MIDI - I've mentioned before that I've been tinkering around with the capabilities of our Yamaha Clavinova. In much the same way as digital photography allowed me to dust off my old love of photography and blend it with computers, the Clavinova is doing a bit of the same with respect to piano and music. The instrument is a decent MIDI synthesizer and sequencer hidden under the facade of a digital piano. I've had fun recording Claire's practice music and its duet accompaniment.
I also mentioned that I'm trying to brush up on my skills programming in Perl. It seems like I write a handful of Perl scripts a year -- just few enough that I always feel rusty at it. So tonight I did a blend of the two. I did research into how one can use Perl to help generate MIDI files for playing on our piano. I readily admit it doesn't get much geekier than that. Nonetheless, it's been interesting because when you think about it, a lot of aspects of music have patterns in them that could lend themselves well to a little automation. I'll see how it goes...
Noel - After the boys went down to bed, we thought we'd put on the TNT holiday special, Noel. It had been sitting for about a week in TiVo cache and it had some big name actresses. About 15 minutes into the movie the set transitions to a bedroom scene where Penelope Cruz is barely dressed in the arms of her lover. Fast forward. Within five minutes of that a co-worker of Susan Sarandon's character is crudely telling her that what she really could use is some intense ... ahem ... marital congress. At that point Michelle quickly zapped the movie and told the girls she would find something else as this wouldn't be interesting to them. I don't recall seeing any warning that this was more sleezy soap opera than holiday special, but ... <delete> good bye. That freed up some TiVo disk space.
Tidbits - It's not been the best weekend to be outside, but what do you expect for the third week of Advent in NH. I let the boys ride their big wheels a few times to stretch their legs and get some fresh air. I also took them to see our brook which is flowing well at this time of the year. Abigail went to a birthday party yesterday for a girlfriend down the street. The girls helped Michelle wrap presents for the boys last night. Today I decided to see if the twins are behaving any better in restaurants and took them along with the girls to Blakes so that Michelle could catch a nap. Tomorrow night is our company holiday party at C. R. Sparks. Our local office was a bit surprised to find that our new CEO (and his wife) flew out from California to be with us tomorrow for the celebration.