While browsing one of the guitar magazines I’ve picked up recently, I saw a full page add for this bad boy, which is one of the new Dimebag models from Dean Guitars. The suggested retail price for this nice looking Dean is $1689.99.
Dean currently has eight Dimebag Tribute models to choose from. Out of all of them, I think this one looks the coolest.
By the way, Happy Fourth!
Today we spent most of the day at Ribfest 2005 in Naperville, IL after Jonna had seen something about it on the news. We had a great time and have a bajillion pictures on Flickr to document the occasion.
I would say the best ribs that we had throughout the day were the ribs from Sgt. Oinks Pit BBQ. More meat than any ribs I have ever had. The best BBQ sauce, however goes to Desparado’s “Hotter than ‘H'”. Excellent sauce. So good, we bought a bottle.
Ribfest is a hell of a place to spend the day. Great food, good bands — and some really big signs.
Unfortunately, we were unable to stick around for Ted Nugent, who was playing at 8:30 this evening. Oh well, maybe next year!
One thing I forgot to mention last night is that ABC TV was walking around Ribfest interviewing people for the show Wife Swap. It was actually pretty comical watching the guys eyes glaze over as he asked us what we thought was interesting about our family and we just kind of stood there looking at each other.
I don’t think we’ll be getting a call back.
We actually did get a call back. Jonna returned the call, but then they didn’t call back. So, technically, isn’t that like not getting a call back at all?
We went to see War of the Worlds yesterday. Before going, I read a few reviews. This review hits it right on the head.
Overall, I found the movie really entertaining. Kelsi didn’t find it entertaining at all, and she even cited many of the issues the reviewer in the referenced article hit.
I liked pretty much everything except the ending. It was completely rediculous and typically “Hollywood”.
With the 4.9 release of iTunes, support for podcasting was introduced. Now, I have to admit, I’m behind on all this new-fangled iPod stuff, so I wasn’t really sure what was involved in it at all. All I knew was from what I read, that it uses RSS feeds to organize and publish audio files. I didn’t realize how cool of a concept it was until I downloaded my first podcast and listened to it on the way to work. The first choice, of course, was from the Acts of Volition web site, since I’ve heard a lot of great things about the show on the Internet and read that it was actually available through the iTunes Store – and therefore was easy to get right into iTunes (which should be read “I didn’t have to think that much”).
Here’s what I can tell you. Now that I have my Transpod FM and can listen to the iPod in the car without completely cutting out the world around me, I may just stick to podcasts from now on.
There’s something really nice about listening to someone talk about and play music that they are really passionate about, without all of the corporate bull getting in the way (you know, the 20 minute commercial breaks, etc). I was really entertained by Session #21 – A Musical Baton. Great music, by a guy that just loves music and wants to talk about it and give others the opportunity to listen to it and appreciate it with him.
This is really what radio should be. When I was a kid (and much into my adult life) I wanted to do that as a career. Now I’m tired of radio, of 15-20 minute blocks of advertising, and especially the FCC, who treat the American public like a bunch of idiots who can be turned into raving maniacs if they see a cartoon ass on the television.
The iPod and technologies like it, combined with publishing possibilities on the Internet, have the potential to completely change the way we view radio, allowing people to create and share things they are passionate about rather than what will get ratings from the currently popular majority.
I think I’m hooked and apparently so are a lot of other people, as 1 million podcast subscriptions happened through iTunes in the first two days after the release.
This new fangled technology stuff is really cool …
In a previous post I had mentioned finding Wil Wheatons blog after seeing him mention it on VH1’s 100 Greatest Kid Stars.
Wil has answered a load of questions on Slashdot in an article called Wil Wheaton Strikes Back and it’s a pretty interesting read. Check it out.
Just to show you how much I actually keep up on things, I read last night that neo-classical 80’s shredder Vinnie Moore has been playing with UFO, replacing Michael Schenker. Vinnie, along with people like Tony MacAlpine (now playing in Vai‘s band The Breed), Steve Morse (now with Deep Purple), Yngwie Malmsteen (still doing his own thing), and Steve Vai, were the primary ingredients of my musical diet back in the 80’s. Since I got the iPod a couple of weeks ago and subsequently loaded all of these guys on it, I’ve been listening to them almost non-stop recently — hence my interest when reading this article.
Now, this all seemed like news to me, but when I hit Vinnie’s site, I found out that this actually happened in 2003!
Way to keep up Ron!
Vinnie’s albums Mind’s Eye and Time Odyssey are still two of my favorite albums from this genre. He’s a really great guitarist, and has a sound that is instantly recognizable.
Time Odyssey also includes, I think, one of the best covers of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” ever made.
A couple of weeks ago in Borders I found the latest issue of Guitar Player Magazine, which had a great interview with Steve Vai. One quote completely stuck out to me and I’ve been mulling it over in my head since. However, I couldn’t remember what it was specifically in order to put it up here.
Well, I went out and bought the magazine last night so that I had the quote and then found this morning that the whole interview is already online.
The article is essentially Steve being interviewed about how he does what he does. How he became original.
The first quote that was interesting to me was this. Steve was asked “How do you create effective music”, to which he responds:
It’s just the muse. It’s that elusive, creative juice we all have. I would venture to say that if you asked Jimi Hendrix or Beethoven or Trent Reznor why they did what they did, the answers would be, “I don’t know.” I don’t think they did know. They had no choice. They were who they were. Danny Gatton had no choice—you know what I mean? He couldn’t help but be who he was.
I really liked the concept that these great musicians (Steve included) “did what they did because they had no choice”.
The next one is the one that actually stuck in my head. I think it’s pretty self explanatory. Steve is asked a question regarding musicians who can’t visualize their music too much past whatever their favorite artists are playing:
Steve replies:
I watched this documentary on how the brain works, and it stated that when Christopher Columbus approached the new world, the natives couldn’t see his ships. They were right there in front of them, but they couldn’t see them, because their brains couldn’t register what they couldn’t comprehend. Finally, a shaman came along who noticed the water was moving differently, and he stared out into the harbor until the ships became visible to him. I think some very rare guitarists are like that shaman, and we need them. For example, there was a time before Hendrix and Stevie Ray and Satriani when people couldn’t even conceive of the things they ultimately did. But once these pioneers came along and made their voices known, the new musical vocabulary they developed became assimilated into popular culture. We need visionaries and leaders to constantly show us what is possible.
The last few interviews I’ve read with Steve, (and even at the EVO Premium Meet and Greet) he has been talking at much more of a philosphical level than I remember him doing in the past. For some reason I really like this “meta level” talk about what he does much more than the scales and legato run talk that you normally get in the guitar magazines.
Take some time to read the article.
There are also interviews with both Steve and Billy Sheehan in the June 2005 issue of Guitar & Bass magazine.
I found this, once again, on kottke.org. Someone has used Google Maps to map out the casualties of the Iraq War. Each click on the (+) on the left of the screen shows 30 more casualties.
I think the reason I find this so cool is not because of what this application is mapping out (which is cool — don’t get me wrong), but the fact that it was able to be written at all. Software written this way leverages the Wisdom of Crowds concept, allowing software to be written that the original authors had no idea would be an application of the technology they were creating at the time.
More than even that though, we are seeing a lot of what I call “application level reuse”. The distributed nature of Internet applications such as Google Maps allows the application to be used as a subset of a completely different application that serves a specific, specialized purpose. Applications can be written stringing together multiple applications like this, creating something brand new and extremely useful.
I think corporate IT shops, in most instances, aren’t getting the concept. They continue to write software in a very closed, monolithic fashion, that force their view of the world on their customers and do not allow that view to change — unless they agree and make the change themselves, increasing their development costs.
Amazon.com is another company that gets the concept. All patent issues aside, they were the first company that I remember that created a service oriented API to their application that allowed their customers to actually build their own store fronts if they wanted to. These APIs were used in ways Amazon wouldn’t even have thought of. The Amazon plugin for WordPress I use on the site is a really good example of this.
I think the world has already turned to this model of development and big corporations are missing it. Hell, even SAP, one of the most monolithic software applications in the world right now is getting it. The time has come where your customers want to use your software to make their own models of the world, that are specific to them. They want you to be transparent. They do not want your branding, they want the services you provide. Your branding has a place, but not everywhere.
I believe that customers are moving to the point where they just don’t want you to intrude on them. They want you to be invisible. Being able to integrate your software into theirs in a service-oriented fashion allows you to be invisible and to be integrated into the world they actually work in, rather than the world you think they live in (or worse, making them change worlds to work with you). The more you increase your transparency, the more you can be integrated. The more you are integrated, the more invisible you become. Pretty soon, you are used by default because you are part of your customers world , rather than a vendor that must be dealt with in an additional context shift.
Now, the problem with a paradigm shift like this is that it doesn’t come for free. Employees and business users have to be taught to think this way. Software has to be redesigned with this paradigm in mind. It’s not cheap — but I’m willing to bet its a lot more rewarding, from both a financial perspective, and a customer satisfaction perspective. Once the shift happens, you can stop worrying about “features and functionality” for the customer and start thinking about services the customers can use to make their own “features and functionality”. You can start focusing on the core services you provide.
The additional advantage is if you develop these services with customer use in mind, you can use them too. You can leverage the same services your customers use to constitute new functionality in your software. This also, can decrease your development costs.
This is how I see the world. But then again, who am I? I could be wrong. I doubt it, but I guess it’s possible.
I found this article on kottke.org.
It is an article by Richard Stallman that explains the harm that software patents can do by explaining what would happen if the same concepts were applied to literary works, such as plays, movies, or books. This winds up being an extremely simple and effective way of explaining how harmful software patents can be.
A really interesting read, and definitely makes you think — especially in light of the latest patent that Amazon was granted.
Another note to myself:
Currently I have three books going at once. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth all recommended to me by Tom the Architect and all really interesting books — as a matter of fact, probably the most interesting stuff I’ve read this year.
The problem is, I’m over extending myself again on the reading and really need to get my act together and get to audible.com (also recommended by Tom the Architect) and get me some audio books for the iPod, since I have over an hour commute to work. A friend said he got through the audio book of The Innovator’s Dilemma pretty quickly using audio books. It took me a couple weeks of on and off reading.
So I’m going to try it out — eventually — and see if it increases the velocity of information getting into my head. Maybe I can clean up the reading queue and get some more books from my amazon wish list out of the queue as well.
Bieber Labs 