Adrian's Scrapbook

Why no posts?

I’ve just been way too busy to post here nowadays.  I am occasionally tweeting now though.

Long time, no post

I’ve been totally swamped and right now I’m dealing with the flu.

Last week at IBM we shipped both Rational Team Concert 1.0.1.1 as well as Rational Team Concert 2.0 M2 which is the second milestone in our 2.0 development cycle.

With the IJO, I’m working towards our season finale as well as our forthcoming 2009-2010 season.

Finally, I’m working on a book which has to be complete in April and I also need to record the CD for it too.

Lots of stuff to do.

Willie Shakespeare Blues

Tomorrow evening I’m playing at a fundraiser dinner for the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival.  I first started working with the wonderful folks at this festival in 2007 when I put together The Duke & The Bard, an extravaganza featuring Baroque music, jazz and Shakespearean readings.  At their fundraiser last year, I brought along a trio and we played some jazz and accompanied a couple of readings.  The theme of the evening was Shakespeare and Jazz or something like that.  It was a lot of fun with great people and great food.

This year the theme is Shakespeare Sings the Blues.  This might sound crazy but there’s actually some basis to it.  In the time of Shakespeare, people believed in the superstition of fairies as invisible, magical creatures that could affect their lives.  When they encountered trouble or just felt down, they would blame it on  “the blue fairies” or “the blues.”

One of the things I did for tomorrow’s event was write a song for Steve Berndt to sing.  Steve plays trombone in the IJO and is also a great vocalist.  We always have fun on gigs and he is game to try anything.  The song which I wrote in a few hours tonight, is of course a blues.  The rather colourful lyrics tell the story of Shakespeare’s rise to fame and how the blues helped him.  I wrote the story in first-person so in effect Steve will be sing as Will Shakespeare.  Before we perform the piece, I’ll talk to the guests a bit about the origin and the form of the blues and the relationship of the blues to Shakespeare.

After we’ve performed this tomorrow night, I’ll post the chart somewhere.

Google Chrome

I am loving Google Chrome and have made it my default browser. I find that I switch back and forth between Chrome and Firefox. For most browsing I use Chrome because the startup time is so much quicker. There are times however when I do want to use one of my Firefox plug-ins and that’s when I have to start up the slower browser.