viaDigita

ABOUT  ::  dave the blogger

Glad you’ve stopped by for a visit at my “home away from home.” Walk around, take a look, see if anything grabs your fancy! This site is a labor of love that I have long wanted to bring into being; I’m pleased as punch that the site has finally become a reality, and I hope you enjoy your visit and find something here that helps you in some way.

Here at viaDigita I share my many varied passions — reading on a wide variety of topics; playing, listening to, and collecting classical music on CDs, LPs, and in digital format; learning and thinking about design; musing over puzzles, board games, and other mental challenges, as well as enjoying various types of digital entertainment; discovering incredible online resources from all corners of the internet; and working with all sorts of software that makes available many possibilities in this life that could only be dreamt of in science fiction when I was a child.

ABOUT  ::  dave the cellist

As you can see from my photo, I am a cellist. Western classical music was my first love, and continues to be central to my happiness. I earned a Bachelor’s degree from Indiana University School of Music, where I studied with cellists Gary Hoffman, Fritz Magg and Janos Starker. Upon graduation, I earned a Master’s degree and a Master’s of Musical Arts degree from Yale School of Music, where I was a student of the great cello teacher, Aldo Parisot. I still perform throughout the year, most recently giving the world premiere of Ding Dong Bell (8 epitaphs for solo cello) by composer Juliana Hall.

I have played at the Tanglewood and Waterloo Music Festivals, as well as the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, NY, where I was also a faculty member at the June in Buffalo composer seminars at SUNY Buffalo. Other performances include Lincoln Center and Merkin Hall in New York City. Here in Connecticut, I’ve performed with the symphonies of New Britain, New Haven, Norwalk, Wallingford, and Waterbury, as well as the Connecticut Chamber Orchestra and Orchestra New England. Long a contemporary music enthusiast, I have performed numerous works by composers of the past 100 years including, among many others, pieces by Martin Bresnick, Benjamin Britten, Earle Brown, Elliott Carter, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Paul Hindemith, Mauricio Kagel, Olivier Messiaen, Vincent Persichetti, Jan Radzynski, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Harvey Sollberger, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, Stefan Wolpe, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, in addition to several pieces by my wife, composer Juliana Hall.

ABOUT  ::  dave the computer guy

In my day job — my second career — I work for a large organization where I maintain a 5,000-page website (which I hand-coded), in addition to responsibilities for forms design and print publications. Although I swore growing up that I would never use a computer, I began my “official” computing career in 1992 during the desktop publishing revolution. My first experience was learning Xerox Ventura Publisher, the cadillac desktop publishing program of the day. Throughout the years, I have come to use all manner of software — graphics, presentation, publishing, web, and too many utilities to remember — as well as various types of hardware — video editing equipment, teleprompter, IBM AT computers with 8MB of RAM to present-day powerhouse boxes with 24-inch high-resolution monitors. Over the past 17 years, I’ve discovered that I like “playing” computers too!

Some of my favorite computer applications have included Acrobat, Dreamweaver, HomeSite, PageMaker, Photo-Paint, Photoshop, TopStyle, Ventura, Visio, and Xara. My newest digital enthusiasm: <oXygen/> XML Author — an outstanding XML code editor with native ability to create XHTML-based websites that comes with a fantastic Subversion client, as well as beautifully-designed modules for diffing both files and folders. I like it so much, I've created this entire site with <oXygen/>!

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