November 2010


Music21 Nov 2010 07:39 pm

I saw a note on Facebook from my buddy Mike Fisher that The King’s Heralds album “Encores” is on Grooveshark.

All right, I thought, I really like that album and I don’t own it. I have also written extensively about it.

So went to play the album, and realized that this is the rare original version with Jim Ayers on bass!

As I understand it, Jim Ayers left shortly after they recorded this album. Jeff Pearles then re-recorded the bass parts, and the album was released from then on with Jeff on bass.

I wish I could listen to the Jeff version again and compare them back-to-back.

I just realized that they also changed a track completely. The album is all a cappella save for one track, Champion of Love. Except on this original version, that track is “A New Name in Glory.” Much better, in my opinion.

Thanks for the tip, Mike.

Aviation17 Nov 2010 07:51 pm

A while ago I talked about aviation, and how I was going to become an RC pilot. That was not idle chatter. After a lot of research (thank you Dave Powers, internet hero), last winter I bought several cheap electric foamies on ebay, fixed them, and took to the air.

Very briefly.

At first, anyway. It was awhile before I used up a fully charged battery, I’d always bust up the plane before I ran out of juice. Fortunately, most foam planes are pretty tough and easy to repair. And I’ve had to make countless repairs on them!

That’s my Wild Hawk. It has taken a tremendous beating, I had busted it up beyond belief and repaired it so many times that finally I couldn’t salvage the fuselage any more. I ordered a new one and rebuilt it and have logged quite a few more hours in it. With it.

There’s nothing quite like a Piper Cub, even one that’s a rather poor replica! Someday I’d like to get a nice (and big) RC Cub.

Here’s a good beginner’s tip, though: fly with snow on the ground. It saves a lot of plane damage!

So I’ve been flying quite a bit since last winter. For my next plane, I want to build the RCPowers F-22 EasyBuild Version 2.

Thanks to David for the pics on this post! He took them when he was out here this summer.

Hoosierville15 Nov 2010 11:09 pm

Jewel took a night shift a couple of days ago, and when she came home the next morning she asked me, “Who were your visitors last night?”

I had no idea what she was talking about until I took a look out the window and saw this unspeakably hideous monstrosity in the front flowerbed.

Evidently he thought he’d use the faux “facilities” and his friends abandoned him there.

As you recall, a few years ago we came home from vacation to find the front flowerbed “remodeled” with some plumbing fixtures. I guess the vandals thought after all this time it needed a little update.

Unbelievable.

I discovered when I moved out here to Hoosierville that vandalism is very widespread. It’s common to drive down the road and see a house or two festooned with bathroom tissue, and I have had my personal car desecrated with bar soap. This kind of stuff is commonplace out here, and we’re victims yet again.

A day or two after the Grotesque Blue Christmas Monkey showed up, the girls were playing in the backyard. Jewel looked out the window to check on them, and they were gone. She quickly went looking, and found them holding hands with this hideous thing!

Tech12 Nov 2010 01:43 pm

For the last few years I’ve been using Thunderbird for my email. A while ago I kind of switched over to Gmail for the portability factor. Byran had been using it, and if I remember right we had discussed it and I gave it a shot.

The big issue I had with Gmail was that you couldn’t view the inbox and see the contents of a message at the same time. Even worse, when you view a message and delete or archive it, you’re kicked back to the inbox instead of the next message!

This seemed completely ridiculous to me. I thought it couldn’t be so, and checked around. But sure enough, Google in its all-knowing wisdom designed it that way and there was no way change Gmail’s behavior.

I really liked the spam filter, I liked the labels and archiving features, I REALLY liked the portability aspect. But this fundamental usability flaw really made me hesitant.

Today at work I was whining to Justin about my gripes with Gmail. He tried to dismiss them as trivial, saying “I’m sure if everybody thought the way you did then Google would change it to work the way you want it to work, blah blah blah.”

A few minutes later he was changing his tune. He had done a quick search and realized that maybe I wasn’t being so unreasonable after all, a lot of others had been making the same complaints. So I took a quick look too, and look what I found.

I saw a post on the Google Operating System blog, a Google-watch blog, that was an announcement of the Auto-Advance lab. I took a quick look and realized it was just what I and so many other reasonable people wanted!

I use several of the labs but I hadn’t taken a look at the labs page in a while. And I had just told Justin, how hard would it be for them to make a simple lab to give us this functionality!

Thank you Google. It’s about time.

So I’m using the lab and it’s much nicer. I still wish I could see the inbox and a message at the same time, but maybe in the next few years there will be a lab for that too.

Edit:  There finally is!

Family02 Nov 2010 11:41 pm

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