studioblīp

My friend Maura approached Ryan, my bandmate in (and the frontman of) The Franklin Kite and me before her recent wedding to ask if we’d help her flesh out and perform a song with her at her wedding reception as a gift to her husband and our other great friend, Joe.  Ryan and I were, of course, stoked.  We only got one full-group writing/rehearsal session in before the reception, but I think it came together really well.  Maura wrote the melody and played violin, Ryan the lyrics and guitar, and I did some arrangement and the usual laptop jockeying.

After the wedding a couple of friends asked about the tune and I thought it would be fun to put together a quick recording of it to commemorate the event, which was a truly amazing weekend with great friends new and old.  With Ryan moving to Durham, England three weeks after the wedding and Maura with her typically hectic travel schedule, I managed to sit them both down, individually, for about 45 minutes in my apartment to get their tracks laid down.  Hope you enjoy listening to the tune at least some small fraction of the amount we enjoyed writing it.

So here’s the Mp3… right click to download it.  It’s even got cover art if you pull it into iTunes.  I know.  So profesh.

Some Will Dream

Update: I’ve been using named_scope for a bit longer now and totally don’t agree with my former self about naming conventions when creating named_scopes.  I now do what comes natural.  Love, me.

I’ve been using the new-ish Rails feature named_scope for a couple days now, and I love it.  The expressiveness was something I really missed jumping from OpenACS, a “framework” where you’re encouraged to write powerful queries in raw SQL.  So you get the best of both worlds: modular business logic and (relatively) powerful queries.  I wish Rails had more features to enable INNER JOINs using finders in a way that still allows the pre-fetching of associated objects, but that’s another matter entirely.  Some observations, though:

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At work, we use Oracle’s calendaring software. Oracle is nice because it can be synced via SyncML. This worked great with my Treo thanks to Synthesis’ PalmOS client software. But sadly, my iPhone is hopelessly tethered to Apple iCal. Ironically an iPhone on PC would have no problems since you can sync an iPhone with Outlook, and sync Outlook with Oracle Calendar via SyncML. But being attached to iCal is a decided problem. It’s just not used by enough corporate types that it gets that kind of attention. The only sync tool I found, Spanning Sync, hooked iCal up to Google Calendar which is a big win for me, since I do my personal calendar stuff in Google Calendar. So we’re 50% of the way to having my calendaring life mobile.

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This is an article I wrote back in May for the forthcoming issue of the North Atlantic Audi Club newsletter, Hubcentric.

Most people have the good sense to stick with what they do well. Unfortunately I am not most people, and that sad fact has led me on a whirlwind tour (or as my girlfriend might describe it, were she not so charitable, a downward spiral) of different cars and plans since my relatively recent introduction to the world of motorsport with the Audi club. In the process I’ve met great friends, brought five different cars to the track, gone from green student to instructor and learned quite a bit about the finer points of driving, car setup and maintenance. The most humbling lesson of all, though, is this: Don’t get cocky. You’re still a rank novice in somebody’s book, and you probably always will be. And now I have the SCCA Club Racing Novice Logbook to prove it.

Now, most people looking to go closed-wheel road racing in New England will wisely call up Andy Bettencourt at Flatout Motorsports or Dick Shine of Shine Racing Service and rent an arrive-and-drive race car for the one of the SCCA’s mandatory licensing schools. No need to keep your eye on fuel, oil levels, tire pressures, or even worry about blown transmissions or spent clutches. Their crews will keep your rig up and running so you can focus on the act of driving. Like a true novice, I thought of a better idea.
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I’m not gonna lie. I began fantasizing about the iPhone back in January when it was announced at MacWorld. But I really had no practical need for the thing, given that I already had a Treo 650 that could do all the usual SmartPhone bits, and that my existing iPod nano had hung out in my car pretty much since I got it and served exclusively as a CD-changer replacement (with an increasingly stale copy of my iTunes library).

So I held out when the big launch came. I probably read more of the iPhone hype on Wired.com than the people who actually bought them. Being a UNIX geek, the greed welled up within me when I learned that people had been successful at installing an SSH server and standard set of command line utilities on the phone. And this wasn’t like reflashing your iPod to run Linux, thereby throwing out all of the excellent software that it came with, making the device less useful. Nope, the iPhone ran a full multitasking protected-memory Darwin kernel. Jobs hadn’t been overstating the fact that the phone ran OS X (which I half snorted at when I heard it last year).

Then came the price drop. I still held firm for another two weeks, but ultimately my resolve crumbled. I had to have it. Continue Reading »

On Wednesday, I happened into my Facebook account (which is a pretty rare occurance for me – I think I’m getting old already), and noticed that one of my good friends from college, Kip Jones, had posted a new song he’d written, recorded and mixed last weekend. Kip is a phenomenal violinist, multi-instrumentalist in general, and all around interesting guy.

The tune intrigued me, particularly how nicely the backbeat sat among some fancier time signatures and harmonic stuff. So I went home and remixed it that night. Since Kip had skillfully performed all of the parts acoustically on real instruments, and mixed it down without any effects, I figured I would take the opposite approach. I used nothing but the mp3 for source material, and didn’t touch anything but my laptop.

Download: Run and Hide Remix