It is around 7 AM and daylight is just breaking out over the Taoyuan airport in Taiwan on Chinese New Year’s Eve after a long flight from SFO, and I’m sitting waiting for a connecting flight to Kaohsiung and I’ve been studying advanced SQL techniques. I turn on my iPod and put on some noise-canceling headphones to cut out some of the din in the room, with announcements coming in over the speaker and a rather loud dehumidifier placed behind my seat. I’m listening to Hilary Hahn play the Adagio from Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in E, BWV 1042. As the movement opens, this old woman gets up from her chair and starts practicing some morning Tai Chi Chuan. And it’s like I’m the sole witness to this sublime personal ballet. Her movements are graceful and limber, far beyond what you would expect from a woman of her years, and the movements of her hands in the air surrounding her seem to be in perfect step with every note being played. It is an indescribable moment of pure elegance; sublime, spontaneous beauty that will disappear with the the pre-boarding announcements coming over the loudspeaker for my next flight. For a moment there, I witnessed art – but I was the only one who knew about it.

Ah it’s that time of year again. Macworld announcements, and now this. Thanks jeantue for this wonderful distraction.

for those of you unattuned, this is just a casual list of friends that send around a list of their favorite cultural distractions for the previous year. I think it’s a fine tradition. For fun’s sake, I’m blogging mine this year. If you’d like to play, use a pingback to this post and any others you find, and tag it “cultura”.

From the creators, you are requested to write about…

…bands, djs, songs, films, theatre, moments, meals, photos, paintings, videos, tv shows, travels, egret sightings – whatever moved you! Whatever you liked best is what we wanna hear about.

The rules: There are none. Whatever format you want, whatever you wanna pick and whatever you wanna say is cool. A few people get elaborate. Many are brief. Some aren’t wearing briefs at all.

Here’s my picks for favorites for 2006:

Kaki King ~ …Until We Felt Red

This album knocked my socks off. Virtuosic, unique guitar style coupled with haunting songwriting. My faves:

I Never Said I Love You ~ Deeply sexy beautiful smoky dark early morning unrequited love music.

Yellowcake ~ Have your yellowcake and eat it too…

Gay Sons Of Lesbian Mothers ~ It’s not really as complicated as it sounds.

Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus

This album conjures up black turtlenecks, ber√�ts, triangular cocktails, and reefer madness.

All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother ~ I could be 7 different kinds of fungus.

Yo La Tengo ~ I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind ~ Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhgmlb.

Duruflé: Requiem

I first discovered this piece playing a benefit concert last September with the Pacific Collegium. I can say nothing else about this sublime, underperformed masterpiece for soprano, orchestra, choir, boychoir, and pipe organ, except that you need to go and hear the entire recording.

Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Reiner & Chicago Symphony Orchestra – Brahms: Violin Concerto & Double Concerto

This is my favorite recording of these two Brahms works. Piatigorsky does the masterful cello work on the Double Concerto. This is in my mind the definitive recording of both works, although I’ve had arguments on this subject with others…

This is a great idea, beautifully implemented:

ChinesePod

I like the fact that they’ve broken down the podcasts into newbie, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. I especially like their business model: Distribute the podcasts for free, and charge for the additional learning materials.

They have chosen the blog format to present the material, and have made it available for subscriptions via iTunes and comments are open. Not to mention, a fairly attractive site design. Well done, useful, and innovative.

No, I’m not talking about dabbling in doing my own podcast. I’m way more behind the times than that. Yesterday was my first experience with actually downloading and listening to one.

Well three to be exact.

My goal was to see if I could quickly find and download some new content, stick it on a CD, and listen to it for my drive in to San Francisco last night for my weekly orchestra rehearsal. I wanted to find something about technology, something about food, and something about music.

The food and music things were easy – I found a nice reasource at SFGate that had several great entries. I found a nice entry on dim sum and a piece on Jazz jam sessions at Amnesia. Finally I found a great show from Pro PHP for the technology component, and I was good to go.

Most of the time when driving in my car, I like to listen to music off my iPod. But now and then I like to get some news and information, and this way of picking my content is much more interesting than the parade of over-simplified content and constant commercials from AM radio.

This is sincerely hilarious: iPod My Photo

Via Slat Rat.

Telltale Weekly: Digital Pitch Pipes – MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and AAC Audiobook

Cute. A buck for three octaves of decent-sounding tuning reference. The author uses a piano as the source. As a musician, this has got to come in handy at some point – especially since I keep forgetting to turn off my digital tuner and let the battery run out.

Link via MacSlash

Wired News: Duke Gives IPods to Freshmen

This is such a cool idea for distributing multimedia curriculum:

Students also will be able to use the devices to download course content, recorded lectures, foreign language lessons, audio books and music from a special Duke website modeled after iTunes. The school will supply voice recorders for some classes, enabling students to record notes while working in the field.

Imagine the implications – one could retreive supplimental course info at any time, from a centralized Intranet website, or possibly via kiosks, and have instant access to all their downloaded material at any time. Giving this technology to each students allows curriculum developers to really get creative and go after new directions in creating educational material.

The kiosk idea gets even more interesting now that I think about it. Imagine having a kiosk at an art museum or where visitors could just download an audio tour. Or how about a symphony hall, where visitors might be able to hear a pre-concert lecture and recorded versions of the music selections long after they’ve enjoyed the live performance. Of course, such a kiosk would somehow have to figure out how to just download a few specific files without trying to sync the whole damn iPod, but that seems like it would be a simple software issue. Alternately, downloads from a website would do the trick, but then you lose the physical presence effect of having a kiosk within the perimiter of a building.

Language learning comes in particularly handy with an iPod. I have imported all 32 of my Pimseleur Mandarin level 1 & 2 CDs into mine, and can review any lesson I want to work on at any time. I have 16 more CDs to add when level 3 arrives.

I think what Duke is doing here is outstanding, and I am betting that many more will follow. I wish that I had this kind of technology when I was in college. Heck, all I had was a Mac SE and access to a bunch of Quadras in our computer lab back at NEC. I mean, that was cool and all at the time, but iPods as a means of enhancing curriculum at a music conservatory is a no-brainer. It has to happen eventually…

Father’s day is coming:

Brighthand RumorMill: palmOne Preparing Treo 610
Rumored Treo successor expected to finally get Bluetooth support. My 270 wants to retire soon.

Sonnet PodFreq | Photo Gallery
Looks like someone has finally figured out how to make a higher-quality iPod FM transmitter than the chaff currently out there. Uses the audio out instead of the headphone jack to help eliminate distortion.

Swissmemory USB Storage in a Victorinox Pocket Knife
The ultimate. Swiss Army Knives have always been a favorite among gadget-struck dads worldwide. Stick a USB key drive on it and you have the 21st century version.