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Ian Sidden

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Updates and Email Subs

May 13, 2016 By Ian Sidden

In the past few months, a lot has been happening.

The Move

My wife and I have moved into a new apartment, and in Germany that requires a remarkable amount of effort. Things like cabinets, window dressings and so on are installed by the renter, so that’s occupied a lot of my attention. Only in the past couple of weeks does it feel like we’re really in, even though we’ve been here officially since the beginning of March.

Email Sub-Weirdness S’more

Simultaneously, the service that’s been providing the email subscriptions on this website has just been awful. It had been sending repeat emails of old posts, and then finally it just stopped. The service is called Feedburner, and it’s a service that Google doesn’t really want to support anymore, so when it breaks, there’s no real recourse other than doing rain dances and hoping it starts working again.

Solution?

I think, I think that I’ve fixed it by changing how emails are sent out, but honestly, this is just hard for me. I know a lot since I’ve been doing this website for longer than I care to add up right now, but it’s not my profession, so I just didn’t know how to move forward here in way that was mostly seamless and didn’t cost me a lot (or anything really, since I basically make nothing from this website).

Email subscribers shouldn’t notice anything. For folks subscribed via RSS, I strongly suggest that you subscribe to this feed:

https://iansidden.com/feed/

The Feedburner feed should keep working for the time being, but I have no idea when it will shut off. It may be years. Nevertheless, I cannot move your RSS subscription for you.

This problem has been vexing me so much that’s it’s caused me to abort any writing attempts, it just felt like a knot that I didn’t know how to untie.

Catching Up

Nevertheless, there were some posts that weren’t sent out via email, and maybe you’d be interested in reading them. Here are the posts that aren’t just updates about performances I was doing:

  1. The Dramatic or the Musical Choice
  2. Singing with Earplugs
  3. Actually Doing the Job
  4. Meditation Practice

I think those four are enough for now if you’re interested. I’m proud of them and hope you enjoy them.

Hitting Publish now. I hope this works.

Filed Under: My News, The Rest of Life Tagged With: Email, Feedburner, Moving

Email sub weirdness

November 9, 2015 By Ian Sidden

For those of you who have subscribed to my site via email, you might have noticed that you’ve been receiving old posts multiple times. I’m aware of the problem, and I’m trying to fix it, but I’m sorry if you’ve felt in any way spammed by this stuff. It’s not intentional, and I’ll figure it out.

Thanks,
Ian

Filed Under: The Rest of Life

Meditation Practice

November 7, 2015 By Ian Sidden

 

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Since I began my morning routine, I’ve dedicated at least ten minutes most mornings to a sitting meditation practice. This is very simple; I sit cross-legged on a pair of pillows and gaze out my living room window. I do not close my eyes. In front of me sits a small Siddhartha Buddha that my mother gave me on a crystal clock that was a gift from a former voice student. Once there, I “meditate”, and a meditation-timer-application on my phone chimes at certain intervals.

In general, I follow the meditation instructions laid out in What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula:

You breathe in and out all day and night, but you are never mindful of it, you never for a second concentrate your mind on it. Now you are going to do just this. Breathe in and out as usual, without any effort or strain. Now, bring your mind to concentrate on your breathing-in and breathing-out; let your mind watch and observe your breathing in and out…Forget all other things, your surroundings, your environment; do not raise or eyes and look at anything. Try to do this for five or ten minutes.

This is a basic concentration exericse. I’m not very good at it, to be perfectly honest. I began meditating off and on about ten years ago, and even so, my mind wanders. I do catch myself reaching for my coffee sometimes or staring at some detritus on the floor before I snap out of my mental wandering and return to the task at hand.

What has changed is my sense of the objective. Before, I was looking for some far out experience. Maybe I might feel euphoria or have some blinding insight or even a hallucination. Nowadays, I’m just trying to be present and dodge the self-congratulatory or self-deprecating thoughts that tend to arise and take me out of my immediate surroundings. Whether good or bad, those self-referential thoughts vainly arise to build some kind of edifice of the self that is permanent and unchanging.

When they become too much, I’ve learned to shut them down momentary with a loud mental “HERE” that reconnects me to the present. When I’m successful at this, it proves to me the words of Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche:

As water clears when undisturbed, mind clears when undisturbed.

And from this point, if I ride this state of calm well enough, any insights tend to feel minor and obvious, and they are known without the mental trumpets blaring congratulations. It’s more of an internalized “huh” or check mark, and then I move on, knowing more clearly that many meditation practicioners have tread similar paths before and know things that I currently don’t but someday might.

I write this in hopes that, if you have considered meditation, you give it a try. Now, I do have a Buddhist perspective, but you don’t need to worry yourself about that. Meditation is not strictly Buddhist or religious in nature. You don’t even need to sit cross-legged unless you want to.
It’s very basic, and I suppose at it’s core it’s just you trying to be patient with yourself for a set amount of time with as few external distractions as possible.

This should be possible, but as I can attest, it’s harder to do once attempted. Many people after giving up the practice say something along the lines of “Meditation isn’t for me. I’m not the type. I tried, and it didn’t work.” But that’s more or less true for everybody. Sitting quietly with yourself is challenging, and it’s especially challenging if you have some goal in mind for what you want meditation to do to you.

There’s no real goal except those that you set for yourself, and any waypoints I’ve reached have felt very mild. I will not list any potential external benefits of meditation beyond saying this: there is something worthwhile about it. But it’s not a drug. It’s not going to fix your life in one go. It’s not going to make you a bunch of money. It can be easy some days and hard on others. It can be deadly boring. It is challenging. It can be sad or happy or frustrating. It can be nothing at all.

It’s just life, more quietly lived, in the present, in your own head, where you always are.

Filed Under: Craft, The Rest of Life Tagged With: Meditation

Thoughts on Playlists in Apple Music

And I've added the "New Listener" Playlist to Apple Music

July 3, 2015 By Ian Sidden

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I just updated my giant post “Don’t Know Where to Start with Classical Music? Start here” with a playlist made in Apple Music. If you’re – like me – an early adopter of Apple Music and want to try it out, then here’s the playlist link directly. Have fun!

A few thoughts on Apple Music playlists so far.

Their Curated Playlists are Great

In general, I like it. It’s a solid streaming service, and I’ve been able to find all the music I could want (absent a few notable exceptions). It’s very easy to find new music as well. As I write this, I’m listening to a curated playlist for people working. Right away, I’m being introduced to some new stuff, and because it’s human curated, there tends to be a logical and fun assembly.

I honestly think these playlists are Apple Music’s greatest strength. Integration with iPhones and Macs and our iTunes libraries is fine great etc., but we’ve been living with streaming services for a few years, and it’s hardly been a giant imposition to open a different application to stream stuff. But the playlists are very nice, and I’ve heard they’re what made Beats Music special.

Making Playlists in Apple Music: Too Hard

However – and it’s a big “however” – making playlists is way too complicated at this point.

For one, there’s no way to import playlists from other services. I recreated the above playlist myself, and it took about 45 minutes. There are public playlists on Spotify that are many times longer than that, which individuals have been creating for years. Do we expect their owner’s to actually recreate them by hand in Apple Music? No.

The question then arises; why is it so hard to move playlists? Here’s why. Songs that you find in Apple Music can’t be added directly to playlists. They must first be added to your library and then added to playlists. This is not how Spotify – for example – works. I can add music to any playlist in Spotify and not add it to my larger library. Because of this limitation in Apple Music, imported XML playlist files can’t just auto add songs to playlists because those songs aren’t in the user’s library yet.

If you do want to create a playlist, as I just did, then you have to navigate back and forth between the “My Music” and “New” tabs in iTunes. Using the search field while in “My Music” searches your library by default. You must then click the button to specify that you want to search Apple Music, which will then take you to a page with your results. The search field is then erased, so if you want to refine your search, you have to retype everything.

Banging your head yet?

Mutually exclusive

Once you find what you want, you must first add it to your library before adding it to a playlist (even though you are presented with the option to add it to a playlist!!!) by clicking the plus symbol. Then you go to the track and click the three dots (don’t right click, because you’ll get a different menu and different playlist options), and then you can add to a playlist.

Along the way, you might run into a few bugs, which I won’t go into here, but suffice it to say, they slowed me down.

Once you have the playlist, you can share it with a link. There’s no embedding yet, which is a drag, and I don’t know if we’ll ever get that. I hope we do. I also can’t just “publish” it somehow within Apple Music for other people to stumble upon. That’s also a drag. I’ve found some really good playlists made by users in Spotify, and I’d like this to work a little more seamlessly.

Caveats

I like the service. I really do. I like that my wife and I can have a family account that’s cheap. I’m glad I can mix my own recordings and the streamed ones. I love the playlists. I’m glad they’re paying musicians slightly better. There’s a lot of stuff to listen to. Metadata is decent (I want to write a post about this). I even dig the new icon. All good stuff.

But it has a ways to go yet, and I’m hoping they’re going to iterate it quickly.

Filed Under: About the Music, The Rest of Life Tagged With: apple music, classical music, itunes, new listeners, playlists, spotify

Asterix und Obelix Morning

February 21, 2015 By Ian Sidden

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My colleagues keep mentioning Asterix und Obelix, so I figured this would be a good next step after Calvin und Hobbes.

Filed Under: The Rest of Life Tagged With: asterix und obelix, calvin und hobbes, German, language, miracle morning

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About Ian

Ian Sidden is currently a baritone member of the Theater Dortmund Opera chorus. Read More…

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