Happy Birthday Jimi

Hendrix Tattoo

Today marks Johnny Allen Hendrix’s 66th birthday. It’s hard not to ask the question of how music would be had he stayed alive. It’s also useless because there is no way we could ever know. He left his mark at the right time and at the right place.

I’m not the biggest Hendrix fan. Some would disagree since I have the man’s head tattooed on my left shoulder, and I’m not really going to get into why I have it. But you cannot deny the influence he had on music, and in particular the way he elevated the way a guitar was played. In an age of guitar hero’s, he was the first to actually earn that title. You could even say he created the very notion.

I remember when I first learned about Jimi. I must have been around 16, and had just started getting serious about playing guitar. I kept coming across his name in countless articles I read about other guitar players of the time. Who the heck was this Jimi guy? So I went out, and purchased 1967’s Are You Experienced. After the first couple of listenings, I distinctly remember having the feeling that my world now made more sense. I was hearing the origins of a lot of musical things I was already familiar with from listening to other guitar players. It was like finding the missing link. Aside from the obvious blues and rhythm and blues influences, he injected into his playing a unique style that can still be heard in today’s music.

His influence spans more then just the way he changed the way the guitar was played. His approach to song writing, performing, musical experimentation, producing, recording and integrity to ones music are all ways that I think he uniquely defined. This is harder to come by, but I encourage you to read one of the many biographies out there on the man, to get a sense for this if you are interested. The stories of the time alone, for example how Eric Clapton wanted to give up playing guitar and went into a depression after seeing Jimi perform live, are priceless and worth reading about.

He was also an amazing blues player, which a lot of people do not know. At par, if not above, his contemporaries, his blues recordings are actually some of the best material he ever recorded and stand the test of time. Have a listen.

He has a special place in my heart. As I write this, listening to his version of Born Under a Bad Sign I can’t help feeling sad. Burned too brightly. Faded too fast.

So, get out your guitars, tune them down to E♭and play, its what he would likely have done. Happy Birthday Jimi Hendrix.

Waking up in the city

Waking up in the city

Watching the city come alive in the morning is a special treat that I often get to enjoy. Viewed from my balcony, or from walking the empty streets, it is an experience most people up at this hour take for granted. But who can blame them really? Too busy to smell the flowers. Rushing for that one streetcar that will get you to work on time. Feeling the drudgery of yet another day. Hugging that warm cup of coffee that will give you the first of many boosts. Is it Friday yet?

Yet the sun reflects from the office towers to the east with its first rays touching the surface of the city. A warm and welcoming pink glows from the clouds. Birds start their songs and take to the skies from their sleeping places in groups, feeling the sharp morning air and looking for their first meal. The noise level on Queen Street West is at first quiet. Then slowly it raises as more streetcars travel on the steel tracks, and the cars start to come awake with their masters at the wheel heading towards their destinations. A city man with its bright reflective yellow jacket, sweeps the sidewalk. Construction cranes are already moving their heavy loads. The beeps from a truck backing up can be heard echoing and bouncing off the faces of the buildings. Car horns. Metal pipes hitting the ground. Screakie streetcar breaks. It is a slow cadence that if one listens for it, can give you the feeling of a city waking up. But it’s not just a feeling. The city is waking up. And somewhere out there, some lucky pigeons are enjoying a fat piece of banana bread.

I’ll be part of this process in a short little while. I’ll be just another human, following the daily routine that gets one to work. It sounds boring yet not always. You do the same thing every day. Some days its easier then others. Some days you don’t want to leave the warmth of your bed, the softness of your pillow, the tender touch of your partner. You hit snooze a few times hoping for a little more blissfulness, the return to the dream you were just having. One more sweet embrace…

But you get up. You belong out there too. You have a place to take, a part to play. Soon you’ll be in it. Soon you will struggle to remember what right now feels like. Soon you will be standing in the crowded street car, reading your book, listening to your ipod or alone with your thoughts. Soon you’ll be at your desk, or behind your counter, saying good morning to your co-workers or customers. Knowing that they too have gone through their own struggles to get up and be here in their own way. Different yet the same.

The day has started. There is new hope in the air, a smile on your face. Get out there.

Get Air applications to use Chrome as the default browser

I’ve been using a couple of Air applications as interfaces to Twitter. Mainly Twhirl (which i now use daily), but for a little while Tweetdeck, and noticed that hyperlinks inside of tweets were spawning Firefox instead of Chrome which was set as my default system browser. After cursing the Air applications, which is where I thought the issue was, I discovered that the issue actually lies with Chrome and the process it runs to set itself up as the default browser. It took a bit of googling around to find this solution, and unfortunately i cannot remember where i did find it, but the solution is as follows on windows.

  • Open up Regedit and navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.htm
  • Change, or add the value of .htm to “ChromeHTML” minus the quotes.

That does it. I also read that this should be fixed in the next version of Chrome.

Look at what’s coming to daddy

When I was around 16 and just really getting into playing guitar, Ibanez released the JEM 777v series. I wanted one badly but could not afford the then $3K price tag. Fast forward to today, a store bankruptcy, a forum post, a loss of hope and a few emails.
Ibanez JEM 777vbk
Can’t fucking wait!

order your WordPress links

Found this neat plugin after trying to figure out how to specify an order to my WordPress links. The install could be even simpler, but its easy. Why isn’t this part of WordPress itself?

del.icio.us links for you

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been noticing that my friend thebigjc has been leaving me links in my del.icio.us. Of course i wondered how it was done. Nothing was right away obvious, so i gave up after 2 minutes (that’s my attention span these days). But today I figured it out.

First, add a friend to your network, then when you are tagging just add “for:YOURFRIEND” just like any other tag, and voila.

My first story on Sutori

In my previous entry, I mentioned that I had been beta testing a new site that my employer is supporting and that (shameless plug) I had a very tiny hand on called Sutori.

Well, the goal of the site is to allow us, consumers, to express our experiences with the multitude of businesses that we deal with on a daily basis. As such, i’ve posted my first story about Mr Greek.

Now i’m hungry.

Sutori! Beta feedback

Sutori is in beta! and I got some feedback/bugs :) These will be in somewhat random order.

Stories

  • Having the story ID on the post name doesn’t read well. I would lose the ID on the post. I understand why it is there, but why not do what WordPress does on duplicate titles for example?
  • There is no “next” link on a story listing page.
  • Can’t preview a story before posting (at least it appears so, i haven’t posted a story :))

Profile

  • Can’t change password in edit profile.
  • Can’t see email address when signing in. The field is not long enough, I would suggest a more traditional approach here.
  • When editing profile, there is a web site name which needs to be filled in if you give a link or the link will not render. I would say, render the link if no site name is available anyway.
  • Can’t add links to the profile description or html. Some limited html would be good, like simple formatting, maybe links.

In General:

  • The tag cloud on the top right seems to stand out too much. The section bellow it is not really visible. No real suggestions here yet.
  • What about sending out sutori invites? ya just like gmail, except the more love the more invites?
  • It would be nice to see a list of my recent comments and voted for them.
  • When posting a comment, have the agree/disagree option as it relates to the story in question. It kinda ruins the flow to have to go back to the top of the page to “vote”, but make it not mandatory.
  • I love the default monkey icon. He looks somewhat familiar :)
  • Not sure if “remember me” functionality is planned, but its handy to have.
  • Needs “forgot password”.
  • The text font used in the images, apart from the logo is hard to read and looks “messy”. A font that small and chubby just doesn’t alias well.
  • ATOM/RSS feeds - be l33t and just offer ATOM
  • What’s the default session time out? I just got logged out :)
  • How is the featured story chosen?

That is it for now. It has been interesting reading the stories posted so far. I need to go out and buy something so I have something to post. Great Job guys! And be sure to stop by the Sutori Blog for news on the site.

Google geoservice

This is likelly old news to some, but Google Maps has an API that can return location coordinates. I’ve always wanted to know what the longitude and latitude of my house is, and short of going out and getting a GPS device, I hadn’t really tried to figure it out (yes i am lazy, or rather just too busy :)). Well today I did, and i also wanted to have a quick command line way to find other locations. The Google API has a REST HTTP interface. One easy way to call this, is to use wget. But I wanted Ruby. So i wrote a little script which at its core has:

open(’http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=’ + q + ‘&output=’ + format + ‘&key=’ + key) {|f|
f.each_line {|line|
result = line.split(’,')
}
}

The output option is nice. I default to ‘csv’ which ruby handles easely since I am only interested in the longitude and latitude, but you can get XML and JSON.

The rest of the script is just picking up command line options and output. Which by the way, it looks like Ruby could really use a nice command line options interface. It has 2, but it would be nice to have something built in that is stupid simple. GetoptLong is identical to get_optlong(), and and OptionParser seems to be the new kid on the block, but the documentation is horrid. Or maybe its just too rubish for my understanding at this time. But back to the topic…
Geotagging appears to be a growing trend, but it appears that there is no standard format of specifyinc this information. Any clues out there of what are the best options to geotag pages? Or even blog posts (that would be cooler then a page since you can write a blog from almost anywhere).

Update:

Interesting links:
geocoder.us
geocoder.ca
feedmap
plazes

Tim Bray on contribution and experience

Tim Bray is by far one of my favourite bloggers. Always full of insight. Today is no different, and it is about something that hits home. I’ll just post here verbatum what the post is since it is so short, but do go visit:

“User-Generated Content” is an irreparably ugly and broken phrase. First, we’re people, not “users”. Second, people write and speak and design and compose and sing and play and build and earn and pay; machines “generate”. Third, it’s words and pictures and sound and money, not “content”. The trouble is, we need labels; short ones that still say something. Say, contribution and experience? The Net (really, truly) is the sum of billions of contributions from millions of people, and that’s all that’s interesting about it. People contribute at the edge, and experience the contributions at the edge. (Experience, not consume; the difference is obvious). The Net itself’s a contribution, by humanity to humanity, the engine of future contribution and experience. The Net’s not finished of course; contributing and experiencing, both of them, are too hard and awkward and slow.

Flickr Photos

Hendrix Tattoo