Last night I got notification that another person had subscribed to my YouTube channel.

That makes 27 subscriptions so far. Yay!

I'm obviously well on my way to my 15 minutes. But I digress...

I went to the new subscriber's page and left a thank you comment. While there I notice he's favorited a video of a fella playing Rhapsody in Blue on the baritone ukulele. Gotta check that out, right? It was pretty darn good too and I'm planning on posting it real soon now, but that's not the point of this post.

While on the page with Rhapsody I check out the "similar videos" bar on the right. Whoa! What's this? A video by Boxcar Baer.

Perhaps I should give you a bit of background...

Look at this, willya... two "just plain weird" entries in a row. Though this one has quite the cool factor as well.

This morning Radley Balko at The Agitator had an entry called Myth Busting which featured this video of a couple Dutch college students proving that you really can't pull two interleaved telephone books apart. Nearly half a ton of force on them before... well, I won't give it away but they didn't pull apart. Who'd a thunk it?

The Fallen Angel for one. As soon as I told her about it she told me about her high school physics teacher who did a similar thing with a couple paperback books. She grabbed a couple off of our shelves and sort of sloppily shuffled them together like a deck of cards. Absolutely immovable, even when they weren't carefully interleaved, page-by-page, which is how the Dutch students did it.

Radley had found the video link in this excellent Slate article on how phone books are still hanging in there, even in the face of unlisted cell phones, online directories and all the rest.

According to their website, "Three Squares Greetings is a Los Angeles, California, based company that designs and publishes greeting cards for those who are incarcerated throughout the world. We know there are few words to express thoughts and feelings when a family member, close friend or the child of a close friend is arrested. Our mission at Three Squares Greetings is to make it easier for you to communicate with those loved ones."

Now I could easily go into a rant here about the US leading the world in how many of our citizens we lock up, how prisons are a growth industry, or how something like this company shouldn't even have to exist. But I'm going to leave this one as a just plain weird because I haven't posted one in a while and because life is just too tiring right now to work up a really good rant. 

Ah, and the best weirdness of all, it was founded by attorney Terrye L. Cheathem who says she "...recognized the need for such products when her brother-in-law was serving time."

Terrye L. Cheathem, the attorney? 

Of the famous firm Boye, Dewey, Cheathem and Howe?

Here's the other one from today's Saturday UkeTube feature over on Uke Hunt.

This is The Barnkickers out of Florida doing an original tune called Night Song. I think they're a bit of awesome. You can check them out (and friend them like I did) on their MySpace page as well. 

Here's the direct link to the video.

Al at Uke Hunt often has treasures in his Saturday UkeTube feature but today he had two that I just have to share with you. Ok, with the non-ukephreak portions of you as the rest have probably already seen them.

I'm going to split it into two posts though. I've noticed that when I try to view the Saturday UkeTube I get about 1.5 seconds of the video, then a pause, another second or so of vid, another pause, etc. ad nauseum. It doesn't even help if I pause it and let the whole thing load before watching. I think it's because there's usually 8 or 9 embedded videos on the page and it's choking something somewhere. When I go to watch the very same vids on YouTube I have no problem. I'm going to assume I'm not the only one in the world with a trailing edge technology computer and not pile 'em on in my posts.

This is Seeso (short for Narciso) from Chicago doing the Beatle's tune, Come Together. Check out his YouTube channel for more uke goodness. 

Oh, and you can ignore the announcement after the song as this online open mike is a done deal. Though I'm sure they're going to do it again sometime. 

Having trouble with the embedded video? Check it out on YouTube. 

(P.S. Al, if you put the direct links in like above those of us with old, creaky computers could copy them and check 'em out on YouTube a lot easier.)

enormity

Another fine example of security theater by our highly-trained, professional staff.

Now don't you feel safer knowing that the terrorist nipples have been disarmed?

So, directly after writing that last little mini-rant about the FireFox upgrade breaking one of my favorite extensions I remembered that for the last couple weeks there's been a little notification on the admin page that this blog (it's the Pivot weblog software) had a recommended upgrade ready.

No time like the present, eh?

So I backed up the whole, bloody blog folder and all its thousands of files and sub-folders, etc. Then I unpacked the upgrade files, uploaded them to the server (breaking my ftp connection in the process -- a recurring problem when I'm moving large amounts of files that I have to get sorted out) and having to go to the very lame web-based file manager my webhost supplies me to finish the uploads.

I then unpacked, uploaded and ran the little upgrade checker tool. It said everything was groovy.

Next step, log in to the admin section of the blog and do various rebuilding of indexes and such.

Uh oh.

You guessed it. It was broken. I couldn't get to the login page, all I had was an error message.

Lawsy.

I left a comment on the upgrade page but waiting for a response was gnawing at me. I finally decided I should try and fix it myself.

I'm a coder and further, I code in php, the language this blog software is written in. I could tell that there was a function being called that the program couldn't find. The problem here is that the code is spread out through a bunch of files and I didn't really want to open all of them up and look for this dang function. Then I remembered the grep utility.

This grep thing looks through files on your computer and will tell you if it contains a given string of characters. I knew that but had never actually used it. So a googled up a grep tutorial and managed to put together the very arcane command line to do what I wanted, to wit, look through all the files in the blog folder (and its sub-folders) and tell me the name(s) of any files(s) the function name from the error message appeared in.

For the rest of you geeks in the audience, the command looked like this:

find . -exec grep -l "snippet_lang" {} \;

Looking at the list there was a file that looked to be the likely culprit. So I opened it in a text editor and searched it. Sure enough, it had the actual function in it.

Back to the lousy web-based file manager (ftp still not working) and looky there... it's listed as a 2 byte file. I don't think so.

I re-uploaded it from the new files and tada! I got my blog back. I finished all the rest of the upgrade tasks and, as you can see, I can login, make new entries, etc.

I feel like such an alpha geek right now. I believe I'll just log off and bask in that for a while. It might even be enough to keep me from growling about the broken FireFox extension.

The clever boys and girls at Mozilla have just issued an upgrade for FireFox (at least, on the Linux platform). Being on Ubuntu Linux I got automatically notified and I installed it.

It broke the Google Notebook extension. This is one that I use every day.

Fuck. 

I do hope the clever boys and girls at Google get on this soon.

I've really got to get off my lazy ass and get some recording done. I've been telling myself that for... oh, god... years now it seems.

The busking season is already going and the height of it -- i.e. the summer tourist season -- is coming up fast. It's a well known fact that your daily income increases quite a bit if you have a recording to sell. I also have a couple of solo gigs of the 'tips and treats' variety that will surely be better if I have a little product to flog.

But there's always been one excuse or another. Busy with this, got to do that first. One of my excuses has been my limited amount of sounds.

Let me explain that.

I just beat 20Q three times in a row.

If you're unfamiliar with it, 20Q is a neural net software that plays 20 Questions with you online and guesses what you're thinking, in 20 or less questions, quite frequently. It 'learns' from each player, hopefully making it better as time goes on. But therein lies the problem.

Anyone with a net connection can help train the program. Here's the readout from the end of my last game. I'll intersperse my comments in italics. Note that I was actually thinking of a glass bottle. More specifically, a beer bottle, but I wasn't going to be quite that much of a stickler about it.

You were thinking of a bottle.
You said it's classified as Mineral, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is Other.
    Glass is made of silica, which is a mineral.
Is it made of crystals? You said Yes, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is No.
    Glass is a crystalline structure.
Do you use it in cooking? You said Sometimes, 20Q was taught by other players that the answer is No.
    What? You've never poured an ingredient from a bottle?

It also had some cavils when I was thinking of 'cigar'. When it asked, "Is it green?" I said sometimes. Other players had taught it "No."

Newsflash! There are green cigars.

It also said it was taught that a cigar was "Other" rather then "Vegetable." Odd. I always thought that tobacco was in the vegetable kingdom. Do people really think that the only things that are vegetable are carrots, peas, and such? The lilac bush in their front yard isn't in the vegetable kingdom?

I suddenly felt bad for ol' 20Q. The GIGO law seems to be taking effect.

It's still a fun game and did, indeed, win the first few times I played it tonight. But I don't recall winning more than one in twenty or so when I first found the thing a couple years ago. It may be learning how to be dumber over time.

Wouldn't that be sad?

Test your reaction time by shooting tranquilizer darts at sheep.

I can't seem to make it past "Bobbing Bobcat." And I don't think they make a stronger coffee than the French Roast that I commonly drink.

I just uploaded the video of Snake Suspenderz doing Don't Get Around Much Anymore to my YouTube channel. This is the next-to-last video we got from our gig at Smokin' Pete's BBQ on February 21, 2008. A great gig and, since we got five usable videos from it, a great bit of PR.

I uploaded my solo version about a month ago, so I call this one another in the "compare and contrast series."

As usual, should you have trouble viewing the embedded version, you can check it out at YouTube.

Steven Strauss, a ukulele player and bon vivant, has this video on his blog, Ukebox. Complete with great music by They Might Be Giants.

It reminds me of a story I often tell...

Sometimes I download an mp3 for "later listening" and don't get around to the actual listening for a couple weeks.

This often happens when I'm doing things like going through my RSS feeds and want to finish that before doing something else (like, say... listening).

One thing leads to another. I get too drunk to stand up busy with other projects. But eventually I get around to listening to all of them. And there's where the problem arises.

If you have filled out the ID3 tags (v1 and v2, thank you), I'm able to go in later and give you a nice plug in my blog (or elsewhere). If you haven't filled out those tags, I probably won't remember where I got the damn thing nor who from.

When Snake Suspenderz played at Smokin' Pete's BBQ back on February 21st, we got five nice videos. The first one went up within a couple hours of the gig ending.

Then I got busy with other projects.

I finally got around to posting another one yesterday. It's Blue Angel by the Squirrel Nut Zippers. At the very first gig that the quartet version of Snake Suspenderz played we got a vid of this song, but the audience was so noisy you could barely hear us and Sketch, our drummer, was mostly hidden. This vid is better. Check it out!

If you're having trouble with the embedded video, try watching it on its YouTube page.

You may be amused to note that at the start of the video some over-macho idiot burns off his tires at the stoplight just outside the window. Neither Thaddeus nor myself could resist the temptation to snark a bit.

Today I went out busking (my fourth day this year). One of the many - often stupid - rules at the Pike Place Market is that you can't actually pass the hat. You have to have a static tip container.

Today that rule was ok. The crowd was so damn cheap that if I'd passed the hat I would have been lucky to get the fucking hat back.

Both my main site and the Snake Suspenderz site have a little file that's included at the bottom of each page that contains the "copyright by..." info. Both of them have the range of dates... ie currently for the Snake's site it's "copyright 2004 - 2008" and so every year now - for a number of years - I've had to go in and change that last date.

I've been putting in a lot of hours lately doing some re-coding on my site (and a bit on the Snake's site as well), translating some of the back-end stuff so that it uses the pjjTextBase code instead of my home-rolled version of the same idea. Since I'm not as familiar with PTB as I am with my own code, I keep referring to its help file. About the umpty-fifth time I looked at a particular function and its examples I had a Doh! moment.

Przemyslaw (the "p" in pjjTextBase) was pointing out how you couldn't use a php function inside one of his function and the example he was using was the date function. The date function will print out the current date in all sorts of formats. Including one that just gives you the current year as a 4 digit number.

Jeez!

I've known about and used the date function for years and it never occurred to me to use it in the little copyright include. That's fixed now. Both sites currently - and correctly - show 2008 as the second date and next January 1st, at 12:01am (at least, in the timezone that my webhost's servers live) it'll automagically change to 2009.

No typing. No fresh uploading. And it's a tiny bit of code so it wasn't even a hard choice to implement.

Huzzah! 

Oh yeah... now that I think about it, I'm going to go in and make that little change to my template for this blog too.