An Old Jones Rediscovered

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No record on earth is more associated with the beginnings of my love of music than The Allman Brothers’ Brothers and Sisters album. I became an Allman Brothers fan the very first time I heard Idlewild South (and specifically In Memory of Elizabeth Reed). Then when I heard At Fillmore East, I decided they were my favorite band (they’ve been neck and neck with the Grateful Dead pretty much ever since). The future was bright with the promise of new music until Duane Allman and Berry Oakley were killed in motorcycle accidents within about a year of each other.

When Brothers and Sisters was released after various delays, no one knew what to expect. What we got was an instant classic, with Dickey Betts moving easily onto center stage and Greg Allman sounding as soulful as ever. The record epitomizes southern rock and roll- it’s a soulful mix of rock, blues and country. It is not an overstatement to say that if there was a soundtrack to my youth, this would be it. When I listen to it, every single song reminds me of somebody I knew back then or some crazy thing we did. At one time or another during every stage of my life, I have rediscovered how much I love this record and created a new set of memories and associations. That’s what is happening now in my house. My kids are sick of hearing how incredible the opening of Southbound is; and how great the piano is in Come and Go Blues. When I saw the Dickey Betts concert on HDNet, I made them watch it with me (fantastic show; check it out).

There are 7 absolute classics on this record. The song most people know, Ramblin’ Man, while a great song, is no better than the 5th best song on the record, behind Wasted Words, Come and Go Blues, Southbound and Jessica. The other two songs (Jelly Jelly and Pony Boy) are also tens on a 10-scale.

I didn’t have this record on CD until a couple of weeks ago. I realized that it was crazy to have as much music as I do on my music server without having maybe the greatest rock and roll album of all time. So I bought the CD and have been listening to it non-stop ever since.

If there’s a song in the world that rocks better than Southbound (playing on my stereo right now), somebody point me to it.

Castpost & a Very Old Video

Castpost is a new service that hosts audio and video files for use with blogs and other web sites. It is in alpha testing now, and is free during testing. Better yet, alpha testers get a free one year subscription once the site goes live. Run, don’t walk, over there and sign up for a free (for now) account.

I just signed up tonight and am beginning to put the site through its paces. I uploaded some very old video I renamed 3 Short Films from the Vault. It’s comprised of two test films I made when preparing to make Bride of Gibster, my first more or less full length film, and the beginning of another film that never got made. The first test film is some animation I was practicing in preparation for a scene in Bride. The animation in the later film was much more detailed and included dialog (I’ll try to post that scene later). It’s amazing (at least to me) what we got done back in 1991, without the use of a computer. The second test film is a bunch of random photos I shot to learn how to film still photos. I was shooting these photos on a TV Tray with the JVC video camera on a tripod pointing straight down. I used this exercise to figure out the lighting, timing and distances. You can easily do something much better and more complex in minutes using Photo Story or any of a hundred other programs today on a computer, but it was a lot harder in 1991. A lot harder.

The last film runs about a minute, but it is my favorite, only because it features my mom and you can hear my sister laughing in the background while I filmed her. My initial plan was to film mom sleeping for an hour or so and then superimpose some silly photos and music that would approximate imaginary dreams she was having, but she woke up. When she figured out that we were trying to film her, she was very careful not to sleep in plain sight anymore.

Here’s that old video from the early 90s, served by Castpost.

Proof Positive

That if enough people blog loudly about an issue, they can make a difference.

Microsoft was rumored to be negotiating to purchase Claria, a company that has been associated with spyware. Everybody from Ed Bott to Dwight Silverman wondered why Miscrosoft would do such a stupid thing.

Today word was leaked that Microsoft is not going to buy Claria. One of the reasons- the adverse PR that would have resulted.

Mark one up for the good guys.

Songs A-Z (Part F)

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I have posted another A-Z installment on the Err Bear Music page. It’s a pop/rock number which was inspired, in part, by an empty apartment and a full bottle of Jack Daniels.

A Great Timesaver

One of the problems with having a web site is that what looks good today looks awful tomorrow, as tastes and technology change. There is nothing more depressing than knowing that you want to change the look of your site, but also knowing that you have hundreds of pages that will have to be changed individually to facilitate the new look. Yes, CSS (which I now use religiously) can help a lot in this regard. But many older pages, including until last month all of mine, either don’t use styles at all or have the styles embedded in the page itself (talk about defeating the purpose).

So when I decided to update the look of Newsome.Org, that was one thing, since it only has about 3 pages to worry about. But when I decided to update the look of the Err Bear Music page, that was another thing altogether. The EBM pages contain a main page, 5 index pages and literally hundreds of song pages, one for each of my songs. It would take days and days and days to reconfigure each page individually- I know this because I have done it twice in the past. This time I decided to see if technology could make it easier, and boy did it.

There are a number of search and replace programs that will work with html files. I tried several of them and found Alias Find and Replace to be the best. It made a 30 hour job a 2 hour job, and the only reason it wasn’t a 30 minute job is because I had to figure out what to tell the program to replace to get what I was after.

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The hard part was the individual song pages. Those pages are identical except for the lyrics part in the middle. After a little trial and error, I changed hundreds of my song pages in a few minutes in 3 steps. First I used “Search & Replace Blocks” to remove all of the header tags and embedded styles in favor of a uniform header and a reference to a remote style sheet (which will now allow me to globally make any subsequent changes to all pages merely by modifying the style sheet). Second, I used “Search & Replace Blocks” again to replace everything in each page before the beginning of the lyrics with the new code from my new page template. Third, I again used “Search & Replace Blocks” to replace everything after the lyrics with the new code from my new page template. Worked like a charm.

Alias Find and Replace works with all kinds of files, so it’s not only a time saver for html files, but also any other files where you need to make the same change a lot of times.

It’s a great timesaver and I highly recommend it.

Jukebox, Uncensored

Here’s this week’s list. You know the drill. Open up your jukebox of choice, point the shuffle feature to your entire library of songs and list, without exception, the first 10 or so songs that play.

Poison Love – Doug Sahm (The Atlantic Sessions)
Uncloudy Day – Willie Nelson (Greatest Hits)
So You Are a Star – Hudson Brothers (Super Hits of the 70s)
Mary Brown – Dave Alvin (Blackjack David)
First Meeting – Lightnin’ Hopkins (And the Blues Summit)
Everything’s Gonna Be Allright – Drivin n Cryin (Drivin n Cryin)
The Great Compromise – John Prine (Diamonds in the Rough)
St. Tropez – Country Joe McDonald (Vanguard Years)
The Rope – Martina McBride (The Time Has Come)
Sad Lisa – Cat Stevens (Tea for the Tillerman)

Is That a Train I Hear a Comin'

to take my TIVO away? Or is it Rupert Murdoch. More unfortunate evidence that TIVO is dying on the vine. I like my TIVO, but I know that it is not a long term DVR solution. When Direct TV turned its back on TIVO after allegedly trying unsuccessfully to buy it, the end was beginning. A lot of early adopters like me are going to soon have some very expensive paperweights. The problem is being accelerated by the fact that the current HDTV models do not support MPEG-4, and Direct TV is about to switch to MPEG-4 in order to create more bandwidth for additional HDTV stations.

Like a lot of things (VCRs, tablet computers, etc.) the person who invents something isn’t always the one who capitalizes on it. If Direct TV says subscribers need a Direct TV branded DVR to record HDTV, most subscribers will get one. I don’t know how (or even if) TIVO thinks it can survive without the support of Direct TV, but it can’t.

To make matters worse, TIVO recently hired a contraversial CEO.

Looks like rough waters ahead for TIVO and its (so far) loyal customers.

Podcasting Revisited

Ed Bott agrees with my reservations about Podcasting and the real world.

I actually spent some time last night considering doing a Rancho DeNada podcast, but then I remembered that it would take forever to do it, I couldn’t use any music other than my own without risking the wrath of the priority-challenged RIAA, and even if I did, no one I know has the knowledge, hardware or inclination to listen to it.

Songs A-Z (Part E)