I thought of another story for the “What Are The Odds?” category. This one isn’t totally out there random but it’s a wee bit strange.
Through a dating site I met a woman with an interest in classical piano music. I never thought we were going anywhere and I don’t think she did either. But she was nice, and so am I… I think.
The random thing was when we discovered that a year or so earlier we sat next to each at a concert on Park Avenue. It was an all-Busoni event. Attendance was by invitation only. A friend of mine from college was among the performers, so that’s how I got an invite. The woman from the dating site was recording the concert, and she frequently got up to check on the cameras.
We did not speak at the concert but we both remembered each other that year later.
This one I put low on the list of exciting randomness. Classical piano music was our main connection, and that world of pianists and concerts is pretty damn small. I do not have a finger on the pulse of the piano world like I used to but I’d actually be surprised if there were not others at that concert who I know or at least know of.
If I thought that woman and I had a chance at anything it came when she mentioned the Dvorak Piano Concerto and I hummed the main theme of the first movement. I doubt she found anyone else through those dating sites that could hum the tune to that relatively obscure piano concerto.
But it was no magic moment. In fact I think it put her off, looking as it did like I had upstaged her, or flaunted my knowledge of the repertoire when, as I discussed in an earlier post here, doing so has a way of making me look like a pompous ass — even to people who you’d think would have an interest in the subject. …
Another incident of randomness involved someone I know named Dave. I was on 6th Avenue near 42nd Street once when I saw a a DUNBAR armored car drive past. At the time I knew a woman whose last name was Dunbar. Upon seeing that name I thought of her and, in rapid-fire stream of consciousness, remembered the names and faces of everyone else from that little circle of friends which included her. My mind settled on Dave, also a friend of Ms. Dunbar. In my mind I was seeing Dave’s face when I heard someone call my name. I turned to my right and it was him. Right as his face appeared in my mind it was like I summoned him into existence. In the moments after this happened I was alarmed enough about it that I had trouble explaining it to him. I just couldn’t find the words quickly enough to explain this strange incident.
And then there was the matter of the therapist I’d been seeing for 6 months having been and possibly still being friends with the first woman I dated in New York. There, again, though, the world of the arts is pretty small, making that connection not so random as others.
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Blahblahblah.
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Long, laborious, but calming day at the helm of the code monster. I finally got it going on with multiline regex search using Perl one-liners. Somehow the /s and /m switches just never worked for me until today. But I arrived at that eureka moment after getting the search and replace attack with one of my favorite software pieces ever. X-Replace, which I bought years ago, still works on Windows 7. It just swallows text. It’s like the Pac-Man of text. It doesn’t sound like it should be but X-Replace is one of the most fun pieces of software I’ve ever used.
So I got the scraped data into pipe-delimited format for zip codes starting from zero to three. It’s a start. Since putting in the new search engine traffic to the mailboxes thing seems to have jumped by 500 views in the last week, and maybe a lot more since I have not enabled it reporting for the search queries. That’s something. I read somewhere that a benchmark for a money-making niche site is 1000 views a week. I get three or four times that in a day. I used to get 30 times that in a day but things change.
The bartender here just declared that I am an “interesting person.” He seems cool. He’s new here. He will learn, soon enough, that I am always boring as hell and tiresomely solipsistic.
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