So, I was in Canada with our son for about ten days from the end of July until early August. A lot happened, and it was nice to see my sisters and their families, who gave us a warm welcome, as well as my friend Ian (who drove up to Vancouver to see us). It was also nice to properly give our son a little experience of Canada. We did a lot of things: aside from family time, which was most of our time in Saskatoon, we visited the Forestry Farm and did some shopping in Saskatoon, played mini-golf and visited the Vancouver Aquarium and Vancouver Science Center in Vancouver, and also had a stopover in Narita Airport, just long enough to get some ramen and other goodies for Jihyun.
(The header image for this post, indeed, is from the Vancouver Aquarium.)
What does this have to do with “recoveries”? Well, while we were there, my sister presented me with a couple of bins of family heirlooms and old papers of mine, including—to my absolute surprise—a stack of old manuscripts for musical compositions I wrote back in my undergrad days. (She also gave me some old DAT tapes with recordings of some of them, which wasn’t a surprise.) I had to buy a second hand suitcase from Value Village just to be able to bring some of that stuff back—well, along with the metric ton of LEGO our son was given during the visit.
We returned on Monday, and while I’ve leaped into the work I fell behind on—I did spend a little time inputting a couple of the pieces into Musescore. One of them is a vocal piece, and I discovered that Musescore now integrates with an app called “Cantai,” a machine-learning program for simulating human singers from nothing but a digital music manuscript. Of course, AI can never replace human singers, but for pieces that were never recorded, and likely will never be performed, this at least will give me a chance to sort of “hear” something close to what these pieces would have sounded like in concert. I don’t know any choir directors or even many singers these days, so organizing a real human performance is sort of out of reach for me, but a simulation can at least help me hear these long-lost pieces in some form. I’ll probably share the PDFs and output tracks here when they’re done.
(That said, I’m saving up, because Cantai isn’t free, and I have a number of pieces with vocal parts. Might as well just input them all first and then run them all through Cantai all at once on a one-month subscription, since I’m not really writing new choral/vocal music anymore, at least not very often.)
I also returned to a nasty surprise: something changed about how WordPress handles character encoding—it’s less forgiving of certain specific database problems—which necessitated the repair of my blog’s database, and the conversion of some tables from one encoding to another without actually changing their contents. (Basically, all non-English text on the blog was borked. It turns out that there was a mismatch with language encoding: the database had UTF-8 data inside it, but was designated as being encoded in latin-1. As a result, all the foreign language text on my blog was displaying as garbled text/”mojibake”.) I tried unsuccessfully to solve this myself for a few hours, but then Jihyun noticed this and convinced me to just hire someone to fix it.
Probably nobody but me noticed, as the outage was pretty brief. Now, the next day, it’s more than 99% back to normal, but there are some posts and comments (less than 200 total), mostly from decades ago, that still need to be recovered. Happily, I can nab them in their original form from the Wayback Machine, because most of them were indeed correctly displayed and archived over the years before the database errors started creeping in. Often the fixes just involve replacing a placeholder character with a bit of punctuation, but there are also instances where comments have been cut off in the middle and are missing a bunch of text. Anyway, despite being a compleatist—I will fix all of these problems eventually, manually copying the original comment from Wayback Machine to my blog—I’m not in a real hurry to fix them all right away. I figure if I fix like ten a day, it’ll all be repaired in no time. Well, over a mere few weeks, anyway. There’s also some site-general stuff: the content in my sidebars and footer are kinda half-gone, for no clear reason. (But that’s stuff’s available on Wayback Machine too, and to be honest it needed some updating anyway.)
I probably could finish the remaining recovery work in a couple of days, of course, but I have other stuff to do. There’s edits sent back by the publisher with comments and questions about a novella we’re publishing sometime soon; a couple of chapters of a different sample translation we’re working on; some revisions to my class website, and to the content of the SF in English course that I’m teaching (because I want to integrate some Korean SF in English translation); and I’m also sorting through some of the clutter in my home office, as well. I’m also working my way through Robin Buss’s translation of The Count of Monte Cristo: I brought the book to Canada but barely read 200 pages during the entire trip, though I’d like to finish it before school starts. Hell, I’d even like to do a short piece of creative writing that’s been bouncing around in my head, if I can carve out the time.
Definitely traveling brought on this burst of productivity—it’d been too long since I’d had a break from Korea, and that’s never good for my brain—and I’m happy about the shift, as it’s helping me break out of some bad habits and to focus on things I’d rather spend my time on. We’ll see how long it lasts, but I’m aiming to keep the momentum going.