Blistering pace with crunch and groove, my latest challenge is to accompany Tangos del Titi. I played some variations on arpeggiating the main chords with some diminished(?) chord, which sounds modern and appropriate for the way I want to play.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cAqOVJHO2k Intro: Tangos del Titi is typically played in a minor chord, but may change to major in the middle of the song, as demonstrated above by Poveda and cuadro. Excellent resource on Flamenco, see more here for Tangos styles. http://www.flamencopolis.com/archives/324
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Last Thursday I attended a riveting, well-organized event about APIs, technical documentation requirements by two Meetup groups in the Bay Area, http://www.meetup.com/API-Craft-San-Francisco/events/233267541/ and I am not being sarcastic!
I surprised myself a bit, having written "riveting" above to describe this event. What was so riveting about it was the quality of the presentations and questions asked, leaving everyone with a deeper understanding of the challenge at hand - well-crafted API documentation. There was palpable tension in the room at the end, each camp, the technical writers and the API writers each proposing a vision of the ideal, one developer asserting that API implementation can change, leaving the documentation in an inevitable sorry state. To this, a palpably experienced writer claimed for the writers camp that we have a way of smoothing things out. Most agree documentation is a developer task in the beginning, and the boundaries become less clear as the product passes from working idea, to a thing that a person uses out in the wild. At the time the docs are crafted, the users are the product creators (engineers), as well as the technical writers - but writing something worth reading requires a familiarity with product that is both high level and low level, and the other important requirement is good writing, that has been burnished after a few cycles of "dog-fooding" the product as per the documentation. The problem has been well-explained. Documentation traditionally and by its nature comes later in the game to get a product out the door to the public and scaling this activity with a large team of technical writers is difficult and unwieldy. The smart solution is to involve engineering early and often in the task of documenting the product. As one person deftly pointed out, the spec is used as a template for the product, and this spec in the end comes to conform to the product, completing a loop which is not really a full circle, but a swirl, because the spec ends up in a different state than at inception. If this passage from dream to reality and back were better solidified in software documentation, we'd be living in a much more reliable tech world. It is always a game of catching up. There is no such thing as getting ahead with the documentation, but planning for the future keeps us less behind, so there is something to work toward besides the docs themselves. What better way to celebrate Don Miguel Cervantes's masterpiece than with other enlightened readers, sitting around a table fascinated how one author could engender such universal feelings in a story as surreal as Don Quixote? Uninhibited, us readers comfortably shared our reactions and hypotheses on the subject of "the Quixote", protesting the online anonymous extemporaneous conversations that drone on past the capacity of a scroll bar, shelved inside the "Read more" block in the online threads (as most of our conversations happen online don't they?)? This discussion was friendly, and unified us, a delicious bookend to the summer of Quixote put on by my friends at the San Francisco Public Library as part of the Don Quixote and the Golden Age exhibit.
No discussion I've had in any previous book club meeting was so enriching. - all that was shared made me giddy to read more. I had not come close to finishing the epic, but the themes are woven so strongly across the book, you need not read it all to understand its importance and relevance to this day. (I will be reading on!) The author, Cervantes lived a life worthy of his own story, and Jaime Manrique tackled this with gusto in El callejón de Cervantes. We would believe most of it to be fiction. Quixote garnered interest and influence in places as far away in the Spanish empire as Bolivia. Professor Quiroz, who attended the Quixote tertulia dedicated significant time to revealing his countrymen and Cervantes's mutual interest and Bolivia in his expository work., Cervantes y Don Quijote en Bolivia. I learned Cervantes had applied for a government position in Bolivia, which was denied by the Spanish crown. This position was post-mortem and Bolivians have carried on paying homage to Quixote in their own literature and more.. Don Quixote is a work that draws on the human experience, but does not interpret this experience in terms of science, but rather through art, finding humor in human folly, error and (mis?)understandings. Cervantes encodes this experience in the characters of Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza with such force, convincing us that we are not so much products of the past, as we are a continuation of it, barely distinguishable, just as surreal: the world Cervantes knew is fascinating, a barely governed or barely governable Spain, the character of Quixote an expert in the custom and rule of knights-errant, able to cohabit and subdue by decree, some sort of might-is-right-righteousness and notion of justice, with a soft side. I feel we are still tethered to romantic customs we want to break from, but ultimately find ourselves perpetuating: asserting we are nobility entitled to our own wild lands and a uniquely beautiful prince or princess, an imagined destiny personally crafted from a collection of stories read, breaking slightly from them and the traditions they came out of, so we can call our stories our own. Don't we all come from hometowns that were stifling, but miraculously able to produce us, great men and women, with a capacity for compassion, love and forgiveness.? We are Quixotes, and Quixote is a man-child, a person free from everything except his attraction to legend and destiny, loathe to admit defeat. We can see our struggle for perfection and the path to each of our own destinies through the book. Specifically, finding a princess and likening our own wanderings about the earth may not resonate on their face, because they sound like the same storybook we grew up with unless you read on, but our momentary despair, injuries and perseverance are similar. - we forget these and move on, shedding skin and fears, repeating this process until we die. We are all kind of crusaders and we all fall off our nags, which we imagine to be great horses - metaphors for our jobs or successful careers. We all sort of aggrandize our turmoil and success, right? Our admission of not-so-greatness does not pass into our conversations. Is this what is most universal about Don Quixote? According to the group, I met with at the reading room esconced neatly beneath the main library first floor away from the bustling of readers and those seeking a clean refuge from the Civic Center SF streets, we nobly agreed the Quixote is as current as can be. Thanks to Pythonistas and PyBay we all have the chance to enjoy the complexity of the world through ever cooler interfaces, without the politics of purity or property.
Few languages have instilled a healthy curiosity about the relationship between humans and technology as well as Python has, with its pithy commands, and eschewance of the skewed view of programming as a "black art" for a privileged class of information workers and engineering buffs. Now, after getting some experience, and after PyBay, I can ask myself honestly, how can I make the world better by programming? Because, now I have no excuse. - Anaconda, Bokeh, Boto - Python brings the world to you through helpful packages you can use to leverage the strength of the computer, and process and output information in a universally intelligible way, like charts or graphs. This access and ease of use make it possible to change your life, and by association that of others. Coming from a liberal arts background, I had little idea of what I was getting into when I embarked on learning Python to understand programming and text processing in the context of AI, leading then-confused me into haphazard, meandering research. On a trip back home to Los Angeles to the Viterbi school, where I was enthralled with the level of intellectual effort and complexity involved in NLP. . I found nerds who loved language and math, but still I didn't have the background or interest in pursuing research through formal training, yet. I later stumbled on one blog, coindcidentally of a Viterbi alum, a great access point for me to understand Machine Translation (I asked myself, where is the translation industry going and am I going there with it?) - this process led me initially to see how computers "understand" language through the NLTK package. I went on to learn some basics: C++ and more at CCSF Computer Science Dept. I soon after joined the SF Python Meetup a healthy group of teachers and students, all working together finding out how to share our enjoyment of the science and art of programming with the world. Native and novel Python packages, comprise the most incredible software ecosystem I have ever seen. What this does is allow users to create a personal workbench to practice programming for any purpose they may have. It has made everyone's lives better, because we are not only distracted from the horror of groundhog days, we are enriched through this distraction, and we propagate a sense of wonderment about the world, and that is engaging beyond the software programming world. and apparently making us more productive, faster. The only impediment to success is the amount of options you have at your disposal and the number of goals you have in mind for the processes and data you want to weave together and visualize. However, at any conference, I find it is more about channeling the energy of the speakers and using what bits you know to figure out what you don't know, following a path toward success, whether for you that means pure fun or utility, or something in between. I am coming to realize that programmers touch many fields in their journey, as they encode information from the physical world - this information is diverse. This access affords some privilege and responsibility perhaps as some assert that now, a programmer has a strange moral obligation to write code for humanity, help squash poverty, support democracy.. Here is one way. PyBay scholarships give the underserved equal access, equal chance, because this is a critical part of equal access to education today. The community has set a higher standard for what equal access to education is. I think by extension, this means access to the open software community itself.. Even though I am not a programmer by trade I am made to feel welcome in the Python community, because students matter, as much as teachers or professional programmers, because at the end of the day we are all students. We all write and rewrite, correct ourselves, correct others - it is what it means to be human since a long time ago. By writing we research ourselves, push our mental limits, open our minds to the world as we find words to decipher it, nowadays through the keyhole of the computer. What does PEP 20 mean to you? "Programming changes the way we think." Would you agree with this statement by Jessica McKellar? Why or why not? Guitarists know there is no one perfectly designed practice schedule. A schedule should challenge and inform, question, refresh and enliven the music we live and aspire to find ourselves in. If I aim, to be an accompaniment guitarist to a singer or dancer, I need to solidify technique, memory of cante and simply execute, which is at the end of the day the only thing between practice and performance well done.
Here are some steps I've taken to bring my practice material to the stage. 1. Tagging video resources and files for study is one way to build the skills required for performance, at least on a solo level, before bringing the material to perform, for example., the accompaniment class. 2. Playing - drills, each part of the palo, take Solea - drill arpeggio, rasgueos, escobilla, intro, falseta. Alternating daus. Test with a metronome and compas timer like Solo Compas. However, it is not necessary to start outright with scales. It can be plain yucky to start your day with drills. This isn't the military! 3. Recording take notes, mark dates in the filename, see what gaps need to be filled when compared with goals or some template used to study the palo. I noticed when playing soleá I can better emphasize the downstrokes on three which anchor the compás and provide strength to the palo, which is often airy and arpeggiated. The downstroke on E on the three, is a natural counterbalance to the intricate, yet typical details in the song. The hardest part may be to overcome the self-critical mode that can get in the way of completing a whole song structure - playing it without stopping. - forgiving mistakes. Identifying where drills could bring structure and reliability to your playing in those challenging parts and transitions, the falsetas that are mind and time-bending...it will all work out. Just listen, practice, break, repeat. Vacation can be a lot of work. Some of us still haven't learned that blocking off time to spend away from work does not mean guaranteed relaxation, though chances are that is part of the deal. I can't yet put my finger on what this month away from San Francisco means for me, but I do feel that I sweat out a lot of my worries on the road about what I should be doing while in my hometown. Here below is the rough summary of the trip, after which I will branch off into more detail about my study of flamenco, though I might not be able to get to it today. There are still videos and lessons to review. July 1-4 - Swimming in my own sweat - each day meant peeling off/on clothes for a new day in the tropical heat. Peeping the posh Playa del Carmen, I quickly wanted to remove myself to get the real stuff: street tacos - not just carnitas here, you can get a mix of meat. Besides that, there is the pyramid and surrounding old city structures at Chichen Itza and likewise in Tulúm on the coast. I skipped on via direct flight (Evelop Air) from Cancun to Madrid for the "hard" part of my trip. July 5-15 - Getting my feet moving again in Spain made me instantly happy. - it was cooler for a moment, but torrential rains from Mexico followed me even to my first night in Madrid. Walking the streets of Madrid led alone by the salty must of hanging pig parts, fish, and some traditional landmarks, the Royal Palace, which always seems to be a stone's throw away when I'm in town, I begain stringing together a nice stroll, letting loose a bit and letting go any notion that there is one goal for my flamenco trip to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where I was to take a week and half long guitar intensive course with Niño Manuel, a natural gift whose teacher is Manolo Sanlúcar, a great of greats. for those who don't know. Just being there was the original reason for the trip - to get back to Spain and rekindle some love for a place and an art form I've grown to recognize as partly my journey and feel almost at home in it. More on Sanlúcar - To be continued in another post. After meandering through Jerez with trepidation especially through the rougher edges of town, I moved on to see some old friends I knew from San Francisco, but who reside in Galway and Paris now, respectively. July 16-21 - I landed in Dublin, accompanied by Paco, and stood at the luggage belt darting from conveyor to Paco's watch since we had a bus to Galway to catch. I was unsurprised to find my luggage had not made it from the Madrid connecting flight. We took the bus, no luggage, jsut my backpack and it even made it through a night od debauchery at the practically all-Irish Rowing Club, which is a damn good nightclub for all ages. We biked - me, Cathal and Elina. Luggage arrived the next day in Galway, where my friend Cathal had housed me over several days, then chaffeured me to his mother's farm, where I learned that taking care of three kids (Cathal's nephews) is deserving of a nap, or at the very least deep consideration of my capability to take care of people. July 21-24 - Amsterdam - miles of brick buildings that look out to canals, uncountable bikes and small watercraft. Walking in the west part of town, when the shops had been closed for the night, I saw a whole different side of the city life.: mannequins which were visibly tailored for the looks and stature of the local population stood out, evidence of a culture I've still yet to get love contact with. The people were kind, asked my name, and it was a joy to sit out, look at the canals and get to know people and their lives there. July 25-28 - Berlin - the Hauptbahnhof train station is an oblong glass fishbowl acting as one of the main hubs for Berlin trains. You can see the tracks from the outside, on various levels of the station, making this a must-see attraction. The museums in Berlin are on par with the quality of Amsterdam's, but are a fourth of the price or less, only 3-4 euros with discount. I wouldn't have counted out any of the museums visited: German Historical Museum, Markisches Museum (City History), Jewish Museum, Technology Museum, DDR Museum. Each offers an impressive view into greatness, achievement, even in turbulent times. At a refugee NGO called Give Something Back to Berlin, I donated my guitar. A much harder one is finding a new one that fits me and my playing style. Back in SF that should not be too difficult - the challenge is that there are so many options to choose from...now to test some out. Stephan Crawford and his team of musicians and, all heroes I might add, unraveled the natural progression of human "development" over recent time exploring modeled data beyond the current day through a didactic and scientific music you must hear to understand.
ClimateMusic is a new genius, that improves upon the musical ability of classical greats like Debussy, because: ClimateMusic instills so much more than wonder, fear and excitement about our environment than traditional approaches to music - the urgent message for me was: Compose yourself, and act with purpose. I sincerely wish to promote this engagement so that a growing community of activists can gain momentum in various arenas to influence the discussion and action on the issue locally and globally using grassroots. The stellar group of musicians (piano, synth, violin and others) interpreted the feeling of the data about our Earth's life forms' crucial health indicators modeled in terms of CO2, temperature and key energy pollution metrics. these laid bare a truth to the audience over the course of 25 minutes - the problem can't be ignored and we can't drown it out - beginning somewhere in the 1800's continuing on into the distant 2200's until 2300, here we stand between our past and future as a specie part of a larger community. What could you do to revolutionize the way you see humans adjusting to environmental change. How do you see yourself as a responsible part of the climate improvement solution? Why is this relevant and why does my response matter? Your response matters because all of our responses to the issue matter - few issues can be more urgent to human life as a whole than this one, and our ability to enact change on the issue has never been greater, because the planet is reaching a level of understanding and real technical capacity to be able to shift its focus away from the day-to-day crises of leadership and daily human needs using the old system, to do more with less, and not be another victim of the "tragedy of the commons", a word I heard so much in school, now forgotten in the world we live in - a consumerist mess driven sadly by the need to create to consume - a cycle we can't break, but one that we can influence tremendously to help our future provide for itself. http://www.theclimatemusicproject.org/ Glosbe provides an API to access dictionary data in multiple languages. It's easy enough to grab the html or JSON, but putting it in a "pretty" format is the next challenge.
Also on the to-do list. Allow multiple calls to the API in order to fill in the blanks of a list of words created during the course of personal reading or movie watching. This way I can keep track of the words I am learning and not have to do the footwork of looking for the word. A central place to store the list is also something I would like to experiment with. Evernote is the first application, crossing over the mobile-desktop boundary seamlessly. 1) Keep a separate database of your translation memories bundled together into one .db file. Use APSIC Xbench or TmLookup to perform searches to complement the specific project translation memory you have open in your working CAT tool. You can use Xbench for many file types and you can count on it to be compatible with almost any file type since Xbench is a true multi-tool. When you're in a bind and need to convert from one file format to another, look no further. See this tutorial on how to create tmx and txt files out of your native TM file.
2) Have a browser open to your most used search engines and online databases. For me these would be the Real Academia Española dictionary page, a Proz.com glossary page where I can look at discussions on terms other translators have seen before. Go to proz.com/search. For anything that sounds remotely like legalese or economics jargon, access the EU DGT website.. IATE and EUR-Lex have other important official language databases. Some others are listed by a prolific purveyor of translator tips, Pablo M. Sánchez: 3) Get access to a standard industry database or body of knowledge that can provide you with concepts that should/must be reproduced with a certain wording in your target language. You may even be able to get a quick look at what types of concepts a document contains without reading it. METAMAP from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is one such tool that can process medical text (so far only in English, but developers are working on extending the functionality to other foreign languages) to output known medical concepts it found in the document using its ontology of medical concepts. To access the NLM tools, you need to apply for a license. 4) MultiFultor, by Rolf Keller, allows you to conduct concurrent searches in your favorite online or offline resources without having to touch your browser. The documentation is around 30 pages. After testing it out, adding websites and using the tool to ensure access to my sites, I am able to say that this is a tool that is easy to set up. and perfect if you need to conduct fast internet searches but do not want to leave the translation alone for very long, whether you are in the zone, on a tight deadline, or both. 5) There are some great Google search operators to use if you really want to drill down and find specific types of documents on subjects you are looking for, e.g. the words "vascular" and "drug" in the title index from an actual document like a pdf or .doc file. - intitle:(vascular + drug) filetype:(pdf or doc) Most internet resources don't offer the assurance of quality that your trusted print resources do. Don't rush! Read the sentences before and after the concept you want to learn more about. (Context is everything.) Then start your vocabulary research with monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.. I recommend keeping general and specialized versions on your desk and referring to them in conjunction with more specialized resources, e.g. Black's Legal Dictionary or similar, to get a well-rounded vision of the term you are studying. If you have any favorite practices you would like to share, please leave a message below! During this week off from translating I decided to put on a new hat, an auditor's hat. I scheduled time to finish collecting my job stats for the quarter. I filled out a spreadsheet with my time spent on projects, what the service provided was, whether it was a translation, editing or other quality management activity, and how it was billed (my hourly or word rate).
Much of the information I have put on paper is not news on its own, and still needs to undergo some processing to give the whole activity some purpose beyond information collection as an end in itself. I want to know: What does my "best" project look like? That is, where was I most efficient in terms of time management and amount billed. Is it a project where there was little research to do? Where was the time on research spent? in locally saved TMs, glossaries, web, databases on the web? This leads into another question which I found relevant to my professional development. What project was the most intellectually stimulating? the one that solidified my understanding of a field I was interested in before. In my case, it is chemotherapy drugs. During this quarter I worked on several of them, but one in particular stood out. Why? It provided empirical data about the trial rather than just the information on how the trial was structured. I have not yet recovered my web search queries that I made during the job, but this should be my next step to reflect on my thought and research process and to understand what worked and why and see how efficient I am at using the web. We could all benefit from this because whether we are under the gun or not to finish, we just want to do what works. My hypothesis is that we can use programming and text processing/NLP techniques tools as a shortcut to a good search query on items that will prove problematic for understanding or present translation doubts. The tools are out there (e.g. NLTK, Scrapy using Python) but these need to be welded together to create a working text pipeline. that gets you from source text chunk > explicit doubt about translation > effective search query > applicable search result that resolves the doubt. The benefit of strategizing our research is time saved. Yes, I expect I will still save time by first reading the document and analyzing the structure and determining the audience and then later launching into web search with our learned parameters (audience, terminology, structure, context in mind) to find what we I am looking for: I expect my web searches fall into a few categories What? predict to be create combinations that are better formed than the last time around, so that you get the most relevant source or target webpage/document from your final web search, thus increasing your chances you are finding and using the most natural target equivalent. Of course, it's best to restrain yourself from running a search query until you've gained a more thorough understanding of the document as a whole and even after you have worked and translated through the document's other sections, but my goal is to reduce time spent in the search browser, and craft a strategy or tool that does the heavy lifting of web search and extraction. |
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