Posted in general on 25 Feb 2005
I’m getting more and more comfortable with this blogging software. The latest additions are, as you may notice, a list of recent comments in the sidebar, and a different color to my own comments. What you may not notice, since it is not noticeable anywhere, is that I’ve installed some logging equipment — now I can track down what you had for breakfast and the angle of your screen.
Not to worry — that was a slight exaggeration. It’s fun, though. What is recorded is browsers, referrers, number of hits, that kind of things. I notice that a little more than half of the blog readers use Firefox. The statistics I have for the main site (available here) show a Firefox share of around 12-25% (the figures are based on the last 100 hits only, hence the huge variation). The difference is striking — an indication, perhaps, that my plugging in here has been efficient? or that the ones who surf around for more general contents are more likely to be “web-savvy” than those who just come in for the chords?
I also notice that someone has come here through a google search for “small plastic things”… The wonders of session statistics, indeed!
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Posted in general, politics on 24 Feb 2005
The Nation | Article | Our Godless Constitution | Brooke Allen
As the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The Treaty of Tripoli, 1797 (endorsed by president John Adams, unanimously ratified by the senate)
Posted in computers, general on 23 Feb 2005
Today, I happened to look at this page on a computer without ClearType activated. And man … I had completely forgotten how ugly text on a computer screen can look. Really, with Clear Type, what you see on the screen comes reasonably close to looking at a printed page (whereas the “old” screen view comes close to looking at a piece of paper someone has dropped on a henhouse floor).
If you have Windows XP, this is already available, but for some reason MS have decided not to turn it on by default, and furthermore they have buried the setting in some menu one would not normally look for something like this.
Here it is:
Right click on the desktop and select …
Posted in dylan, guitar, philosophy, software, tabs on 22 Feb 2005
OK, here’s the full story of the battle of Wichita, as requested.
It sounds pretty easy at first — just a run down similar to so many other songs (The Wicked Messenger, Down the Highway, and quite a few others), but when it came down to figuring out the details…
One thing was for certain: the highest string had to be tuned to the tone that is ringing throughout — there was no way in the world that that was going to be a fingered tone, the dexterity that would have been involved in that, would have been quite alien to Dylan (no offense). So there was one string…
For the rest, I worked with the different tunings that I knew Dylan …
Posted in dylan, guitar, tabs on 22 Feb 2005
After the story of the battle of Wichita, here’s some info on the tools I use when I tab.
Ear. Couldn’t do it without it.
Plain text editor. Well, not quite, but in principle. No fancy tabbing software, just typing. Tabbing is an ASCII art form…
Occasionally, pen and paper, but nowadays, I can hardly write music on paper anymore. Although that’s where I come from, it now feels odd to write down a guitar part in standard notation. Only when there is doubt about the tuning, as in the Wichita case, do I write down the actual notes.
Technical equipment 1. Ah, back in the good old days, back in the late nineties, when tapes were still the standard trading commodity (remember …
Posted in dylan, tabs on 21 Feb 2005
Finally! Now I can admit it: Wichita Blues has been bugging me for years. Thanks to a CD from Thomas Romon, and a file from lowgen at the Pool (heartfelt thanks to both!), I’ve finally won the struggle. Turned out it was played in a tuning he has never, to my knowledge, used anywhere else. The tab is from the Cynthia Gooding Tape (Feb/March 1962).
The tab is fairly accurate for the intro and the beginning of the first verse, and all the chord shapes he uses throughout the songs are there.
There is one text line I couldn’t make out. If anyone has suggestions, please help me out.
Posted in general on 20 Feb 2005
Sometimes things happen quickly, and you stand there, left behind with a feeling that you didn’t quite catch up, and now it’s too late…
No, it’s not that my grandpa died and there were so many things I would have wanted to say to him — he died in 1984 — I’m talking about the blog…
Just my luck: two weeks after I set it up, WordPress comes out with a new version (1.5, mind you!), packed with new features that I just simply must have. I download, follow all instructions, upload, — and the comments won’t show up.
The temporary solution was to abandon the theme that I had so carefully designed to match the colours of the main page. …
Posted in dylan, tabs on 19 Feb 2005
See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Another little gem (or at least almost-gem) from the McKenzie Tapes. Differs from the standard version by using the E class of licks instead of the Drop D class of the recorded version. But the most prominent feature is the uneven rhythm, with 5/4 bars alternating with plain 4/4.
Posted in dylan, links, music on 14 Feb 2005
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: The Wanderer
I’ve only recently gotten involved in the blog world, and this is one of the blogs I’ve realized I’ve missed. Alex Ross is known in the Dylan world as the author of one of the best recent articles about Dylan, and in the rest of the world as music critic in The New Yorker. His blog (mainly concerned with classical music) is one I frequently check out, and the Dylan article is available there too.
Posted in computers, general, software on 10 Feb 2005
Firefox — Rediscover the web
You may have noticed my shameless promotion of Firefox lately. It’s a love relationship that goes a while back, to when it was still called Firebird and was just a test thing. Now — well, it certainly has grown: 25 million downloads since November, a browser share that approaches the 10% which seemed a utopian goal only a couple of months ago (that’s the general share; at some sites it already hovers around 30%), and it seems that nobody who spends some time on the net could have missed seeing it mentioned. (Or am I wrong? If you want to give some feedback on this, I would be quite curious to know how many of …