Andy Chase

Of all the pop/rock music that ingrained itself in my impressionable young mind during the mid to late 1970's, I have to say that Supertramp wins the prize for being able to transport me instantaneously back to the era, as foggily as I remember it.

Steely Dan is a close second.

Tagged:

• supertramp
• nostalgia
• 1970s
• steelydan
• music

No matter how many times I make pastry cream, I am always amazed and delighted when the tempered custard/corn starch mixture solidifies. It happens instantly – like something out of a chemistry kit experiment, except you wind up with dessert.

One Boston Cream Pie coming up...

Tagged:

• cooking
• custard
• dessert
• food

Bachelor Weekend
Originally uploaded by Usonian.

Kimhotep and Zinny are off to upstate New York for the Thanksgiving weekend, so it will be just me and Tice rattling around the house. We'll probably spend most of our time more or less like this.

Tagged:

• mandolin
• weekend
• photo

One subscription to The Fretboard Journal and one subscription to Make Magazine, please.

Tagged:

• lutherie
• banjo
• guitar
• mandolin
• tinkering
• gadgetry

After a few months of so/so shaving with an electric razor and/or some cheap disposables, I decided to grit my teeth and shell out for the outrageous cost of some replacement blades for my Gillette Sensor. If you've never used a razor with refillable blades, it's pretty much the same business model that inkjet printer manufacturers use: The initial cost of the razor itself doesn't seem too bad considering it comes with some blades already, but when you go to buy refills you discover that it would be cheaper to buy a whole new frigging razor.

They didn't have Sensor blades, so I bought a pack of blades for the Gillette "Mach 3", foolishly assuming they would be backwards-compatible with the handle of the Sensor.

They're not.

And of course, I didn't discover this until after I had torn the box open, so now I have to go buy a new razor to recoup the almost $9 I spent on these stupid blades. Bastards.

When applying CSS to an unordered list, the list will only render with bullets (disc, circle, square, image, or otherwise) if the 'display' style of that list's <li> elements is set to "list-item". ("list-item" is the default, but in this case I had set it to "block" for one special circumstance, and then wanted to override that. It's a long story.)

I just spent way too much time figuring this out.

Tagged:

• css

There's a nice article about Pete Wernick in this week's Denver Post (linked for now, but it will probably be dead within a week or two), who is fairly well known in bluegrass banjo circles.

Part of the article talks about how, after earning a doctorate from Columbia, he pretty much turned his back on academia and has made his living playing, teaching, and writing about banjo ever since.

We Americans love our stories of people who have "left the rat race to pursue their passion", yet they always seem to be told with a jealous undertone:

"Don't you wish you were interested enough in something other than this week's episode of American Idol to want to quit your crappy job and pursue it?"

I'm sure a lot of these career sea-changes are not as spontaneous as they are sometimes portrayed; If you look far enough back in my employment history you'll see that I went from special effects shopmonkey to web designer in a single bound... but that was after several years of building web sites in my spare time for the express purpose of getting into web design as a career.

I am very, very interested in lutherie, but I'm not going to get manic and quit my proverbial dayjob anytime soon, if ever. The building of instruments is one thing... making a living at it is quite another. At the same time, I am not going to resign myself to a lifetime of pushing bits around because it's my most marketable skill right now.

Tagged:

• banjo
• lutherie
• career
• deepthoughts

I upgraded my cell phone service to a FamilyShare plan so that Kim can have her own phone. Since switching plans requires a new service agreement anyway, I took advantage of the equipment upgrade credit Verizon gives you every two years and ordered a free Motorola e815. It's got all kinds of bells and whistles - most interesting to me is the 1.3 megapixel camera, which appears to be capable of some pretty decent photos. The ability to capture video clips will be novel, too.

Still, I am left with a bad taste in my mouth knowing that Verizon has crippled most of the phone's useful features like Bluetooth OBEX file transfer; they want you to pay through the nose to shuffle your photos, videos, and music around even though the phone is capable of transferring all of those things right to your desktop. From what I have read you can get around this by using a TransFlash card for the photos and video.

If this is the case, I can probably live with that arrangement... I expect I will be taking quite a few photos with the thing. Five years ago, when I carried my Handspring Visor with me religiously, I took hundreds if not thousands of photos with my Eyemodule camera.

When the 1 year warranty is up I will probably take a stab at the seem hack so I can use the damn thing the way Motorola's engineers intended.

Tagged:

• motorola
• e815
• cellphone
• cameraphone
• eyemodule
• handspring
• visor
• camera
• verizon

Given enough time, everyday objects accrue value to the point where they must be sealed in a display case, never to be used for their original purpose again; old silver, old china, old furniture... you see them on programs like Antique Road Show, gasp in amazement when their worth is revealed, then gasp in horror when you hear about how they've just been kicking around in the corner of somebody's musty basement for generations. Then you wonder whether the owner will ever really be able to enjoy the thing again, now knowing that their favorite hand-me-down dresser is worth $10,000.

One of the many things I've always liked about musical instruments is that they often continue to be used for their original purpose long, long after many other things made at the same time have been enshrined in antique collections. Violins jump to mind first, but there are also plenty of banjos from the famed makers of the late 19th and early 20th century that are still out there.

I came across a pair of Cole's Eclipse banjos (circa 1895) at an antique shop today. They were being sold only as a pair and at a cost well beyond anything I could afford, but it was lovely to see them. They are in need of some attention, but you can tell that there's still a lot of music to be made on them once new heads, a few new tension hooks, and new strings are applied.

The thing I wonder about most when looking at old instruments is what songs have been played on them, and how many people have memories of them; not only their former owners, but friends and family lucky enough to have heard the instrument played. I've never had an opportunity to play an instrument this old, but it must be a wonderful connection to the past.

(The photo was taken from an Ebay auction for a Cole's Eclipse with the Man in the Moon inlay exactly like the ones I saw today; I posted it on my own server so as not to steal bandwidth from chinasyndrome.net, who I assume took the photo originally. The auction finished at $2,078.98.)