Today I found out Prince will headline the US Superbowl halftime entertainment on February 4th. I, for one, applaud this choice. He’s a stunningly talented musician / songwriter / performer. I have long been a fan of his royal purple funky weirdness, and this will make the Superbowl all the groovier. It’s up there with the year KISS played during halftime… the Superbowl is a high-definition entertainment extravaganza, and the halftime show should be as over-the-top as humanly possible.
Beginning in early December I started putting in more time with my basses. It’s taken some time to become accustomed to the longer scale length of my five string. And I’m still working on my intonation on the fretless. But overall it’s going pretty well and I am beginning to feel pretty comfortable with it. I have always really preferred the tone of (right hand) fingers on the strings rather than the sound of a pick. One small advantage is that I play classical guitar, so I have reasonably good right hand technique for the three main types of plucking strokes. In addition, I know how to slap and pop, so I have some choices for timbre.
Up to this point, I’ve been playing my basses through my trusty guitar rig, but it’s really not ideal. This week I am going to order myself a bass amp. I’ve been looking at specifications and asking other players for advice. I am planning to order a Behringer Ultrabass BXL3000A. With 300 watts and built-in compression/limiting, it should handle my needs easily.
While I’m fairly certain my favorite creature on the planet is the cuttlefish, I have to say that I’m mighty pleased that evolution has favored us with the Vampyroteuthis infernalis or “vampire squid from Hell”. Take a look at this web page for more information. And hooray for cephalopods!
Einstürzende Neubauten first performed on April 1, 1980 in Berlin. They’re generally considered an “industrial” band, and that is a reasonable description of their sound, although most people think of industrial music as having more of a techno beat, e.g. Nine Inch Nails or Skinny Puppy. I would be tempted to classify their music as being similar to the futurist style of Luigi Russolo, in which the music is inspired by the sounds of human industry.
EN employs wide array of instruments of their own construction, along with found objects and some traditional instruments. Their music has a complex compositional style and the band has invented its own notation system for internal use when arranging and recording. The band’s name Einstürzende Neubauten means “collapsing new buildings” or “new buildings falling down”. Their logo is reputed to be an ancient Toltec design, and it happens to be tattooed on my right arm.
Back in 1988 I was a subscriber to “Guitar Player” magazine. In the back pages of each issue, the editors would review musical submissions from up-and-coming guitar talents. One of the big mentions that year was an enigmatic guitarist who called himself “Buckethead”. It’s generally believed that his real name is Brian Caroll, but he is something of a mystery. Buckethead wears a white plastic mask covering his face and a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on his head. He is 6’6″ tall (over 7 feet tall with the bucket) and never speaks when on stage. And he claims that he was raised by chickens and lived in a chicken coop. Moreover, he is fascinated with Disneyland, particularly the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean. His web site is essentially a strange haunted amusement park full of monsters and robots. Many of his CDs carry this theme as well.
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For the past five years, I have been hosting all of my web sites at webhost4life. They consistently deliver great service and support, to the point where I regularly recommend them to friends, family and professional clients. The major selling points for me have been the level of flexibility with server-side technologies and languages, along with solid database support. In a single host account with them, I house six different web domains, each with databases and email accounts. They offer a simple control panel to manage the implementation of pre-written applications for blogging and merchandise catalogs, but I am always eager to dig in and write my own code (hence the implementation of this site). Webhost4life has been a handy place to write/test/deploy my library of classic ASP, ASP.NET/C#, and PHP code. Overall, I’m very satisfied with their service and have been delighted with their quick-response technical support.
Last week I took my favorite electric guitar to Mike Lull for a set up. On a stringed instrument like a guitar or bass, a “set up” involves things like adjusting the action, intonation, neck relief and other mechanical aspects of the playing geometry. Generally, I do my own guitar work since I have a pretty good idea of how I want things to be on my instruments. But I wanted to have this guitar get a detailed shop setup from Mike. He’s considered to be one of the best – if not THE best – luthier in the Northwest, and his shop rates are actually fairly reasonable considering his reputation for excellence. All in all, I’m delighted with the results, and feel the money was well spent.
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Every electronic device in my house has a different control interface, and anything with a remote control uses a proprietary IR command set per manufacturer (and sometimes per device). As much as I can appreciate the competitive advantage that this provides, it means all my gizmos live in isolation from each other. I can’t use them to the degree I want to. And it means that whole-house automation is a challenging task. What I want to see is a standard USB port on every electronic device in the house, with some kind of control panel or other documented API for control. USB is fast, ubiquitous, and inexpensive to implement. They should be able to discover each other and be controlled from any computer on the network.
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Every item in my home theater setup has a dedicated remote control. There are separate remotes for the TV, cable box, VCR, receiver/amp, and DVD. Each is somewhat capable of acting as sort of a master for the other devices, but with limited functionality and no means of customizing the setup. The especially frustrating part is all the switching between them to first choose the correct video input on the TV, then select the corresponding audio input on the receiver/amp, and then actually control the source in question. They take up space, are difficult to differentiate, and every remote consumes a couple of AA batteries per month.
What I wanted was a good universal remote that could (1) act as the single source of control for every function on every device (2) be programmed with macros to send a series of predefined commands with a single button (3) run on some kind of rechargeable batteries and (4) in spite of all this power, be self-explanatory to first-time users. After over a year of research, I decided to order a Logitech Harmony 880 universal remote. It took some effort to get it programmed, but after a few weeks of working on it I can say it’s been able to meet my requirements.
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