Mandolin Camp 2009 was this past weekend and it marks my fourth year of attendance out of 5. It's always a pleasure to be surrounded by people who share a keen interest in making and listening to mandolin music of all types. This year the faculty concerts were breathtaking and especially tight. Mike Compton from Nashville was the guest performer/instructor this year and what a treat to see his effortless playing style that had such a great feel. I've been a fan of his for some time and put his CD collaboration with David Long entitled STOMP high on my list of great works. Well worth buying!
It was nice not being a newcomer and absolute newbie any more. While there were some classes where I was overwhelmed and out of my league [mostly because my practice this past year has been so sporadic] it was nice feeling comfortable in the experience of 'not knowing'. The panic really wasn't evident so I guess I'm progressing!
There are many things I enjoy but high on the list is simply being exposed to so many types of music that people are exploring.Whether it's blues or jazz or bluegrass or irish or old time or a hybrid of them, it's really instructive to hear and see how people are relating to their music.
Personally, a great eye-opener is learning how much I enjoy listening to traditional Irish tunes. David Surette is one of the instructors who specializes in this kind of music. His CD Green Mandolin [hint: listen for free by clicking the link!] showcases some beautiful mandolin renditions of traditional Irish tunes. I grabbed a copy during the weekend and put it on while I was driving home from the camp. The recording captures how adeptly he plays these sometimes complicated Irish jigs and reels and really brings the music alive in a way that you don't hear every day. I was pleasantly surprised to hear applause at the end of the tracks as they were so beautifully recorded and played, I assumed they were recorded in a studio but no the tracks were recorded at festivals around the country!So there are just two examples of the many fine musicians and instructors I got to enjoy this weekend. As a friend put it, it was an escape from the reality of the day to day and a real treat to think of nothing other than mandolins for a weekend. I"m ready for next year!
Having passed 1,000 followers on twitter this past weekend has gotten me thinking of twitter and how I use it.I use twitter daily for a variety of reasons. Part IRC chat, part live newswire, part magic 8 ball, twitter is many things to many people.My testimonial for twitter usually goes like this: I'm a news hound. I update all the newsites many times a day to get the latest.Recently when there was an earthquake in California, do you know where I heard about it first? On twitter! People in California sent messages like 'did you feel that?' and soon there was a groundswell of up to date information on what happened. When I called my friends in LA to ask about it, they were shocked that I knew because it hadn't made the news yet. Twitter is as real time as real time gets.Here are some random observations:
The longer twitter is around the more people will have follower counts in the thousands. This drastically changes how twitter looks and feels. It looks less like a small log of friends sending notes and more like a live news feed on a variety of topics from people all over the world. Using search and subscribing to search results is the way to make sense of the overwhelming amount of twitter data.
New to twitter? Here's some advice---> One way to think of twitter is how it differs from email. We are all familiar with email by now aren't we?
Email defaults to 1 person to 1 person. You have to do something special to mail a note to more than one person usually by CCing or BCCing or sending to a group email address.
Twitter defaults to 1 person to many people. You have to do something special to send a a twitter message [tweet] to just one person. How do you send a twitter message to just one person? By prefacing your message with a D for a direct message [that is truly private] or @ message which is public but directed at one or more people.
It's a very interesting time to be discovering twitter because there is a lot of action in the way of new sites, applications, and interfaces into what twitter does. For the old timers who have road tested twitter in the real world, twitter has become part our daily information intake.Here's my twitcard as an example of what people are doing with twitter data.
It's that time of year. Spring has come in full force. Of course here in Central NJ, we were greeted with snow flurries but I digress.
Now is the time of year to start our seedlings, rake our lawns, and start on those spring cleaning rituals.Rob and I were dismayed to find out that we will need a permit to accomplish a spring project we've been planning. Yes here in Central NJ we need a permit just to put up a little tool shed in the backyard. To add insult to injury, not only do we need to get a permit from the Inspections department, we need to get approval from the Zoning department as our shed is over 10x10 feet.So this shed will not be done before May is my guess. We were hoping to have it done in April. Funny how the best laid plans get reworked.On the topic of spring, I've impressed my friends with my little seedlings that I've started for the first time. While it's not nearly as exciting as this video, there is a simple pleasure in watching things grow from seed.Have you any gardening plans this season?
So Rob and I bit the bullet and got a new kitchen floor put in. We hemmed and hawed because it was a lot more expensive than we thought it was worth but it had to be done. In fact, I've been waiting for a new floor from the day I bought the house 8 years ago!The old floor had what I referred to as ghetto vinyl tile. It was horrific and it was coming up pretty easily. The previous owner obviously had a dog which put lots of scratches in the floor and those scratches trapped dirt and made it very hard to clean.Some of the things that we did in preparation for the flooring were shopping around. Thanks to some great net tools like servicemagic.com [highly recommended] and the better business bureau website at bbb.org , we were able to get a number of estimates from reliable and highly rated sources. That certainly gave us a level of confidence in our final vendor selection.Have you heard of servicemagic.com ? It's a service we've come to use for all of our home improvement projects. It works like this:
you create a free account
you enter the job details [type, time frame etc.]
they contact suitable contractors and provide them the details
the contractors call you and setup appointments to do estimates
you can review contractor reviews submitted by other users
you select a contractor [either from them or not]
if job is completed and you picked their vendor, you rate the vendor
This service was _very_ useful a few years ago when everyone was competing for the limited number of contractors. Remember those days?In today's economy, it's a bit easier to get contractors to return calls but nonetheless having access to feedback from other clients is useful in making decisions on who to hire.In addition to servicemagic.com we used the better business bureau website at bbb.org If you're not familiar with them, give it a look. They break out their sites by geographic location and then you can drill down to see types of contractors and whether they had complaints and whether they are bbb certified. This is another tool to use when trying to figure out who to hire.So there you have the whole story of our kitchen floor and how we use the net to get the job done.Do you have any other tools you use? Do share...Here are the pictures of the job:
The last few days have been full of twitter messages to @wefollow with hashtags like #creative or #technology.You may be asking yourself what is that all about? Well it turns out that the young entrepreneur behind digg.comKevin Rose has launched a new service that is quickly gaining traction in the world of twitter.The new site is called wefollow.com and it is a directory where twitter users tag themselves with 3 attributes via hashtags [the #something ] and this website collects all names with a similar hashtag and sorts them by popularity.This service is pretty useful and solves a few shortcomings with twitter. Twitter is all about real time interaction but it doesn't show people a way to find other users that have shared interests without a lot of trial and error. Wefollow.com solves this vaccum pretty elegantly Just tag yourself with three things that describe you and then others will be able to see you in the directory and if they choose they will follow you.How did I tag myself you ask? I chose #gay #mba and #pmp It will be interesting to see how tags change over time and whether the limit of three will ever be raised. More than one person has bemoaned that rather arbitrary limit.Check out wefollow.com and give it a spin
This weekend Rob and I saw Doubt which stars Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and was directed by John Patrick Shanley. This movie takes place in the late 1960's in the Bronx and is set in a small catholic school. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Father Brendan Flynn, the priest of this church/school with a heart of gold. He takes to the children with a heart of compassion and love. Meryl Streep plays Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the school principal who reports to the priest. Her characters approach to life and work is fear driven. She works very hard to be stern and feared among the students and staff. The contrast between her character and Phillip's is like night and day.A young nun/teacher has the first black student at the school. He's got the typical rebellious streak that kids go through at that age. One day the child comes to class with the smell of alcohol on his breath after a 1:1 meeting with the priest. The young teacher goes through the proper channels and reports this to Sister Aloysius. Sister Aloysius breaks all protocol and takes this to be a sign of a molester in her midst. She never trusted Father Flynn, what with his longish nails and seeks to prove that he is an evil man.Father Flynn fights against this vendetta on his reputation tooth and nail. The drama that takes place is fascinating to watch and upsetting to think about. The costumes in the film make the film seem more medieval than it is. The power that Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep bring to their respective roles makes the story come alive. The plot is a timeless one that could just as easily have taken place today and reminded me quite a lot of the film Milk with it's storyline that included witch hunts against teachers who were gay and those that were sympathetic to them.Without spoiling the movie, I will say that the story and characters are complex, the dramatic turns are riveting and every character on the screen is integral to the story. There are no weak links in the film and from beginning to end you are engrossed in a story that shows the highs and lows of the human spirit.
A friend in Australia shares this video of a drive on a lonely highway in Oz. This footage is amazing to me.I've never seen a dust storm like that and can only wonder what it was like.Amazing huh?
If you haven’t yet, you will. A netbook is basically a smaller notebook computer that is CHEAP and miniaturized. How cheap you ask?
Well I just picked up an Acer Aspire One this weekend from Staples for $299 US [Model: AOA150-1635]. This model included a 120 GB HD, webcam, 2 card reader slots and that includes Microsoft XP home as part of the package [which aint free!]
Why the Aspire One? Well I tried the EEE PC that Target had for $249 US and was horrified at how unusable the keyboard was. Sure it’s got to be smaller than a normal keyboard but it also has to be usable! That and the build quality left a lot to be desired.
Some folks recommended the Dell Mini 9 netbook which is getting a lot of press. The Dell looks like a good machine but when I added in all of the peripherals that the Acer had the price shot to above what I wanted to pay. My price point for a netbook was sitting at around $300. Above that and it seemed to be too close to the price of full laptops nowadays.
When I stopped in at my local Staples store, they had the Aspire One on display and the build quality, looks, and keyboard feel were way ahead of the EEE PC making it well worth the $50 premium over the EEE PC. I got mine in blue.
Being somewhat of a glutton for punishment, within hours of taking the Aspire One home, I was installing the Linpus lite distribution that Acer created for the Aspire One. I would have bought it over the XP version Acer sells but no one had it locally so I had to install it as part of a multi-boot system. After a few hours of tinkering and with a lot of reference material from the excellent aspire one users forums. After a day or so I had a triple boot system that had XP Home, Linpus Lite, and Ubuntu.
Of course my glory was short lived when Nerstalker a.k.a. @aforonda said:
“meh, get mac os on there then i’ll stand up and salute”
Not today I wont.
There’s always tomorrow though.
You may be asking, as some friends did, why a netbook when you have a Macbook white 13″?
Well, to be honest, I use the macbook as my main machine. Having to unplug it and plug it when I want to browse and tweet from the couch was overkill. That plus the heat of the machine made it uncomfortable for extended use on my lap. It is just too much machine for the light browsing and tinkering one does when vegging on the couch. That plus it is not really one to throw in the bag when travelling without feeling like you’re taking your life in your hands. What if it got stolen? Of course I do time machine backups but who wants that drama?
I took the netbook into the city recently and couldn’t help but notice that my anxiety about having a computer on the road was greatly diminshed. The difference between having a $299 laptop or a $1200 laptop stolen is HUGE. These netbooks are as close to disposable as one can get while still being useful.
Well it's time for another big change in our house. The time has come to say good bye to the brother and sister (ages 12 and 8 now) that we've been foster parents to for a year this month. The process to get them back home has started with weekend visits and talking through the transition with all parties.It's not easy saying goodbye but in this case the adjustment wont be so hard for us as there was never any pretense about them being anything but foster children. They are adorable and nice kids that any parent would be proud to call their own. We'll miss them dearly.
We're also debating putting a moratorium on foster children for the short term. We want to focus on adoption and it has been our experience that being foster parents has distracted both us and the foster care system we work with from our original goal. The reality is that there are SO MANY CHILDREN that need safe places for the short term (foster care) that it is overwhelming. There is such a pressing need to put these kids out of harms way that the adoption cases seem to get less attention.When these kids go home it will be a quiet house and for the first time in almost 2 years, it will be just Rob and me in our home. Hopefully the tactic of not being foster parents will reinvigorate our attempts to become adoptive parents.Stay tuned!
One of the unexpected benefits of getting older is the ability to reminisce about how things used to be.As a young gun growing up in and around New York City in the 1970's, one thing that made the 'CITY' magical was how many characters there were everywhere you looked. By characters, I mean colorful people that defied what a normal person should look like, speak like, or behave. Sometimes these people were strange and scary to a little one like myself but more often than not, they were endlessly entertaining to watch and think about.
Joe Ades was part of this dying breed. His type would have been common place in the late '70s when I was waking up to people and personalities. Wearing expensive suits, speaking in a loud and exotic voice, and selling something while sitting on the street. Talk about defying logic and being endlessly fascinating. Anyone who has spent any time at all in Manhattan has seen this person. He traveled up and downtown faithfully selling his $5 vegetable peelers using a backdrop of press clippings about his life as his stage.As I was saying, one of the best things about growing older is saying I remember when. Well I'm going to say..."I remember when New York was vibrant and colorful and scary in a good way. Before Giuliani turned NY into a big overpriced strip mall, New York was full of little shops that sold things you couldn't find anywhere else, people that wore clothes you couldn't buy anywhere else, and full of sights that you couldn't see anywhere else"Joe Ades could only have lived the way he did in New York.RIP Joe Ades!Hat tips: His Stage the Street, His Rapier the Peeler Union Square Peeler Peddler Joe Ades Dead at 75
