I am starting the year with a new piano – a Yamaha P-515 – and with some new compositions. For now just a photo of my new setup and a recording of some old material – the first few bars of Beethoven’s Pathetique recorded on my new instrument.
Download brass quartet sheet music: Es wird scho glei dumpa.
Please note that “Es Wird Scho Glei Dumpa” is also part of the compilation Christmas Reharmonized, Volume 1 & 2.
Here’s what it sounds like when played on a piano:
I like Christmas. Especially the couple of weeks before Christmas eve. It’s getting dark and cold, but there’s candles and everything is lit in vibrant colors, we cuddle, drink tea and sing our favorite Christmas carols. At the some time everybody is busy shopping or trying to finish whatever they need to get done before the year ends, but we usually still find time to spend with friends and family. It’s a confusing but beautiful time. I tried to capture this weird feeling of enchantment mixed with numbing haste by arranging and reharmonizing the Austrian Christmas carol “Es wird scho glei dumpa” for brass quartet.
Word of advice if you want to play it with your band: The second half of the piece could be callenging and needs practicing.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
A couple of years back I did a website for a friend of mine, which I blogged about in The Making of Haraldbaumgartner.com. We did a couple of updates since then, but there haven’t been any changes over the past three years or so. Moreover I neglected updating the software behind the website, so it was still running off Joomla version 1.7.
About a week ago the provider disabled PHP 5.6, which Joomla 1.7 depended on, so the website was broken. It also meant that there was no path for automated upgrades any more.
After some brainstorming I had found my solution: I decided to recreate the setup that the provider had disabled (Apache, PHP5.6, mysql) in VirtualBox. All I had to do is to
Tada, the website was up and running again on my local machine:
With this in place I could restore all the stuff I nedded and migrate to Joomla 3.9. Finally http://www.haraldbaumgartner.com/ is back online! On the way there I also fixed all the file permissions, so that in the future Joomla would be able to update automatically.
When I look outside the window, I see the sun setting. It is setting faster than usual. That’s because it’s the window of an airplane and we are flying east.
This morning, before getting to the airport, I was woken up by the sound of my phone’s alarm. I turned it off and went ahead with bad habit: I checked the news. The headline: “Limiting temperature increase to 1.5 °C unrealistic, is global worming unstoppable?”
There you go, my dilemma in two short episodes. I am surrounded by information about global warming and still I rock an off-the-charts-carbon-footprint lifestyle. Travel is just so much fun and too affordable. Plus my job requires me to go places. Actually most of my carbon footprint comes from work related travel. Would quieting my job be the right thing to do? Wouldn’t just somebody else take my position and do the same traveling instead? Should I stop going on vacation too-far-away at all? What’s too far? Is there a way to compensate for what I am doing to our planet? When I’ll look back at this dilemma in a couple of years, will I hate myself for not being more decisive on the issue? Will it still be there, or will we have found ways to deal with it? Will regulators have come up with smart solutions?
And most importantly: Chicken or Pasta? Uh, dinner is about to be served. What a welcome distraction, let’s just postpone dealing with the issue.
Airplane Sunset
We just traveled Canada for three weeks and there’s one thing that became clear to me: I need a Kayak! The whole concept of hiking on water resonates with me on so many levels.
Getting from A to B at a steady pace while enjoying beautiful landscapes is pure pleasure to me. Kayaking has all of that, plus it lets me experience lakes and rivers in an almost meditative fashion. My favorite book is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and I think that my fascination with water plays a role in that.
Last weekend we did a day-long Kayaking trip from Ebensee to Gmunden. Makes you feel like Huck for a day …
Some years ago I posted a list of things you and I should not forget to bring when traveling.
Turns out it’s pretty outdated by now, who needs an mp3 player these days, so here’s an update:
– Undergarments
– Socks
– Shorts
– Trousers
– Evening Attire
– Swimming
– Bathing Suit
– Boggles
– Ear plugs
– Towels
– Jacket
– Lid
– Gloves
– Black shoes
– Sporty shoes
– Running Shoes
– Thongs
– Flip Flops
– Money
– ATM card
– Credit Card
– E-Card
– Driver’s License
– Teeth brush
– Toothpaste
– Shaver
– Shaving Cream
– After Shave
– Floss
– Shower Gel
– Deo
– Swiss Army Knife
– Towels
– Sun Screen
– Electric Hair Trimmer
– Imodium
– Mexalen
– Paspertine
– Power Adapter
– Mobile Phone
– Camera
– Tripod
– Memory Card
– Battery
– Laptop + Charger
– E-Book Reader
– Tablet
– USB Charger
– USB Cables (C, Micro, Lightning, …)
– Passport
– Guide
– Business Card
– Maps (e.g., Offline Google Maps)
– Infos: Flight, Hotel, Visa
– Presents
– Sun Glasses
– Water Bottle
– Passport
– Mobile Phone
– Wallet
– Camera
– Sun Glasses
Here’s the list as pdf.
Another 30 Days Challenge! I’ll record small snippets of music / sound every day for 30 days and will upload them to soundcloud.
Some background information:
No alcohol (= no beer) for 40 days. Usually, I just do 30 days projects, but I think I am going wild on this on.
In parallel I have started taking one photo every day, which I’ll share here: https://goo.gl/photos/ZmW82v8Pxw1LaDBKA.
Every year around Christmas I start a little DIY project, that most of the time involves some programming and some real hardware (e.g., TI chronos: My watch controls my bedroom lights). With most light bulbs in my apartment being Philips Hue light bulbs, I decided I wanted to be able to control them from my PC. So this Christmas I created “Hue System Tray”, a tiny program that lives in the system tray and lets me check the status of my hue lights as well as control them.
Instead of using Java, which I’ve used for most of my GUI programs (e.g., jdotxt), I did this little project in C++ using Qt. The only down-side is that Philips does not offer a C++ SDK. To keep things simple I decided not to implement a full-blown SDK myself. At this point in time the program basically makes hard-coded RESTful API calls to the Hue bridge directly. It would of course be much nicer if the list of rooms would be populated automatically from the list of rooms stored on the bridge and if all API calls were derived automatically. But hey, holiday time is limited ;)
This was my first encounter with Qt and a rather pleasant one I have to say. The signals and slots mechanism is rather intuitive, it features a nice collection of libraries (e.g., for networking or for parsing JSON), the documentation is good and the learning curve is not too steep. Actually I found programming Java for Android apps more difficult. Also deploying my program to another machine was not too difficult, once I had figured out which dlls to carry over.
I will probably have to do some more C++ coding at work in the near future, so I hope that dusting off my C++ skills and Qt will come in handy.