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Up in San Fran today and the next few days for the Office 2.0 conference. So far the agenda looks very relevant, and surprisingly currently as enterprise topics go. Should be a fun time.

This one didn’t turn out quite a good, but I’ll post it here anyway. This has a bit more or a melodic tone to it. I particularly like the sound of the banjo in the higher registers. It almost has a bell-like quality to it.
You might also notice i did a rough splice toward the end because I kept messing up on the ending, so I just used a previous version. Guitar is also not high enough level — okay enough excuses.
Thanks to my eldest daughter for being the audio tech, running the board, and helping out on the shaker.

Again, let me know what you think.

I’ve been playing banjo off and on now for about 3 weeks and thought I’d share my progress here. This is a very slow version of cripple creek which, if you know the song should be played much faster. What do you expect for 3 weeks??!! I added a little guitar accompaniment along with egg shaker percussion to emphasize the beat/tempo.
For those interested, this was recorded using an MBox2 and ProTools LE with a Shure SM57 mic. I didn’t add any effects to the tracks at all, and had quite a bit of ambient noise in the room caused by computer, ceiling fan, and my dog chewing on a toy.

Excuse the size of this file - it’s about 3M and is 2 min long.

Let me know what you think so far.
I’ve got a couple other tunes I’ve been working on, and will post them later.

btw - that image is of Cripple Creek, Colorado circa 1890.

Yes, I know it has been a while since I last posted here. Recently I’ve actually found Twitter to be a more convenient way to comment on my life online. Requires less time, and fits into my daily routines.
But I’ve recently embarked on a new musical journey that I thought I would share with you all. I’ve been playing music most of my life, starting with woodwinds like the clarinet and saxophone, and moving on to guitar. I’ve played everything from classical to jazz, funk, fusion, rock, and even a little folk. But I’ve never ventured into country or other American genres such as bluegrass, until now. I’m not exactly sure what inspired me, but I’ve had a desire to learn how to play banjo and last weekend I went out and acquired one to start learning. I love the casual nature of the music you play on it - you almost always associate the instrument with celebration and having a good time, and almost never with formality or pretentiousness. It’s an instrument that requires skill but relies on repetition of patterns and a keen sense of rhythm, both of which I felt were my musical strong suits.
So after a couple of days, what are my first impressions? I really love it. I love the sound and feeling of the instrument, and have already learned a couple of songs and am pouring through all the various styles to determine which direction to go in: bluegrass, Irish, etc? If you’re a guitar player it takes getting used to as the tuning is different and that 5th high G string can really throw you off. But so far I’m enjoying the challenge and will be taking some lessons at the local Blue Ridge Pickin’ Parlor soon.
So what did I buy? After extensive research and trying various models I settled on the Deering Goodtime 2 banjo. Not the bottom of the line, but you can spend a whole lot more. I don’t know anything about banjos, but so far I love the tone, response, and feel. I highly recommend for a beginner.

Don’t worry. I’ll be posting a recording or two of my learning to play soon.
Here’s pic of the banjo I bought.

And oh, by the way - apparently playing the banjo is like one of the most un-cool things a dad can do to his tween aged daughters. My oldest has no so subtly posted a sign on her bedroom door “NO Banjo Zone.”

I’ve been fighting off and on performance problems with my service provider for the last few years. It’s one of those nagging issues where performance on my DSL would slow considerably, to the point where it was useless, and just when I got to the point where I was going to give up troubleshooting, a reboot of the router or something would magically make it go away.
Anyway, this happened again, and kept the same state for the last few days. I tried all the variables, and calling support is like going to confessional - “it must be your fault” “its something on your end, everything here looks fine” say the phone operator from Bangalore.
Anyway, after trying everything I was still convinced it had something to do with my provider so when I started researching and posing possible problems I found that a awful lot of people out there are having problems with SBC/Yahoo/AT&T DNS servers. A couple recommendations said that changing DNS settings from “auto configure from ISP” to OpenDNS would clear that up. So I tried it, and low and behold my problems magically disappeared. This would also explain why operators trying to test my line would not find anything wrong. Anyway, if you have this service, and have been dissatisfied with performance, try switching to OpenDNS. It’s free and if you aren’t very technical, they have pretty nice documentation walking you through step by step.