ezyang's blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

Dudamel visits MIT

April 16, 2010

Conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel will be visiting MIT today to accept the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. Part of the awards ceremony will include a session with Dudamel conducting the MIT Symphony Orchestra; I’ll be on stage playing Oboe and English Horn on Rimsky Korsakov and Mozart. Our regular conductor (Adam Boyles) has been prepping us for this by taking, erm, unusual liberties in tempo and phrasing.

I’m not usually very aware of names of conductors, but I have heard Dudamel’s float across WQXR on occasion. The evening promises to be exciting.

Non sequitur. You can join PDF files together using pdftk input1.pdf input2.pdf input3.pdf cat output output.pdf. You can also use GhostScript, but this results in quality degradation since the file gets converted to PostScript first. (This may also explain why we keep finding 2.5GB PostScript files filling up our server disks.)

3 Comments

  1. Brian
    You can get some more flexibility with pdfpages.
  2. Gabriel
    And pdfpages can be easily used thanks to the pdfjam command-line tools (pdf90, pdfjoin and pdfnup).
  3. Edward Z. Yang
    Brian, interestingly enough, shortly after you commented I found that I needed to include another PDF in my LaTeX document. Excellent!