Intraday Charts
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
-- Georgia O'Keeffe
Friday, December 8, 2000
Three years ago: Lantern Committee
This morning I still had no idea what would be happening this weekend. I sent mail to Jack to ask him to let me know -- would he come down? There would be a gathering of some Vanguard friends at "A Hard Day's Night" for Karrie's 59.5 birthday that I'd like to go to.
He phoned in the middle of the afternoon. He'd rather stick around Bellingham, so he can visit A----. They'd had the hearing (yesterday, I guess), and she got twenty two more days! Unless they find a bed for her in a drug rehab place, she'll be there until the end of the month. She's angry, of course, and sees it as everyone being against her. He's been visiting her every day, I think.
So I said I'd come up in the evening. Sometimes I've brought my clothes and things with me even when I don't know that I'm definitely going to see Jack, but this time I hadn't done that. So going back to Seattle, packing, then hitting the road, would delay me for sure.
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Today at work, we turned on intraday charting for the first time, for public access. We'd had internal testing pages going for a while, of course. Intraday charting means that each interval is five minutes, or ten, or an hour, rather than one day or longer. This is valuable to day traders, I guess, though our data is delayed so any day traders shouldn't be depending on it.
In my year plus at StockCharts.com, I've come to see that data is like crack -- there's no such thing as "enough." People always want more detail, faster, and of course it should be free.
The new charts are very cool, and Chip was very pleased with it all working, finally! We'd been delayed in turning this on, not because of problems in our code, but because a change in the way we get our data that was supposed to be a big improvement suddenly made things worse! A lot of thrashing, with email and phone calls to our provider. Finally Chip discovered what was causing the problem -- a misconfiguration on the server they'd given us. Bogus!
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I drove home (took an hour because I left work a little later than normal), packed, ate two slices of Georgina's pizza hurridly (but it was still very tasty), refueled the car also (the nice Chinese lady there commented on not seeing me lately, and I didn't have the heart to say it was because her gasoline is too expensive), then hit the highway.
When I got close to Bellingham, I was able to turn the radio to CBC2, "Classics and Beyond." A saxophone soloist was playing a classical-jazzy piece, accompanied by a piano. Afterwards it became clear that the show, from the Glenn Gould studio, was profiling the pianist, and the piece was called the Hot Sonata, by Schulhoff, from the thirties. I liked it! Here's an excerpt from the review by Peter Bates:
Schulhoff's Hot Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano (Koch 3-1232-2) is his most mature jazz piece. Marked by strong rhythms and a guffawing saxophone that almost sounds improvised, this piece is George Gershwin on absinthe. Saxophonist Detlef Bensmann plays a languorous legato as well as a wailing arpeggio in masterful syncopation to Lamke's piano riffs. Schulhoff once boasted to his publisher that he was the inventor of "classical jazz." With this piece, he may be the first classical-jazz fusionist, skillfully blending an upbeat expressionist tempo with neo-classical precision. Modern fusionists like Stanley Myers and Richard Rodney Bennett continue this tradition in their saxophone concertos.
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 Jack came downstairs when he heard me come in the front door. He gave me a hug and a kiss, then pointed out a bunch of pink carnations, precariously balanced in a small juice glass. "For me?" I exclaimed coyly, "how nice!" He said I deserved them because of last weekend being a tough time.
Plus, he'd made sure there was sufficient diet soda cold in the refrigerator. Yay! We made it an early night, since he was tired from going bowling with the science fiction club the night before. But we kept the CD changer going fairly loud, to drown out the party next door. I stayed up later than Jack, reading by flashlight.
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