Tuesday 1/2/07 7:48 AM

Spent more time with Bach at the organ yesterday. Played through some Leipzig chorales and trios. I logged onto the church secretary’s computer and messed around with software that indexes all the church resources. I asked for a working copy of this software months ago. My boss said she didn’t find it that helpful and I took her word for it. But my brother convinced me over the holidays that it does indeed search the texts of all the resources of the American Episcopal church. I was kind of confused as to why my boss didn’t find it useful. I will ask her as soon as I get a chance.

In the meantime, I used the secretary’s copy. This is clumsy but possible when she’s not there.

I didn’t work too much on college stuff yesterday. Sunday morning I got up and looked at the syllabus for the class with the new textbook (Music Theory for Non-Music Majors). Eileen helped me with some ideas I have for this class. Discovered the new text has the same number of chapters as weeks in the semester (14). That can’t be an accident. Will probably organize my new syllabus that way. Need to work on it today.

I also ordered a copy of a book on WordPress. I am using OpenOffice.org to do this website right now. I am satisfied with everything except the possibility to leave comments. My gut tells me there’s a way to do it with a basic html editor (like OpenOffice.org)but so far no luck. I have installed WordPress on Bluhost, my server. But don’t see how to get started easily. I did it once before and got discouraged at the template nature of everything.

On the other hand I seem to be feeling the lack of collegiality more keenly lately for some reason. As I have been playing through Bach I realize how many conversations I have had with my former teachers about Bach. Mostly Ray Ferguson at Wayne State. Ray is dead now and I continue to realize how much he taught me. In retrospect, my time at Notre Dame was not as helpful. But I think I color that with my current distaste for Christianity and especially Catholicism. It didn’t help anything when one of my profs killed himself the year after I left because he couldn’t face the fact that he had AIDS. He was sure it would ruin his career as a liturgist. He may have been right.

Anyway, I hope I can get a comment feature up on this web site sometime and see if anyone talks back. I don’t check the stats on this very often (I think I’ve done it once) but when I did it surprised me how many people actually visit the site. I wonder how much they read. I suspect my main readers are family (Hi Sarah!). That way they can keep up with what’s going on I guess. I keep envisioning the Internet as a means to more connecting and developing of ideas.

A guy on the radio today called it “Technotribes.” He was naming developing trends in 2007 of course. Not sure I want to be in a “technotribe” but I’m willing to consider it. I feel more like a blogger I read who gets on and writes pretty much the same negative stuff over and over and then dumps reams of quotes from books he doesn’t seem to process I think he’s my “moral stoplight.” Heh.