Blogging Ottinger (tim)

My youngest has picked this one out for the blog. It’s really beautiful, and I could see picking one up. It’s already got the stop tailpiece and the solid block in the center, so that’s some similarity to the ES-335, I guess. It has a wonderful look, and grover tuners. I guy could do sooo much worse. I can see that I need to make a trip down to washburn and see what they’re up to. You can visit them by clicking on the link or guitar: Washburn

Today’s quote of the day was too funny:

If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn’t be enough to go around.
Christina Stead (1903 - 1983), House of All Nations (1938) “Credo”

Here’s one from a local Chicago retailer (and a big major guitar chain) Washburn.

And why not? She’s cute!!!

Here’s is a real beauty for those who pop in to see my latest guitar finds. Oh, if only I could afford to collect the guitars the way I collect the pictures. I guess I’d need to be quite the guitar player to justify a collection like that!

The latest is from Eastman Guitars:

It is a model T180 Double Cutaway hollowbody jazz guitar. Doesn’t it look like it needs to be held?

Salres are booming because people are downloading. There have got to be a million bloggers saying “I told you so.” Now if the labels can release interesting music, we’ll be all set. My suspicion is that a lot of the music sales are the back catalog of 60s, 70s, and 80s music.

The internet may be full of temptations and problems and distractions, but it is also a very great blessing.

When one is away from home, one has contact with family and friends through email and chat and potentially through skype or vonage soft phones. That is a good thing. Also, when in a strange place where one’s native language is not spoken in the local congregations, it brings sermons and bible readings through MP3 files or whatever streaming media.

I have heard pastors talking about the internet as a great evil, and I take exception to that. It is not a force at all, and not an evil at all. It is a means of connection. One can connect to good things or bad things. There are sites that are not healthy and good, but there are others which are very fine. There are chats with remote wives and children, and then there are sex chats with strangers. There are predators, but there are others who make useful software or educational facilities available to the everyday person for no charge at all — out of the goodness of their hearts.

The only good and only evil on the internet is the evil that is in the hearts of those who are using the internet. There is only virtue and evil in people, in their intentions and actions. The internet is a powerful thing, but it has no agenda. It is amoral, just as a car can be used to drive the family to church or maybe to visit a loved one in the hospital or it can be used to help access reach a drug dealer or prostitute. The internet is a vehicle. It’s up to us to drive wisely.

Pastors who speak against the internet are risking the alienation of those who have a better handle on what’s really going on. You never want to “flip the bozo bit” — to be so clearly and obviously wrong that the congregation quits listening to you. We’ve already seen this with radio and television and even the automobile — pastors have been so dead-set against human progress and access to the undesirable that they’ve missed the point entirely and have lost the voice that they could have had. If a pastor is against poor content, let him provide good content. More sermon podcasts, more church sites, more promotion of charitable causes, more blogs on the Christian life. In this way, the ratio of evil-to-good is diminished, and the likelihood of overcoming evil with good is increased.

Let’s not refuse change — that is the sin that the church leaders had in Christ’s day. They preserved traditions against the will of God, and persecuted those who understood how to live “in the world and not of it”. Can we accept the idea that we should have access to other people, good and bad, and that they should have access to us? We can’t closet-in the gospel. Our light should shine everywhere, should it not? Our city should be on a hill?

A pastor discusses the blessedness of peacemakers, the pacifist Jesus, and the Just War Doctrine. This is a pretty good application of biblical principles and the Augustinian understanding of a “just war”. It raises some good questions and issues.

This is the first sermon I’ve heard from this particular pastor. It probably won’t be the last.

The main things that I loved visiting were the town square (Rynek) and the Cathedral Island (Ostrow Tumski, but with an accent over the second O). A quick google image search can show you what they look like, but not really how they feel.

The city is very busy. There is a lot of foot traffic, automobile traffic, bus traffic, and electric train routes going everywhere. It looks like someone could live here quite comfortably with no automobile at all. The taxis are very fast, which might give you a white-knuckle experience the first time or two, but they are very skillful also. You can trust them.

In the middle of the city is the Rynek, which is beautiful, but which is also a great big party going on all the time. People are walking, sight-seeing, meeting friends, laughing, dating, watching the street performers, and eating and drinking. There is a lot of outdoor seating, and the weekends draw very large crowds of diners. There is a lot of Italian and Greek food on the square, and some traditional Polish. For several blocks outside the square there is an abundance of good food and shops. One of the best we found was only a block or two away and had killer pierogi (meat & veg dumplings). A hazard of being here is that all the food is comfort food, and one can easily order more than he needs and then finish it all.

Contrast this to Cathedral Island (Ostrow Tumski) where there are a number of Catholic cathedrals all nearly butted together. The churches and art are very old and beautiful. Clearly I missed out on a lot of the wonder by not being able to read the plaques and not knowing the stories behind the men who were commemorated with statues. A guide might have been useful. The feeling on the island and on the park across the river is completely peaceful. It is beautiful, and frozen in time.

So one can choose their own way to unwind by visiting either of these two places. Between the two are many shops, including specialty pastry shops and icecream stops. It’s hard to go wrong.

When in poland, try the Bigos. Really. Wonderful stuff. It’s a “hunter’s stew” but you would recognize as a kind of sauerkraut over pork (or other meat). It’s quite nice, if you like sauerkraut (polish: kapusta) at all. I love it. My wife makes something very much like it from time to time, and we all overeat those nights. I had no idea it had a particular name. Ah, the wonders of travel.

Oh, and looky here! The wikipedia has a cookbook!. I’m betting that my wife will love this! I’m betting she can submit a few recipies of her own.

I’ve had a few meals in Wroclaw (vrrrrot-slaf) and actually they’ve all been far too good. I struggle to not eat far too much, often in vain. One hopes one will still fit on the plane for the ride home.

On a guitar thing this weekend.

Here’s one really beautiful Belman Albatross Grand

Larry Carlton’s new album, Fire Wire, is available and he’s got some samples up on the site. This sounds like some mighty tasty stuff to me, but that’s not surprising. This one has a nice edge to it, and yet another neat break from the adult contempory smooth jazz scene. Larry C’s last album (Sapphire Blue) was a very bluesy album, another departure from the smooth jazz world. He’s showing us that he’s not lost his versatility and punch. It makes me want to learn a lot more about guitar playing, and also makes me want a Gibson hollowbody. What great sounds!

I’ve become somewhat fond of CDconnection.com, not only as a music store but as a reasearch tool. Try it sometime. Type in the name of an artist who is known to have done studio work and you’ll find something approximating a complete catalog.

I thought that Linux on an iPod was pretty cool, but maybe RockBox is an even cooler thing. It’s a total replacement for the iPod’s software… or ArchOs, or just about anything you can upgrade through flash. If that’s an overstatement, it’s not all that much wrong.

The idea of having RockBox is almost enough to get me to sink my hard-earned sawbucks into an iPod. Right now, I already have ogg playing on my Zaurus, though it’s not as big on storage (flash only : cf and sd) and I can’t do fast-foward within a song (only jumps by songs). So I have some incentive to move up to a hard-disk based player. Now I have another good reason.

This is from Tym Guitars

I guess you’re guaranteed that the guitar will go with whatever you’re wearing for the show.

Today’s honey comes from Eastwood Guitars. It looks like it would be fun to play. Real fun.

I was listening to the Linux Link Tech Show’s March 15 show with Rick Timmis (I think). He was talking about how Microsoft support people recommend a complete wipe and reinstall of the servers once per year and often they schedule server reboots to happen overnight.

It seems that wiping out a hard disk and completely reinstalling the OS and all software, and all data, and then making it run is a disaster recovery process. By that measure, running windows for a whole year is a disaster!!

He contrasted it with a linux-based server customer who didn’t call back for a year. When they finally checked the uptime on the server, it had been in steady service (without ANY downtime) for nearly 500 days. They never called because they never needed anything.

Add to that the far better user experience of a modern linux desktop and you start to wonder why on earth people buy windows. Oh, yeah, it’s because the distribution channels don’t get much of a choice.

Well, if we can beat that barrier, there’s no stopping Linux. It’s already more credible, more stable, more powerful, cheaper, and more reliable than windows AND it’s an open world — no single vendor can cage you in. Freedom and quality at the same time… whooda figgered?

Something Awful is right, but this was just too funny for me (an old B horror movie nut) to pass up:

:-)

A cat with a pegleg walks into a tavern, and says “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.”

Windows Users:

You need VirtuaWin. Without it, you are not getting the advantage of multiple desktops, and the organization that brings to your workday. You may not know you need it, but you do.

The idea is that you have “places” to put things. You can keep your email open on desktop #4 where you don’t even see it most of the time. Throw your web browser on #3. Now you can instantly access them with hotkeys, without the need to find them on the task bar and navigate with mouse. You can have your programming on one screen and your test-runner on the other. You can have a spreadsheet on #1 and a document on #2, and all of them full-screen.

Better yet, you can set your chat window to show on all desktops, so you don’t miss a message.

You don’t think you need this, but once you’re used to it, you’re not going to want to go back. It’s like firefox and openoffice — you’ll be spoiled with non-M$ goodness.

Linux Users:

Given VirtuaWin and cygwin, you can amost do work in Windows. If it only weren’t for that seriously crummy console window (which I hate so severely). Why can’t they make a good command line window? You’d think it wouldn’t be so hard. Maybe we should make one, if it didn’t mean we have to code in windows.

The upside is that sometimes you see connections and similarities and patterns that others don’t. The downside is that you have trouble keeping similar things (similar in appearance, spelling, location, usage) separate in your head. Today I needed to pull down some code from the repository. I tried apt-get update but I was on windows and it was the wrong repo update command anyway. So then I type svk up which is the right domain, wrong system. Finally I settle on svn up and that works.