Penmachine

A few weeks ago, when I bought my new eyeglasses, both my wife Air and my daughters' piano teacher Lorraine independently said that one pair—my set of black Ray-Bans with pearloid decorations on the sides—strongly resembles a Fender Stratocaster guitar, like the black and white one I own. I didn't notice it when I picked the specs, but they're quite right:

In this photo, I also bear a frightening resemblance to Vince the ShamWow guy. That too was entirely unintentional, believe me. (Though maybe I can make America skinny again, one chord at a time!)

Labels: celebrity, glasses, guitar, music, photography, television

This piece is a text transcript of my segment on the latest episode (#79) of my podcast Inside Home Recording.

Most of my music career has had nothing to do with recording. It's been about playing live, mostly in a cover band. I've been doing that since 1989, more than twenty years. And I think that has now come to an end. Let me explain.

The first live performance I remember giving was on nylon-string guitar, to a group of senior citizens, I think at a music recital at a local church. It was organized through my elementary school, about 30 years ago. I was playing "Romanza," a well-known classical piece. And I forgot to tune my guitar beforehand. They applauded anyway, and I learned my lesson.

A few months later I played the same piece for a school talent contest. I remembered to tune this time, and I won the contest. But it was nerve-wracking. While I loved being in plays and skits, I found precision of live music performance a bit terrifying.

After I took my Grade 4 Royal Conservatory guitar exam in 1982, and then changed high schools, I quit guitar lessons, and stopped playing, and forgot everything, including how to read music. Every once in awhile I'd be startled by a string breaking inside the guitar case in my closet, but I never even bothered opening it.

I was inspired to take up music again at the end of 1987, when I discovered I could play drums half-decently without ever having tried it before. In 1988, my roommate Sebastien and I decided to form a band with our other roommates Alistair and Andrew, and my friend Ken. We'd all play instruments, and we'd all sing.

One day Sebastien and I went out with the agreement that I would buy a drum kit and he would buy an electric guitar. We got the cheapest, crappiest instruments we could find at pawn shops, and we were on our way.

The next lesson came when the bunch of us got paid for a show. But we didn't use our instruments, because it was a lip-sync contest at UBC. We were very silly and overblown, with costumes, makeup, props, a giant wall constructed of cardboard boxes (for a Pink Floyd song) and even some unauthorized flames (for our Alice Cooper impression). We won, and received $600. That was more than we'd get paid for a gig for quite a long time.

The lesson was that showmanship was important. Sometimes more important than musical skill or talent, especially when you're starting out and don't even know how to sing proper harmonies. You need to put on a damn show.

Our first real gig, in the spring of 1989, was at a year-end university party where we sounded great because the audience was really drunk. We played up the schtick, calling ourselves the Juan Valdez Memorial R&B Ensemble (though we played little R&B) and featuring Batman logos on our instruments and T-shirts, for no particular reason other than that we played the theme from the "Batman" TV show.

In some form or another, Sebastien and I have played in bands together on and off ever since, me on drums and him on guitar. We even tried it full-time for awhile in the mid-1990s, with a short-lived original act called The Flu we took as far as Australia, and cover bands with names like The Love Bugs, HourGlass, and The Neurotics to pay the bills. Sometimes we busked in downtown Vancouver for spare change. The direct rewards were a great way to learn what people liked, or at least what they'd pay for.

I left the band for a few years after I got married and had kids, but still guested when they needed a drummer in a pinch from time to time. I returned in the early 2000s when the gigs were more stable and better paying. We even got flown to New York City once for a single night's show in the fancy Sherry-Netherland Hotel.

The Neurotics, our long-running cover act, has had a rotating cast of musicians for years, but it's always been both about the songs—the classic hits people always respond to—and the show, including glittery jackets, wigs, fake British accents, improvised jokes, crazy stage-leaping, and intentionally mangled lyrics. This past decade, I can't think of a gig where I haven't laughed uncontrollably at least once at the antics of my bandmates, either onstage or in the dressing room between sets.

It's been so much fun that even after I found out I had colon cancer at the beginning of 2007, I tried to keep playing as much as I could. On Canada Day that summer, less than a week before my major surgery, and hopped up on morphine against the pain, I played drums and sang in the sun on the shores of Vancouver's Coal Harbour. Luckily our substitude drummer, Christian, was there on percussion, and could take over on the kit when I needed a break.

I didn't play again until the following February, having lost more than 60 pounds and then regained much of it. Once more, Christian and I spelled one another off, and I made it through. I kept playing through that year and the next, weaving around chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments, more surgery, side effects, and fatigue.

But it was getting harder. In 2009, I had to turn down more and more shows. Paul Garay invited me to fill in on drums with his new band Heist that July, for a long daytime outdoor pub booking. It was great, but setup, playing, and teardown exhausted me for days afterward. I had to refuse an offer for a two-night gig a few weeks later.

The Neurotics had two shows, at the end of September and beginning of October 2009, a week apart. Sebastien suggested that, for the first time in years, I try playing rhythm guitar with the band, in addition to drums and percussion alternating with Christian.

I spent a couple of weeks woodshedding to figure out chords to songs I'd played for decades, but always on drums, and we had one rehearsal, because there were other new people in the lineup. Always confident behind the kit or the mic, I was nervous with the guitar around my neck, but I got through.

The last show was on October 3, at a golf club in Tsawwassen, one of Vancouver's southernmost suburbs. I did okay. My drumming and singing were fine, and I didn't miss too many chords on guitar. But the two gigs, even days apart, wiped me out. I slept a lot over the next few days.

Since then, I've returned to a more aggressive chemotherapy schedule to try to combat the cancer that long ago spread to my lungs and chest. I'm often nauseated, immensely sleepy, and unreliable. I can't in good conscience say yes when Sebastien calls me about an upcoming gig, because I can't promise I'll even be able to show up.

So, unless my cancer improves and I can take less nasty treatments—which isn't all that likely—I've had to admit to myself that my time as a regularly gigging musician is probably over. Sure, I might appear as a guest from time to time with some of my old bandmates at the occasional show, for a song or two, maybe.

But I've had to look at my studio at home now and think of how to rearrange it. For at least ten years it's included drums and PA equipment, cymbals and mics and stands and cases, packed on shelves and in bags, ready to load into the car. I think I can take them down, and maybe set them up to play at home instead.

It's no longer a storage room and preparation space for my job as a player, but a space for me to practice music as a hobby, when I feel up to it. I think now I may as well make it work that way.

Like many things I've had to jettison as my health has declined, I regret the change. But it had to come eventually. Even if I could live to 95, I don't think I would ever be like Les Paul, gigging until weeks before his death of natural causes. But I also didn't burn out and die drunk in a hotel room on the road somewhere, like others have.

The choice to stop playing live has been forced on me, but at least I get to make it. And I still have music all around me.

Besides, if my kids ever want to start a band after all their years of piano and singing lessons, then the rehearsal space is right here. And they don't need to buy a thing. Plus, I can teach them about how to put on a damn show.

Labels: band, cancer, chemotherapy, memories, music, neurotics

Any musician or music geek worth his or her salt knows about The T.A.M.I. Show, a one-off 1964 TV special/theatrical movie. It capitalized on that year's Beatlemania with an astonishing evening of concert performances by hitmakers from the U.S. and the U.K. in Santa Monica near the end of October of that year:

The film is now available for purchase for the first time (yes, the first time in 46 years). Like The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, The T.A.M.I. Show has been mired in copyright and ownership disputes for decades—bootlegs have abounded, but even those lacked footage of The Beach Boys, who had their part removed after the initial theatrical release in '64.

The T.A.M.I. Show is best known for the explosive performance (and amazing hairdo) of James Brown, then nearing the peak of his powers as a singer, dancer, bandleader, and musical innovator. (He would basically invent funk the next year, with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag.") If you were among those who thought The Beatles were strange and radical in 1964, then this footage of James Brown and the Famous Flames would have simply exploded your head.

But check out the rest of the lineup too: The Barbarians, Marvin Gaye, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean (who hosted), The Supremes, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, and Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. Plus a few other acts you might have heard of: Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones. All on one concert stage.

It's a shame the movie has been essentially underground since before I was born, but now it will be easy to find starting March 23. I made sure to pre-order a copy, and I'd like to thank Tim Bray for telling me it was showing on PBS tonight. I've been trying to see the whole thing since the 1980s.

Labels: film, movie, music, sixties, television

...until the end part.

I wanted to like the whole thing, I really did. I've turned into a total Winter Olympics fanboy in the past two weeks, and I watched it on TV and made my way to several of the Olympic sites. I cheered and cursed and got myself in knots over curling (curling?!) and snowboard cross and hockey and bobsleigh and speed skating, and even events where Canada wasn't in the medal running, like the men's 4x10 cross-country ski relay.

First, let me note that the Derek Miller playing guitar and singing with Eva Avila and Nikki Yanofsky early on was not me, though since the camera angle was pretty wide, I probably could have gotten some good mileage from pretending he was. But no, he's won Juno awards and is way more talented than I am.

Anyway, watching the Closing Ceremony on TV today with my family, I liked its tone, happy and respectful when it needed to be, delightfully cheeky beyond that:

• The "repair" of the cauldron that malfunctioned at the Opening Ceremony, with Catriona Le May Doan on hand to relight it (she missed out on her earlier chance because of the snafu).
• The informal, casual return of the visibly relieved and tired athletes to the stadium—in a loose, milling throng instead of the regimented blocs of nations from the also-lovely Opening Ceremony a couple of weeks ago.
• The beautiful seaside figure skating piped in from Sochi, Russia as part of their feature during the event.
• The spontaneous (and lengthy) standing ovation after Vancouver chief organizer John Furlong's brief but apt tribute to dead Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili.
• William Shatner's Canadian semi-slam poem. I mean, come on, The Shat, my friends! People joked about the idea online beforehand, and then IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED! Awesome. (I just wished they'd beamed him up at the end. After all, Scotty was from Vancouver, you know.)
• The whole every-Canadian-stereotype-and-the-kitchen-sink production number with Michael Bublé. Loved when the Mountie-ettes tore off his Red Serge uniform, when the giant inflatable beavers appeared, when the hockey players broke into a brawl. I'm not sure everyone around the world got the intended irony, but I don't care. It was hilarious.

Alas, the musical cavalcade during the finale was a disappointment. There is so much more diversity, talent, and power across the Canadian music scene, and much of it was on hand for the free LiveCity concerts during the course of the Games.

But not at the Closing Ceremony. Neil Young played "Long May You Run" as the flame was extinguished. Good job. k-os finished the evening with some of his distinctive and rousing hip-hop. Also good. In between, we got Nickelback, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morissette, Simple Plan, Hedley, and Marie-Mai. All very mainstream, white, big-selling pop acts.

None of those acts, on their own, was particularly problematic. (Lots of people have a hate on for Nickelback, sure, but like the absent Céline Dion, they sell the records). However, all of them together reflected a profound lack of imagination.

The reaction among Canadians online, which had been mixed before that point, turned savage. Steven Page, former singer of the Barenaked Ladies (he or his old band should have been there), got in some of the best digs:

• "It's easy to make fun of Nickelback, but there are worse things. And Chad's hair looks nice. Like Katie Couric's."
• "I have nothing to say about Avril. Except I wish it was Anvil."
• "Wow. If I just arrived on Earth now, I'd believe that sports were better than music."

Entertainment Weekly piped up with, "Where is Rush? Be cool or be cast out, Canada..." Comments from my friends and other rank-and-file Twitter and Facebook users were less kind. At the end, my friend Ryan pointed me to Parveen Kaler, who summed it up with this:

• "FREE BIRD."

Think about some of the other options: Sloan, Blue Rodeo, Spirit of the West, Stompin' Tom Connors, Arcade Fire, Jessie Farrell, Tegan and Sara, Matthew Good, Alexisonfire, Bruce Cockburn, Hot Hot Heat, K'Naan, The Trews, Paul Anka, D.O.A., Mother Mother, Skydiggers, Lights, Sarah Harmer, Robbie Robertson, Metric, Diana Krall, The Tragically Hip, Bedoin Soundclash, Jann Arden, The Guess Who, Divine Brown, Odds (with my friend and sometime co-musician Doug on bass), The Stills, 54-40, Sam Roberts, Cowboy Junkies, Colin James, Great Big Sea, Bif Naked, Wide Mouth Mason, The New Pornographers, Shania Twain, Feist, and I could go on. Wouldn't it have been nice to see some of them in the mix?

I'm not even including French Quebec, jazz, country, blues, metal, R&B, folk, reggae, bhangra, and hip-hop artists I don't know much about. Doubtless there's a huge list there too.

So, as with its opening counterpart, I loved the ceremony part of the Olympic Closing Ceremony, and all the staff and volunteers did great work bringing it together. For this fan of Canadian music, alas, its musical finale felt like a fizzle.

Fortunately, the two-week-long street party that several parts of Vancouver have become continues, especially after the big hockey gold medal yesterday afternoon. I bet some of those revelers are singing Nickelback songs too.

Labels: band, controversy, music, olympics, sports, television, vancouver

Tonight's Winter Olympics opening ceremony was impressive, if often a bit phallic. There was one technical glitch with the hydraulics for the first, indoor cauldron in B.C. Place Stadium, but the ceremony did the most important thing right.

That was to remember Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died this morning in a terrifying crash during a training run on the Whistler luge track, at the age of 21. (He was born the year the Winter Olympics were last in Canada, in Calgary in 1988.) He was the fourth athlete to die during a sporting event at the Winter Games since they began in 1924.

Jacques Rogge, the head of the International Olympic Committee, pre-empted his prepared remarks with a memorial to Kumaritashvili. Vancouver head organizer John Furlong also included the late athlete in his speech. There was a minute of silence during the ceremony, and a standing ovation for the remaining members of the small Georgian team, walking sadly wearing black armbands.

And the bonus? Instead of the rumoured Celine Dion, we got a spectacular k.d. lang. Good choice.

Labels: death, music, olympics, sports, television, vancouver

If you're a guitar or rock music nerd (like me), you need to see It Might Get Loud. My friend Andrew recommended it to me a few weeks ago, and I was reminded about it on the 37signals blog. The film is a documentary featuring Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin), The Edge (of U2), and Jack White (of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs), talking about how they came to be guitarists, playing individually, and jamming together on a faux–sitting-room set built in a warehouse.

So if you're a guitar nerd, you might be off to buy the DVD right now. Still, it's worth knowing why this is not just some self-indulgent guitar wank-fest, and why it's also worthwhile for general music fans too.

No doubt Page, Edge, and White are three of the most influential and popular electric guitarists of the past 40 or 50 years. It would have been interesting to add, say, Tom Morello or Eddie Van Halen to the mix, but I think director Davis Guggenheim was wise to structure the film around a tripod of players—Page from the '60s and '70s, Edge from the '80s and '90s, and White from this past decade.

Each of them talks about individual songs that helped propel them to their current careers. Jimmy Page, resplendent in a long coat and silver hair just the right length for an elder statesman of rock 'n' roll, listens to Link Wray's "Rumble" crackle from a 45 rpm single—he jams along on air guitar and also turns a phantom tremolo knob on an invisible amp to demonstrate how Wray took that classic instrumental to a new level, and grins in sheer joy as he must have as a teenager.

The Edge recalls watching The Jam blast away the twee pop and bland '70s rock that dominated Top of the Pops on British TV in his youth. Jack White puts Son House's skeletal "Grinnin' in Your Face" (just vocals and off-time handclaps) on the turntable and says it's been his favourite song since he first heard it as a kid.

And that's the funny thing. White, who's 34, turned five years old in 1980, the year Led Zeppelin disbanded and U2 released their first album, Boy. For most guitarists of his generation, walking into a room with your guitar to meet Jimmy Page and The Edge would be terrifying, especially when they asked you to teach them one or two of your songs. But in some ways White comes across as the oldest of the group, a pasty-faced ghost from the 1950s or earlier, wrestling with his ravaged and literally thrift-store Kay guitar, wearing a bowtie and a hat and smoking stubby cigars, channeling Blind Willie McTell and Elmore James, building a slide guitar out of some planks, a Coke bottle, and a metal string, assembled with hammer and nails:

While Page and The Edge both grew up in the British Isles, and have never held any jobs besides playing guitar, White is from Detroit, and his hip-hop and house-music–listening cohorts in the '80s and early '90s thought that playing an instrument of any kind was embarrassing, so he didn't come to guitar until he'd already worked as an upholsterer. Somehow, though, if White and Page are rooted in gutbucket, distorted blues, it's still The Edge who seems to be coming from outer space. When he plays his echoing, beautiful intro to "Bad" alone on the soundstage, it's a sound neither of the other players could have created.

During the guitar summit, each of the guitarists teaches the others a couple of his songs. The Edge's first one is "I Will Follow," and it works better than any of the rest, in part because, as he explains, he often creates guitar parts with the absolute minimum of notes, so that they sound clearer, more distinctive, and less muddy when played really loud. And Page and White play really loud. Together the result is, as Jimmy Page says, "roaring."

Labels: band, film, guitar, movie, music, review

British music site Musicradar recently published one of those visitor-voted lists of the 50 greatest guitar riffs (not solos, or rock songs) of all time. It's pretty much what you'd expect: heavy on the '70s, with plenty of Zeppelin, AC/DC, Metallica, Black Sabbath, and (being British) Radiohead, Muse, and such thrown in.

But I have to say that the top 10 is an interesting result, climbing from "Satisfaction" (number 10?!) through "Day Tripper," "Enter Sandman," "Back in Black," "Layla," "Smoke on the Water" (number 4?!), and "Whole Lotta Love" to "Sweet Child o' Mine" at number 2. Not a surprising list of candidates, though I wouldn't have predicted that order.

Number one, though, I would never have forecast in the top 10, never mind at the peak, even though I personally agree it's the right choice: Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)," from 1968. Here, watch the full psychedelicness:

Hendrix and his band basically jammed the song out in the studio while creating footage for a visiting film crew. The song as a piece is like a whole weather system, and it's hard to know exactly what Musicradar's users were voting for—is it Jimi's slinky, ominous solo wah-wah raindrops at the beginning, or the full booming open-string thunderstorm once the full band comes in?

It doesn't really matter. I think either one wins. Stevie Ray Vaughan, my favourite guitarist, used to play "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" all the time, but even the best he could do was basically replicate Jimi nearly note-for-note.

Many music fans might know the song, but the riff certainly isn't among those people hum to themselves, like "Killing in the Name," "Sunshine of Your Love" or "Ticket to Ride." Certainly no beginning guitarist would attempt it, as they would "Satisfaction" or "Smoke on the Water" or "You Really Got Me," which is on the Musicradar list, but shamefully not in the top 10. I can't play a lick of it.

Yet "Voodoo Child" stands apart. (Joe Satriani called it "the greatest piece of electric guitar work ever recorded.") That main thundering riff is both separate from and weaved throughout the song—you never know when Jimi will drag it back out from the maelstrom. It's scary and beautiful and bluesy and futuristic—like Jimi himself in a few notes.

I think I'll go listen to it again.

P.S. Of course I have quibbles with the list too. Three riffs mysteriously missing are the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun," Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl," and of course Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama." How did people miss that one?

Labels: controversy, guitar, history, linkbait, lists, music

When I learned to play rock music back in the '80s, Vancouver's Odds (and their cover-band alter-ago The Dawn Patrol) were among my key inspirations. I got to know some of the guys in the band too. In the last five or six years, Odds bassist Doug Elliott has also become a good friend, as well as playing bass sometimes in my band.

After a hiatus of close to a decade, the Odds returned with a tweaked lineup of musicians and a new album, Cheerleader, last year, and now they've posted all their music videos dating back to 1991 on YouTube. They're worth a look and a listen. I think "Someone Who's Cool" is still my favourite:

Although the big suit shoulders and done-to-the-neck dress shirts of the early-'90s ones have a certain retro appeal too. Make sure you read the little descriptions by the band.

Some of the best Odds songs combine the intelligence of Elvis Costello with the booty-shaking overdriven guitar boogie of AC/DC, and that's a hard balance to accomplish.

Labels: band, friends, music, odds, video, youtube

I played the gig last night at the tony private Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club, covering percussion, some drumming, background vocals, and (the first time for a performance that long) rhythm guitar. I was a bit of mess—my health was fine, but the three instrumental roles, plus singing, include lots of mental and physical gymnastics, so I usually felt like I was scrambling along a bit behind the others. I did okay, and I had a lot of fun.

It was also the first time this particular band lineup had worked together. We have another show next Saturday, and I expect I'll do a bit better, particularly since I'll improve my sense of what I should play on different songs. I also think a week is about the right amount of recovery time. Thanks to Jeremy, Dave, Rose, Sebastien, and Christian for having me sit in for these two Saturdays. It's been a nice break during my ongoing cancer-treatment nastiness.

Labels: band, cancer, friends, music, vancouver

I studied classical guitar as a kid, between 1978 and 1982, but I was never especially good at it. I quit when I changed schools and forgot pretty much everything about it, including my rudimentary ability to read music.

A few years later I discovered a talent for the drums, and with my then-roommate Sebastien learned to play classic sixties garage rock. By the end of the 1980s we'd formed a band and played our first gig. Twenty years later, he and I are still in The Neurotics together, playing many of those same songs.

I don't play as often as I used to, because my cancer and the associated medication side effects make me weak and unreliable, but the group is kind enough to let me sit in when I can, alternating with Christian on drums and percussion on nights I can make it out. This upcoming weekend, I plan to play yet another show, but in addition to drums, percussion, and vocals, I'll be trying my hand at electric guitar for a good chunk of the set—the first time I've done that live onstage in any serious way for many years.

Of course I resumed playing guitar a long time ago, not long after we started that first garage band in 1989, and I've even recorded a whole album of guitar-based instrumentals, derived from my irregular podcast. But that was by myself, in the basement, where I could fix my mistakes. Live, in front of an audience, I don't get that chance.

So I'm spending some time re-learning all those songs I've known for decades, but this time I have to know what key they're in and what the chords are. My fingers are a little sore from the practice, but one other advantage is that I'll know a bunch of tunes I can teach my youngest daughter, who says she's ready to start playing the guitar I bought her a few years ago. She's nine, the same age I was in 1978.

Labels: band, fear, guitar, memories, music

My wife Air had a hard day today, for various reasons, which is too bad, because it was her birthday. But I was glad to be in good health myself, so I could help her out. Things have improved a bit this evening, so tomorrow should be better. She'll probably try for a fun-birthday do-over on the weekend.

On the plus side, I bought Beatles Rock Band today, and we all had fun with it. My 20-year tenure as drummer/vocalist for a '60s rock revival band helps with the drumming and especially the singing, but knowing how to play a real guitar or bass only tends to confuse things. Air is also a naturally good singer, so she could handle those John Lennon melodies with aplomb. The kids loved flailing away too. It was pretty fab.

Labels: band, beatles, geekery, guitar, memories, music, videogames

A few weeks ago I wrote about Les Paul, who died in mid-August at the age of 94. My podcast co-host Dave Chick and I decided that our next episode of Inside Home Recording would be a Les Paul special edition, dedicated to different aspects of Les's career, because as the inventor of multitracking and pioneer of solidbody electric guitars, he was so important to modern recording.

Tonight, we put that tribute episode (IHR #74, available as an enhanced AAC or audio-only MP3 podcast) online. In the process of putting it together, both Dave and I were astonished by how much Les Paul accomplished that we didn't even know about—most of it before we or any of our listeners were born.

I came to the conclusion, expressed in the our editorial at the end of the show, that Les was the single most important person in the history of modern recorded music—more important, on balance, than Thomas Edison or Leo Fender or Elvis or the Beatles or any of the other contenders.

You can listen to the show to find out if you agree. But it's indisputable that anywhere in the world where there is a microphone or a speaker, a Record button or a set of headphones—from every music studio or TV soundstage to every car stereo or iPod earbud, from every crummy punk dive bar to every high-end hip-hop nightclub, from the Amundsen-Scott outpost at the South Pole to the International Space Station—Les Paul played a part in making them what they are.

Labels: death, guitar, history, insidehomerecording, jazz, music, recording

My wife Air live blogged the first day's talks here at the 9th annual Gnomedex conference, and you can also watch the live video stream on the website. I posted a bunch of photos. Here are my written impressions.

Something feels a little looser, and perhaps a bit more relaxed, about this year's meeting. There's a big turnover in attendees: more new people than usual, more women, and a lot more locals from the Seattle area. More Windows laptops than before, interestingly, and more Nikon cameras with fewer Canons. A sign of tech gadget trends generally? I'm not sure.

As always, the individual presentations roamed all over the map, and some were better than others. For example, Bad Astronomer Dr. Phil Plait's talk about skepticism was fun, but also not anything new for those of us who read his blog. However, it was also great as a perfect precursor to Christine Peterson, who invented the term open source some years ago, but is now focused on life extension, i.e. using various dietary, technological, and other methods to improve health and significantly extend the human lifespan.

• Some stuff Dr. Plait said: "Skepticism is not cynicism." "You ask for the evidence [...] and make sure it's good." "Be willing to drop an idea if it's wrong. Yeah, that's tough." "Scientists screw it up as well." "It sucks to be fooled. You can lose your money. You can lose your life."
• Christine Peterson: "Moving is how you tell your body, I'm not dead yet!" "You see people hitting soccer balls with their heads. Would you do that with your laptop? And that's backed up!" (You might like my friend Bill's reaction on my Facebook page.)

As Lee LeFever quipped on Twitter, "The life extension talk is a great followup to the skepticism talk because it provides so many ideas of which to be skeptical." My thought was, her talk seemed like hard reductionist nerdery focused somewhere it may not apply very well. My perspective may be different because I have cancer; for me, life extension is just living, you know? But I also feel that not everything is an engineering problem.

There were a number of those dichotomies through the day. Some other notes I took today:

• Bre Pettis passed out 3D models "printouts" created with the MakerBot he helped design. "Bonus points for being able to print out your... uh... body... parts." "Oh my god, you should put this brain inside Walt Disney's head!" "What's black ABS plastic good for?" "Printing evil stuff."
• One of the most joyous things you'll ever see is a keen scientist really going off on his or her topic of specialty. Firas Khatib on FoldIt protein folding was one of those. For a given sequence of amino acids, the 3D protein structure with lowest free energy is likely to be its useful shape in biology—and his team made a video game to help people figure out optimum shapes, which in the long run can help cure diseases.
• Todd Friesen is a former search engine and website spammer. He had lots of interesting things today. In the world of white and black search engine optimization (SEO), SPAM = "Sites Positioned Above Mine." For spammers, RSS = "Really Simple Stealing" and thus spam blogs. Major techniques for web spammers: hacking pages, bribing people for access, forum posts and user profiles, comment spam. Pay Per Click = PPC = "Pills, Porn, and Casinos."
• I liked these from the Ignite super-fast presentations: "There are more social media non-gurus than social media gurus. Which means we can take them." On annual reports: "Imagine waiting A YEAR to find out what a company is doing."

We had a great trip down to Seattle via Chuckanut Drive with kk+ and Fierce Kitty. Tonight Air and I are sleeping in the Edgewater Hotel on Seattle's Pier 67, next to the conference venue, and tonight is also the 45th anniversary of the day the Beatles stayed in this same hotel and fished out the window.

Labels: anniversary, band, biology, conferences, geekery, gnomedex, history, music, science, travel

Cross-posted from Inside Home Recording...

No one who performs popular music, or records music of any kind, hasn't been affected by Les Paul, the legendary guitarist, musical innovator, and inventor who died today at age 94.

Many people know him only for the solidbody electric guitar that bears his name—indeed, he hand-built his own solidbody electric years before that, but Gibson was uninterested in the design until rival Fender successfully sold similar concepts in the early 1950s. Still, Paul was not only a talented and prolific player (who continued a regular live gig in New York until very recently), but also a hit-making jazz and pop artist, as well as the inventor of multitrack recording and overdubbing, as well as tape delay and various phasing effects:

He was a constant tinkerer, heavily modifying even his own Les Paul guitars with customized electronics and switching, and often acting as his own producer, engineer, and tape operator. Every listener to Inside Home Recording, and every musician or recording enthusiast today, owes him a massive debt, and we'll all miss his talent and contributions.

Labels: death, insidehomerecording, jazz, music, recording

This weekend in Vancouver included the Abbotsford Airshow, the Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival, the Under the Volcano festival, and the closing ceremonies of the World Police and Fire Games (WPFG). Twice over the past few days, I've seen the Canadian Forces Snowbirds aerobatics team fly directly over my head in conjunction with some of those events. Once in Stanley Park (presumably to promote the Airshow):

And once this evening right in our front yard, when the Snowbirds flew right over our house (on the last of four passes). At first I thought it was for the Blues Fest, but I think it was really for the WPFG finale:

Both times, I could almost read the markings on the bottoms of the planes. It still amazes me that human beings, we apes from the savannah, can control flying machines traveling at hundreds of kilometres an hour in formation:

Such brains we humans have.

Labels: airport, music, photography, sports, transportation

If you're in the Vancouver area and aren't going to VinoCamp tomorrow afternoon (Saturday the 8th), you could head out to the Blueberry Festival in Cloverdale, which features vintage cars, various activities and entertainments—and the band Heist, with whom I'll be sitting in on drums.

It's the first time in several years I've played with any band except my usual gigs in The Neurotics and HourGlass, but it's the same kind of classic hit rock 'n' roll material, so when we rehearsed on Monday I felt right at home. My old podcast co-host Paul Garay (with whom I've also made some training videos) plays keyboards with the group, and brought me in while their regular drummer is out of town.

We'll be at the Cloverdale Station Pub from noon till 5 p.m. If the weather is decent we'll be outside; if it rains (which it might), then inside. The pub is about 30 minutes east from Vancouver along Highways 1 and 15. I'll even do some singing for you.

Labels: band, music, paulgaray, vancouver

While researchers continue to study it, no one is yet sure why music moves us—how we can be affected emotionally by timed sequences of sounds. But we are. And while I play rock drums and love me some guitar, in my life, the most affecting music has been live, vocal, and collective.

Here's what I mean. One of the most astonishing things I've ever heard was the student choir at Magee, the high school where my wife teaches. Years ago I attended one of their concerts. They are, and have long been, an excellent choir. You can get a tiny sense of it from this video, but the sound doesn't do it justice (plus, Christmas carols in August sound weird):

That's a pale simulation of the true experience, though. At that concert years ago, held in the school's old auditorium, the singing was enveloping, and overpowering, from a full-size choir onstage. I almost cried from the sound alone.

Here's another example that had me getting teary for no good reason:

Thanks to Darren for the link.

Those of us who were around in the '80s best remember Bobby McFerrin from his annoying novelty song "Don't Worry, Be Happy." But he is a powerful and innovative jazz singer, who is at his best when co-opting audiences. When he does that, when the audience sings along as a mass of voices, I lose it. I nearly cried right now as I listened to the audience come in on "Ave Maria" at the link I just posted—and again at the end:

So beautiful. There's no way I could have held it in if I had been there.

I can think of other instances: Celso Machado and the crowd I was in at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre more than 15 years ago, or a packed-full B.C. Place Stadium singing the end of U2's "40" ("How long/To sing this song...") long after the band had left the stage in 1987. You get the idea.

Whatever the reasons we evolved to love music, one of its benefits is how it joins us. When you sing with a group, or even if you're just there when one is singing well, you become part of that group in a way that's almost impossible by any other means. You could be singing "Ave Maria" with McFerrin, or chanting "Die! Die! Die!" with Metallica, but when it happens, you're all one. We're all one.

Labels: biology, evolution, music, video

This is a re-post of the guest entry I wrote for Raul's Blogathon on Saturday.

Here's a story. Two years ago this week, I weighed 145 pounds, about 70 pounds less than I do now. I looked like I'd been in a PoW camp, pale and skeletal. I'd just left St. Paul's Hospital, where I'd been for close to a month after major cancer surgery and an intestinal blockage.

By October I'd gained back 30 of those pounds. Within a year I'd taken a bunch more chemotherapy, lost my hair and grown it back, and had terrible chemo-induced acne. A year after that, the cancer is still here, but I'm fighting it, and I feel pretty good. End of story, for now.

We all grow up making stories—when we're kids, we call it playing, whether it's using an infant mobile or a video camera. And our stories are best when we make them for others, or with them. Unfortunately, many of us become unused to playing, thinking it childish. We grow up terrified of giving speeches, or we write our thoughts only in diaries instead of for reading. We become shy.

For whatever reason, that didn't happen to me. I've been passionate about many things in my 40 years—computers, photography, public speaking, music, making websites, writing and language, science and space, commuting by bicycle, building a life with my wife and family—but when I took at them all, each one is really about making stories for others. Or, as my wife succinctly pointed out, about showing off. I'll admit to that.

Some examples, in no real order:

• Helping put together a school newspaper in sixth grade (or high school, or university).
• Donning a smoking jacket and hand prosthetic to play Captain Hook on the elementary school stage.
• Setting my daughters up with blogs and email addresses before they each turned ten.
• Posting photographs to MacDesktops in the late '90s and photo.net a few years later.
• Playing in a band in crappy bars or luxury New York hotels.
• Editing my high school yearbook (with others) and the UBC student handbook (by myself).
• Teaching courses about Microsoft Word.
• Talking about my cancer on the radio.
• Talking about geeky stuff on TV.
• Recording songs and giving them away for free.
• Helping my wife Air put together her podcast.
• Uploading thousands of pictures and videos to Flickr.
• Crafting obscure technical documents to make them understandable.
• And of course blogging and blogging and blogging for close to nine years.

I've done many of these things for no money (and some for lots of money), but for almost all of them, I wanted other people to know.

Okay, yes, I wanted to show off. Is that healthy?

For me, on balance, I think so. Whether for my jobs or my hobbies, being a ham and wanting others to see and appreciate what I do prods me to make those stories good, and useful. Humans are natural tellers of stories, and we enjoy anything presented in a story-like way. So I've tried to make all of those things in the form of a story. Whether a discussion of evolutionary biology, a fun rockabilly instrumental, a bunch of rants about PowerPoint, or a pretty photograph (or yes, even the instruction manual to install a wireless cellular modem in a police car), I want it to generate a story in your mind.

Stories don't always have an obvious structure. They don't necessarily go in predictable directions, or have a moral or meaning. I certainly didn't see it coming when all this cancer stuff from the past two and a half years happened. But I've been able to make it a story that other people can read, understand, and maybe find helpful. So too with my other passions.

So whatever you're trying to do, whatever hobby or job or habit you have, if you want to share it with others, try to craft it like a story—short or long, visual or auditory, but something that flows. Show it off. That, it seems, is what I like to do.

Derek K. Miller is a writer, editor, web guy, drummer, photographer, and dad. Not in that order. He's been blogging at penmachine.com since 2000, and has been on medical leave from his position as Communications Manager at Navarik Corp. since 2007. His wife and two daughters have put up with his show-offishness way longer than that.

Labels: band, blog, cancer, charity, editing, friends, music, photography, vancouver, writing

Yup, still on a blog break. So, more of my selected Twitter posts, newest first:

• Vancouver to Whistler in one minute (okay, I cheated):
  
  
  
• We're in the mountains, but in a civilized way. Pool/hot tub, grocery store across the street, Wi-Fi. But, uh, there is mountain weather.
• Super-duper stop-motion movie with 60,000 photo prints (ad for Olympus, via Lisa Bettany and Photojojo). Chris Atherton points out that this follows Wolf and Pig.
• Okay camera nerds, here's some rangefinder pr0n for you.
• The stereotypically blingtastic (and boobtastic) video diminishes Karl Wolf's tolerable version of Toto's "Africa." (And I'm no Toto fan.) It's like a live-action Hot Chicks with Douchebags. Yes, the choirboy harmonies are actually kind of charming, but he's going P-Diddy on it in the end.
• In the storage closet, my kids found something of mine from 1976 that is EVEN GEEKIER than my U.S.S. Enterprise belt buckle:
  
  Red shirts were available back then, as well as the blue Mr. Spock style, but I chose Kirk. Of course.
  
  
• The only sounds I can hear right now: the dishwasher, the fan in the hallway, and the birds in the trees outside the window.
• During my biology degree, Platyhelminthes was a favourite organism name. Now there's a plush toy! (With 2 heads!!)
• When I used to busk with the band, our biggest victories were scaring away the holy rollers across the street (we got applause).
• Neat. When a ship is built, here are the differences between milestones: keel laying, christening, commissioning, etc.
• AutoTune the News #6. Even more awesome.
• Picked up kids from Aldergrove camp. Sadly, there was a terrible accident on the Port Mann Bridge. We took a long Langley/Surrey/New Westminster detour.
• Google's changing culture. Point: Google now has more employees than Microsoft did at launch of Windows 95.
• Time lapse: 8 hours from my front window in about 1 min 30 sec, made with my new Nikon D90 and free Sofortbild capture software (and iMovie):
  
  Something like John Biehler's Nikon Coolpix P6000 is better for timelapse long term; the D90's mechanical shutter, which is rated for 100,000 uses, would wear out in less than 6 months if used for time lapse every day. P.S. Andy Gagliano pointed to a useful Macworld podcast about making time-lapse movies.
  
  
• Depressing: most Internet Explorer 6 users use it at work, because they're not allowed to use another browser.
• These Christopher Walken impressions are way funnier than I expected.
• The way monkeys peel a banana shows us we've all been doing it the needlessly hard way all these years.
• Um... hot!
• Most appropriate Flash cartoon ever?
• Drinking whisky and Diet Dr. Pepper, watching MythBusters. Pretty mellow.
• A good photo is "not about the details or the subject. It's what your subconscious pulls out of it all without thinking."
• Just picked up another month's supply of horrible, nasty, vile, wonderful, beautiful, lifesaving anti-cancer pills. Thanks, Big Pharma Man.
• My wife tells me she's discovered a sure-fire tip for a gal to attract quality guys in public: carry a huge SLR camera over your shoulder.
• "For the great majority [...] blogging is a social activity, not an aspiration to mass-media stardom."
• Just talked to younger daughter (9) for first time after three days at summer camp. She's a little homesick, but having fun.
• I took a flight over a remote landscape:
  
  
  
• The 50 worst cars of all time (e.g. "The Yugo had the distinct feeling of something assembled at gunpoint").
• I haven't seen either Transformers movie, but that's okay, I saw this.
• Dan Savage: cheating on your spouse should now be known as "hiking the Appalachian Trail." Good point in the article too.
• You can still buy a station wagon with fake wood paneling!
• Train vs. tornado. It does not end well. Watch without fast-forward/scrubbing for maximum tension.
• Just lucked into a parking spot on Granville Island. Time for some lunch.
• Sent the kids off for a week of horse-riding camp today. Wife Air and I had sparkling wine in the garden. Vewwy vewwy quiet around here.
• Just sorted a bunch of CDs. Still several discs missing cases, and cases missing discs. I feel like a total '90s throwback.
• Rules of photography (via Alastair Bird).
• When did the standard Booth Babe uniform become cropped T-shirt and too-short schoolgirl kilt?
• Listening to "Kind of Blue." It's been awhile.
• "A two-year old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it." - Jerry Seinfeld (via Ryan).

Labels: audio, biology, blog, cancer, chemotherapy, family, flickr, geekery, google, microsoft, movie, music, oceans, photography, sex, startrek, transportation, video, whistler

Once again, while I'm on my blog break, my edited Twitter posts from the past week, newest first:

• Photo of Obama picking up his infamous housefly victim.
• Guess that U2 iPod is never coming back.
• And now: "Ant and Buttercup," my debut HD macro closeup movie from our summer garden:
  
  
  
• My first experiments with off-camera flash during close-up photography:
  
  
  
  
• If I'm passed at high speed by someone with a Washington plate BOKEH, I now know who it is. He says he'll wave.
• Mammals will play, even between species, even when you'd never expect it—wild polar bear and huskies (slide show via Dave Winer).
• A couple of crows are nesting nearby; they keep landing in our birdbath and on the house and lamp stands, looking ominous. Too smart, crows.
• Sitting in a B.C. garden
  No waiting for the sun
• CompuServe finally shuts down.
• Just in case you're looking for a $2.1 million convertible.
• Congratulations to Buzz Bishop, Jen, and Zacharie.
• I presume this tiny USB-driven monitor screen is Windows-only, because of drivers? Looks pretty swell. (Via Neal Campbell.)
• Definitive proof I'm not afraid of heights: I love this idea.
• Via John Biehler, I found that as well as MythBuster Adam Savage, his co-workers Grant Imahara and narrator Robert Lee are also on Twitter.
• When I had my first Nikon 25 years ago, I wouldn't have believed I'd ever own one (a D90) with 66 pages of the manual (out of a couple hundred total, in a 16 MB PDF file) just for menu options. Then again, 25 years ago, a friend showed me a shoulder-mounted Betamax camera from Hong Kong, and it was the latest in high tech video too.
• That's the funkiest beat I've ever heard a marching band play (via Jared Spool). Maybe some James Brown next?
• Has anyone pinpointed the exact day that Victoria Beckham stopped being able to smile? Angus Wilson speculates, "whatever day she began to look less like a hot English babe and more like a velociraptor."
• Meg Fowler: "Sarah Palin's quitting politics like Ann Coulter's quitting evil."
• As the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing approaches, some fabulous photos from the missions, via Bad Astronomy.
• From Ben Englert: "Thank you, gdgt, for institutionalizing the arduous task of dick-measuring by figuring out who has more toys."
• Ten best uses of classical music in classic cartoons.
• Our fridge magnet: "I love not camping."
  
  
  
• How did I manage to bite the inside of my upper lip while eating a peach? If this were high school, the guys would say, "Each much?"
• Back to short hair for summer. And now I realize that it's Colbert hair.
• I think my guts have calmed down now. Time for bed. In the meantime, enjoy a naked Air New Zealand flight crew.
• In case you'd like to watch Jeff Goldblum reporting on his own "death," on Colbert Monday: links for Canada and the U.S.A. (sorry if you're elsewhere!).
• Didn't attend various Canada Day parties because of tired family and my usual intestinal side effects. Hope you had fun in my stead. Managed to avoid intestinal chemo side effects for a few days, but they're back with a vengeance. Could be a looooong night. (And it was. At 2 a.m., my chemo side effects were "over" and I went to bed. Bzzt! Wrong! Finally got to sleep at 9 a.m., woke up at 1 the next afternoon. As Alfred E. Neuman says, Yecch.)
• Whatever you think of the 2010 Olympics here in Vancouver, VANOC is doing a good job with graphic design.
• I, too, welcome our new ant overlords.
• I had no alcohol on my birthday yesterday, but still had a Canada Day headache on July 1. Here's my new free instrumental.
• Inside Home Recording #72 is out: Winners, Studio Move, Synth 101, Suckage! AAC enhanced and MP3 audio-only versions.
• Normally I really like our car dealer's service dept, but today the steering wheel came back oh-so-slightly to the left. They had to re-fix it.
• World's geekiest pillows (via Chris Pirillo). My guess: they didn't license the Apple icons. Get the pillows while you can.
• Officially made it to 40. Thanks everybody for the birthday wishes. Most people are bit melancholy to reach 40, but I am extremely glad to have made it.
• Just returned from a Deluxe Chuck Wagon burger (with cheese) at the resurrected Wally's Burgers in Cates Park, North Vancouver:
  
  
  
• From Rob Cottingham: "The hell with putting a ring on it. If you liked it, you shoulda made a secure offsite backup."
• Info about recording old vinyl records into a computer: You need a proper grounded phono preamp, with good hot signals into an audio interface or other analog-to-digital converter. A new needle might be wise if yours is old, but the real phono preamp (w/RIAA curve) is the most necessary bit after that. Route it thru an old stereo tuner if needed! See my old post from 2006 at Inside Home Recording.
• Myth confirmed: Baby girl evidence (named Stella) shows MythBusters' Kari Byron actually was pregnant.
• My new Twitter background image is the view we saw at sunset during my birthday party on Saturday. (I've since replaced it again.)
• Back from another fun sunny summer BBQ at Paul Garay's new house—it's been a burgers-n-beer weekend.
• Photos from my 40th birthday party now posted (please use tag "penmachinebirthday" if you post some).

Labels: animals, band, birthday, cartoon, family, food, geekery, insidehomerecording, linksofinterest, moon, movie, music, mythbusters, news, paulgaray, photography, politics, space, transportation, usb

I turn 40 today, and in honour of that, here is "Dodging Buses" (3.7 MB MP3 file), a three-minute instrumental number. Like many of my others, it has that signature Penmachine granky guitar-bass-drums sound, with a hint of AC/DC. I started recording it back in March, using my Yamaha Pacifica electric guitar tuned to an open E chord, but only in this past week did I add bass, mix, and then master it.

The name comes from something I've said numerous times during my past two and half years of cancer treatment: the saying goes that you could get hit by a bus anytime, but personally, I feel like I'm dodging buses every day. It's licensed for you to share and reuse, as long as you give me credit, so have fun with it.

Labels: birthday, free, music, penmachinepodcast, podcast

While I'm on my blog break, more edited versions of my Twitter posts from the past week, newest first:

• My wonderful wife got me a Nikon D90 camera for my 40th birthday this week. I'm thinking of selling my old Nikon D50, still a great camera. Anyone interested? I was thinking around $325. I also have a brand new 18–55 mm lens for sale with it, $150 by itself or $425 together. I have all original boxes, accessories, manuals, software, etc., and I'll throw in a memory card, plus a UV filter for the lens.
  
  
• Roger Hawkins's drum track for "When a Man Loves a Woman" (Percy Sledge 1966): tastiest ever? Hardly a fill, no toms, absolutely delicious.
• Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who came to my 40th birthday party—both for your presence and for the presents. Photos from the event, held June 27, three days early for my actual birthday on Tuesday, are now posted (please use tag "penmachinebirthday" if you post some yourself).
• I think Twitter just jumped the shark. In trending topics, Michael Jackson passed Iran, OK, but both passed by Princess Protection Program (new Disney Channel movie)?
• AT&T (and Rogers, presumably) is trying to charge MythBusters' Adam Savage $11,000 USD for some wireless web surfing here in Canada.
• After more than 12 years buying stuf on eBay, here's our first ever item for sale there. Nothing too exciting, but there you go.
• Michael Jackson's death this week made me think of comparisons with Elvis, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain. Lennon and Cobain still seemed to have some artistic vitality ahead of them. Feel a need for Michael Jackson coverage? Jian Ghomeshi (MP3 file) on CBC in Canada is the only commentator who isn't blathering mindlessly. But as a cancer patient myself, having Farrah Fawcett and Dr. Jerri Nielsen (of South Pole fame) die of it the same day is a bit hard to take.
• Seattle's KCTS 9 (PBS affiliate) showed "The Music Instinct" with Daniel Levitin and Bobby McFerrin. If you like music or are a musician, it's worth watching, even if it's a bit scattershot, packing too much into two hours.
• New rule: when a Republican attacks gay marriage, lets assume he's cheating on his wife (via Jak King).
• The blogs and podcasts I'm affiliated with are now sold on Amazon for its Kindle e-reader device, for $2 USD a month. I know, that's weird, because they're normally free, and are even accessible for free using the Kindle's built-in web browser, so I don't know why people would pay for them—but if you want to, here you go: Penmachine, Inside Home Recording, and Lip Gloss and Laptops. Okay, we're waiting for the money to roll in...
• Great speech by David Schlesinger from Reuters to the International Olympic Committee on not restricting new media at the Olympics (via Jeff Jarvis).
• TV ad: "Restaurant-inspired meals for cats." Um, have they seen what cats bring in from the outdoors?
• I planned to record my last segment for Inside Home Recording #72, but neighbour was power washing right outside the window (in the rain!). Argh.
• You can't trust your eyes: the blue and green are actually the SAME COLOUR.
• Can you use the new SD card slot in current MacBook laptops for Time Machine backups? (You can definitely use it to boot the computer.) Maybe, but not really. SDHC cards max out at 32GB (around $100 USD); the upcoming SDXC will handle more, but none exist in Macs or in the real world yet. Unless you put very little on the MacBook's internal drive, or use System Preferences to exclude all but the most essential stuff from backups, then no, SD cards are not viable for Time Machine.
• Some stats from Sebastian Albrecht's insane thirteen-times-up-the-Grouse Grind climb in one day this week. He burned 14,000+ calories.
• Even though I use RSS extensively, I find myself manually visiting the same 5 blogs (Daring Fireball, Kottke, Darren Barefoot, PZ Myers, and J-Walk) every morning, with most interesting news covered.
• I never get tired of NASA's rocket-cam launch videos.
• Pat Buchanan hosts conference advocating English-only initiatives in the USA. But the sign over the stage is misspelled.
• Who knew the Rolling Stones made an (awesome) jingle for Rice Krispies in the mid-1960s?
• Always scary stuff behind a sentence like, "'He is an expert in every field,' said a church spokeswoman."
• Kodachrome slide film is dead, but Fujichrome Velvia killed it a long time ago. This is just the official last rites.
• My friends Dave K. and Dr. Debbie B. did the Vancouver-to-Seattle bicycle Ride to Conquer Cancer (more than 270 km in two days) last weekend. Congrats and good job!
• My daughter (11) asks on her blog: "if Dad is so internet famous, I mean, Penmachine is popular, then, maybe I am too..."
• Evolution of a photographer (via Scott Bourne).

Labels: amazon, apple, backup, birthday, cancer, film, geekery, linksofinterest, music, news, olympics, photography, politics, religion, science, space, television, twitter

While I'm on my blog break, here are some selected, edited, and concatenated versions of my Twitter posts from the past week, newest first:

• A DJ is a fake DJ if he plays music that he composed and recorded himself.
• For photo nerds, a fun shootout from Poland of Nikon's 1960-era 58mm f/1.4 lens vs. a new (2008) autofocus 50mm f/1.4.
• The sunset is beautiful and calming. Wish I could say the same for the state of my digestive system.
• My kids are suddenly obsessed with Devo's "Whip It" and Lipps Inc.'s "Funkytown." Sounds like 1980 around here. They are also keen on "You Spin Me Right Round (Like a Record)" and "We're Not Gonna Take It."
• Best tilt-shift time-lapse movie yet (check it out in HD).
• When Robert X. Cringely isn't trying to predict, he can be very wise. Here he is on SMS and Twitter.
• I'm uneasy about the proposed new Canadian Internet surveillance law.
• In case Iran distracted you, note that Obama is taking lots of heat from the U.S. gay community this week.
• Listening to "One Thing Leads to Another" by The Fixx (1983). That's one killer guitar tone, I tell ya. [...] Have moved on to "I'm a Man" by the Spencer Davis Group. Hard to believe Steve Winwood was only 18. Sounds like an old soul shouter.
• Sometimes when listening to a good podcast, I’ll pick a longer line at the grocery store so I can listen to more of it.
• I believe the commercial jingle for MTI Community College (on their site) may be the worst such tune ever made.
• Photos by Andy Ihnatko using the improved camera on the new iPhone 3GS. Tap-to-focus also invokes spot metering, which makes a HUGE difference.
• Since I took a break from blogging a few days ago, I'm tweeting and commenting on other blogs quite a bit more. Can't not write, I guess.
• Roger Ebert writes that right-wing TV blowhard Bill O'Reilly tells viewers, "You're right, but you're not right ENOUGH! I'm angrier about this than you are!" And that is corrosive.
• How the human brain perceives images.
• As 11:30 news ends, they say, "See you on the morning news at 4:30." Uh, sure.
• Is there anything that will more instantly provoke itchy eyes than a Visine ad?
• For recording a podcast with two people, the Blue Snowball USB microphone is okay, but there are better USB mic options now. If you want to use a single mic for 2 people, the Snowball is actually better in its omni mode than in unidirectional. Alas, to change its hardware gain setting you need to change firmware (available from Blue site), which is annoying. Look also at Samson's C03U, and don't ignore the possibility of using a small USB audio interface and traditional mics too. For two people you'll do best with two mics. Modern lavalier (clip-ons) like the Audio-Technica PRO 70 do very well there.
• DCResource on the tiny new Olympus DP-1 Micro Four Thirds camera.
• Is this real or a spoof?
• "Dancing Queen," "Brown Eyed Girl," "I Saw Her Standing There"—some songs work regardless of the audience.
• Any entrepreneur worth his or her salt talks about their actual business, not "entrepreneurism."
• Not chuffed; rather, chafed.

That'll do in the meantime, won't it? Oh, and happy Father's Day to my dad, other dads out there, and me!

Labels: geekery, linksofinterest, music, news, photography, recording, twitter