Here is a little note I sent to a couple of friends. Upon reflection, I thought it could make for a nice little album review and endorsement. So I am sharing it with you too.
Hey Guys,
I was listening to a band this morning and thought of you. The band is called Cheer Accident. They are stalwarts on the Chicago scene and are old friends of mine. I suspect you would enjoy hearing them.
I was listening to their album Introducing Lemon this morning. The first track is 22 minutes long and instrumental. Most of their songs are instrumental. It takes about 12 minutes to really get to what makes Cheer Accident great, but when you get there, it is really awesome. The first 12 minutes are good too, but their true goodness comes about half way into this long song. What starts out as interesting, complex and intriguing goes dark and even more interesting, complex and intriguing.
I hope you guys look up this album on [insert favorite online music service here] and check out that first song. Let it play into the second song and you get even more of a glimpse into the amazing depth of Cheer Accident.
I once turned on the tv and saw them playing on a public access station in front of a green screen; they were all wearing the same color clothes as the green screen as well. Strange imagery gave great visuals to their odd music. It was fantastic.
I just found this really cool feature of Chrome’s Dev Tools. I was thinking: ‘hey, it would be really cool if when I edited CSS after inspecting an element that the dev tools would highlight the changed declarations. Well, in a roundabout way, the dev tools do highlight your changes and they even keep a history. You just need to know where to look: switch to the Resources pane and locate the CSS file where your edits occurred and you will see a little arrow that signals there is a history of edits on that file. Whabam! There ya go!
Update: Things have changed in Chrome and this isn’t as easy to find and work with. The issue is being tracked and I expect a better experience in a future release.
It looks like I might be playing a fund raiser this weekend for a legal defense fund regarding my neighborhood assoc. and the city of Peekskill against some shady developers (building, not web).
If so, it will probably be a mix of some classic covers and some crowd friendly originals. I am going to try to squeeze in the Bitter Tears song too because it is just too awesome.
I have been getting the urge to say things lately, so I may be writing more in this space in the near future. And I am going to talk about things other than Rock music, or should I say “in addition to Rock music.” In fact, I am going to start now:
I just started on a project that began using ExtJS before I arrived. I have been trying to remain unbiased and learn the pros and cons of the Javascript library/framework. So far, I have not been won over. I see lots of people talking about performance and I am noticing that the sites that use ExtJS are often preempted by a little loading graphic. Both are not good signs. But this latest thing I stumbled upon takes my confidence in ExtJS down even more:
I have found that ExtJS prefers no doctype. This may be the case for 3.3 and earlier version only — 4.0 should be out soon and I think they abandon this recommendation for that release. But for 3.3, I believe it is so, and the reason given is…
“…[t]he only reason that no DOCTYPE is recommended is that Ext is faster on IE6 and IE7 in quirks mode…” LINK
Where have I been for the last 2 years, almost 3 years?
That is not the point. Where was I last night at about 5pm? That
one I will answer: on the train working on mixing Dear Jessica
vocals. As it stands now, there are 3 vocal tracks for me, 2 of
Thea Lux, and 6, count ‘em 6, of James Olsen. James and Thea both
do a great job and I am doing my best to have that come through in
a way that doesn’t saturate an already crowded mix. Instead of
having my vocals doubled and tripled all up in front with some
panning, I decided to focus on one of mine and pan hard the other
two but pull them way back for some color rather than a full
frontal vocal attack.
So things have been pretty busy round here and I forgot to even post about our appearance on RadioOne Chicago on WLUW. We had a really great time and it was all broadcast live and was also recorded. The recording came out pretty well and it is a great document of the band with Faiz, who has now moved on.
I was listening to a band this morning and thought of you. The band is called Cheer Accident. They are stalwarts on the Chicago scene and are old friends of mine. I suspect you would enjoy hearing them.
