gregdoolittle.com

one of the most frequently used functions in DOM/Ajax JavaScript code is getElementById…. it’s used so often that i decided to create a shortcut for it:

function $(id) {
    return document.getElementById(id);
}

now i can use this shorthand notation:

$("div_id_name").style.display = "block"

instead of:

document.getElementById("div_id_name").style.display = "block"

this is pretty handy for front-end developers…. a similar function is included in most JavaScript toolkits, but it’s nice to include this in our own in-house library of JavaScript functions.

i just finished up playing 1st trumpet in 4 performances of bye bye birdie at mills college in oakland this weekend. the music was a little hammy, but overall a lot of fun, and a good challenge. i never intended to be on 1st trumpet, but the 1st trumpet player for this show backed out two weeks before opening night.

so… yeah, i played the 1st trumpet part. it was fun — but tough! i took a lot of stuff down an octave, and occasionally re-wrote some of the 16th note lines into 8th note lines… (after reading 16th notes at 140bpm, i have a new respect for broadway trumpeters!). i did an okay job (i think!), but i’m loathing my inability to consistently hit the upper register — during the 2nd half of the last performance, i missed some of the B’s above the staff… and had to entirely skip the double-high F’s and some of the D’s - shameful, i know… . i found a book of cat anderson techniques that should help me address this, by doing exercises to expand my range.

the next show i’m doing, is the producers with newark high school. the performances are in july, and i will be playing trumpet 3 in all of them. it was good to get out of my element and challenge myself with bye bye birdie’s 1st trumpet, but it will be nice to have a more relaxed part with this next play. i learned a lot, but now it’s time to kick ass on something within my ability.

and with that i leave you with the most well-known song from the play. (which ironically, was almost cut from the play)
“Put on a Happy Face”

better songs from the show, in my opinion:
“Honestly Sincere”
“One Last Kiss”
“Telephone Hour”
“Reprise”

we’re almost ready to begin spriting all our inline images. we had been using sprites in our navigation background images, but recently i’ve been writing some css for eric, one of our engineers, who figured out a way to dynamically replace all inline images with a giant image sprite.

what is an image sprite? it’s an image file that contains several other images within it. images are displayed as background images, in a div, span, or img element that reveals only one image at a time.

why would you want to sprite your images? the advantage of an image sprite is that all of the images are loaded all at once. so instead of a user’s browser calling to the server 30 different times for a various images on a webpage, it just makes a single call, and loads all 30 images in a single image file. this is significant because with each “hit”, or call to the server, there is a chunk of time spent communicating between the browser and the server establishing the connection. this is call “first byte load time”. with a sprite you consolidate each of those first byte load times into only one.

awesome work eric!

In the process of interviewing for a junior developer position at my company, I was speaking with a designer/developer who went to school at Academy of Art. The interviewee brought up something I had heard about, but had to confess that I had never needed to use: the PNG-8 Fireworks Hack for IE6.

PNG’s allow for alpha transparency in your images. This goes beyond what you do in a GIF image, merely poking holes in your image, allowing you to see through the areas of the image which are transparent. PNG’s allows you to create an image that has differing areas of opacity. This allows you to overlay images, and use cool effects like drop shadows.

PNG’s aren’t usable in IE6 - at least as I had known them. But the Fireworks hack makes it possible. Fireworks has one specific advantage over Photoshop when saving for the web: creating PNG’s that maintain their opacity, or alpha-transparency in IE6.

Here’s a tutorial if you’d like more info on how to use this technique:

(more info)

while i try to avoid css hacks as a general rule, every once in a while you have to use them as a last resort. i’ve known about the _underscore and *star hacks for IE6 and IE7 respectively, but until recently haven’t heard of a good solution for webkit browsers (i.e. safari, chrome).

this works fantastically however:


@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
/* Safari 3.0 and Chrome rules here */
}


happy coding!

I flew into Philadelphia Saturday night before the inauguration. We left at 7am the next morning to make our 1pm rehearsal in DC. We got to DC early enough to do some ‘drive-thru’ site-seeing. We briefly saw the Capitol, the parade route, the White House, the Museum of the Native American, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial.

Finally it was time to head to our first rehearsal at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Getting there, we drove southeast from central DC. When we crossed the river, all the sudden we entered a third world country, where all the people looked disheveled, and most of the storefronts were either boarded up or run down. You could tell it was getting bad when the rate of abandoned houses exceeded the rate of wings-chinese-subs-chicken-soul food combination restaurants. We were definitely in one of the ’stabbier’ parts of town.

We finally arrived at the hospital, which looked more like a prison than a hospital – and it turned out that it basically is a prison, or at least some of the patients are on lockdown. The patients I saw looked a lot like the homeless in San Francisco. DC apparently tries to keep their homeless out-of-sight. There were huge plumes of water vapor rising up from their front lawn, probably the exhaust pipes from a heating system built at the turn of the century. It was a nice little detail that really added to the whole warzone effect. Uniformly decaying institutional brownstone buildings all over the campus.

We entered our conference area, which was held in the chapel at St. Elizabeth’s. Let me tell you, a chapel had never felt so sanctimonious, as in this case it was a shield from the throngs of patient-zombies who roamed the hospital campus. After registration and getting settled in there were a few speakers: the liaison to the inaugural committee and to the military, DC police sergeant (Who told us “If you put your hands in your pockets at any time during the parade route, or make any gesture that can be perceived as a threat, we will shoot you!“), our 3 drum major’s, the artistic director, etc. Finally we went out into the cold with our caps, ear muffs, and gloves to practice our music in the 20-something degree weather. More rehearsal, followed by a break inside the chapel to thaw out a little. More rehearsal outside. One last thaw in the chapel before we called it a day.

Afterwards, a small group of us headed over to the aptly-named Nellie’s bar, a gay sports pub (who knew?) in a nice part of town, where we were supposed to have some tables reserved. There was no room for us, so we left, and ended up eating dinner at a deli. It was a long day, so we crashed pretty early after that.

Day 2. Back at St. Elizabeth’s, we focussed more on marching and moving around while playing. We marched about a mile from the chapel to our first audience of slippered, bath-robed loonies and homeless people. They were thrilled, probably because this was the closest they were going to get to seeing the parade in person. We marched back to the chapel. Ate our boxed lunches. Rehearsed inside the chapel. Went back outside. Our second audience was about 2 miles from the chapel. This area was higher security, and the audience was mostly staff. The president of the hospital welcomed us, and let us know that there were people in the 6th (top) floor of the building who were on maximum security, who could hear us playing. Later I discovered that one of them was John Hinckley – it was very strange to know that I had played for him, before playing for Obama. We finished around 4pm that day. I called my cousin, to see if he would be up for a quick visit, but he was already tied up with his wife’s family for the evening at that point. I’ll have to go back to DC sometime to see him on a separate trip! A few of us went back to the Jefferson Memorial (which has to be my favorite landmark in DC) and actually were able to park the car and walk around. On the way to the freeway, we saw either Obama or Bush drive down part of Pennsylvania Ave. in a motorcade. We had a decent Mexican dinner in Maryland (by East Coast standards of Mexican food, that is), on the way back to the hotel.

Day 3. Inauguration day. We got up at 5:30am, and despite several road closures, made it to Arlington for our 7am breakfast. Two of the Arlington City Supervisor’s spoke at our breakfast, welcoming us to their city. From there, we got on our buses, and went directly to the Pentagon. We waited, and waited. Heard Obama stumble over his words with Justice Roberts during his swearing in. When Obama began his inauguration speech, our bus finally started moving. We went to a separate screening area at the Pentagon. Everyone disembarked the bus, and went through what was basically airport security run by the military. Our buses were searched by police dogs. The army gave us food. An hour or so later, we got back on our bus. We waited at the Pentagon for several hours, then we drove to the ellipse in front of the White House. We got off our buses for the last time, and went to our ‘warming tents’. I have to put it in quotes because the tents were only 40 degrees. Outside it was 24° with a 10° wind chill. We lined up, and played a few songs. The Howard University cheerleaders were directly in front of our drum majors, and they danced to our music while we practiced (probably just to stay warm! there were basically wearing one-piece swimsuits with a shawl – yikes!). Eventually they called everyone back into the tents, where we learned that there was going to be a delay in the parade because of Senators Kennedy and Bird’s medical problems.

Around 4:30 we lined up again, and started marching. We had 2.4 miles to march, before the parade even began. And it really started to get dark (not to mention cold!) at this time. I wasn’t using sheet music because I had all my music memorized, so it wasn’t an issue for me. Some people who were planning to rely on reading music soon discovered that they actually had most of the music memorized. We finally got to the entrance of the parade route. We heard an announcer call out “Howard University Showtime Marching Band…”, and then a minute later we heard our own blurb, “And now, the Lesbian & Gay Band Association, the first time an openly gay organization has marched in an inaugural parade…” It just sounded weird to me. The first? Weird. We had a few fans on the sidelines, one of whom yelled out “It’s about [bleep]-ing time!”, another “We love you L-G-B-A!” Others cheered for us, and each time they did, I got that choked-up feeling. At the same time I had an overwhelming surge of adrenaline, which really helped dealing with the cold. 1.6 miles later, we turned down 14th St, and reached the silent zone. At this point, we weren’t supposed to play until we got to the reviewing stand. We were silent except for the snare click we used to maintain our cadence. We passed several military personnel in their formal uniforms. They saluted our color guard, probably only because one of them was carrying an American flag.

Our setlist for the parade:
Ode to Joy - Beethoven (bc it’s a pretty song, and we were overjoyed!)
Hold on I’m Coming - Sam & Dave (one of Obama’s campaign trail songs)
Washington Post - Sousa (just because…)
Brand New Day from The Wiz - Luther Van Dross (bc the lyrics are fitting)
Manhattan Beach March - Sousa (bc we know how the military loves their marches)

We started playing the Washington Post March (also Sousa) about 50 yards before the reviewing stand. I couldn’t help staring at Obama for a few seconds after we started playing. As we got closer to the reviewing stand I looked straight-ahead. I was about 20 feet from Barack, Michelle, and Joe Biden (I think Ms. Biden was also there, but I didn’t get a good look), as we passed the stand. We finished playing about 30 yards past the stand, and then got an up-close view of the West Wing, and the Blair House.

We got to the official end of the parade route, but the ‘unofficial’ parade kept going another several blocks. This area was more crowded than the official parade route, probably because you didn’t need a ticket to be an observer in this section. We played a few more songs, marched a few more blocks, and then turned the corner to head back to our bus. Finally, the home stretch.

We had our last wait on the bus before heading back to Arlington. When we got there, we had dinner, said our goodbyes, got into our cars, and went home. The next day I stopped in Wilmington for Lunch with my aunt, and then spent a few minutes at Independence Hall in Philadelphia before dropping off our rental car and getting on our plane.

I got back home to Redwood City at 1am. I woke up with a horrible cold the next morning, worked all day Thursday and Friday, played the closing weekend of ‘Damn Yankees’ in Newark on Friday night and Saturday night. Today I had a rehearsal for the Chinese New Year parade, and now here I am writing this while my cold is almost cleared up. This coming Saturday my orchestra (Bay Area Rainbow Symphony) is playing at the SF Conservatory of Music. I’m pretty excited about this performance, because one of the composers is coming to speak about his piece that we are playing.

Here is some footage of us from the weekend:
in the parade, at the reviewing stand:

practicing at St. E’s, it skips around a little:

It was a great trip!

i’m playing trumpet in the following performances!

damn yankees with stage 1 theatre - conducted by ken nadler
original broadway score, arranged by richard adler
january 9th, 10th, 11th, 16th, 23rd, 24th @ newark memorial high school, newark, ca

obama inaugural parade with lgba marching band - conducted by rice majors
washington post - sousa
manhattan beach - sousa
hold on, i’m coming - ’sam and dave’
brand new day (from ‘the wiz’) - luther vandross
ode to joy - beethoven
january 20th (inauguration day), @ the white house, washington d.c.

‘winter celebrations’ with bay area rainbow symphony - conducted by martin fraile (stanford)
jesi in festa — aquilanti
cello concerto in a minor – schumann (robert howard, guest soloist)
symphony no. 1 winter daydreams – tchaikovsky
january 31st, 8pm @ san francisco conservatory of music

‘myths and stories’ with west county wind ensemble - also conducted by rice majors
star wars saga - williams, arranged by de meij
lord of the rings - de meij
march 12th @ knox center for the performing arts, contra costa college

san francisco lesbian/gay freedom band spring set - conducted by bob calonico (uc berkeley)
suite of old american dances - bennett
folk dances - shastakovich
march 13th, 8pm @ ebenezer lutheran church, sf, ca

i’m going to be playing in d.c. this january, in the inauguration parade. due to the cold weather, i’ve been advised to consider purchasing a plastic mouthpiece:

i’ve read a lot of reviews and it sounds like they function almost as well as metal mouthpieces, but you lose some of the darker tones… the great thing about using it in the cold is that plastic doesn’t conduct heat very well, so it won’t feel as cold, and my lips won’t freeze to it when i’m playing – all great things, wouldn’t you say?

while searching for images about the mouthpiece, i came across the most random image i’ve seen in a while:

weird.

this song makes me feel like a kid: hall of the mountain king

a little disappointed with google’s movie-showtimes feature. i googled “redwood city showtimes” and got a result page with all the movies in the area by theater. i like having the IMDb and Trailer links right on the results page. what i don’t like however, is that the listings were not up to date.

i like animations, and i try to see every pixar film. today i tried to see igor (not pixar, but supposed to be pretty funny with decent graphics), but when i got to the theater, i found out that it wasn’t playing. funny though, google was telling me otherwise:

a little disappointed, but i guess it’s just a learning experience. note to self: don’t use google for showtimes.

I recently purchased The Conservatory Method for Trumpet, by J. B. Arban — it’s sorta like the brass bible. It’s got tons of really tough studies and exercises. This, combined with the berp training device, are really helping me build up my chops.

I came across some funny reviews of the book tonight:

Arban is sooo annoying!! It's funny though I managed to persuade my teacher to lend my copy to another guy she teaches, so I can't practice for the next week or so and he has to suffer it!!

My euphonium teacher just lent me her copy....although I did try and point out that I was likely to spill/break/ruin it in someway shape or form she insisted that I take it..... It's still sitting in the carrier bag next to the euphonium....ah well...

[Question:] May i ask what arban is?! [Answer:] It's a (is it originally for cornet?) book for brass players full of nasty studies and exercises! It's hateful!

You can read more of them here and here.

i decided to sign up for private trumpet lessons, and i just had my first lesson yesterday. i’m playing with scott weigum, who i found through the union street music store. i just had my first private lesson with him, and he seems pretty good so far.

first thing we did was play a piece of my choosing (i picked dvorjak symphony 8, which i just played with the band). then he gave me a few comments:

Breathe!

i’m not breathing correctly for trumpet. i went to an alexander technique workshop with the symphony about a month and a half ago, and they were very preachy about posture and breathing. i talked about this with scott, who thinks that alexander technique is great, but wasn’t specific to brass players. he says that being able to push out your gut while playing will make your tone a lot more solid. breathing from the bottom of my diaphragm, as opposed to with my shoulders will help with air flow, and improve my tone.

Buzz!

he also pointed out that my tone could be improved further with mouthpiece-only training. my notes crack every once in a while because i lack this type of skill. he wants me to think of the rest of the horn beyond the mouthpiece as just an amplifier, and that for every note i play on my trumpet, i should be able to play the note using just my mouthpiece. so he had me play a chromatic scale of whole notes, each note played first on my trumpet, followed by playing the same note on my mouthpiece detached from the horn. we did a similar exercise with some interval studies (Arban’s Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet, p.125 #7, p. 127 #3). i was amazed after playing it on the mouthpiece alone how much better it sounded when i brought the mouthpiece back to the horn.

Sing!

he showed me “Last Rose of Summer” (ibid. p.192 #6), but he made me sing it. “no, no, you don’t want to hear me sing, i’m a horrible singer” to which he replied, “sing the way think this song should be played. think about how you want it to the sound - otherwise the trumpet is a roadblock to acheiving that sound.” meh, i sang it decently, though i’m pretty sure it would be my voice that is the roadblock to a good sound, not the trumpet. played it first on the horn, then just on the mouthpiece, then sang it, then played it on the horn again. the singing actually helped a lot, both in realizing how all the dynamics should (could?) sound, and in hitting the right pitches on my horn.

he also suggested buying a “BERP (Buzz Extension and Resistance Piece)” to acquire muscle memory in my lips for embouchure & tone. i bought one tonight from Bronstein’s Music in South City, and it’s pretty fun to use. it cost about $20, and it seems like it’s working already… placebo effect? possibly…


my homework: page 1 of “venezia carnivale” (ibid. p. 339)
someone told me this song was in my Arban’s book, but i couldn’t find it. yesterday scott showed it to me (it’s actually called “Fantasie and Variations” with “Carnival of Venice” in small type underneath. i listened to him play the first page, then i had to play each phrase on my horn, then on my mouthpiece, then sing it, then play it on my horn again. it feels stupid, but it’s a really good way to practice. i’ve never played this song before. the first page is very lyrical, and flowing… the lower half of the page is all 16th notes in 6/8 time, with tons of difficult slurs. the next pages get even crazier. definitely pushing my limits on this piece. i can handle sight-reading the intro, but the rest of it is a little out of my league. once i can play the first page slowly, i’ll try speeding it up.

we ended with a few duets.

here is allen vizuti, playing “the carnival of venice”:

There’s a lot of code for credit.com, and a lot of it is extremely spaghetti-fied (i re-factor code every day, but still haven’t had enough of a lull to plan the ‘grand’ re-factoring where all our site variables are contained in one place, all our javascript functions are documented and easily importable, and all our images and styles are cached in a css repository on our CDN….). While trying to get to the bottom of a JavaScript problem I was having with IE, I googled “javascript validator” and came across a very useful tool:

www.jslint.com

Which reminded me of a CS comparator rule, and showed me where the problem was. Basically I was testing a variable to find out whether or not it was null. When you test for null, you need to use an additional equal sign in your comparison operator:

“==” becomes “===”
and
“!=” becomes “!==”

Firefox allows the non-null equivalency operator to be used on null comparisons, but IE is stricter, and throws an error when this is done. So… though the problem was only apparent through IE browsers, it was a result of bad code. If Firefox were stricter about what it allows in JavaScript, this error probably would’ve been caught by my predecessor… It’s fixed now. The moral is: use “===” and “!==” with null comparisons, and when testing JavaScript, make sure to test in IE (duh!), consider building for IE, and then testing in Firefox after the goal is accomplished…..

while ‘youtubing’ for a good version of the hummel trumpet concerto, i kept seeing the name “alison balsom”.. i kept asking myself, why does she look familiar? oh that’s right, i saw her play this summer in the SF symphony’s “summer in the city” concert at dolores park. she played the hayden trumpet concerto, all three movements, (the first movement is the best, IMO). she was really good, but i didn’t know anything about her when i saw her. now i have all this background information, i’m more stoked about her, but… i don’t know when the next time i’ll see her play will be.

note to self: next symphony concert i go to, find out who the featured musician/artist is ahead of time.

wait for the trumpet to come in. it’s pretty amazing:

(here’s the sheet music, if you want to follow along)

wow.

we just had our dress rehearsal for the symphony concert at the conservatory. holy mother of god!!! that room is amazing!!!!!!!!!!

what a great feeling to play in there. i can’t wait for the concert. being on that stage and familiarizing myself with the building was a huge help in getting the nervousness out of my system. hearing myself play on my new horn, with the hard wood walls and flooring felt really solid.

during one of the songs that i’m not in, i sat and listened near the back of the concert hall. very nice blend. the difference between the concert hall and our practice space is profound (as it should be i suppose), but i hadn’t realized how good the group sounds all together! (that sounds arrogant… oh well). the building also features incredibly ornate walls and ceiling. there’s a choir balcony behind the stage, as well as a side balcony…. i then walked around the building trying to find access to the balcony. i got onto the choir balcony through the second floor (we might open this as overflow seating if we sell out the main seating area). then i asked around for the smaller side balcony/box seat. none of the conservatory students knew what i was talking about, but i eventually found a locked door on the third floor labelled ‘loge’, and i figured that was it.

anyway…. i’m super-excited about this concert! such a cool location, such wonderful music.

tomorrow is my freedom band dress rehearsal. it’s at ebenezer lutheran church, which will be another huge improvement, accoustically speaking. i’m sure it will also sound much better than our band practice space.

I’ve posted the press release for the symphony I’ve been playing with this past summer below. Our summer concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is coming up this Saturday, 9/13. The tickets are priced at $16-32, sliding scale, which includes a free wine reception immediately following the concert.

You can purchase tickets online (http://bars-sf.org/Concerts.html), by phone (415-57-VIOLA), or directly from me up until Friday. The show may sell out (there’s only 400 seats), so reserving a place ahead of time is strongly recommended.

The press release:

Hope to see you there!

-Greg

p.s. If any of you are allergic to classical music, but still have the desire to hear me play, you can see me in the San Francisco Lesbian Gay “Freedom Band” on Friday night, at Ebenezer Lutheran Church at 8pm. The music in this set will be more modern, more geeky, more goofy, and possibly more fun. Admission is free.

More specific info about the band concert, if it interests you:
http://laughingsquid.com/squidlist/events/index.php?com=detail&eID=178658