Concert of Qawali music

Yesterday evening we went to a Sulha meeting at the Everest Hotel in Beit Jala, since Dorit had to present something there. The atmosphere was quite good, though not so many young Israelis (lots of older ones). More young Palestinians, and also older ones. Lots of drumming and singing.

Then we went to hear a concert by Iqbal Ahmad Khan, featuring the music of Ameer Khusro. As so often with Indian musicians, he attempted to explain the mechanics of the compositions and, as usual, I didn’t understand any of the explanation. But the music was wonderful. I wonder why Indian musicians feel a need to explain their art? Obviously any art inspires because it follows certain rules of aesthetics. We know that the Mona Lisa is a wonderful painting without understanding what makes it so. So they played for an hour and a half and then stopped, and I was moved to tears and left feeling that I hadn’t quite heard enough.

The Rest of the Web

With Facebook accounting for 25% of US pageviews and their conquest of the internet growing by day, it looks like the rest of the web is on the way to becoming terra incognita – a dangerous place with dragons and headless face-chested men. But still a more interesting hangout than Zuckerberg’s insipid blue and white diner. It seems the only hope for the social web is in tumblr.

I wish Tumblr and others success but hold out for opensource blogging software on cheap shared hosts like tubu.net. Here, I’m not in competition for coolness or influence. It’s just what interests me. Facebook, Twitter, Google and these other companies make me feel like I’m their commodity. Most users don’t even seem to mind.

In the 20th century we only had to worry about our credit rating. In the 21st century we increasingly have to think about our “social rating” or however it eventually comes to be defined. In such a world, I prefer to drop out. It may not be true today, but I predict that the hippies of our era will make sure that they remain under the radar of the commercial social networks. Truly we need a new social movement: not a ludite web-rejecting canaille, but a tech-savvy coterie that embraces FOSS and open source distributed social networks such as Appleseed or Diaspora are trying to cook.

Blog editing software

Ubuntu 10.10 doesn’t work with Sun’s weblog publisher for OpenOffice. In the comments, it seems not to have worked since Ubuntu 10.04. I have installed ScribeFire, a Firefox extension. I wonder why WordPress hasn’t found an easier way to set up email-to-blog. That looked like such a laborious process that I gave up. I’m new to ScribeFire, so we’ll see…

Okay – but a little bit buggy. The possibility of editing an original post (rather than publishing anew) is greyed out. And the control box on the right appears and disappears. But at least it publishes.