\t\t\t\tI thought of another story for the \u201cWhat Are The Odds?\u201d category. This one isn\u2019t totally out there random but it\u2019s a wee bit strange.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Through a dating site I met a woman with an interest in classical piano music. I never thought we were going anywhere and I don\u2019t think she did either. But she was nice, and so am I\u2026 I think.<\/p>\n
\u00a0The 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
\u00a0We did not speak at the concert but we both remembered each other that year later.<\/p>\n
\u00a0This 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\u2019d actually be surprised if there were not others at that concert who I know or at least know of. <\/p>\n
\u00a0If 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.<\/p>\n
\u00a0But 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\u2019d think would have an interest in the subject. \u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n
\u00a0Another 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\u2019s 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\u2019t find the words quickly enough to explain this strange incident.<\/p>\n
\u00a0And then there was the matter of the therapist I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n
\u00a0Blahblahblah.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n
\u00a0Long, 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\u2019s like the Pac-Man of text. It doesn\u2019t sound like it should be but X-Replace is one of the most fun pieces of software I\u2019ve ever used.<\/p>\n
\u00a0So I got the scraped data into pipe-delimited format for zip codes starting from zero to three. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u00a0The bartender here just declared that I am an \u201cinteresting person.\u201d He seems cool. He\u2019s new here. He will learn, soon enough, that I am always boring as hell and tiresomely solipsistic.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought of another story for the \u201cWhat Are The Odds?\u201d category. This one isn\u2019t totally out there random but it\u2019s a wee bit strange. \u00a0Through a dating site I met a woman with an interest in classical piano music. I never thought we were going anywhere and I don\u2019t think she did either. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-1VZ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}