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Here’s a rhythmic treat for your dominant hand. Trust me; it’s tired of playing eighth notes. And your band is tired of hearing them.
To compensate for the added complexity of the ride hand, which has your addled synapses thinking “No, it’s e+ damnit!”, the snare and kick patterns have been streamlined, cut back to the minimum necessary inputs that will still make the soccer-moms at the PTA gig shake their upper-middle-class booties.
If your band has a percussionist, he’ll thank you for this beat — there’s a lot of room to solo within the pulse.
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 4 HH x x x x xx xx 1/4 = 112 - SD o o 4 KD o oo
Patronize these links, man:
Scanning the web for drummers tonight, I discovered a page of photos of Danny Gottlieb. Gee, that top picture sure looks familiar… because I took it! Here is the original Gottlieb photo, from my Drummer Gallery (which, I must warn you, has not been updated in 3 years).
Hmm, it seems my images of Terry Bozzio and J.R. Robinson have been liberated too.
One of the most irritating arguments I hear against efforts to increase privacy is beautifully summed up, and eviscerated by Dan Gillmor (SJ Mercury News columnist) in Want Privacy? Take Action:
Another scenario is the “forget about it” system, which holds that privacy is gone and we might as well get used to it. In this world, you do have a choice if you don’t enjoy having your every move tracked, and your data dispersed widely. But the choice is absurd, since it prevents access to the benefits of society, not just the drawbacks of lost privacy.
(The choice, which Gillmor does not describe, is to pull a Kaczynski — basically, move to a remote shack in Montana and live a somewhat bad-smelling life among the wildebeests and lack of plumbing. To be clear, it is not necessary to send explosives through the mail to adopt this pro-privacy stance.)
I spent the weekend (2 weeks ago) designing a new website — something I have not done since this journal went online in late 2000.
Here’s the site: stlouiscelticcross.com
It uses CSS heavily, but not exclusively. I would have expected CSS support in modern browsers to be a lot further along than it is, given that CSS was introduced in 1996. But the process of making a CSS-based site look right in even the recent browsers makes for a frustrating, teeth-gnashing, no-fun weekend.
The art of CSS is the art of piling hacks upon hacks, without having the whole mess come crumbling down. (Tip: just load up your CSS-based site in IE5/Win to see Eiffel-tower-as-pick-up-sticks.) CSS authors, perhaps due to their backgrounds as designers (by which I mean: non-programmers), seem to seek out cross-platform compatibility within the stylesheet itself, rather than doing what I would consider more natural, because I’ve had to do it for most web projects for the past seven years: detecting on the server side what browser is being used, and serving up customized content to fit.
I see the appeal of the client-side solution. I recently discovered that an old site of mine, which used browser detection on the server to tweak the javascript-based navigation, was failing in Mozilla 0.9.X because I hadn’t had the foresight, in 1998, to predict that ‘Mozilla/5' would eventually be widely used. (And in my defense, it still isn’t!) The client-side solutions advocated by designers appear to be less likely to suffer from this sort of version-specific breakage, in that the hacks they employ tend to be based on capabilities rather than version numbers. In other words, any browser with the specific capability will work, regardless of its version number — so, in theory, 5 years from now the page will work for everyone, even though its CSS has not been tweaked to accomodate the pecularities of newer browsers. Of course, this very much remains to be seen.
Hacks upon hacks… here is a crash-course:
Sharp-eyed readers may recognize the core design of the stlouiscelticcross.com site. See the site’s colophon for the credits.
If there’s a final lesson in all this, it is, as it has been for years, test your site. I spent 4 hours implementing the original site, which looked great in Mozilla/MacOS… and then another day trying to make the site work in IE/Win. Perhaps my mistake was in not designing for IE/Win originally — although my experience indicates that the various versions of that browser are so broken in so many different ways, it probably would not have helped.
Following up on Friday’s piece about the death of the web search industry, I discovered an excellent example of just how dismal the prospect of pay-to-play submissions can be.
Ask Jeeves and Teoma share this Site Submit page. It describes their fee-based submission tool with a few bullet-pointed features:
They require the user to click through before they explain that the “one-time fee” is charged per URL. Meaning, if you follow their suggestion and submit 1,000 URLs, they’ll invoice you for — I’m not kidding — $18,012.
You need not ever refresh or update your pages; presumably they’ll index your stale old crap over and over again, all year, ensuring that the “latest, best content is always available to our users”. Or, as necessary, the outdated, uninteresting, poorly-formed content published by someone with $18,012 to blow.
(At this point I picture Jeeves standing insouciantly in his tuxedo, before an open bottle of chrome polish… in one hand he holds a chamois, in the other, a turd.)
