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This page updated 13 February 2010
www.danbyrnes.com.au
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Dan Byrnes | Note: This personal website was begun on 13 August 2008 as an adjunct on the domain - http://www.danbyrnes.com.au/ It replaces a different and older personal website which is now superseded. It will be a vanilla, no-frills website and will probably carry various family pictures and some family history information, and a little "blogging" as well. Anyone who can manage a website doesn't really need a blog, is the feeling. - Dan Byrnes | |
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Dan Byrnes Blog (??) Sorry about any dog-Latin text given below, it's placed there just to wrap around the graphics being lately loaded.
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By Dan Byrnes Poem 801 of 18-12-2009 draft 6a
(For Paul Anglin, Melbourne)
We secured the location with rifles,
grenades, mortars and air strike.
Rifles using academic-coated bullets,
the grenades of utter frustration,
napalm of seemingly-seductive linguistic balm,
burning and smoking,
turning in the wind and choking.
And set to making the sets.
A dictionary here, a rhyme there,
a word from a nerd, a cast of a thousand recluses,
each of their homes lovingly detailed
to capture the misanthropy, angst and anomie
that go into the making of The Poetry.
The secret is to learn how to digitise the word,
bring in graphics the poet never thought of,
freeze-frame it, speed it up, slow it down, give it an edge,
make it contemporary and drown it in the ignorance
that all sorts of people have, who actually think
that the emotions are, or ever could be,
skilled workers.
We needed more special effects and make-up than expected,
though, truckloads, because poets regrettably get old
and often can't plausibly explain any more
their fantastic love affair when they were twenty-six,
any better than you or I could who were never there.
And what's the point of lengthy filming or re-enactments
of the wit-of-the-stairs of them
half-remembered smart-arsey quips,
now-demolished hospital wards,
forensic DNA work on landfills of dead used condoms and pizza crust,
the archaeologies of the bad use of punctuation and of
well-intentioned tendencies to multiculturalism?
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| Dan Byrnes (not normally looking so bleary) at an April 2008 Poetzinc reading. Photo by Bob Cummins |
G e t .. a .. l i f e. We thought, this is historic and never been done!
Drizzled with history like a homeless dog in the rain,
flavoured with dead languages, printed,
and remorselessly drained
of life fluids in the morgue for posterity.
A screen-saver picture of a waterless, wind-blown desert here,
a bit-torrent download of Beethoven symphonies there,
and we get Rumi-eyed poetry,
poetry of the frangipani,
poetry of the beloved homeland,
poetry of the needy-souled wishful thinker,
poetry of the disastrously-undressed soul
in some fresh and excrutiating extremity,
and a eulogy from a meek vice-chancellor
from yet-another pointless university.
Is good. The sound track is by Phillip Glass,
as minimalist as an old city razed
slow-mo in just a few blitzkrieg strokes.
Hence the ending with the ...
disappointing scenes of ruins
under slowly-rising smoke.
We gather now in post-production parties,
and everyone here tries to hide
that they know the other people know
that they all knew, that the others know,
who aren't saying, unforgiving,
this is the kind of joke that arises from high school, from Year Seven,
when wordy-educated people, ordinary voters, try to make a living,
but also secretly try to defy the angels and to annex heaven.
What they're going to do in heaven
for such a long time
is the question never answered.
Odd that the parties never wind up,
talk continues while the zephyr winds blow, the surf comes in,
peace grows between the wars,
and no one knows what a zephyr is anymore.
Somone puts on some old Irish music
composed by the mounds of heartbreak.
Someone cries,
and life goes on because it has to.
(ends)
Item 13-3-2010
So some years ago I abandoned all use of Microsoft software in search of something much more reliable, after having finally been guided to Ubuntu/Linux. Earlier I'd looked at Red Hat, Xandros, Mandriva, but the last thing I wanted to do was try to use a dual boot system using both Microsoft and Linux. That would be a sure road to disaster, probably sooner rather than later.
So I waited, hoping that Linux systems would soon evolve to the point where I could completely abandon Microsoft for most purposes. Which finally happened.
Ubuntu! Marvellous, a true revolution. Restful. Reliable, I can get a lot more done without having to stop to wonder how and why the computer regularly fouls up.
Now, when I hear someone complaining about their computer working badly, and that's a lot of people in my age group, I regard their problem as entirely self-inflicted. It's very simple. Their problems will go away when they stop using Microsoft.
Admittedly, it does take a while to get used to using a Linuxy system. And it takes a while to learn how to use WINE. What is WINE? WINE is software that allows us to use various software originally intended for use with MS Windows as we'd like. WINE is a sort of Windows emulator that cutely bills itself as WINE is NOT AN EMULATOR. Whatever, WINE allowed me to efficiently use my genealogy database -- PAF5 -- on a computer running Ubuntu. I've not bothered to test WINE with a great range of other Windows-type software, there is too much work to be done. One day perhaps I'll get around to it.
Meantime, I used to do a lot of experimenting with Windows-type software, partly in the search for tactics of using a computer that worked well and reliably, an often vain search. I gave up experimenting when I switched to Ubuntu, partly as Ubuntu provides about 25,000 packages which can be downloaded quickly and efficiently to my computer -- far too much to bother to test. A great many of these packages are quite nerdy, and often for those who are interested in programming issues for their own sake, which is not me. In 2008-2009 I slowly started to download more packages. One marvellous offering is PICASA, which is organizing software for collections of pictures. Highly recommended!
Whatever, I recently became interested in music-handling software for an Ubuntu system. Not software for handling .mp3 files or mp4, .ogg files, ; or .wav files (the Microsoft format for sound files). Software to help me compose some music using a computer. Problem, it is a bit complicated. Firstly, the project goes back to 1979, when I wrote many sections of music using a 12-string guitar, and taped them using a cheap mike and a small cassette player. The result was not good sound quality, but the exercise was enjoyable and I wanted to preserve the ideas, so I wrote down the most complicated chords with a view to one day transcribing the whole thing onto paper. Which never happened, to the present day. Meantime, I had copied the old casette tapes to hard disks using Audacity (cross-platform software for editing sound files).
What has to be done then?
It would be ideal if we could have software which "listened" to a music file and notated the music. Quite an impossible ask. The tasks involved have to be researched. A good deal of software would have to be freshly installed. I don't even know as I start if my sound card (a new wave card from Intel on a brand new computer) can do all the necessary without some fix-ups. Firstly, I used the Ubuntu system to download several different systems for handling music notation. (And whether any notation can be printed out to paper is a separate but related question, a printer question,not a sound-handling question.) The system I liked most exports my sets of notes to several formats including MIDI. Is my computer set-up to play MIDI files? It seems not. More work is required.
The software I prefer to work with is NoteEdit. (See http://noteedit.berlios.de). NoteEdit seems to require JACK server, which I then download. After some more mucking about, it seems I may as well download Kguitar Project (for making chord charts), and kmid (what does that do?) But I still need to work out how to get some sound from some MIDI files. This requires more experienting, consulting forums on the Net, etc. I downloaded several more files, especially GStreamer plug-ins (from "the bad set") to be able to play MIDI files which happen to be sitting in the computer for test purposes. Hmm, it seems my system is not yet configured to play MIDI files. The fix on the forums seems to be to install Timidity and/or Automatix. But Automatix seems to be unavailable to my system. Whatever, I install Timidity ok and bingo, now I can play MIDI files.
Re: How to play MIDI files in Ubuntu? I had to same problem to play midi files. So I installed automatix. It's really an amazing program. It solves many problems automatically. So I installed the MIDI package via automatix. It did all the steps about timidity or soundfonts itself. But I found that timidity is a software sequencer and eats up so much system performance. So I removed all of that.
My card is a SBLive! and finally I could configure it to play midi. It may also work with audigy:
In terminal:
sudo modprobe snd_seq_midi
sudo modprobe snd_emux_synth
sudo modprobe snd_emu10k1_synth (this creates the device modules for MIDI)
sudo apt-get install awesfx;asfxload
"asfxload soundfont.sf2" for ALSA or "sfxload soundfont.sf2" for OSS
(and this is a tool to load soundfonts, you can find them on internet)
and after that you can play midi by selecting a port "emu10k1 : 0" etc in a midi
player
and to make these changes permanent (to load the modules at boot):
sudo gedit /etc/modules
(Enter these lines at the end of file in editor)
snd_seq_midi
snd_emux_synth
snd_emu10k1_synth
save n exit. This sould work with SBLive! or Audigy (emu10k1)
Last edited by barisurum; January 26th, 2006 at 08:30 PM.
Actually, I didn't have to do any of the above. I installed Timidity, and suddenly I can play MIDI files, the sound card can handle things!
More to come ...
- Dan Byrnes (otherwise indicated in these pages as -Editor)
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these domain stats begun 18 December 2005
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