It’s official… I exercised my right to vote. You should too. I’ll give you one guess who I voted for…

A lot has happened in the last 4 weeks but here are few highlights:

I’m mostly finished with the revamp of Allied’s web site… just a few JavaScript tweaks and some content additions and it’ll be ready to go live when their new associate starts in early August. So yeah June was a profitable month which is always nice. But those months don’t happen very regularly at this point in my career.

Anyway, I certainly earned it as I had to do a lot of busy work. I think I edited in total about 70 images which took the good portion of 2 days. But the results I was pretty happy with (as was Greg). I got the feeling whoever initially designed the site kind of dropped the ball because there were a lot of loose ends I had to tie up with the CSS and XHTML. It was crazy because the CSS was written in a really confusing fashion… or written in a way that I wouldn’t do. Needless to say it was interesting slowly figuring out why it was written like that. It did have a lot of specificity with respect to some CSS rules, particularly list items, which taught me a few tricks I was previously unaware of.

I did decide to give jQuery a shot to do a couple JavaScript effects. It’s worked out well and I think I’ll be using jQuery again.

Lately I’ve been fighting with their Exchange server again trying to configure it for RPC over HTTP… which I will not go into as it will not make for good reading. However I will say it has been humbling. It would be nice though if the guy who set up their Win 2K3 Server was a bit more helpful. But I don’t see that happening.

Lets see what else has been happening?

Well I got a sweet Fender Highway One Telecaster at the Music 6000 parking lot sale a couple weeks ago. Been wanting a new Tele ever since I had to sell my American Standard for dubious reasons. Been enjoying it immensely. It rings so much more than the Jazzmaster. But that’s kind of what Tele’s are known for. The JM is still my Number One though. Maybe I’ll do another post why I love the Jazzmaster so much…

Speaking of the JM, it’s new body is here! A little background… About a month ago I was doing some maintenance that required removing the trem plate. In the process of doing that a thin piece of the finish about an inch in length flaked off the body just to the left of the trem plate. Yep it was visible even with the trem plate reinstallled. A couple days later I took it over to Peter’s house to have him help me with something. He noticed it and thought it could probably qualify as a warranty repair (he deals with the special orders at M6K). So he called Fender and they offered to give me a brand new body! So to make a long story slightly longer, the new JM body will be installed in a couple days.

People tend to complain about Fender’s customer service but I’m a pretty happy customer. I’m sure it helps that I know everybody at M6K and I’m a good customer to them too.

One last thing… I now have a bachelor pad. That’s right I’m living alone. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived alone but so far so good. Not getting terribly lonely yet! I can finally have my gigantic Cure poster in the living room! Definitely need some more furniture though…

Starting on another wave of projects for Allied. I checked out 2 books form the library about working with MS Exchange. The big one is called “Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed.” It’s crazy huge… over 1000 pages. Pretty much everything I need to know is in the book and stuff that isn’t is just a Google search away. Strangely looking forward to mastering these MS enterprise products as it will look good on the ol’ resume.

I’ll also be revamping Allied’s web site, which is going to keep me busy the next week to two weeks! More on this later…

Now I’ll finally be able to pay off my Jazzmaster!

Left my computer converting .mov files to .flv overnight on Tuesday so when I showed up to work this morning they were ready for publishing. We decided to split the DVD up into 6 chapters for the web which will hopefully make the incredibly dry content more palatable. Fortunately we use this company called Influxis that only does Flash Media Server hosting so things stream quite nicely. My boss was pleased with the outcome and we can only hope membership feels the same.

The rest of the week will likely be mellow…

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?

After a while the program director, bless her soul, gave me the evening jazz host slot 5 nights a week. I was a very happy young man. But not without caveats. The station followed playlists that where generated by this software that I can’t remember the name of based on what was in “heavy” rotation, followed by classic cuts, and other newer jazz cuts that the music director liked.

The problem was neither the music director nor the program director knew the first thing about jazz. Some of the playlists they generated were totally ludicrous… paying no attention to flow or how songs would segue. So I did what any self-respecting music snob would do… I would strategically ditch certain cuts on the playlist and play songs I deemed as worthy of listeners attention. It was great fun as I knew I’d never get caught because they wouldn’t know. Remember I said they didn’t know anything or even listen to jazz? But I think in reality they actually knew what I was up to but never said anything because my sets were really good.

I scored a ton of killer jazz records from that place that I still have to this day.

So the point is I love music and snobbery isn’t necessarily such a bad thing as long as you’re nice about it. Now that I’m a little older my snobbery has mellowed considerably. I’m just a lot more diplomatic about my musical likes and dislikes.

As I said, I love jazz… mostly stuff from the hard bop period of the 50s through the lovely sounds of Blue Note Records in the 60s and 70s. I also adore the early electric hybrids pioneered by Miles Davis and his acolytes. There is so much great jazz out there in the world and listening to all of it is a lifelong journey. Even if you think you’ve heard it all some nugget from the past will somehow find you and completely make you reassess everything you thought you knew about the canon of jazz. Perhaps that is why I like it so much. Even with all the fluffy sub-genres that have popped up there is still an equal amount of ground breaking music being created by musicians following in the footsteps of the greats.

I really got hooked on music in general in the late 80s. I happened to be lucky enough to grow up across the street from this guy named Harold Pugh. He was a few years older than me and he introduced me to what was then referred to as “alternative” music. He hipped me to bands like REM, Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, and countless others via records and MTV’s 120 Minutes. He also got me started playing guitar. He had this beautiful 1967 Gibson ES-335 that a friend of his let him have on extended loan. I was over at his house practically everyday checking out his record collection and playing that Gibson. He never seemed to mind. Another important thing he introduced me to was computers. He had what was at the time the coolest computer you could have, a Commodore 64!

I am so thankful that he set me on the path that I still follow to this day. I should call him and thank him sometime.

However when I saw My Bloody Valentine on 120 Minutes on a hot summer night in 1991 it was all over. I became a lifelong shoegazer. The sound of Kevin Shields’ Fender Jazzmaster crashing through the tiny speaker on my Dad’s TV was the sound of heaven to me. This led me to all of the British shoegazer bands of the time.

Not much has changed as I still listen to all this music (take a look at the Last.fm record covers below for proof) and it’s still as fresh as it was back then. Perhaps it’s a little nostalgia but it seems this period from the early to mid 90s was the last great period in rock music. It all seemed to come to a crashing halt when Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994. Shoegazing was ridiculed by the press, “alternative” became a commodity and a fashion movement, alternative music became synonymous with corporate as major labels started gobbling up any band that fit the mold. I guess “grunge” should be included here. But where I grew up no one really listened to those bands, at least not the college kids.

There was this amazing record store in downtown East Lansing across from Michigan State called Wherehouse Records. All the dudes that worked there were seriously into all the shoegazer bands… they got me to buy so much stuff that I wore out from repeated listening and had to buy again. All the local bands where plugging their guitars into delay and reverb pedals copying the atmospheric and hazy sounds coming from across the pond. The grunge thing was kinda slow to catch on in East Lansing. It’s ironic that I now live in the birthplace of grunge.

I was coming of age and I guess I never really grew up. Sure I discovered many many awesome bands since then but my first love has always been the shoegazer bands from this era.

I play a Fender Jazzmaster, I have scads of pedals, I put reverb on everything… it’s what I do.

There are still tons of bands chasing those sounds these days too… some more derivative than others. But, as the hippies at Evergreen might say, it’s all good. It’s the sound I like and I’m sticking to it. In fact there are probably more second and third wave “nu-gazers” than there were initially.

Some of the first wave bands are even getting back together, like MBV and Swervedriver… could Ride be far behind?

If you ever want to know about shoegazing, I’m your man…

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…

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…

It worked!

Felt like I conquered the beast that is classic ASP. But I’m sure it’ll get me back in time. Now all that’s left to do is prettify the form, add some more email addresses, and style the successful submission landing page.

The whole reason I decided to undertake this mini project was to alleviate the spam issues we’ve experienced with having our staff email addresses ripe for the picking on the site. Thought about some sort of CAPTCHA-esque verification but perhaps I’ll tackle that later.

Over the phone this afternoon, I walked the other lawyer in Seattle through syncing hers to Exchange. They seem to be pretty happy. Now it’s on to other tasks that will be more challenging and will likely increase my knowledge of working with Exchange.

So that’s my excuse for not working on this site. Need to get cracking as its present stripped down, sans images nature is beginning to make me feel self-conscious.

Will likely get to do my first classic ASP coding session tomorrow at work for this contact form project I randomly decided to start today. Hopefully the tutorial I found actually works.