Down for everyone or just me? helps you tell if a site’s working, or if it’s just your router. I could’ve used this earlier in the week, as I frantically fiddled with my router until I noticed the crew working on the pole line …
Author: scruss
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one Pete Seeger, there’s only one Pete Seeger
Oh my, Pete Seeger, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Guy Davis were great last night at Hugh’s Room. Everyone was belting out the songs, and having a great old time.
(thanks to Kathy Reid-Naiman for the photo.)
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living legend
We’re going to see Pete Seeger tonight.
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1kg of recycling
I wish the Toronto Star would stop giving me their Saturday edition. I already get the newspaper, so the Star is recycled unread every week. If it wasn’t 50% car section, I might take a glance.
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bbtrackerwpt – create GPX files of named waypoints from bbtracker
I like bbtracker -it’s a very simple GPS track logger for the Blackberry. It has (at least, at the current version) one problem – you can’t create waypoints in the way that most GPS applications would expect. You can, however, name trackpoints – so I wrote a little perl script to extract all the named trackpoints from an exported GPX files, and save them as waypoints.
Download bbtrackerwpt – converts named trackpoints from bbtracker GPX into waypoints. You’ll need XML::Simple for this to work.
I imagine this script has a limited audience, and quite likely a limited lifetime. The author of bbtracker has said they’d provide waypoint support in the next version. You know me and patience, though …
If I remembered more XSLT, I’d have done this the proper way. As is, I create XML using Perl
printstatements. I’m probably okay, as the name field is the only piece of free-form text, and I do some rudimentary escaping of characters that XML doesn’t like. The output seems to validate, which is more than the GPX that bbtracker produces does. The length of your GPS track may vary 😉 -
tee”oh^oo”oh lo^oo tee
I’m learning to yodel, from Cathy Fink & Tod Whittemore’s Learn to Yodel. Why not?
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husky gets the milk bone
at Pages Books on Queen W. -
oh, and while you’re at it …
somebody please buy my Gold Tone Bob Carlin 350 banjo and Peavey SRP-16 Stereo Digital Reverb Pedal.
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somebody, please buy my guitar!
Black Godin SDxt. Floating tremolo bridge blocked out to make it a hard-tail. Plays very nicely. Cheap! $275, on consignment at Encore Music Exchange – call Dave at 416 691-2686.
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dammit
The left channel of my Etymotics just gave out.
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supplies!
Pleasantly surprised that a local store – Scarboro Music, at Vic Park and Kingston has autoharp strings.
It also has a very fine old Dobson banjo for $1500.
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banjo chord forms
I’ve been trying to learn banjo chords for a while, and the books I have keep flopping closed. So I resolved to make a blank chord form that I could fill in, like this:
You might wonder why it goes to the 7th fret. If you’re in Double C tuning, you’ll need that if you’re drawing a tuning chart.
So for G tuning, the F chord would look like:
There are 12 fretboard images to a page – that’s enough for four whole folk songs!
Download: stewart’s banjo fretboard / chord grid [PDF].
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mississauga smogrise
I love the way the smog rises over Mississauga in the morning.
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at Bill Rickard’s
I went up to Bill Rickard‘s yesterday to have Hugh Hunter tweak my banjo. Unfortunately Bill wasn’t there; he father died earlier in the week, and the memorial was later in the day. My condolences to Bill and his family.
Hugh was busily turning a banjo-uke block rim on the lathe when I arrived. After a little setup work (file the second string nut to kill a buzz, reduce the head tension to get the tubaphone sound), I looked around the shop.
Tone Rings and rims – including Bill’s new Dobson tone ring
Hardware – bracket bands, Whyte Ladye parts, etc.
The work in progress rack
Whyte Laydie at rear, Tubaphone up front.For a banjo and engineering nerd, Bill’s shop is amazing. Get yourself invited up there if you get a chance.
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coffee time
In which Catherine menaces my ca phe sua nong:
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Make Link
Make Link :: Firefox Add-ons copies the current page as a link. Just like that.
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wordpress can’t count: my 2000th blog posting
I was all exited about my 2000th post, because the dashboard is showing:
So I decided to tabulate my entries by number, and discovered that I really have 2261 (well, 2262 now) blog entries. This is the real story:
The numbering seems to have gone sideways in the last 1000 entries; entry #1000 is, as they say, what it is.
