packing list.
We had dinner at La Professeure’s college roommate last week, who will be travelling with us - Alaska was her idea - along with her husband and teenage daughter. I get the sense that the husband and daughter haven’t done any preparation for the trip, so I hope they don’t get too disappointed.
- D
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