Dorkage goes Personal

Find more photos like this on Tix-R-Us Presenters Network

It is a good thing to step outside of one’s ordinary activities and get a different perception of the world. This slideshow is to remind that there are other ways to see, and that life is a beautiful precious gift and we are all a part of it. Peace

At Portland Barcamp this weekend, I caught the tail end of a session on patents. I didn’t know that Google has put all patents online. Sheesh! I gotta get out of my tracks and explore more. If you want to search for patents you go to Google and then hit the even more>> menu option at the bottom of the more menu. At the left you can see a light bulb icon beside “Patent Search” OK… so you just type “Colleen Dick” in the simple search bar and voila,
MY PATENT!

How do I happen to hold a patent? A long time ago I implemented cascading bandpass filters for speech on an embedded Texas Instruments speech chip –the same chip that powered the Speak ‘n’ Spell toy. We had to listen to this mechanical voice over and over to test it and we noted that it really messed up certain foreign-derived words that were not in its Exceptions Dictionary, particularly names. Particularly, the name of the founder of our company….. NOT good for demos!

We were laughing at the way the thing pronounced our founder’s name one day at lunch. See the patent and use your imagination and you can figure out for yourself what the joke was. I said to my team, “we need to allow the user to add stuff to the exceptions dictionary.” So we kicked around a few ideas. I thought about how you would architect it, and that afternoon I spec’d out a rough requirements document for it. It was almost a joke, because we knew our boss would never approve of building anything useful, and certainly nothing proposed by an engineer. We weren’t in marketing. All product ideas have to come from marketing. That’s the way corporations work. And marketing could not wrap their heads around this one.

That specs document languished on the file server for nearly a year. Meanwhile I was off on maternity leave and had not been to work for two or three weeks. What I didn’t expect was a Saturday morning phone call at home from one of the company patent attorneys. When a lawyer phones YOU before you’ve even sucked down your first Joe of the day your first thought is I deny everything! But he was all about the audio editor specification. He informed me that the company was seeking a patent on it, and as per my conditions of employment all monetary benefits from it would be assigned to my employer, but as the original inventor/designer I would get the honor of having my name on the patent, I remembered having written it, had no trouble digging up the theory of operation (because to me it was obvious) and thinking it might be a good idea. He asked permission to drive over to my house immediately and interview me. Sheesh maybe he thought somebody else was trying to patent the same thing to do it that quickly on a Saturday! It must have been about a 60 mile trip for him, but there he was about an hour later. There in my humble dining room with my little baby, he asked me a number of more detailed questions about how the program worked etc. Based on that he wrote up and submitted the patent in legalese as you see it now.

Well of course I asked someone from my team what was going on. My work mates informed me that this new manager had come onboard and started poking around and found my spec. Furthermore, this manager was championing my audio dictionary editor, had found someone in marketing to determine that there was a need for this functionality, and had already allocated several members of his team to work to productize it. I thought great, cool. Why does everyone seem to dislike this guy?

I soon found out. Apparently this ambitious new manager had initiated the patent process on my phonemic editor. He had proposed himself listed as the inventor but the attorney had smelled a rat. I’m guessing the manager was not answering the questions like the real inventor would. My buds told me the lawyer had been snooping around in the cubes and asking people questions about it. They just produced my original document for him. The name on the document and the time stamp clinched it.

It took months, but when the patent finally came through, the patent attorney took great pleasure in visiting Cubeville and hand delivering a copy to that manager’s desk. Nobody told him that his name had been rubbed out and replaced by mine (hehehehe) I wish I’d seen the look on his face when he opened that! Not another word was ever said about it; I received no recognition for it in the company (monetary or other,) but it certainly dresses up my resume!

The cousins collaborated and built this snow sculpture in Kansas over the Christmas break. Mulligan and Ida, Jean, Connor, Eamon, and Eleanor I, and Keegan and Eleanor II all had a hand in it. Keegan and Eleanor II’s mom is an artist and Mulligan and Ida’s dad is as well, so there is art in some of the cousins’ genes; and the ones that don’t have it (basically my crew) are still useful as snow packers. This project was a long time coming, primarily due to lack of sculpting supplies in visits past. This was the first visit to Kansas in years where the weather has been remotely like I remember Kansas winters–cold and usually snowy. The four or five winters prior to 2007 have been snow-free and balmy enough for me to run outdoors with no jacket. I felt stupid lugging a down jacket along. Oh well, the weather got us this year. The sculpture is meant to be reminiscent of the Easter Island heads. Even though they built it at Christmas, for one thing the digital photo didn’t make it out of the dregs of Ellie’s photo archives to my ready collection quickly. I decided to post it around Easter. Here it is for your viewing pleasure.

Way back in 1989 my good friend Laura Zaerr fiddler Roy Rowland, and Tom Creelan (R.I.P.) and myself were a band called Heather Breeze. We played for a couple of years but babies, careers, relationships and geography kind of got in the way. In 1995 when I was living in Mexico, Laura regrouped with three other musicians to form Village Green. I found out about the band and wanted to be in it but at that time they didn’t think they could use me. So I got hired by The Nettles and played high energy dance music with them for five years. Meanwhile Village Green lost their box player and vocal bottom when she moved to Hawaii. After I had parted from the Nettles, Village Green decided they wanted me after all, so for the past 2.5 years we have been reworking the arrangements a few at a time to make some space for a piper. This winter we lost our flute player — her career is taking off and she just can’t spare the time. So Village Green is down to a threesome. That’s the three of us performing at the 2008 Scottish Society’s Robert Burns supper in Albany — me, Laura, and Kathryn Ronnenberg, a talented multi-instrumentalist and a fine singer. I’m embarrassed to say Village Green doesn’t even have a website. We had a stub on my server before the big meltdown, and there was some mention of us on Laura’s website. We may be changing our name to something else since it’s not really the same band as in 2000 when the first Village Green CD “Swan in the Evening” came out. There will be audio samples soon I promise.

I’ve recently gone back to my “roots” and started attending the Corvallis Celtic Session at the eggsistential Sunnyside up Cafe in Corvallis. It is a great friendly session; there are some strong regulars that make it fun and varied, and I recommend the food if you are hungry. Originally I didn’t know the name of the bloke pictured playing fiddle, but I found out that his name is Mark Phillips. I plan to make it a regular occurrence and of course it’s a recurring event on the WazzupLocal community calendar. By the time you read this the specific event may be expired but it’s every Friday at sixish. And the next time I go I will gift everyone with a pretty ABC2ps version of Fire in the F-Hole.
ABC is a music notation computer program developed for shlepping ASCII text files of tunes around the internet easily, and ABC2ps processes ABC files into standard music notation suitable for printing. I ABC-ified a number of my tunes when we lived in Montana and I’m sure they are around here somewhere. I’m gonna dig ‘em out and start giving them out. Life without music isn’t worth living!!

Find more music like this on Tix•R•Us Presenters Network

I built this widget on the T.P.N and then exported it to the blog. This is an MP3 version of our Christmas Download. You can REALLY tell the difference between .mp3 and .wav in classical music. The clarinet does not have the trueness and depth of tone and the piano sounds kind of flat and dingly, especially when doing mathematically complex intervals like minor seconds. But anyway, I thought I’d spread it to the blog.

Colleen Dick and son Connor Dick’s recording of Debussy’s Primier Rhapsody for clarinet and piano is yours for the downloading. The online Free Dictionary defines the musical rhapsody form as an irregular form incorporating improvisation. Debussy’s Rhapsody certainly fills the bill–it moves from typical Debussy soft and dreamy to playful stacatto with a little game of tag between the clarinet and piano. Connor is a 22 year old clarinet performance major at the University of Oregon, and Colleen has logged years as an accompanist since seventh grade. (We aren’t even going to say how many years that is.) Thanks for letting us share our own music with you. BTW, the background for this graphic is, in fact, a chunk of the first page of the actual music.  Did you think a geek like me would phony it up with just any old music?   The link points to the .wav version.  The .wav is better quality than the compresed mp3 format but is is quite a bandwidth and space hog.   If smaller is what you’re looking for see the widgetized mp3 version in the other post.