Categories
Music

Sunshine and Snowflakes — Free mp3 download

Sunshine and Snowflakes is my favourite Christmas music album in the world. Released in 1973 by Light Records (album LS-5625-LP) by Lexicon Music, Inc. and distributed by Word, Inc., it presents an upbeat and energetic take on familiar Christmas carols, sung by an impressive, 40-member children’s choir. Unfortunately, the album has been out of print for some time now, hence I wish to make it available here. The album is arranged by Clark Gassman and directed by Jan Gassman.

[Sunshine and Snowflakes Album Cover][Sunshine and Snowflakes Album Back]

I digitized individual cuts of the album from a well-played LP record and converted them to 192 kbit, 44100 Hz, joint-stereo mp3 format using the Audacity audio editor and the LAME mp3 encoder. No (audio) compression, noise reduction, or any other digital signal processing was performed on the raw digital data, as I prefer the sound of the original vinyl recording.

I truly hope that you enjoy this unique Christmas music. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “Joy to the World” from the medley are not to be missed!

Right-click the following links to download:

Cut Title Length (m:s) Size (MB)
1 A Sunshine Christmas Medley 14:36 20.1
2 Over in Bethlehem 3:31 4.7
3 Wise Men Still Adore Him 3:19 4.6
4 The Very First Christmas Day 2:51 4.0
5 Where’s Christmas? 3:30 4.6
6 Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus 3:19 4.6
Total 30:46 42.6

If you appreciate this music, please leave a comment below. Your stories are most welcome. And please link to this page on your website or weblog. Thanks!

Oh—and I’m not getting paid to say this—if you want, you can buy a used LP or an unofficial CD-R of this album from sweet-music.com.

— Darren

Categories
Astro China Tech

We’re back in business

Hey, my website is back up. I hope I didn’t lose anybody in the outage. Bruce didn’t give me any explanation, but the IP address did change and the machine failed to notify me.

Oh, and Happy Winter Solstice everybody! I just spent the day with Eydie at the Forbidden City here in Beijing. I learned that the Winter Solstice is one of the special ceremony days for the Emperor in Old China. So it was a great day to go. We wore many layers of clothes cause it was a cold day, but we stayed mostly warm. Eydie is at home now warming up her toes.

Categories
Astro General

Blame it on the stars

My website has been down for about a week. [I am writing this post offline without being able to publish it for now.] This is really frustrating since there is not much I can do except wait for Bruce, the server’s administrator, to discover and respond to my messages. He must be out of town on a long trip or something. In addition, for about a week before the server outage, file transfers were extremely slow. And, for the last five days, my broadband connection at home was AWOL too.

So it was over this weekend that I made the connection between these problems and Mercury being retrograde. This phenomenon is known to disrupt communication and, in particular, computers and computer networks. So I’m being hit in multiple ways. Mercury goes direct in the next couple of days, so hopefully things will get back to normal.

Categories
Tech

Google: A Computer Scientist’s Playground

From the BrianStorms weblog, I found this talk given by Urs Hölzle on the infrastructure, commodity hardware, and distributed software used by Google to support its many services. I enjoyed learning about how Google works and what goes on behind the scenes when a user submits a query. Hölzle also gives an overview of the programming framework that is made available to Google’s data mining engineers.

Categories
Speech Tech

Geek, Like Me

Over the last five days, I discovered audio content on the internet, namely Linux radio shows, audio blogs, and podcasts. But this post isn’t about this. One of the gems I found is a site called IT Conversations, which hosts audio programs of interest to IT professionals. But this post isn’t about that either. A specific recording I found on IT Conversations was a talk given by Wil Wheaton at Gnomedex 4.0. People either remember him as the actor who played the young writer in Stand by Me or as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, the Next Generation. Well, it turns out he’s not just a geek, but a blogging geek, and he’s published a couple of books from his weblog WilWheaton.net: Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek.

It’s a great talk. I really enjoyed it. He talks about his life on Star Trek, his decision to leave the show, the 15 years of regret that followed, and his coming to terms with himself and the demon inside named Wesley Crusher. It was entertaining and even touching. I cried.

So, go have a listen. Maybe you’ll even buy his books.

Categories
General

Minor website tweaks

Last week, I performed some minor work on my website. About the only visible change is to the formatting of the Date and Title of each weblog entry. The Date is now grey in colour, and the Title gets underlined with a green bar. Thus, multiple entries on a single day will be clearly delimited. (Okay, I admit I don’t make multiple entries very often, but it does happen!) I have been aware of the need to distinguish between the Date and Title for a while now, but I didn’t have the idea of how to do it (design-wise). I ended up borrowing the design from Chris Dunphy’s nerdsyndrome.com.

In addition to the above, I fixed the titles for each of the sub-pages under my website. This involved tweaking the Python script that I use to compile the pages. And each time I make a new weblog entry, the appropriate archive page gets updated too. So basically, I revised a lot of the glue that I use to put this site together.

And finally, as a minor detail of major importance, I replaced all link references to tea.math.ualberta.ca so they point to the current site www.madphilosopher.ca. The former doesn’t exist anymore, and this was necessary so that any graphics in my past entries will display properly.

With that, I’m hoping that the warts are mostly gone and that it all works now.

Categories
Audio Tech

It’s all about the music

I’ve begun the process of backing up my music collection. I’ve got most of it on my portable 60 GB harddrive in mp3 and ogg format. Since the drive is portable and I sometimes carry it in my backpack, I’m worried about losing it. So, I’ll be dumping all the music files onto 700 MB CD-ROMs in the coming days.

The harddrive collection is about 7.4 GB large. Some of this is duplicated in the original collection of 6 CD-ROMs that I brought with me to China two and a half years ago, but not all. So I need to figure out what exists on CD-ROM already and what needs to be backed up. Once this is done, I’ll be in a better position to estimate the true size of my music collection, both in terms of Gigabytes and in terms of minutes. The later should be an interesting figure.

Before I came to China in April 2002, I commissioned my friend Bruce to rip my entire CD collection to mp3. Taking up 6 CD-ROMs, this was a compact way to bring my music with me. Since that time, I’ve acquired more CDs. But it’s not all just album music. About 1 GB of the above figure consists of radio shows I’ve “taped” off of CJSR, having Bruce record them onto his harddrive so that I could download them to China. Another part of the collection consists of my childhood LPs that I first recorded onto minidisc and then recorded into mp3. I’ve since burned these albums onto audio CDs for my nieces to listen to. And lastly, I’ve got a growing collection of spoken word stuff, including lectures by Alan Watts and Ram Dass.

When I figure out the final statistics of my backed-up music collection, I’ll post the figures in a new entry.

Categories
Tech

Opportunity lost

The website nerdsyndrome.com is down. Chris Dunphy must be moving into his new apartment across town, waiting for internet hookup. Damn. I just got the idea that I should have offered to host his website during the move. That would have totally been within my means. And it would have been a great way to make a new friend. Oh well, maybe next time…. We nerds have to stick together.

Categories
China

China Calling

My friend Trevor is featured in the latest issue of Canadian Business magazine. There’s a full-page picture of him looking sharp in the print edition, but unfortunately it’s not shown in the online edition. Trevor works for Calgary-based Zi Corp., here in Beijing, and he’s a regular dancer with us at Swing Beijing! Way to go, Trevor!

Categories
General

“Lady in Red” with a side of fries

I’ve been sitting in KFC for about an hour working on some new pages for my website. This particular KFC in my neighbourhood is nice because they sometimes play interesting music beyond the typical canned music that fast food places play. But not today. I’m hearing “Lady in Red” for about the third or fourth time. Maybe it’s time I leave…

Anyway, I got some good work done, including a Websites I Read page that should be up by the time you read this entry. Check it out.