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Listen to “Tsunami Child” by clicking the play button below.

To view a slideshow connected to this song you can go to
http://homepage.mac.com/rueven/iMovieTheater18.html

Ten days in Michigan with brothers and sisters, and then a final week in California, and we returned to Cairo, where again I am teaching my music courses at AUC, and Nelle is tutoring children from a family that she is more and more a part of.

More or less, our routine in Cairo is re-established, and we’ll add more here as we go through the next few weeks and months.

No sure plans yet as to what the December 2006 concert to be held on the mainstage at the Falaki Theatre will entail.  But there are reasons to think that a very fine Arabic violinist and a well-known Qanun player may join me in this program.  If so, it will be a very interesting night.  Worth attending.  But at present, I don’t know the precise date. When I do, I will include it here with more detailed information.

I have now returned to Cairo, Egypt, and I have resumed my teaching duties at the American University in Cairo as well as my recording projects in my little studio at home.

I will post more exact dates and information about the upcoming December concert as soon as I know more.

The link to the podcast will look like this:

Tsunami Child

Sunday mornings are supposed to be laid back, at least here in Heliopolis, the city of the sun. Outside, by 7 am one hears the school children gathering, but our schedule no longer calls for us to go and teach them. The TV opens our world to the terror attacks in India, the chaos of relief work in Pakistan, the bombings in Iraq. But the immediate surroundings seem peaceful as the students in their courtyard back of our house sing the National Anthem, off-key in a mixed chorus of relative pitches. I do think they love their country, and one prays that Ramadan reaches a peaceful end in Egypt, with a happy Eid El Fitr celebration.

Only next Tuesday’s classes to teach, and then I go on a desert trip, with Nelle and the American Research group we often travel with. To Kharga this time (an oasis in the desert) to see results of recent exploration efforts there. A three night trip, I think it is: one night in a hotel and two in tents on the desert sands. We’ve enjoyed such trips in the past, and expect to enjoy this one.

Then back home, to plan and practice for a November 16 concert, and to work harder to understand the process of managing this website. Krister is a terrific help in this: he explains things clearly, and has a lot of patience with this old man. But I do want to learn how to correctly set up a podcast so that subscribers can download it. I completed an mp3 file for the first podcast: it is an explanation of the song Tsunami child, and a rendition of the song. the recording came out clear, I think, but I have not figured out yet how to properly upload it. Got to do some more reading about the steps one must take to properly enclose it in the codes needed to permit people to subscribe to a podcast and download it.

One frustrating thing: my newer iPod, the one I use for photos and for the music downloads, just up and died. I can figure out no way to restart it. Luckily, the older iPod is chugging along, and it contains the material I use in the classroom, so I am still okay for teaching. And also luckily, I took out a one-year insurance policy that will replace the new iPod if I can’t get it to work. That, however, may not be so easy to do, unless I can find someone to carry the machine back to the US.

So it goes. Hope all is well with all of you.

Now if a person opens this page, he or she should be able to download the song by clicking on the title after I do this right.

Once you have uploaded the file (must be an .mp3), remember the exact name, such as buffalo_skinners.mp3.

Now you start a new post (or edit your downloads/listening page) and at the point that you want to place the link for the download, you click on the “Download” button, enter the name of the file and click “OK“. Now you add the actual text for the link (visible to the user) and then click once more on “Download” (which now says “/Download“)...

and you get this:buffalo skinners

To provide the viewers with a file to listen to, the process is almost the same, except you don’t need to press the button a second time. Just write the text with the titel of the song as below, followed by the “listen” button, entering the file name and clicking “OK“:

Listen to muleskinner blues

The Quicktags should be right above the text box while in the writing mode. First you will see a link (quicktags) to the help file. (right click to open it in a new window) Next to the link, you should see the following buttons:

• b: make text bold


• i: make text italicized


• link: add a link to the post


• Podcast: add the link to a podcast


• b-quote: make the text/paragraph indented from the rest


• del: show text as “deleted“, also called strikethrough


• ins: which seems to underline the text(?)


• img: This allows you to place an image in the post


• ul: stands for “un-ordered list”, meaning not numbered but “bulleted”


• ol: stands for “ordered list”, meaning numbered


• il: is the tag to indicate each item (line) in a list


• code: makes text look like this bit of text


• more: this will divide the post/page into more “pages”, handy for long pieces of text


• <: gives this < (cause if you simply use that character, it will mess up the text)


• sup: makes text into ^this


• lookup: this will have you enter a word to look up, and take you to answers.com


• close tags: can be used to close any tags you may have forgotten to close


• IImage Browser: will help you upload, arrange and place images in your posts

Here are some more in depth explanations of some of the less obvious tags.

Most HTML tags work with an “opening tag” and a “closing tag”. The quicktags can be used two ways. You can first click on the tag (for instance “b” to write in bold) and then write the word. then you will notice that the tag looks different. It is waiting for you to close the tag. Sometimes you will forget this, and that is where the tag “Close Tags” comes in handy.

The easier way to use the tags is to simply write the complete post, and then go back and add the tags. Then it is simply a matter of selecting the text and clicking once on the tag. That way, the opening and closing tag are added at the same time.

To add a link, you first need to know the URL (http://www.name_of_site.com/name_of_page) of the link to add, and that you will enter in the pop-up window.

To add a podcast, you will basically do the same as a link, but this time only filling in the name of the podcast itself (not the path to where it is).

To add an image you do pretty much the same as a link again. You must know the URL of the image. In most cases you would ignore this tag and use instead the “IImage Browser” tag.

To make an ordered or un-ordered list just make the list as you want it, placing each item on a new line. When the list is complete, select the complete list and click on “ul” or “ol”. Then select each item in the list separately and click on “li”. Should look like this:

numbered list (ol)

1. item 1
2. item 2
3. item 3

The “more” tag: You can add a “teaser” at the beginning of the post by using the “more” tag. This comment should be inserted immediately after the text that you want to be the teaser. This will cause WordPress to display only the teaser text followed by a link that says “(more…)”. The reader must click on the “(more…)” link to see the rest of the post.

Fill in the blanks as they are here. The password I will send separately.

Click on “connect“. Once the connection has been established, go to Bookmark >> new bookmark. You now have a bookmark which when activated, will place you in the correct folder to place your Podcasts in. Under the bookmark, you have three buttons. One to add a new bookmark (+), one to remove a bookmark (-) and one to edit the selected bookmark. That way you can give it a logical name, and we can make different ones for different folders.

You can simply drag a podcast from you desktop or finder, into the window, and it will begin uploading the file. You can also use the drop down menu (the one showing /wordpress/wp-content... on it) to look in/ upload to other folders. More on that later. We will use other folders for uploading songs for downloading and listening.

Once you have a file uploaded, there are a number of actions you can carry out on it. If you select it, you can “right click” on it or use the actions drop down menu as shown here.

The most often used action will be “delete“, and needs no explanation. Here you can also upload a file (same as dragging it) and create new directories, but that shouldn’t be neccessary.