Archive for June, 2006

New music service at Metafilter

Friday, June 30th, 2006

music.metafilter.com: yet another way for MeFi to dominate your time online. You can listen and comment. There’s even a podcast feed.

Supreme Court pimp slaps the W.

Thursday, June 29th, 2006

After you hit the news reports, here is a quick summary (and more here) of the possible significance of a very important US Supreme Court decision, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (PDF).

Sixty-six Senators, sitting in a tree…

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Hot on the heels of their “defence” of (heterosexual) marriage, our friends in Washington have continued to pander to the worst of their constituencies by dragging out another favorite, election-year boogie man: the flag burning amendment. It failed in a shamefully close vote. The sixty-six who voted for it (including 14 who [...]

You can comment if you want to. We can leave your friends behind…

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

Can you tell I haven’t felt much like site tinkering of late? I’ve been getting hammered with comment spam for a while now. Back in late March, I tried maintaining a mirror blog in order to allow comments while I fixed (read: wasn’t bothering to fix) the problem here. But that wasn’t [...]

Google Spreadsheets

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

There’s been plenty of speculation here and elsewhere that Google would start offering online apps that mirror the functionality of Microsoft Office. The first salvo has been launched with Google Spreadsheets. Not only does it give you online, sharable spreadsheets, it also imports and exports Excel format. Nice. I pulled in [...]

Debussy and definitions of art

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

You find amazing things on the internet, and often without looking for them. I was at lunch one day recently and heard a bit of classical music playing. I don’t really care for classical music, but I do have a fondness for the piano and, especially, the cello. Rock and jazz are [...]

Video killed the radio star

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

Your life - poductivity = fun! (via Metafilter).

Interview with Patrick Pfeiffer

Monday, June 19th, 2006

I interviewed Patrick Pfeiffer, jazz bassist and author of Bass Guitar for Dummies for bassplaying.com. The bulk of the interview took place during a telephone call back on June 2, 2006. We followed that up with a few emails back and forth to clarify certain points. I finally marked it up and [...]

Cool video mashup

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

I’ve sat through my share of music instruction videos. Evidently, so has dj kels Kel McKeown. This magical video mashup (embedded Quicktime video) of three unrelated instructional videos is amazing. The vids are by drummer Louie Bellson, guitarist Emily Remler, and bassist Beaver Felton. Works like this are a good argument [...]

Movie roundup…

Monday, June 12th, 2006

I’ll probably watch anything that has Naomi Watts in it. I even watched The Ring Two. It was 21 Grams that sold me on her. And she’s good even in bad movies, so I took a chance on her (and on Ewan McGregor, who is generally good) in Stay. It’s a [...]

personal weblog of James “Wheatbread” Martin