• Complimentary Copies
  
• Windows 8 Touch Events Interactions
  
• Happy 75th Birthday, Philip Glass!
  
• The Last Catfish in the East Village?
  
• Adventures in Electronic Music
  
• We Got Mangos And Bananas You Can Pick Right Off The Tree
  

When an author gets a book published, the publisher generally gives the author 10 complimentary copies of the book. Usually the author signs these books and gives them to all his friends, but then he has 7 or 8 copies still left over, and these tend to gather dust on the bookshelves of the author's home.

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During the week in September that I was attending the Microsoft Build conference and learning all about Windows 8, only one topic made me gloomy: This was the Windows 8 implemention of the Manipulation events. These events provide a high-level application programming interface to touch input, so obviously they are very important.

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About 14 months ago I saw the New York premiere of Philip Glass's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No.2 at Carnegie Hall performed by violinist Robert McDuffie and the Venice Baroque Orchestra. McDuffie had commissioned the Glass work (subtitled "The American Four Seasons") for a program that also included the four violin concertos collected by Antonio Vivaldi as The Four Seasons almost three centuries earlier, and McDuffie took the program on a tour of 30 American cities.

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People who live in New York City often inhabit tiny apartments, and the only reason we tolerate them is that we've exchanged private spaces for public spaces. We can frequently be found not in our apartments but walking around outside, or in a store, or a theater, or a concert hall, or a museum.

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I designed and built several electronic music instruments, including a computer-controlled digital synthesizer capable of generating 80 simultaneous sine curves combined into 40 simple-FM voices.

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I suffer from an affliction where certain words trigger songs to start playing in my head. The word "summertime," for example, triggers the George Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess. (I once told my mother than "Summertime" was my favorite song, and she said "That's funny. I used to sing that song to you when you were an infant and I was carrying you around the apartment.")

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