Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Well, somebody ought to do something. I’m hoping that this is helpful. I’m not sure how these things should be done, but I guess I’m happy for movement in a positive direction. This has been a peeve of mine for a long time, since there is plenty of demand for pornography. You’d think that advertising truthfully would keep these guys just rolling in the money, but somehow that isn’t enough. Instead they have to trick people who are perhaps intentionally trying to avoid porn. It’s a bad deal, and you’d expect there to be a bigger backlash..

I still can’t understand why they keep fighting the addition of a port domain name extension like “xxx” or “porn” for such things. I would think that it would be in everyone’s best interest if such things were clearly labeled.

The bass guitar is much more beautiful than I expected. Sure, it looks nice even from a distance in “normal” light. The inlays and detail work are georgeous, but the part that is hard to see in the pictures is that the finish is translucent black, not just black. That means that the right light will bring out the quilt maple top as warm shades of brown in among the black. The best pictures I found for this guitar are at Elderly Instruments, though the guitar is not an old guitar.

Libby is quite happy. The setup may not be exactly what we want yet, and we may have to adjust the neck a little, but the guitar is beyond our expectations in several important ways. The MK case is excellent also, form-fitting, solid, and plush. It even has an extra-deep accessory pocket.

We’ve not tried it plugged in yet, but as an acoustic instrument it is warm and round-sounding. Not horribly loud, but that’s okay. We hope to try it (next week maybe) in Libby’s Ibanez bass amp. We still have to get used to playing a fretless instrument.

I didn’t blog two of the bands I saw and really got hooked on at Cornerstone.

The first I saw at Northview church in Danville, IN on a night when they had a very small crowd but a pretty good show. This band is Edison Glass from New York State. They were at the impromptu stage, though they deserved a much larger venue. They were notably better than the first time I saw them, and they were good then. It’s very guitar-driven rock, with solid drums (and bell kit!!) and intriguing thin-but-catchy vocals. In addition, they have a sense of melody and harmony that I really like. I often get “When All We Have is Taken” or “Such a State” stuck in my head. It is very hard to escape this music once you’ve been exposed to it. When they played at the impromptu stage, it was a very crowded space. The reader is directed to look into “Dear Honesty” for a good first intro to EG.

The other is one I saw for the first time at Cornerstone was solomonsplendor, a very fine little rock band from Oklahoma. I liked them so much I went twice! Another guitar rock band, they also had overt Christian lyrics (which I approve) and some great songs. I think that they were the victims of poor scheduling or poor promotion. They were more interesting than a lot of the bands I saw there, but had almost no attendence. They were playing on the last day, right after noon and at 3:00. They deserved better. They put on a good show, and the album is good, too. The drummer has a good right foot and a solid feel. I really liked it when they busted out the three-part harmonies, but they really kept the focus on their layered guitar lines and their solid vocals.

Someday both these bands will get the kind of attention they deserve, maybe. In the meantime, we can treat them as our little secret and support them by picking up merch online.

I bought a 2GB SD card (from Tiger Direct for my Sharp Zaurus. My Zaurus was my constant companion and note-taking aid, but not so any more. Now it’s a fancy MP3 player most of the time. I was hoping that I would be able to put a lot of MP3 files (old-time radio, and other podcasts) on it. Sadly, the Zaurus has capacity to work with SD cards up to 1GB. Sadly it was worthless to me. Worse than worthless, really, since the zaurus could not reboot with the SD card in. I took it out one day (when I had to reboot) and I put it in my shirt pocket. Sad little thing, I forgot I had it, and it got put through the wash.

Fast-forward a few weeks and my wife picks up a new digital camera. This camera takes SD cards. She takes some pictures at her brother’s wedding, and leaves her 1GB card behind so that they can print pictures from it. When we get home I suggest we try my 2GB card out of purest optimism. After all, the device is solid-state, and there is some chance that it wasn’t totally ruined. What could it hurt? The crazy thing survived the washer, dried out, and is now a functioning 2GB card.

Why is it that to be a musician these days, you have to look like Ray Bradbury’s “the Illustrated Man”? One upon a time, having every available inch of your body tattooed was sufficient to join a circus as a sideshow freak. Now it seems like every aspiring musician has to be that freak. Not to mention the body piercings.

I don’t mind weird hair, because you can always cut it later. Piercings? Well, when you stop using them, most of them grow back (more or less). the really severe ear guages and lip piercings I’m not sure about (nor some others I won’t discuss). But mostly they will become innocuous when the fad dies out. Tattoos are different. Getting a tattoo is kind of like deciding that you’re going to wear the same tee shirt from now until you die (and be buried in it). I don’t care for them, but once you have one it’s for the rest of your mortal life… and they do not age well.

But hey, they’re your body parts. If a guy decides to get the total tat job done, then it’s his choice. I don’t tell other people what to do with their lips and livers, nor teeth and toenails.

But I thought that the whole point of musicians is that they play music well. Silly me.

In an interesting variation of “blame the victim”, I find that London press has blamed the theft of iPods on the iPods. Sort of. Well, that’s the take. The article I reference gives ways to disguise the iPod. Let us hope that the muggers don’t read slashdot, because that’s where I found the article.

A large number of people have worked very hard to make printing in Linux a tolerable situation. It’s a pretty complex system under the covers, with conversions to and from various formats, battles with vendors to stupidly and stubbornly refuse to help with linux-compatible drivers or at least specifications for linux programmers.

Print setup in linux can be a pain, but thankfully the CUPS people have done a great job of making it easier. The web based CUPS configuration utility has been a great thing for me.

Now we find that the standards groups for Linux printing are uniting and joining the Linux Standard Base. That makes 2006 a more exciting year for Linux.

Now we need some more good news from the Debian world, and some kind of good news about wireless networking drivers and configuration, especially about auto-detection and installation.

Amnesty says Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft are doing bad things in China. There has been a lot of talk among friends and coworkers of late about the way things are going, and we’ve been quite concerned. It’s discouraging, all in all. I haven’t walked a mile in thieir shoes. I worry that law in other countries can go in different directions, and then the guardians of much of our “private” information will be coerced (legally, whether ethically or no) to turn against us. I hope that it never comes to that, but I see that it already has for plenty of others. I suppose, as the old joke goes, “now we’re just talking price.”

I found out the Michael Kelly Guitars existed when I saw some of their lower-end stuff in guitar stores. I was reminded again when my wife went looking for a nice acoustic bass and set her heart on the Dragonfly with the transparent black finish, like this:

So I started looking around and found that it’s not the only pretty guitar. I think that the Duce Pheonix is also quite a beauty:

MKG has sound samples and many pretty pictures online. The Valor Custom looks and sounds very nice. The sound samples made it pretty enticing. I like the pickups, and they certainly do have a lot of capability for different sounds with the two coil tap switches.

It’s a chunky, orange-red sauce with a toucan on the label. What’s not to like?

It has some heat. I wouldn’t consider it to be two-x hot, compared to other habenero sauces. I think that it’s maybe 1/2-x hot compared to a lot of habenero sauces, but the flavor is soooo very nice. I think that they’re comparing it to a non-habenero sauce maybe. That’s the trouble with hot sauces, if they don’t list scoville units you don’t really have a clue what their scale is. This wouldn’t be “warmish” compared to the Blair’s line of sauces, but it is extra hot compared to a lot of the popular vinegar-and-red-pepper sauces. I shouldn’t have compared it to Crystal, Louisana, Tabasco, or Frank’s. It’s not really fair. But you don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve recently found that maybe I’m not a real chili head. I didn’t even know there was a mailing list.

I tend to like tropical sauces anyway, and my favorite for some time has been the Walker’s Woods scotch bonnet sauce. I can’t say whether I which I would pass up for the other.

So far I’ve only had it as the “tip of the finger” test and on a sandwich-wrap-thing (roasted pepper hummas and spinach rolled up in a tortilla). I like very much. I’m going to have to try it on some other foods before I give it the final vote, but I think that it’s well worth a try. I picked it up at a grocery store in Malvern, PA. I am looking forward to trying it on a burger or dog, and then maybe on a pork roast later on. And maybe with fritos. Maybe on eggs. Or coffee cake. Or toast. Or to drink.

We’re harking back to 1990s, and we found some real gems. I think that Wally will love this one, I betcha. As might some of my other friends (you know who you are). There may be a few dotcom references reflected in the material, but some things never change. Some just get worse.

Okay, the little HRP-2m Choromet robot is cute, but I want my 12-meter-tall, flying, rocket-firing, laser-eyed version with a passenger compartment in the head. I guess I’d settle for the 3-meter autonomous one that wants to be my friend and beat up all my enemies.

But in the meantime, this little guy would be a lot of fun for my youngest son.

The Linux Journal provides us with a replay of the now-classic essay Why Python?. If you don’t use python, you should read the essay to understand why you *should* try it. If you already use python, then read it and smile with recognition.

I found a little guitar store and spent a little time playing the guitars and talking with the owner.

The new Washburn guitars look wonderful, and I played around a little unamplified. I did decide to plug in when I found a “Montgomery”. The guitar I played was a few years old, but hardly played and it still had the plastic over (most of) the pick guard. It looked a lot like this:

The price was reasonable, but I’ve not met the conditions for buying a new guitar. I still have a strong urge to run out to a guitar store where they’ll let me play a ES335 (pref the Larry Carlton model), but I’m interested in other hollowbodies also. This one is pretty and sounds good, so a guy could do worse.

I also spotted this cutie on the wall and played with it (not plugged in) for a while. The picture is identical to the guitar I had in my hands:

It is not an expensive guitar, but it’s gorgeous. The lesson, I think, is to have some kind of structure so it doesn’t look like a plank (arch top or beveled sides or something), and to have wood stain covered by some lacquer finish, plain or translucent and colored. People like to see wood grain showing through the finish. Those opaque polyurethane finishes are ugly, or at least lacking in elegance.

You can look online at some of the Cornerstone videos of selected bands. You can appreciate some of the diverse styles present. There was a little of everything. Too bad they don’t have some of the more quirky shows from the Jesus People, Gallery, or Fat Calf tents.

The Norma Jean concert is one of the kind of concert we tended to walk on past. I’m sure they’re very good at what they do.

The Ping video is from Gallery stage. They had a little of everything there.

From linux insider comes an article called “Linux News: International: Linux Revolution: Asian Countries Push Open Source“. By the way, they refer to non-open software as “licensed”. I guess that’s okay. I prefer to consider non-open software and DRMed media as “restricted use”. Think about it. Microsoft windows is a restricted-use operating system, and a Sony CD is restricted-use music, whereas linux is open software. Likewise, the mp3s given away by bands on websites are free music, and anything with DRM is restricted-use music.

I think it make sense.

Anyway, you will see here that Linux is taking off quite well in most places. It has trouble here in the US because of an entrenched monopoly, but it’s not doing so badly here either.

There is an old joke that the most popular operating system in the world is Mac OS X, that Windows is just the most ubiquitous. After all, people who like windows have mostly likely only worked in DOS before windows and have a myopic view.

It turns out that the joke isn’t true either, because windows isn’t even the most ubiquitous. It’s an embedded operating system.

Oh, and there is another interesting fact: do you know that there is much more hardware supported by Debian Linux than Windows? It’s true, but not in the way one might think. There is less PC Desktop Hardware supported by Debian, but more processors and hardware for different kinds of computers (whereas Windows is only Intel desktop computers). For most people, windows has vendor support for a wider range of hardware they care about.

The RIAA case against a mother who paid for internet access, but shared no files at all has been dismissed.

Things I wish I had known before I started in the business:

1 People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.
2 It is better to make an improvement than an impact.
3 To be successful, pick something people need to do and get really good at it.
4 When the bus comes, the people waiting for the bus are the people who get on the bus

The first applies everywhere, in business or ministry or whatever. Employees could learn to care about their subordinates, superiors, and organization. Somehow it’s easy to forget that when you’re working.

The second is particularly good for managers and ministry workers and consultants. The last thing people really need is for you to remake their world in your image. They’ll remember the big impact, but they’ll appreciate the improvements more.

The third I got (perhaps a quote from someone else) from an ex-coworker (Hi Jeff). I think it makes a ton of sense all on its own.

The last I learned the old-fashioned way. When new trends emerge, those who are ready for them are picked up and carried along. Those who have ignored them are left behind. Too many people are left behind because they didn’t prepare for the next bus, or because they prepared for the wrong bus. It seems that being ready for a number of different things is a really good policy. I haven’t always kept up, and I could have lost out in some big ways. It’s a good reminder.

The EFF is offering a list of Frequently Awkward Questions for the Entertainment Industry, with some interesting links. Probably worth exploring if you have any interest in the industry at all.

I just read about the Sony ‘Anti-Used Game’ Patent. I followed up by reading the refutation. Sony says it isn’t so.

But what an interesting idea. I have some advice for all the game console and game manufacturing companies out there: This feature SHOULD exist. Sony should build the technology, and then not use the patent themselves. They should license it either free or under fair and non-discriminatory terms to their competitors.

Some poor kid spends hundreds of dollars collecting games, and then one day drops his console on the floor and it goes kaput. He saves bubblegum money for a good long time and buys a replacement console. Guess what? NONE of none games work, and they will never work again!

Perhaps a parent buys a game station for each of his kids, but whichever station plays the game first is the only one that can every play that game. Ever. Junior tries to take the game and play it in his brother’s room, and it fails utterly. Isn’t it obvious that by playing his game on his brother’s machine, junior is committing an evil, dangerous, illegal act and deserves some kind of frustrating punishment?

What a great feature for your competitors to have.

Hmmm… maybe that’s the desirable effect that DRM will have on the market.

I need to join some open source projects. I may have time to work on them in the future, and need to develop ruby and java chops, and I figure I can best do that in a project where my work will help people and won’t have to be on someone else’s schedule. It wouldn’t hurt for me to do some web work or gui work, either.

I’m thinking that joining an open source project would make me look at code and write code, maybe refactor and TDD more when I’m not at a client site. It would be good for me in several key ways.

But what to do? Which projects look fun or interesting?