Big Trapeze

A year-and-a-half ago, I woke up Christmas morning to an acoustic guitar. This was my first guitar, meaning I’m only about twenty-years or more behind all the kids who received the same thing that year. I have a lot of catching up to do.

Since that time, I’ve bought the usual requisite of books any beginning guitarist would buy, including Guitars for Dummies, which I highly recommend. By now I know all the major chords, most of the minors, and even a few of the crazy Gadd9’s and F#m’s. My biggest problem is finding popular songs to play that are transcribed for newcomers like me.

There are many quality chord sites like Chordie.com (my previous favorite), Ulitmate-Guitar.com, and GuitarETab.com, but I finally found one suited just for me: PJ’s Guitar Chords. PJ has transcribed well over a hundred popular songs, and put them in chords that are easy for any beginning guitarist.

Just as an example, consider “The Scientist” by Coldplay. Most chord sites will have:

Dm           Bb                    F                        F9

Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry, you don't know how lovely you are

Where Dm, Bm, F, and F9 are fairly hard chords for beginning guitarists. PJ gives you another way to play it, and to my ear, it sounds just as great:

Em           C                     G                        G9

Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry, you don't know how lovely you are

Where Em, C, and G are three of the easiest chords on the guitar, even a non-guitarist could play the intro to “The Scientist” after 5 minutes study. My other favorite thing about this guitar chord site is that each song is formatted in plain-text, which means you can print out your favorites and not have to worry about chords jumping around the lyrics because HTML scrambled it on print (if you’ve tried to print from one of the other chord sites you know what I mean).

If you’re interested in more, check out PJ’s blog or jump straight to his chords at http://www.iol.ie/~murphypj.

For those of you having trouble knowing how to play certain chords, I always keep the guitar chords chart at 8notes.com handy.

I post this for three reasons. One, to let you know I’m alive. Two, because it really confused me when I read this, and I wanted to see if it was just me or the author. And three, because it’s really annoying to read this on a “professional” website.

This blurb was found on the Major League Baseball section of ESPN.com. Headlines are meant to be quickly skimmed and comprehended. We shouldn’t have to read a headline more than a couple of times before we understand the point of the story. Read the offending headline highlighted below, and see how long it takes for you to figure out what it’s talking about.

“Rookie called up after kneecap KO’s 2nd Reds SS.”

Maybe it’s just me, but it took me three reads to figure out that a “rookie short-stop was called up from the minor leagues after two previous short-stops for the Cincinnati Reds had suffered knee-cap injuries.” Granted, that’s a lot to say in 10 words or less, but I think “Kneecap injury sidelines second Reds SS | Rookie called up” would have been better.

If you’re from another country that knows nothing about baseball, you probably wouldn’t be on this site–but if by mistake you had stumbled upon it, you would have no idea what that statement meant. You could look at the other headlines around it and easily infer what was going on with them. Maybe mixing two abbreviations (KO’s and SS) should be a no-no when writing headlines.

Yes, I have more important things to do with my time than to rant on ill-formed headlines, but for the sake of humanity I couldn’t help myself.

This took a while for me to figure out, hope it helps someone. (I’m using Leopard on an iMac, with Flash CS 3). If you follow the Adobe instructions for connecting your Flash app to your built-in iSight camera, things will start great at first, and you should be prompted to connect to your camera when you run the code:

Click allow, and you’ll likely only see a blank screen. And that’s where I became stuck. After some searching, I found you have to actually change the type of camera inside Flash from the default setting, which is “DVCPRO HD”, to a USB based one. To do this, run your SWF, right-click on the movie, then click on “Settings…”

From the Settings menu, click on the small camera icon, and switch to a “USB Video Class Video” camera. 

That should work for you. You should see your iSight light activate and see video in your Flash app. Let me know if you have troubles.

I pull for the little guy, I really do. But in this case, Firefox gives me more trouble than it does a sense of the downtrodden and oppressed sticking it to the man. So, I’m with Safari.

In its defense, Firefox may not be entirely to blame. I’m running Leopard on an iMac, and I have two plugins installed, Firebug and Adblock Plus. Your mileage may vary. But, I can count on at least 2 hangs/force-quits a day. I especially notice problems when exiting Gmail, but I don’t think it’s related to Firebug.

I haven’t used Firefox in two-weeks, and having used it since the first beta it feels very weird not to use it now. I’ll still use it to test my web designs across the board, but no more than I’ll use IE6/7 for the same purpose. And I do miss a few features too, like the way it restores my tabs and browsing session if there is a crash, or let’s me undo a tab close (Safari doesn’t do this for me), and I do find Firebug to be a very handy tool when debugging some of my Javascript.

I should be fair and let you know that while I was writing this post, Safari crashed. It happened while I frantically did a cut-copy-paste into a popup window, but I’m guessing it was a clever twist of Firefox irony, letting me know I can’t just depend on one browser–and for the little guy, that’s a good thing.

I’ve been pretty happy with PHP for a long time now. Every once in a while I’ll find a good reason to explore another  language, and just as I was getting the hang of Ruby on Rails, Google had to go and do this.

The Google App Engine (GAE) has very exciting potential, especially for developers like me who don’t have a big supply of extra cash they can throw at scaling hardware or bandwidth costs. Free 500MB of storage and 5 million pageviews a month? I’d be happy to pay for exceeding those pageviews.

Conspiracists will find some Big Brother-ly problems with GAE, but really, it’s a neat idea, and I’ll definitely be taking advantage of Google’s services. Unfortunately, it only supports the Python programming language, of which I have no experience. So, for the next few days, I’ll be dipping my foot in the Python pool, and waiting for my invite to the GAE.

Geez I’m really tired of this. We’re not all corporate lackeys that have to entice someone with a tantalizing leader and follow it with a picture or ad then follow it up with the rest of the story. So why do I see people use “more after the jump” on so many posts?

Maybe I’m missing the point, but we’re supposed to be minimizing, not bloating. Just get to the point without any extra clicks or scrolling.

“I don’t like the way it looks now.”

“It feels too bulky.”

These were the phrases I uttered when trying out different cases for my iPhone. Maybe it would’ve protected it from this:

On St. Patrick’s Day, my iPhone took a 4 foot tumble from a counter top to a concrete floor. To its credit–it still works perfectly. The touch screen itself has not been damaged, only the outer glass. It pinches, it slides, it texts, and otherwise works as new, but it has a deathly pall hiding its ingenious beauty. I’ve watched a YouTube disassembly video, ordered the requisite case-removal tool, and am waiting for a replacement glass from Hong Kong, hoping with everything that it fits.

I’ve dropped the iPhone a few times, I guess this was the last straw. I will definitely protect my next one (or repaired one) much better. Surgery video to come soon.

A few weeks back, eBay delivered a 1960’s typewriter to me. Finally, last night, I sat down to write.  I churned out 2 pages in about 2 hours, and am slowly realizing how long it will take to write a book. Normally, on a computer, I’m a very fast typer. But I’ve been on a computer for over 25 years. On this, it’s back to the old days–I have to punch the keys with more force than I would on a computer keyboard, so the two-finger peck is working best right now. The two hours weren’t all spent typing, it was a lot of contemplation, reading, and rereading as I tried to develop the story. There were a few moments where I whipped out a paragraph in a few minutes, but for the most part I’m being very deliberate with every word and every line.

There is something very beautiful about writing this way. For one, you’re forced to slow down.  I think of the words and the line, and by the time I punch a few letters, I’ve already thought of a better way to say something. When I finished a page, there was something very satisfying about actually removing the page and starting a new one. There are no power cords to trip over to erase your work–and its portable so I could work anywhere. There is no screen saver to flash or energy saver to dim the screen while you sit and think of what you want to say.

However, the two things I’ve found I miss the most are the red squiggly line for misspelled words, and of all things, global search. I found myself several times last night wanting to search for a word in the text to see if I had already used it. 

My first computer had a button (the “enter” button) that said “CR” for carriage-return. I now fully understand what a carriage return is, and I love getting to the end of a line and hearing it “ding!”  As for typos, I’m experimenting with corrective procedures now. The typewriter was sent to me with small rectangles of corrective tape, but I think I’ll use a fine-tip marker or the XXXXX method to cross-out words or lines I want to throw away.

It’s been a great start to a fun experiment,  I’ll post about it again later in the process, to see if I’m still having this much fun.

I know if you live someplace where it snows 3 months a year, you’re really sick of it. But being in Texas, we rarely see the stuff. That’s why I’m pretty pumped about this weeks’ gift of not one but TWO days of big, white, fluffy flakes. We probably had 12 inches of snow this week, and it wasn’t the usual Texas ice-snow pellets, it was the real deal.

I’ve only seen snow like this (here in Texas, anyway) one or two times in my life, so this is a very rare experience. Even rarer is the fact that our usually inept local weather team predicted AND nailed it both days. If this is global warming, I’m going out to look for my SUV today.

I’ve been going through a phase lately—a slump, you might call it. Maybe it’s a pre-midlife crisis. The resounding theme of this phase is that I’m really getting tired of modern technology. I love my Mac, I love being creative with programming and design, and I’m a gadget junkie—so this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me yet. But lately I’ve had a yearning to cut myself off from text-messages, IM’s, Facebook profiles, iPhone hacking, and all manner of voice- and e-mail, and just return to a few pieces of paper and pencil as my only outlet for creativity and communication.

Maybe this phase is happening because what I’m doing lately doesn’t fulfill me anymore. It got me thinking, what would fulfill me? What would make me happy? If you had unlimited money, unlimited time, and no other responsibilities, what would you do with your life and your time that would fulfill you and make you happy?

I’ve thought about this question for a few days now. Things like traveling the world or sailing sound great to me–they would be very fulfilling, but they don’t satisfy my need to be creative. And after many similar notions, I hit on one that really makes sense to me: writing. I can be as creative with a pen as I am with a program, and the very act of stringing words together in abnormal ways is very fulfilling to me. The funny thing is, I’m not a writer. I took one or two English courses in college, never a writing course, and I’m shamefully under-read. In the past few months I’ve begun reading some classic American authors like Thoreau (maybe Walden is where this whole anti-technology rant is coming from) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. As for writing experience, I actually wrote a haiku that was published in USA Today a few years back, and have a notebook full of unfinished partials of others. For now, I think it best to continue with reading–because I do believe to be a good writer you must have the benefit of being a patient and well-read reader.

The unfortunate part is that most of us don’t have the unlimited money or time to chase the dreams that fulfill us best. I’ve got the responsibility of a family to raise, and writing poetry or short stories for my own satisfaction isn’t going to pay the bills anytime soon. I’ll have to rely on modern technology for that, so I won’t become the reclusive hermit just yet.

In the meantime, I’ll still read 37signals and turn out fun little web-apps, but if you know of an old school manual typewriter for sale, let me know.