I finally found a Piwigo them that I do not hate. I think I overlooked it because of its bland-sounding name: Bootstrap Darkroom. But it is decent looking and should be a long-term fit for the new photo dump subdomains I set up this week. px.sorabji.com has been around a long time but for some reason (I guess because I paid money for it) I decided to stick with jAlbum, the recalcitrant (to me) photo management software that runs as a piece of desktop software. jAlbum generates flat HTML pages, and I guess I thought this might have some security advantages over PHP-based programs. But it wasn’t worth the hassle of dealing with jAlbum, which is especially clumsy in handling large collections like My Receipts. Piwigo is 100% web-based, like its illustrious predecessor Gallery2, the latter of which was probably my favorite piece of content management software ever. Piwigo also was, or at least appeared to be, the only web-based photo suite that had a way to import the famously complicated Gallery2 database.

Piwigo is not perfect, but I stay with it because it is fast as hell, and with this new theme it’s all good. I can’t stand the URL structure of Piwigo, and it seems to hate or just not want to deal with the .htaccess file. I also cannot seem to find a way to merge separate galleries in a way that brings over the associated descriptions I typed in. But it’s good stuff anyway.

cemeteries.sorabji.com is the other new subdomain, with all the stuff from sorabji.com that I had not updated in a long time. I have so many pictures I’ve never posted but probably should, just to validate the effort of going out there to those big boneyards. I used to make a few bucks as a forensic genealogist, a high-falutin term for cemetery photographer. But that was when i had link rank, and people who were looking for photos from certain cemeteries would find me. My link rank has been flushed down the toilet so what I have to offer doesn’t matter. Maybe it never did.

I’m also going to switch the payphone photos section to that new theme. Yay.

Woke up feeling like nothing sounded right. Everything sounded wrong. I was at the piano, playing some familiar stuff but feeling like everything was wrong. I would look at the keys and see my hands were playing the right notes, but they sounded wrong. I could hear the wrong notes as I hit them, so it’s not like I was deaf to the faults. But what was right sounded wrong. It probably didn’t help that I was playing through something new to me, and that it sounded like garbage. It was a strange arrangement by Earl Wild of a Bach Sarabande. Some of the chords and harmonies were making me wince, and I said right outloud “This sounds like garbage.” But I kept giving it a benefit of the doubt because, after all, it’s Earl Wild I’m talking about. He was one of the finest pianists of the 20th century, and his other arrangements of Rachmaninoff and Gershwin are first rate. But with this Bach piece I just kept asking “What are you doing?”

It is probably just all in my head. It has to be a smoother-sounding piece than I made it out to be, and I will likely hear it for what it is when my head clears itself of whatever is making everything sound so wrong.

It is hardly the first time I’ve been at a piano and felt as if I’d never touched the instrument. But in most instances it is because I had been away from the piano for a while and just needed to get the muscles back in gear. This was like opening my mouth intending to say “hello” but instead saying “glutterpop scrabber cloop.”