This is what I do

Most people who know me are aware that I’m a huge music snob.

I got my first radio job in 1997 at this tiny jazz station in Lansing, MI where I grew up. They played “contemporary” (err… smooth) jazz during the days for all the state workers and at night it was all “straight-ahead” jazz, and late nights it was the blues (and I’m not talking about the classics… it was mostly modern, urban, white blues for weekend warrior types). I was 20 years old and already had a fairly wide lexicon of knowledge about jazz. My first few months I mainly got stuck doing the smooth jazz and blues shifts so it was absolute torture for me to open up the mic and try to sound somewhat enthusiastic. Didn’t I say I was huge music snob?

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The test drive: Classic Player series Jazzmaster

Well I got to take one for a test drive today down at Music 6000 in Olympia, WA… a very offset friendly and knowledgeable staff due in large part to my friends/bandmates Bill and Peter. I told Peter about them and they were able to get a black one. Fender said the others won’t be available till late June and the Jag HH won’t hit stores till mid July. Here are some of my impressions (playing thru a Twin Reverb RI and new Boss DD-7, which I’ll also do a review on)…

Stevie playing the new MIM Jazzmaster
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Productivity is my middle name

I was quite productive today… finished the contact form, put together this video email for a campaign the GA Dept. at WA Realtors are doing for RPAC, got Reverb is not a lie up and running, tried to gas up my car.

Wait… what?

Yeah when I tried to gas up the ol’ Aveo tonight gas started spitting back out, not down the tank as you’d expect. Perhaps it’s related to the check engine light coming on earlier in the week? Who knows but it was weird and I guess I’ll be taking it to Titus-Will tomorrow. Thank goodness for warranties.

But the real tragedy is I won’t be able to go see my girls in Bellingham. Kinda depressed about that. It’s a long weekend and I’ll have no idea what to do with myself.

Good thing productivity is my middle name…

Conquering the beast

Well my attempt to get a working staff contact form for warealtor.org was successful. Albeit not without a little adventure. Till today (or more like yesterday) I never really did anything with classic ASP outside of doing simple file includes. But I was able to taste victory after a few losing battles.

The tutorial I was following used a email function called CDONTS that I found out was deprecated in Windows Server 2003. However the variable structure used to hide email addresses was exactly what the doctor ordered. I’d already adapted this along with a select box holding staff email addresses in my HTML form. So I researched the way Win Server 2k3 likes to handle email and found a built in function called CDOSYS. I figured out how to properly deploy that from of all places w3schools.com. So I massaged (the term I like to use to annoy Erika) the script with this knowledge and…

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