computer expert manqué

Have you ever accidently dropped some carefully intricate but non-fragile construction, and had the constituent pieces roll out on the floor? All the pieces are there, none of them are broken, but it'll take endless time to put them back together again as they were.

That's what it's been like setting up Windows XP on my mother's computer when it needed to be reinstalled from scratch after a replacement of the hard drive. Our paid expert acquired and plugged in the drive, and installed the programs and her backed up document files, but everything else was my job, because my mother's computer knowledge is strictly basic end-user of installed software. I changed the desktop background and icons, I reinstalled MS Office from a CD, I reinstalled Norton Security from the website on her subscription, I changed the password and display preferences on the e-mail client, I upgraded to IE8 (the one thing that was a lot easier than I thought it'd be), I tricked the taskbar control into allowing quickstart icons which it didn't want to do, I installed the service pack, which took not one but two endless intervals, and a whole bunch other stuff.

The one thing I couldn't do was get the computer to play sounds. It'd play a test demo from the RealTek audio controller software, so I knew the speakers were working, but no Windows sounds, no sound on Web videos or streams or podcasts, and if you put a CD in the coffee-holder drive, it'd give an error message saying "No audio device," which is also what the control panel, in its uncommunicative way, was trying to tell me.

Prior to consulting with the paid expert, I decided to search online. What should I find on old support board threads but that apparently this was a common problem in XP installation back in the day. Posts tended to fall into five categories:
1) Complaints that the user had the problem and could find no solution;
2) Proposed solutions;
3) Little goat-cries of bliss from people for whom a given one of the solutions worked;
4) Little goat-cries of despair from those for whom the same solution didn't work;
5) Protestations that that isn't the real solution, this is.

I copied down or printed out eleven different solutions altogether, and tried them all, spending a couple hours cruising around the raw frontiers of my computer knowledge. Each solution carried the imprimatur of ecstatically happy users. But for me, some of them didn't work. The rest turned out to be inapplicable. Here follow the stations of the cross:
1) Changed the sound scheme from None to Windows Default. Didn't work.
2) Changed the Audio Service control from manual to automatic. Didn't work.
3) Checked all the audio devices for claims of nonfunctionality and searched for new drivers. They all insisted they were OK and up to date.
4) Changed the playback device on the audio tab of the audio devices control, or, rather, didn't, because it was grayed out. ("No Audio Device," remember? though this proposed solution specifically said it was applicable for that case.)
5) Downloaded a new audio codec driver from RealTek. Got an error message when I tried to install it.
6) From the same source, downloaded something called an AC '97 driver, or rather, didn't, because they all proved to be for earlier editions of Windows.
7) Replaced the "ISAPNP Read Data Port" device, whatever that was, with a Plug & Play Software Device Enumerator, whatever that was. This was generally held online to be the cleverest solution, and certainly required the craftiest tricks in order to do properly. Didn't work.
8) Uninstalled a duplicate Plug & Play Software Device Enumerator. This was actually the one I created in step 7. Didn't even get me quite back where I started from.
9) Updated the driver for something called a PCI Bus device, or would have, except that I couldn't find a PCI Bus device.
10) Deleted a particular line from the registry, or, rather, didn't, because there was no such line in the registry.
11) Saved this one for last resort: Gulped hard and prepared to uninstall the entire soundcard control software, planning to trust to the Add Hardware function to find and reinstall it. It wouldn't uninstall. Said it was necessary for startup.

That was the lot of them. I give up. And modern computers are supposed to be so simple!

Geraldine Anne Albrecht Phillips, 1922-2011

B's mother died in the hospital Tuesday morning at 3:30. Surgery had not relieved the swelling on the brain that was keeping her in a semi-coma, she'd apparently had a major stroke as well, and there just wasn't anything left to do.

You know the slogan, "Shop till you drop"? That's literally what happened. Ma (as her children called her) loved to shop, and was happiest on a trip to the mall. That's where she was with B's sister on Friday when, on getting into the car to leave, she slipped and fell, and her head hit the pavement heavily. After that it was mostly downhill, and all hospital. At least she went out doing what she loved best.

The doctors and nurses commented on how tough and strong she was, even in this losing ordeal. She should be tough; she was a WAVE in World War II. That's how she met her husband, who had just been discharged from the Seabees. The marriage between a middle-class Catholic storekeeper's daughter from Rochester, New York, and a poor Baptist dirt-farmer's son from west Texas caused a certain amount of alarm in both families, but it lasted to his death a few years ago, and produced 7 children, 12 (if I haven't forgotten any) grandchildren, and so far a few great-grandchildren. You'd think raising all those children - all by herself at times when their Pa was working on construction projects overseas - would be enough, but she also taught school.

By the time I met her, all the children had left home, and in retirement she had what she called "itchy feet." The two of them moved every few years among various developments around Northern California and even Hawaii. For a long time they had a cat named Oberon (Obie for short), a hairless Cornish Rex with a gigantic body and little tiny feet, and he'd walk on visitors in the guest bed, leaving imprints. In widowhood, Ma settled permanently in an apartment in San Jose, close to several children, until physical conditions made living entirely on her own no longer feasible, and she moved to independent living quarters in a senior facility a few months ago.

I could count on my mother-in-law for several things: to always have a box of See's candy around and to partake of it herself without stint; to give Barnes and Noble gift cards for Christmas; and to always be ready to take B. out for dinner (usually at a coffee shop or the Cheesecake Factory) on Saturdays after the two of them went to Vigil mass together (their regular custom), if I was going to be out that evening. She remained the center of her family, as was always obvious at any of their large, boisterous gatherings, and I too will miss her. As S. Gross's bull said to the calf when the cow jumped over the Moon, "Son, your mother is a remarkable woman."

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

A somewhat more cheerful time was had back on Friday at Davies in the City. I'd already been planning to attend that evening's concert on my own when I got the call to be fill-in reviewer. That meant I could save the price of a ticket and take a friend, and it also meant I had to write up my thoughts, which - a bit unusually for me - I drafted immediately on getting home. Fortunately, too, since unexpectedly I spent all of Saturday otherwise occupied. Here's the published result.

I'm particularly pleased with the simile I used to describe the presence of Schubert's Overture to Alfonso und Estrella, which didn't quite fit with the rest of the program, despite being by the same composer as the rest. I spared the review's readership the complicated story from the program notes, which I don't quite understand, to the effect that this overture is actually also the overture to the incidental music to Rosamunde, despite the fact that the piece that is always identified as the Rosamunde Overture is something entirely different and apparently has nothing to do with Rosamunde at all. I have two recordings which claim to be of the Rosamunde Overture, and they're both of the other one. To say that that famous, graceful, and tuneful piece is MUCH BETTER than the pompous little squib we heard on Friday is to underestimate the difference between them.

Well, that was a curiosity. What really brought me to this concert was not to hear the "Trout" Quintet in the vast, chamber-unfriendly confines of Davies, but the string orchestra transcription of the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet. (Never mind that the transcription is by Mahler. Mahler didn't compose it; he only tinkered with the line disposition. Schubert composed it.) One of my shameful secrets is that the original recording of this arrangement, made soon after some scholars dug it up in 1984, is what I learned the Quartet from. Only afterwards did I pick up a recording of the original version (by the Alban Berg Quartet) and learn that. Rather as Steeleye Span was the hinge that turned me from a folk music fan into someone capable of appreciating the virtues, such as they are, of rock music, Mahler's edition of "Death and the Maiden" was one of the hinges that turned me from an almost exclusively orchestral music listener into a more serious connoisseur of chamber music. It's an evolution many classical music listeners go through as they age, though each one's journey must be unique. I still also listen to orchestras, of course, and unlike Barshai's orchestral Shostakovich quartets - which just don't work for me, because the originals are so intimate - Schubert's big, bold quartet fits well in orchestral guise, even handled as gently as in this performance. The comparison to Tchaikovsky's Serenade is one that hadn't occurred to me before.

not the most pleasant day

90% sitting around in hospital waiting rooms, 10% making computer backups. Hope you had a better one.

on beyond armistice

11:11, 11/11/11

new tv shows

An early-term report on the new tv shows I've tried watching this fall:

Ringer. Sarah Michelle Gellar, looking not much older than she did at the end of BTVS, plays two identical twin sisters, one of whom is impersonating the other. This is not a premise for a stable ongoing series, but for a plot-driven, end-oriented miniseries, and after some eight episodes, I'm still not sure which it's going to be. The plot keeps getting more convoluted each week, which almost keeps my mind off the inconsistencies and unaddressed questions of exactly how alike in appearance or personality the two sisters are supposed to be, and whether it's implausible that people like, oh, say, the impostee's husband aren't going to notice the switch, whether the fact that he didn't know his wife had a twin sister makes any difference, and whether that changes when he finds out she does. The fact that SMG is one of those "all her characters are essentially the same person" actors doesn't help, though she's not as far out of her depth as Eliza Dushku was in Dollhouse. Watching the impostor, who's supposed to be the bad sister but is really the good one, taking blame for and trying to repair the wrecked personal life of the impostee (which she didn't know about when she took the job) is potentially interesting, and so far the plot twists and multiple levels of deception are keeping me hooked. To date, neither sister has gotten mixed up about who she's supposed to be (the impostee is hiding out and impersonating someone else altogether), which they would do if Donald E. Westlake had been writing this.

Once Upon a Time. Small town in Maine is inhabited (entirely? apparently so) by fairy tale characters who've been sent there and had their minds wiped by evil queen, who's seen doing this extensively, and tediously, in lengthy flashbacks. Their designated outside rescuer is an incongruously slutty-looking (and -dressing) woman who learns she is the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, spirited away at birth just before the disaster, and dragged in to the plot by her own ten-year-old son, given up at birth and adopted by the evil queen, now posing as the mayor of the town. Like Ringer, this is a miniseries concept, not an ongoing one, because the only plot drive is, when are the characters going to find out they're fairy tale creatures and when is Ms. Shrek going to save them from the swamp? Note also that Ringer has a high concept expressible in eleven words, a proper length for a high concept, while to explain this one took eighty words, not counting the snide comments. I liked the first episode, but halfway through the second episode the arbitrary fairy-tale rules and the "hey, I'm emoting here" acting got to be too much and I abruptly stopped, leaving many unanswered questions. Like: If they've all been in Maine for thirty years and nobody's aged, hasn't someone noticed this? Hasn't anybody moved in or out of town? How can there be children? The protagonist boy has aged from birth to ten while living there, so how does he fit in? And above all, if the evil mayor/queen doesn't know that Ms. Shrek/Slut is Snow White's daughter or indeed anybody special at all, why did she adopt her son and bring him in from outside? It seems a strange thing for a monomaniacal villain to do.

Grimm. More secret supernatural, except this one really is the premise for an ongoing series. Portland (OR) cop learns he is mystically-chosen slayer of - I'm not quite sure what - werewolves, apparently. Concocted by former Whedon minions, so unsurprisingly feels a lot like Buffy. You've got the protagonist who apparently should have learned his destiny long ago and is now desperately trying to catch up. You've got the Giles mentor figure (his aged, dying aunt); you've got the Angel figure of the reformed monster who provides expository lumps; you've got the Scoobie buddy; you've got lots of local color from the setting. Above all, even more clearly than in Buffy, you've got a world simply infested with evil inhuman creatures who pass as ordinary people, and our misunderstood hero is just about the only person who can reliably unmask them, confidently penetrating their firm and otherwise convincing denials, or even sometimes their unawareness, that they are actually agents of evil. Does this premise remind anyone else of the attitude of Commie-hunters in the Joe McCarthy days? Nevertheless, I've enjoyed the two episodes I've seen so far, and will probably continue watching at least until David Levine makes his cameo appearance.

follow-ups

1, to a concert review: I wrote, "once he put the violin on his shoulder ... nobody was going to check their watch again." I was wrong. Old Grumpy from the Mercury was checking timings all through the recital. (Also, he misremembered which movement was filled with embellishments.)

2, to a city council election: A couple of close races here, but it appears that the weakest of the "establishment" candidates has actually lost to the perennially-running irritable gadfly. (This happens, occasionally. Two elections ago an incumbent, not just an anointed candidate, lost to a flaky challenger.) We'll see what hits the fan after he takes office. Also apparently elected: the unstoppably cheerful woman who put her childhood photos on her campaign mailing, and the retired cop who thinks his "integrity" protects him from conflict of interest in voting on police salaries. We already have on the council a retired fireman who talks in the same blunt but foggy manner, and who looks exactly like this guy too; now we have two of them.

concert review: Gil Shaham plays Bach

Dinkelspiel Auditorium is not a very large hall; that's one reason its nickname is "Dinky." So it's surprising how many parking spaces on the Stanford campus its occupants can take up when the hall is full. When I arrived 40 minutes before the start of Gil Shaham's Bach recital on Sunday afternoon, there were still plenty of spaces in the other half of the nearby lot, the part that's reserved for parking stickers on weekdays. But by the time my concert-going companion athenais arrived 20 minutes later, they were gone. Everything was gone. She couldn't find an open non-permit permissible space even on the other side of campus. Nor can I explain why, as I was standing outside the hall with my cell phone on and in my hand, it didn't ring when she called. Fortunately I kept checking it and got the message. We did connect eventually and I directed her to a secret spot nearby where spaces can often be found and, on this occasion, fortunately were. (Am I going to tell you where it is? Maybe not!)

Heart attacks of fear were avoided by my having earlier overheard the hall manager calling for a five-minute hold, which enabled reaching our seats in time. First the concert series director came out and blurbed for a bit. (Blurb: originally a verb, meaning "to talk like a publisher.") Then Shaham himself - shyish, a bit foot-scuffing, doesn't look like one of the world's master violinists - gave a bit of a talk warning us about what he was about to do with the music he'd play. By the time he concluded, it was 20 minutes after the starting gate. But once he put the violin on his shoulder, and, without any hesitation or further ado, began the Preludio from the Third Partita, nobody was going to check their watch again. It was rapturously entrancing, fast as hell - that was what he'd warned us about - but bouncy and vigorous, not at all cold or mechanical. (I'm looking at you, Gidon Kremer.) Wonderful sound, too, on a Strad built when Bach was 14 years old.

Shaham didn't have much to worry about; like many violinists, he's been playing these pieces as private exercises for decades. I was the one who was nervous about reviewing it. I didn't know the Bach solos well, and I sometimes find him too abstruse a composer. There's nowhere for a reviewer, any more than for a performer, to hide behind in a concert like this. It's you facing pure musicianship, and you'd better be able to judge it adequately. So I spent much of my time the last two weeks listening to a variety (and a wide variety, too) of recordings, following and studying the score and making notes all over it, and reading whole books about it, which sounded like this: "in the continuo passage in bars 57-9, the bass is a decorated version of the chromatic countersubject." (Yes, I know what that means.) Not to pass a test on Bach, but to bring myself to a level of comfort and familiarity with the music, so that I could write a review that might be, however analytic in my usual mode, a way to convey what it was like to attend this concert.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Son of a gun, I've finally found a composer that Semyon Bychkov isn't outstanding at conducting, and that composer is Richard Strauss.  The two works of his on tonight's program were good, but Not particularly Memorable.  Don Juan lacked some of the heft in the strings that I know SFS could have given it, and received a weird interpretation focusing on the wandering and quiet sections: Don Juan on the Psychiatrist's Couch.  Also on the program, a one-movement piano concerto titled Burleske.  I'd never heard of it before, and now I know why.  It's very early Strauss, from back when his music still resembled Brahms, but this piece doesn't resemble Brahms at all, though the program notes say it does.  It wants to be light and fluffy, as if it were French, but Strauss doesn't do French.  Imagine a concerto by Saint-Saëns trying to dance while wearing a heavy weighted lead suit.  Pianist Kirill Gerstein played with all the fluency he could muster, but it didn't help much.

The other half of the program, however, featured a composer I've heard Bychkov conduct before, and that composer is Robert Schumann.  To say his Second Symphony was layered, textured, interwoven, hardly does this marvelously transparent (and people say that Schumann was a thick, soggy orchestrator! Hah!) performance justice.  Contrapuntal movement is particularly important in this symphony, and every line was both audible and integrated.  Marvelously luminescent sound too.  And it still all smelled like Schumann, with the weight and stateliness that he brings to all his works of this kind.

Dinner beforehand at the Thai restaurant with the hide-and-seek menu, the one where you have to guess which items will not cause the waitress to come back a couple minutes later with "I'm sorry, we're out of that too."

reflection on the current news

I had to go to Wikipedia to determine that a Kardashian is not the same thing as a Cardassian.