Author: scruss
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I have to donate a spare ukulele
I recently bought a basic ukulele from MusicGuyMic’s Ukulele in Hawaii. It’s a Kala concert uke. MusicGuyMic ships things really quickly, and unfortunately, he sent me a cheaper Makala one by mistake.
I really hate querying sales on eBay, but Michael was exceptionally reasonable: he sent me the proper Kala uke, and told me to keep the other one to play with a friend. I think I need to do better than that, so I’m wondering who really needs a uke, and I’ll give it to them. It’s not the greatest instrument in the world, but it’s a good starter one.
I’ve heard of The Ukulele Project, but it sounds like they have all the instruments they need. I wonder if my uke friends Cathy & Skizz near Baltimore know? Closer to home, anyone at the Corktown Uke Jam?
(One other thing I’ll say about MusicGuyMic – he does an unbelievable setup job on his instruments, even the cheap ones. The fretboards are oiled, frets filed and polished, bridge adjusted for intonation, and really good Nylgut strings fitted as standard. That’s the sort of thing that makes an instrument so much easier to play.)
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Hino bark chips, kinda
His anti-forward-control prejudices notwithstanding, I rather like Joe Clark‘s highly geometric photo Hino gravel.
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I need to be a part of your emergency plan is not
… is what Translation Party makes of “lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”.
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a hand with the circle of fifths
(originally posted on Banjo Hangout)
I’ll give you a hand with this …
Yeah, that’s my right hand. Spare me the tree-frog comments, but note how I’ve carefully numbered the fingers.
You play banjo, so you know stuff in the key of G. So you know three chords: G, C and D7. Musicians are fiddly bunch, with all their sharps and flats and all, but notes go A B C D E F G, then back to A as they go up. If you start with G = 1, you’ll see that C = 4 and D = 5. Let’s not worry about the fact that you (probably) play a D7 chord, but look at the key of G hand:
For some reason (look up chord theory, or chord progressions) the 1, 4 and 5 chords sound good together. Some people write ’em as I, IV and V if they’re feeling all fancy and classical like.
I hate to break it to you, but not all tunes are in the key of G. I know, it’s hard to take. What if it’s in A? Well, use the hand, with A as the first (or root) chord:
So to play those nice sounding 1-4-5 chords in A, you need to know A, D and E (or E7, if you’re feeling folky). In this case, the D pretty much has to be the real finger-stretching D chord (hard for us tree-frogs) or it’ll sound naff.
If you’re singing along to your old Pete Seeger 78s, yer traditional folk/gospel/church songs are in C. Hand to the rescue!
So, for the key of C, you need the chords C, F and G (or G7). F is a nightmare on a guitar, easier on a banjo, easiest of all on an autoharp.
Just in case you ever need a song in D, here’s that hand again:
You guessed it – D, G and A (or A7).
That’s how Chris Coole taught me it. It’s a bit of a simplification, but it works for me.
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bike ride, with rodents
I rode my bike last night and I saw nine groundhogs -
Open letter to Jason Farris
Jason Farris is President and CEO of Citizens Bank of Canada.
Dear Jason,
So you’ve decided to “no longer offer savings and loan products“. For a company called Citizens Bank, your new business plan sounds neither much like a bank, nor of much benefit to citizens.
I moved to your bank less than a year ago. I love the public ethical standards that you hold. I love the online banking facilities — they’re almost as good as my UK bank was offering back in 2001, so that means they’re stellar for Canada. I love the way that if you’re kept on hold for too long at Citizens Bank, the bank will call you back in five minutes or less — and actually does. I love the way that your employees go out of the way for clients — your Toronto account manager came to my house in the evening to help fill out the paperwork. (Never mind that you let him go a few months later when the “current economic conditions” hit.)
I moved to Citizens because my other bank holds the Canadian platinum-iridium standard for absolute bloody ineptitude (actually, I suspect they had it, but lost it somewhere). In the very rare occasions they can help, they charge you for it — even using their bank machines with their card will give you a monthly charge. I did look into a local alternative bank, but they were rude and unhelpful, rather more interested in tallying up and closing in half an hour than helping me with my enquiries.
You’re giving me the option to move to TD. This is my impressed face. What are they but yet another big downtown bank? What’s their ethical policy? Where’s their community reinvestment? Will they return my calls, or help me set up accounts out of hours? I think you know the answer, Jason.
I’m very disappointed, Jason. I’m also embarrassed, as I recommended your bank to many people, some of whom opened accounts, and will now have to close them. You’ve let me down badly, just when I thought I had found a bank I could trust.
All Good Things,
Stewart
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Wind Turbine Transport | LEGO® Exclusives | LEGO Shop
The Wind Turbine Transport will have to do until I get a 4999 from Vestas …
(thanks, Paul!)
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major annoyance – gone!
If you are annoyed by this:
right-click on the Windows Trash, select Properties, and you can kill that confirmation window once and for all:
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my blog from 1976
Discovered a cache of old jotters at my parents’ house, so first I give you steam trains.
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the moon; on being totally over it
With all the current hoopla over the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, I still stand by what I wrote four years ago:
I know I’ll never make it to space. I have no interest in messing up our environment here, just to get somewhere colder and less hospitable. I think I’m expected to be a space-nut, since I was born just before the moon landing, grew up with SkyLab and such, and became an engineer. But if it’s that much trouble to travel so short a distance in space, what chance have we in the stars?
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downtime
Stewart would like to apologise to both listeners of the automatic podcast for the two week downtime. We lost power, and the server’s network connection didn’t come back up properly. All is restored.
I wish I could have captured the sound of all the pudding cups on the plane popping in quick succession as we gained altitude today.
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for *all* occasions?
Saw a van advertising “Bouncy Castles – for all occasions“. Wonder if they’d rent one for a funeral? Maybe in black, to keep it tasteful.
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no no related posts
I’d tried, and failed, several times to install the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin for WordPress. This time, I actually dug around the forums a bit to see why it wasn’t working, and now it’s fixed.
YARPP requires MySQL version 4.1 or later. Partly due to the age of my blog, I still had my WordPress database at 1&1 at MySQL 4.0. They now offer MySQL 5, and any new databases are created under the newer version. As I’ve used less than 5% of my database allocation, it was a simple job to create a new database, backup the old one, restore it to the new database, then point my
wp-config.phpto the new DB.(If it still doesn’t work, view the source to your Settings→YARPP configuration page. Error messages are helpfully, if cryptically, embedded in HTML comments.)
I’ll probably still get a few “No Related Posts” appearing until the cache fills, but that should go away soon.
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slim pickens
Transmission Holding Back Not Only Pickens’ Plans But All US Wind – Renewable Energy World
This week, T. Boone Pickens announced that his plans to build the US $10 billion, 4,000-megawatt, Pampa Wind project are on hold. He cited lack of available transmission and funding concerns as the reason for the scale back.Wait, hang on here … I thought that the Pickens Plan was all about the having the guts and the go (and the $$) to build transmission to make it work. Guess it was just a gas play after all.
