Didn’t get as much done today as yesterday – slept in far too late, which was a bit of a whoops – but my parents and I do seem to have settled into a quietly productive sort of a routine – for the mornings anyway, which is working quite well – for me at least, and I hope for them too. It goes something like this: Once I’ve woken up, I sit up in bed and do my morning pages, then I read a bit more of John Adams’ autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, which I’m absolutely loving. Then I drag my sorry carcass out of bed and greet the lovely parents and have breakfast. I then take my coffee back into the bedroom and start work on some of my theory study while the mama inhabits the study and plays the piano for a little. The afternoon is a little more freeform, but at some point I take over the study and do some listening and some work in there.

Today’s theory study was seventh chords exercises. I found these relatively challenging – it’s the diminished intervals I have to fully get my head around, but the exercises are being very useful – not just building a specified seventh chord on a tonic, but also on the third, fifth and seventh as given notes, which I’m finding VERY helpful for working out the intervals because it’s not as simple as just altering the notes above – you need to work out sometimes whether your actual tonic needs to be raised or lowered. Really makes one think, which is exactly what I needed. Think I’ve got them sorted in my brain now. More or less at least

Did some more work on the site too. Unfortunately, it seems that of the web-fonts-supporting major browsers, only Firefox and Safari understand the text-rendering property, which means that the kerning on the fancy font I’m using in a couple of places is all off in Chrome. I’ve yet to test it on IE in its many flavours. Not sure how/if to hack this one. For Chrome it should be relatively simple – there aren’t too many seriously problematic letters, so one could just surround the tricky sections in <span>s and apply letter-spacing, hopefully, but I’m not sure how IE will react. Yes, I still have to do proper testing in IE. Have been avoiding it. Need to stop that.

Also nearing the end of the scarf I’m knitting for my chilly and very frail great-aunt in Sydney. She’s 94 now and apparently they keep her nursing-home at an Arctic temperature at all times of the year, so I’m knitting her a nice lightweight scarf to keep her warm. I spent a lovely quiet half-hour with my Da this evening in the study, listening to the Mendelssohn string quintets and Schubert’s Moments musicaux, him reading his book and me working on the scarf – happiness! I have lent him Art & Fear which he seems to be finding interesting, as I thought he might.

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I’ve been neglecting my harmony/counterpoint resuscitation programme for a while now – started out well, then life went insane, as it periodically seems to, and it all got a bit too hard. This coincided with the arrival of the Workbook to go with the Textbook and Anthology and CDs, which was rather frustrating but I just couldn’t get my head around counterpoint with all the stuff that was going on. Now that I’m not working, though, and the traipsing about the continent has paused for a little, I’ve been able to start thinking about it again. Yesterday I took a step backwards and started re-reading the chapter on triads and sevenths. I understood it first time round, but I wasn’t sure it had really stuck. Today I started doing the chapter’s exercises in the workbook and discovered that actually, a fair amount of it actually had. WIN! So I spent a largish chunk of the morning writing and analysing triads and I think I got at least most of them right (the only downside to doing all this solo is that there are no answers in the workbook, so if you think you got it right but you actually didn’t, there’s no-one to say otherwise because it doesn’t have the answers in it. I believe there’s a teacher’s edition of the workbook, but unless I run into serious issues, I think I’ll pass on that one – the whole exercise has already cost a small fortune!) – really quite satisfying. Tomorrow I hope to work through the seventh chord exercises so that next week I can move back on to species counterpoint. Yay!

I also picked up my flute for the first time in weeks. Yeah, that wasn’t so kind to the ego. But it had to be done. Hopefully tomorrow will be better… Humble apologies to Messrs Poulenc, Koehler, Sculthorpe and Enesco.

And finally, I got back to the website and did a pretty big chunk of work on it so it’s really looking like a proper site now – my photo’s in place on the bio page, the screensnap from the video on the credo page, there are pages for all the linked compositions, and all the ones that should have embedded audio files (still Flash, unfortunately, but at least it’ll get it online) or links to PDF downloads are now showing these up. I tidied the email form and the page of social networking contact links. I still need to finish testing in other browsers (IE6 is, of course, being particularly stubborn) but I think it’s nearing completion, which earns another Yay!

And I listened to both the Brahms and the Martinu/Schulhoff discs I bought yesterday. Both are lovely. I wasn’t really in the mood for Brahms but the Martinu was absolutely spot on and I think the Schulhoff will definitely repay further listenings.

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I’ve been accepted into CoMA’s Midwinter Composers Masterclass!!!! This is both deeply awesome and rather scary. Not having really received any feedback from other composers in about 15 years, it’s a wee bit daunting. As is having to write a string quintet from scratch by the middle of December, but I really feel like this is a big step towards whatever’s next on the agenda for my music. Scared but elated. The Masterclass is organised by CoMA, who are an organisation who promote contemporary (classical) music for amateur musicians, and the composer in charge of us composer-participants is Tansy Davies… who is the same age as me, which could be a little weird, although I’m hoping not. I really liked what I heard of her music on her website and, reading about her approach, she seems to use architecture as a launching-point in a similar way to how I’ve been using modern art, so it could be interesting. There’ll also be a composer ensemble, made up of whatever we selected composers can play. Not sure if/when we’re advised of what that is – the notes sent through recommend flexible instrumentation – who knows, maybe Deconstruct:Point, line, plane could get another outing? SO EXCITED!

Anyway, that was at the end of the day. Haven’t achieved a vast amount otherwise, but I was feeling I needed to get back to composing, but I’ve been finding the prospect a little daunting with so many people in the house, even if it is a large space and we’re not all on top of each other like we used to be in the old place – it’s just not the same as being on your own. Anyway, so I figured I needed to start doing something about it so I pulled out the music for Egg the Tenth, which I wrote earlier this year (it was the original interlude for the Whitman songs, but didn’t really mesh well there, so I put it to one side to be an egg, but never got around to putting the detail in the score) and dropped in appropriate accidentals, hunted out fonts and did a little layout on it, so it’s basically ready to go now. I also did a MIDI export because I was planning on reworking it in ProTools to sound a bit more like a proper performance than Finale can do… and then discovered that I don’t remember how to wire my tracks in ProTools to get it to use proper sounds, at which point I lost heart and had a nap.

And there was a baking experiment too. When I was seeing my nutritionist, she encouraged me to get hold of this natural sugar substitute called xylitol so I could avoid using sugar when I baked (if you’re new here, I have an insulin resistance – it’s not diabetes [yet] but basically the insulin my body produces forgets what it’s supposed to do with sugar it encounters – unless I exercise regularly, but having been crippled for coming up on a year now, this hasn’t really been happening, hence decision to experiment…). I was in the organic shop today picking up some bits and pieces, and thought that maybe I should give it a go, so I decided to make a crumble with the tasty-but-dry remaining nectarine and some lingering apples – I figured that at least if it was only in the crumble topping, then that could be abandoned if it was too awful. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘awful’. I guess the flavour was kinda OK, but the texture was All Wrong. The crumble didn’t crisp and it certainly didn’t go chewy. But it wasn’t particularly sweet either (that could have been my fault). So basically it ended up like one of those worthy but tedious baked bars they fill with jam. But without the jam. Sort of bland and like eating a high-fibre pillow. There’s a bit left from the rather small packet, so I might have a go at using it up in a cake (possibly cut with some real sugar) and see if that fares any better.

And finally I started work on getting IE6 sorted out with the website layout while I watched Alice in Wonderland – turned out the problem with the fonts wasn’t anything to do with either fonts or code, it was to do with IE6 not applying styles to the new HTML 5 elements which were referenced in the cascade. So that’s sorted out now, which is a bit yay

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Did quite a bit on the site today and had a bit of a breakthrough – I’d been exploring ways to get the latest blog post out of my WordPress blog and onto the homepage (which is a static page, not hosted within the blog) and finally I worked it out, thanks to various posts online, so now I have an auto-updating blog post on the homepage! Whee! Haven’t yet been able to get the Twitter feed working though, so I’ve hidden it for now. And I’ve got the navigation working correctly (highlighting the correct sub-navigation items) across all pages and I’ve added in a home link to the menu for pages which aren’t the homepage.

I also started testing properly in IE6 and I think I’m going to need the JavaScript fix Bruce Lawson talks about in Introducing HTML 5 to get the CSS to apply itself to the new HTML 5 elements that Our Friend doesn’t recognise. I was pretty amazed to see, though, that it’s picked up the fancy font, thanks to Font Squirrel’s easy-peasy generator… although, oddly enough, it has a problem with the blockier font. It’s nothing to do with the position of the definition – it doesn’t make a difference whether I move the blocky font definition to the top of the file, or whether I even remove the fancy font, it doesn’t show up in IE6, so I’m thinking it could be something within the font file itself. Not too disturbed though. After all… IE6 (although obviously I’ll have to see what it does in other versions of IE and that’s likely to do the same thing, I guess). Tossing up whether to put in an IE6 disclaimer. It might be a good idea. Just so that IE users know that what they’re seeing isn’t the actual design. While in general, I feel I should support any browser that is commonly in use, in practice, it’s getting ridiculous to still be fully supporting such ancient technology, when there’s a better, more semantic way to achieve things, so I’m thinking the hybrid approach – ensure all content is accessible, include a note letting IE6 users know that it’d be a better experience if they upgrade – is the best way to go.

Oh, and I made a cake. Chocolate, with chocolate ganache topping. And came to the conclusion that the oven thermometer my mama brought over with her has serious fail. I’m sure the oven’s running hot – it’s been burning everything at supposedly the correct temperatures. So I tested it out with the cake today – I cooked it at the official temperature on the oven dial, as always (because I know it works at that temperature, although it overcooks if you don’t keep a close eye on it) – 180 C, which the oven thermometer then said was only 160 C. Grrr. Might have to invest in another oven thermometer to see if it can do better.

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Today I baked bread I pulled out my new pain de mie tin and The Bread Bible and baked up some bread. Unfortunately I suspect that not only does the oven have fail, but the oven thermometer my mama brought with her has been so long unused it’s forgotten how to properly thermomet. By the time it read the 425 F the recipe said it should be for baking the bread, the dial on the oven was up to about 225 C (should be about 217 C) and while the bread has turned out delicious and with a great texture, it IS somewhat charred on top. Think I may have to get another oven thermometer and compare and contrast.

Apart from that, I didn’t achieve terribly much. Made Nigel Slater turkey burgers for dinner. Did a little gentle grocery shopping and accidentally bought Calamity Jane on DVD for £3 which we watched over dinner. Which then led us on to That Touch of Mink. Might need to make tonight a Doris-Day-free zone for the sanity of my mama.

Did a little bit more work on the site, but no huge breakthroughs.

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Got an absolute truckload of work done on the site today and now the blog is pretty much ready to go – very nearly entirely. I think the only thing left to do with it is to work out the custom template so I can import the latest blog post into the homepage. Worked out some cool features too – selecting subnav items depending on whether the post is in the news or article category (or if it’s a category list page of either) and setting the posting date within the <time> tag automatically.

Also accidentally watched The Omen. I’ve avoided this one for years, but it came on and nobody turned it off… and by the time it got halfway through then I was stuck and had to watch it right through to the end. Really good film – very suspenseful, and much more effective than a lot of more modern movies that have to rely on effects to be creepy.

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I’m afraid I’ve failed at my overall mission for Creative Pact, which was to have caitlinrowley.com online today. But on the flipside, it’s been TOTALLY worth it. I’ve had a fantastic time doing it, and achieved a ton of work I wouldn’t have otherwise, and the site’s very nearly ready to go – I’m hoping I can send it live on the weekend sometime, or at least early next week.

Today was spent messing around with PHP – I sorted out the include files for header and menu and so on and go all that working. I’ve also pulled together a basic WordPress template for the blog (which, bizarrely, has already received its first spam comment – how, I don’t know, given that it’s not been linked from anywhere at all) which is starting to look pretty good. I’ve moved some files around so that the detail pages are in a subfolder to keep the upper levels clean and I think I’ve pretty much decided – at least for now – to use variables in each page which indicate which section should be open in the left nav. I’ve also – I think – worked out how to include the latest blog post in the homepage automatically, although I haven’t yet had time to test it out, but it seems pretty clear how to do it, which it wasn’t before. I found a useful page on creating custom RSS feeds using custom page templates, which made me realise that I actually don’t (probably) need anything that complex, that I should be able to achieve it with a custom page template which consists solely of picking up the latest post ID, and that blog post’s basic code, then reference that as an include file directly from the homepage.

So I’m feeling pretty good about what I’ve got through today, and it’s really starting to come together, and feel like going live very soon is a real possibility, which it wasn’t feeling like two days ago, but there’s still quite a lot of work to be done: Fixing up links between pages to make sure they go where they’re supposed to, testing the whole template in various browsers and implementing fixes as needed for IE6 and other contrary beasts, which will probably take a while of course, getting the twitter feed on the homepage sorted (or possibly I might just hide that until I get it working properly – there seems to be an issue with the script I found and my PHP isn’t quite good enough to work out what’s wrong with it), copying across all the various assets for the composition pages – flash files and cover images and PDF downloads and so on, which I haven’t done yet because there didn’t seem to be much point when I was working on the iPad… And I’m bound to think of other things too. It’s enough to keep me off the streets a little while longer, but I’m still confident it’ll go up very soon.

But SO glad I took the plunge and actually did Creative Pact, in spite of my misgivings. It’s been a difficult month for me personally, but it’s been fantastic having a clear goal to work towards and knowing that if I did just a tiny bit each day then that’s at least a small win for that day. And I’ve met a bunch of really awesome people online through it too, doing some fabulously interesting work so YAY! Bring on next year’s!

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And so I’m back on the Eurostar today. With a couple of quiet hours, it seemed a good chance to take stock of what needs to be done in the next couple of days to get this site online, so I’ve started pulling out chunks of code that will become PHP includes, stole the code for the contact form from Minim Media and have built a new page for social media links. So I think that, barring the video page which may be scrapped, pretty much all the content is in place now – huzzah!

Looking ahead, tomorrow I think I need to focus on getting the PHP bits and pieces working – the includes, forms, highlighting menu items, etc. I think that’s the biggest thing. Plus, to go with that, I need to determine how I’m going to identify the various pages as belonging to a particular section. I guess I could just include a variable in each page – it would be nice and clear, but I’ve also been considering whether it might not be easier just to divide up the content into folders and identify the section by folder name from the URL. The problem with this may be one of longevity. There was an article on URL-naming that was referenced from our course materials for the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices course I took earlier this year which I think I may need to re-read – its premise was that addresses of pages should relate directly to what they are about and not reference filetypes, technical approaches or current-but-possibly-unsustainable filing systems. The idea is to end up with a URL that can be used for that content forever – if the page’s focus changes, then it needs a new URL which reflects that. I like the idea of this, that the address for something is permanent because there is no need for it to change – it means that other sites can link with confidence, and archives can be maintained without the need for ever renewing links. So I’ll be re-reading that, I think, and I’ll see what is feasible to implement right now.

And now, back hooooooommme! And then tonight, the concert. Eeek!

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Today was our last day in Paris and this evening has been – understandably – a little fraught, with the packing and calculations of how long it will take to get to Gare du Nord tomorrow and so on. I’m also feeling rather frazzled at the prospect of tomorrow as a whole – getting the flat all cleaned and tidied and parents out to get to the Eurostar, then getting us all home from St Pancras, and then finally the most stressful thing of all – getting us out of the house again to go to the premiere of my new piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane. I don’t know that any of my other premieres have ever had me so worried as this one. I know I’ve built this piece exactly how I wanted it to be. I’m confident that it can work, but the criticism I received about it when it was still in its embryonic state just makes me doubt just a little bit, even while I know that it didn’t want to be anything other than what it is. And then there’s the question if whether the performers have just decided to change it… And if they have, is it still under my name or have they correctly listed it as an arrangement. I tell you, the sooner Wednesday rocks up, the happier I’ll be!

But we’ve had a lovely last day in Paris. Ran some errands, and my Da finally took me to Shakespeare and Company – and what a gorgeous bookshop it is!!! Most of the books upstairs aren’t for selling – they’re for sitting about and reading! And they’ve got a piano up there, waiting to be played, so we were all happy – the Da nosing around the poetry section, me reading snippets of Julia Child on French bread, the mama playing Debussy on the piano (and drawing quite a happy crowd: Mama: ‘It’s just you there, isn’t it?’ Me: ‘No, but they’re not listening, they’re all reading books, aren’t you?’ Small throng: *assorted giggles*).

And then we visited Notre Dame. And for the first time I noticed the lovely chapel and column paintings – don’t know how I missed them before – so clean and clear. Really gorgeous.

I should stop procrastinating with photos and ‘fess up though that I’ve done precious little Creative Pact work today – I really think I’m reaching the end of what I can do on the iPad for this project. It’s been great and really useful, and I’m VERY glad I didn’t bring the laptop (especially now I’m on the verge of having to lug lots of lovely foodie shopping back to Blighty) but I really need to be working in PHP now, which means I need my books and a server and an Internet connection I don’t need to reset every 30 seconds. Um… On second thoughts, I guess that’s not so much an iPad limitation as a limitation of circumstances, due to not having packed the PHP book and only having rubbish Internet. But still, feeling a little hamstrung and like I’m treading water. I have managed to achieve a tiny bit, but it was only setting up template pages for the contact page (will contain a PHP form) and a page to hold the Tate’s video interview with me, which I can’t tell if I can embed because Vimeo just tells me it’s Flash, which obv won’t work on the iPad – going to have to wait till I get home to see if that should even have a separate page at all or just a link to Vimeo (suspect the latter, which means I’ll need to work out the best styling for putting about a paragraph of text into the right column and making it all look nice). So not a complete fail there, but a bit wussy, really. Still, planning in being at home and working in it for pretty much the whole of Wednesday and Thursday, so I think I’m still in with a chance to get it ready to fly on the 30th…

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Yes, more content: today I tackled the overall music page that all the individual content pages will be linked from. It seems a bit out of date (using what was on Minim Media) but that content’s in now and hopefully I’ll be able to update before it goes live.

Today was spent mostly up The Butte – we went up to hear Mass sung by the Carmelite nuns at Sacré-Coeur (gorgeous – I highly recommend it), then on the way down we found that the vineyard (the only vineyard within Paris and reputedly the source of the worst wine in France) was actually open! In all the years we’ve been coming here and staying in Montmatre, it has NEVER been open to the public. So we finally got to go in and have a wander round. Lovely!

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