concert review: Musica Pacifica

I volunteered to review this one. I'm not sure why I did, unless if it were to get some sort of December review in the Daily Journal: my goal is to write for them about once a month.

It wasn't easy: early music is the most difficult kind to review, and I didn't really try very hard. Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable concert, with good performers and at least moderately interesting music. My seating neighbors had never heard - or heard of - the Biber Mystery Sonatas before and were duly impressed.

I managed to irritate the violinist after the concert in the course of asking some technical questions about her performance. She took my questions as my telling her about her own specialty. I suspect this communication difficulty lies behind a lot of the world's charges of "mansplaining": it's particularly common among aspies, not that I am one, to lay out your own understanding of a topic so that you can be corrected on anything you got wrong. And you can try to frame it so as to communicate that you're taking that approach, but that's not always clear either.

computer question

Apparently I have to jump through huge hoops to get this answered at any kind of product help forum, and googling doesn't produce results that address the question, so I'll put it here.

My printer has stopped printing. It accepts printer commands and spits out sheets of paper, but they're blank. I tried different programs, still nothing.

An obvious suggestion would be that the cartridge is out of toner, but it was working fine yesterday: clear printing, no streaks or anything. I shook the cartridge to redistribute the toner; still nothing. It's possible, I suppose, that it ran clean out at exactly the moment I finished yesterday's large printing job. But before I go out and buy a new expensive cartridge, I'd like to be sure that's the problem. So what I'd like to know is:

Is there any way to tell from looking at the cartridge whether it's out of toner?

I like to be in America

In keeping with my early New Year's resolution to share with you more of my favorite YouTube videos, and in honor of Dave Letterman's impending retirement, here's the women of the 2009 revival of West Side Story on Letterman's show, performing "America" with such verve that Dave reacts as if he's about to be run over when one of them accidentally bumps into him as he's coming over to congratulate them after the number.

Watch on YouTube