In a bit of good news for those who believe that every American, regardless of who they are, has a right to try to live free from harassment and attack, the Senate yesterday passed the Matthew Shepard Act, which, according to the Human Rights Campaign website “updates and expands the federal hate crimes laws to include bias motivated violence based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, and disability, and provides new resources and tools to assist local law enforcement in prosecuting vicious crimes.” To prevent a possible veto, the Senate has bundled it together with a defense authorization bill and claimed that fighting domestic terrorism in all of its forms is as important fighting it anywhere else.

Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho?

He voted against the bill…

I’ve taken on yet another pet project to spend my time and procrastinate on my latest composition and that is ripping all of my CD’s to hard disk. I do this for several reasons: First, I am tired of spending fifteen minutes hunting for a CD I might need or to which I just want to listen. Second, they take up a lot of space and I’d prefer to store the physical CD’s safely away (I will keep them as I view them as my ‘license’ for the music.) Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the time for me to catch up to the times just seemed right.

Unfortunately, as many of you know, the ID tags for classical CD’s are a hellacious mess and take a tremendous amount of effort and mindless time to clean up and make uniform. On the bright side, I can do this while I’m composing, surfing the web, listening to music, grading papers, watching television and anything else that might occupy my time. Multi-tasking is my middle name.

I have also re-discovered some old classics that I haven’t listened to in a while, such as Robert Kurka’s Good Soldier Schweik Suite, a piece that I find refreshingly light and fun and one that makes me smile every time I hear it.

I think I’ll go listen to it again and perhaps write some more music (and rip some more CD’s…)

For the first time since we moved to our current address in May of 2006, we have a legitimate high speed internet connection without stealing a signal from the random unprotected network.

It took me 25 phone calls with 7 separate people over a two month period to get a line bored under the street and our service established, but it is done!

I could not be happier.

If you hadn’t heard, and I’m sure that you have given that it will be the top story in the musical blogosphere, famed tenor Luciano Pavarotti has passed away. I’m sure that somewhere, he and Beverly Sills are enjoying a duet, with Rostropovich at the podium. Rest in peace.

Probably few blog entries for a while longer. My ongoing battle with the local cable company to hook us up for high speed appears to be coming to an end, but not for a few days, at the very least…