There's some mad beautiful but light (wet) snow falling throughout the city tonight, and the walk home was excellent. Overlaying the city sounds was Ryoji Ikeda'a composition for strings, op.
I've touched on "op." before. It's an excellent album. In my first mention of it, I talked about fitting it in with John Zorn's beautiful Duras: Duchamp and other releases. It's fit in to those perfectly, along with The Hafler Trio's long warm drone work, Cleave: 9 Great Openings (part of a trilogy I need to complete). Together (and maybe combined with some Glenn Gould or my/our own Dust Concerto pieces), it all makes for some excellent snow music. Or snow+rain music. Great for sitting in the apartment reading and writing listening to the sounds of wet traffic in the streets below.
As I was climbing up the stairs to the apartment, the iPod switched over to Fennesz' Field Recordings album - a collection of unreleased and rare works 1995-2002. Fennesz is a great composer and performer of modern electro-acoustic, using guitars and environments like Max/MSP to break apart and rebuild sounds in real time. I got to seem him perform with Kaffe Matthews at Earational 2001 (a great event that I was delighted to be a part of). It's been too long since I've paid attention to this album, which has many beautiful parts, including a string done (reminiscent of "op.") which occasionally falls apart into glitches. Not necessarily a snow album, but its got some great snow moments.
mmmm, quiet evenings....
Mark Pilgrim has a good overview of the incompatibilities between the nine different flavors of RSS. They're all small things, but with significant impact - especially because the RSS 0.91-0.94 and RSS 2.0 flavors seem to stem from Dave Winer's whims (including his preferred way of capitalizing). While "death by committee" is bad (and is what makes SOAP such a terrifying experience, in my view), common formats based on the whims of one man who seems to pay little attention to the world outside his own are equally bad.
It's not like I think I could ever do better. And while I'm not really fond of RSS 2.0, its support of XML namespaces was - to me - a good thing (that RSS 1.0 seemed to already offer). This is what allowed me to separate the content of a post from the description - because, by gods (if you choose to believe in such things), there's a difference! A pretty significant difference, in my view.
I still hope that Atom can find that cozy place between the whims of one man and death-by-committee.