I just got a mailing from SUPA where one of my phellow uke-phreaks pointed out Tomás Kubínek (pronounced: toh-mawsh koo-bee-neck), specifically this video.

It, and he, are fabulous! Be sure and check out his bio and the other two videos.

I went to catch up on my MySpace business and checked out the new comments. Someone had posted how they were trying to get to the 10,000 profile visits thing. I said to myself, "OK. A little cheesy but I'll let it stay in the comments."

I went back to my home page to start going through the friend requests and had my "Holy Fuck!" moment. I've had more that 23,000 profile visits!

Now, if each of them could only send me a dollar....

A little while back I was gifted a speedier 'puter (quickest I've ever owned) and I had it set up on the dining room table while I installed Ubuntu 8.04 and tweaked this or that on it. I had it plugged straight into the router because the only wifi card we had around was in the old Windoze box and was so generic that it actually has no brand name on the box. I figured it was going to be a beast to get working (since I've had trouble before with Linux and cheapo wifi cards) so I kept putting it off.

Well, for various good reasons, I've moved into my own room in the same house. It's upstairs and has ameliorated many issues. But that, of course, meant I needed to move the computer upstairs.

So I dug the card out and put it in this box and yep, it wouldn't work. After some frustrated searching the Fallen Angel comes by, checks out the box and looks up what kind of card it is via its FCC id number.

And many thanks to her for that.

Using that info I was able to make the right searches and find out that there was support built in to this version of Ubuntu for the card -- and others that use the same chipset -- so it was just a matter of going into the network preferences applet and telling it to look for this wifi server and that workgroup and I was rockin'.

Yay, me. I did not want to string a big-ass ethernet cable.

But that happened a little over a week ago and isn't the geek victory I mention in the title. No, that one came today.

The nice little Epson printer that Thad gave me was refusing to print in high-quality mode. This happened when I first installed it (from the laptop) using Dapper Drake (v6.something) and I thought I remembered solving it by choosing the "Gutenberg" driver from amongst the choices on the box.

Well, I was close.

It's the Gutenprint driver, and it comes in flavors for all sorts of printers. According to the package manager I already had it on board, but apparently I just had support for it onboard, not the actual driver. Once I installed the proper Gutenprint driver I was able to delete the printer from the list and then re-add it, this time choosing the proper driver.

Yay, me. Again.

It was particularly important to get that working now since I'm going to be in charge of printing out at least some of the PR materials for Snake Suspenderz. We're wanting some gigs here. And the onesheet printed out at 360dpi was just not doing it.

Now if I could just get gcaldaemon to sync both ways between my local Evolution calender and my online Google calendar I'd be a moderately happy geek.

In my previous blog entry I spoke briefly about how much I enjoy seeing a ukulele simply used as a musical instrument instead of being the whole "novelty" focus of an act. So here I'd like to present another great exemplar of that attitude, Old Blind Mole Orkestra, a French band led by Stelele, does an original tune called "Dig Your Grave."

Check it out here if the embedded version doesn't work for you.

Victoria Vox (whom I've blogged about before) just recently put up a video of her and a lady named melaniejane playing their arrangement of the Talking Heads Psycho Killer.

This is a bloody perfect arrangement. Sparse, tightly knit and rockin'! Nowhere in there is the "Ooooh! Looky! I'm doing this on the ukulele!" attitude. It's simply another voice in the mix.

I loves that.

And yes, I have a bit of a crush on Ms Vox. But then, who doesn't?

As usual, check it out on YouTube if the embedded version doesn't work for you.

A Sydney Bechet tune, one on the "gotta learn this" list, masterfully swung by The Blue Street Jazz Band out of Fresno, CA.

As usual, if the embedded vid doesn't do it for you, you can check it out at YouTube.

You can thank me later... you're gonna want to listen more than once.

The Fallen Angel asked me to go out to the truck tonight and bring in a bucket of kitty litter. When I opened the back I also saw a box full of computer and other electronic bits. She'd told me that they were given to us by Susannah at least a week ago, but I'd spaced them out.

Amongst the goodies were several Nokia cellphones, a few mice, a little Dell printer and an old Palm III, with its cradle. Even the stylus was in its proper place (instead of lost somwhere).

I went out and bought a package of AAA batteries for it and lo, it works! With hardly any practice I've managed to master the "Graffiti" alphabet, so that I can just write memos and other stuff into it.

A little Googling brought up Linux software for syncing the thing with my main computer, installing new software on the Palm itself and other such goodies. It's too late to do all of that stuff tonight but I'll be working on that shortly.

I'm actually pretty jazzed. It may not be the "latest and greatest" in the PDA department, but I think I can get it to work for me.

And free is a very good price.

So I'm doing pre-production on my fanciest video to date. Multiple instruments, different camera angles, photos interspersed, etc. We'll see how that turns out, eh?

Anyways... it's for a tune I wrote back in 2004 called 20th Century Fads (click the link to download an earlier recording of it) and one of the fads mentioned is phone booth stuffing.

Apparently phone booth stuffing started in South Africa. Who knew?

I'm searching the web for pics to illustrate all 28 (count 'em!) fads I mention and when I get to phone booth stuffing Google spits out a link to a video of these Japanese "Olympians" trying to set a record for nude phone booth stuffing.

You're right. The video is not safe for work.

But it's really more cute than nasty. A bunch of naked Japanese gals, well... stuffing themselves into a phone booth.

I just thought I'd share.

Yesterday Snake Suspenderz got together at my house and, dressed in our finery, went to our friend Sarah's house and took some "official" PR photos. We used Sarah's house because her daughter has this old 1951 Ford parked in the driveway and we wanted something of that nature to pose around. Up until now we'd been using a photo that was 4 separate pics all joined up into a square. It worked, y'know, but it wasn't really right.

(You can click on the thumbnail pic to "biggify" it. You with javascript enabled will get a popup window with a slide show of the other pics in this entry, the rest of you will get a fresh page with the pic on it and will have to use your "back" button to get back to this entry.)

(more after the break)