boston pops 4th of july

Music, Reviews

My clarinet teacher told me he was playing with the Boston Pops Orchestra on the 4th of July, so Vin and I put on the TV and watched the show! I don’t normally go for watching these kinds of events on TV (they are sooo much better live), but I missed last year’s concert, and my teacher had played in that one as well.

We actually really enjoyed the concert, at least most of it. First, the announcers should just be quiet. I won’t say any more about that. Secondly, I don’t particularly care for John Melloncamp, but I won’t say anymore about that either.

The lineup included a fife and drum corps (now that I have a piccolo, I want to play with them!), some pops search contest winner with a beautiful voice singing Sondheim, a performance by the Blue Man Group, the Boston Children’s Chorus, and some really great fireworks. The orchestra played some good music too: Samuel Barber, songs from the musical “42nd Street,” and those perennial favourites “The 1812 Overture” and “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Just wonderful.

And it was so cool to see my teacher on TV! During Stars and Stripes, we saw a lot of him, and Vin decided that his clarinet was blue. I insisted, no it couldn’t be, I KNEW his clarinet was NOT blue. I kept insisting it was the lights, and Vin kept insisting it was blue.

Hmmph, guess who was right? Not only was my teacher’s clarinet blue, the other two players’ instruments were white and red!

View the photo here. Sorry, but I had to password protect it! If you know the name of my beloved kitty, you can enter it as the username and password to view my teacher and the other two clarinetists with their festive instruments!

php + remove chars from front of string

Programming, Websites

I had a need the other day to remove a char from the beginning of a string in PHP. Rather than fiddle around with the existing function substr(), I whipped up my own function that will remove X number of characters from the beginning of a string.

function removeXnumCharFromFront($instring,$x)
{
$length = strlen($instring);
for($i=$x; $i<$length; $i++) $temp[] = $instring[$i];
$comma_separated = implode(",", $temp);
$outstring = eregi_replace(",","",$comma_separated);
return $outstring;
}

Enjoy!

Network Support Specialist

Computers, Family

As of July 2, I will be in a new position at Endicott College: Network Support Specialist. Basically, this is a lateral move from the web development area of IT to the network area of IT. I will still dabble in programming, be responsible for scripting, and will be learning lots and lots about networking. I’m terribly excited, as this is an area of IT I have wanted to be more involved in for quite some time. I’ve already done a bit of server management and database administration so far, and enjoy the work.

White Wave Designs will, of course, continue as before 🙂 It pays for the music lessons and my ever-expanding collection of instruments!