Random Monday: SF Network, Real World Freebies and Stupidity Science

Mondays — a good time to reflect.

• For giggles I have joined the new San Francisco Symphony Social Network. It is almost identical to the Facebook interface. I am hoping that it will in time prove to be a music-centric place of exchanging ideas and inspiration.Principal hornist Robert Ward is being featured in an “Ask the Musician” contest. The winner will receive tickets to an upcoming symphony concert in San Fran.My only misgivings are its Terms of Service which as Drew McManus over at Adaptistration has pointed out are an “old-school ‘what can you do for us?’ one-way relationship approach.” At Facebook a few months ago, a similar policy created a near-revolt from its users.

• Check out two freebie PDF previews from Wendell Rider’s book Real World Horn Playing, “Balance and Natural Process” and Embouchure.” I was very disappointed that Amazon’s outrageous price for a new copy was over $80 (!?) and opted instead to order mine directly from Mr. Rider for $30.

• Another thought-provoking PDF worth a read is “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research. “Substitute “science research” with “music study” and some importance lessons can be gleaned. Believe it or not, feeling stupid can actually be a good thing! Kudos to Justin Locke at Stupidity Science for finding this.

• Part II of last Friday’s “Copy, Paste and Steal” will be posted tomorrow. In it will be some results from a 4-week experiment on the blog to test articles that were being copied. The results were very surprising.

• Sometime in 2006 I started posting articles on my main web site on a semi-regular basis. A year — maybe two (?) — went by with no posts.I didn’t start blogging on a regular basis until about one year ago. This makes it difficult to pinpoint an exact starting date, but at least on the Blogger platform I am now one year old.

  Wheeeee!