For many years I visited Frankfurt Musikmesse. Roughly speaking, Musikmesse is Europe’s equivalent of the NAMM show in the US.
Folks from my company would stay north of Frankfurt at the Mövenpick Hotel in Oberursel. It was more affordable and very comfortable. The front desk staff remained the same for many years. They got to know us—the obviously American, odd musician types—and were very friendly.
A couple years ago, I’d scheduled to fly home on Sunday, in case I needed to have more meetings on Saturday. The meetings never materialized, and I took it as a free day. The April weather was unseasonably warm. I walked into Oberursel’s small “downtown” and explored it like I never had before. At some point I ended up wandering into paths that led through parks and open fields. It was very beautiful.
For some reason CLI popped into my head the other day.
CLI is the 808x instruction to clear maskable interrupts. If you’re writing a routine to service a hardware interrupt, you do a CLI early in your routine — to prevent another hardware interrupt from causing your routine to be re-entered. Neglecting this invites the most delightful form of bug, the intermittent bug.
I played trombone and piano in high school. I played electronic keyboards (including a Moog Prodigy, my first synth) in a couple bands. I wasn’t a very good musician but I enjoyed it.
I went to Oberlin College 1982–1986. I did a major in philosophy and a minor in religion. Although the Oberlin Conservatory didn’t offer a major in electronic or computer music back then, I did a major’s worth of those courses. I took just two computer science courses: assembly language and Pascal. That turned out to be good preparation for teaching myself C later.
