On-the-job Training

UPDATE: The servers have propogated! The servers have propogated! Check out the new-and-improved blog at missmusicnerd.com!!

Nothing in technology happens without some bugs having to be worked out, right?

For a while now, I’ve wanted to migrate this here blog from free wordpress.com hosting to my own paid hosting, so I could add several features that I can’t currently have (audio hosting will be simpler, for one thing, I think… I hope…)

It took a while for me to wrangle the site layout until it bent to my will, but I finally succeeded, and yesterday, after checking with support staff from my new host to make sure I knew what to do, I entered the gobbledygook in the various fields and pressed save… and voilà!

missmusicnerd.com vanished into web limbo. Aaarrgh! Dang you, novice webmistress!

I checked with the support folks again and found that I had entered the wrong gobbledygook. They kindly supplied me with the correct gobbledygook, and I have entered it, but the millions of little squirrels running on wheels that power the interwebz will take a while to catch up. Until then, I’m very glad I have a backup here on wordpress.com.

Thanks, wordpress.com! Thanks, support folks! And I’m just glad I did this now, rather than during GRAMMY^® week!

Notes From The Department of Music Nerdometry!

But first, a word from our sponsor: please click here to view my “Your OWN Show” audition video, and please vote for me and spread the word! Remember, you can vote early and often! 😀

In a couple of recent posts, I’ve referenced my nerdometer, and I’ve used this gif that I found on the intertubes:

It’s pretty good for general nerdiness, but I really need to create a true Music Nerdometer. Tonight McDoc and I started talking about what would appear at different points on the scale of music nerdiness.

First, it’s important to define one’s terms. I mean, for the most part, nerdiness is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. But sometimes when I try to think of specific examples, I find I need some guidelines. McDoc and I came up with a working definition: it involves wearing one’s heart and mind on one’s sleeve, and getting super-excited about things that others might find arcane. There’s definitely an elevated level of seriousness compared to the general population, though it can’t be said that nerds don’t have a sense of humor; it’s just that the things they find funny are, well, nerdy.

McDoc started poking around online while I finished up a little music copying project, and he found a treasure trove of material. It’ll take some time to sort through and compile it all, but here are a few quick thoughts:

• Nerdometry is often sorely lacking in gender diversity. I’m doing what I can to change that, but I must also thankful for the existence of Lisa Loeb.
• This website will be a rich source of material: Wolf Gnards: Nerding Pop Culture.
• You can find nerds in any genre of music, of course, not just classical. For example: in the jazz world, the nerd scale might have Miles Davis at 0 (not nerdy at all), and Anthony Braxton at the top of the scale.

But I’m open to further suggestions, so what do you think, music nerds? People, instruments, concepts, whatever strikes you as emblematic — post it in a comment! 🙂

Ask Miss Music Nerd: The MMNFAQ!

Hey there, music nerds! I could use your help. I’m writing the Miss Music Nerd FAQ, and I have a few questions in mind for it, but I could use some more. So ask me something! Otherwise, I’ll just make up a bunch of silly stuff! (Well, I’ll do that anyway, but I’ll take real questions, too! 😉 )

Here’s a sample:

Why are Miss Music Nerd’s glasses drawn on?
Have you ever felt like you were born in the wrong era? I started wearing glasses in the 8th grade, long before nerd became the new cool. It was a rather painful state of affairs, especially since I never did too well with contact lenses (darn my dry eyes!). I wasn’t just a little bit nearsighted, either; by the time I was in college, I couldn’t sit at the piano and read the music on the stand without my glasses!

It was always a big challenge to find frames that looked reasonably cute, and even then, it was a big drag for things like exercising or dressing up for special occasions. Sometimes I would dust off an old pair of disposable contacts when I was getting gussied up, and I could get about 6 hours out of them before I felt like someone had stuck little pieces of plastic on my eyeballs (and realized, to my horror, that I had done it myself!).

Eventually, I had LASIK surgery, and it went really well — I haven’t needed glasses since (although lately, it does seem to me that the street signs are getting smaller…). But I believe it was oh, maybe like THE NEXT DAY that those über-nerdy, rectangular plastic film-school glasses suddenly became très chic. D’oh!!

I know, I know, I could always get some fake ones so I could look cool like everybody else. But that’s just not how I roll. So I drew ’em on. I thought it was pretty cute. 😉

Your turn, music nerds — what else do you want to know? 🙂