| Leonard Slatkin, From Two Directions
Musical education has pretty much been eliminated in much of the United States, and a whole generation has come of age with little or no exposure to classical music. Most of our orchestras have been in trouble for years financially. One: Well, there's still a good deal of intellectual interest in what Michael Tilson Thomas is doing with the San Francisco Symphony and in what Esa-Pekka Salonen did -- and what newly named 26-year-old maestro Gustavo Dudamel may do -- in Los Angeles. Moreover, they play to pretty full houses (as, I would add, does the NSO; I'm not sure that I would write off the orchestral concert as a spent force). But those other conductors offer genuinely engrossing contemporary music (as opposed to Slatkin's penchant for pastiche), deeply personal takes on familiar scores of the past (rather than gross, gimmicky rearrangements such as Mahler's graffiti on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony), festivals of substance and distinction (instead of once-over-lightly looks at film music or "Drums Along the Potomac"), and a fresh energy that has been hard to find in Washington for a long while.
Hot Ticket
In the meantime, Craig can bask in all the high praise from the bench. For starters, Judge Porter goes on for 27 pages without telling a single joke at Craig's expense (unless you count a wry statement of fact, "The Defendant did not flush the toilet"). Jay Leno and David Letterman can't restrain themselves for 27 seconds. Even as he tosses out Craig's arguments, the judge finds a way to toss him compliments as the reason. When Craig's defense team contends their client was rushed, the judge applauds the senator's "calm and methodical" behavior in the pre-plea period. While Craig's lawyers portray a client intimidated by the police, Judge Porter sees "a degree of confidence" in the senator. The judge even brings up Craig's "blue eyes"—twice. As grounds for rejecting the motion, Judge Porter sets out to prove that Craig's boneheaded, career-ending admission of guilt was, in fact, an "intelligent plea." As a result, the ruling is full of praise for Craig's thinking, calling him "an educated adult" and repeatedly noting how smart he is: "The Defendant, a career politician with a college degree, is of, at least, above-average intelligence." If that's the case, Lake Wobegon may finally have found its senator.
Testing boosts Friends Provident's ecommerce apps
Financial service company Friends Provident is using software testing tools to improve the quality of its ecommerce applications. The company's tech team designs, implements and manages ecommerce applications that deliver insurance information to banks and independent financial advisors, and needed a testing tool that could be used by distributed teams. Craig Gibbons, senior IT consultant at Friends Provident told silicon.com: "If you go back about three years, IT at Friends Provident was working in smaller teams with business people to do projects. We started to move away from that as Friends Provident got bigger. "We are working more in global teams and we needed a test management product that worked that way. We were looking for a test management product that we could roll out easily and quickly and would support people working geographically apart," he added.
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