we talked bill the breeder last night and one of his cavaliers just had new puppies! we’re going to visit them in a few weeks, very excited. this is a pic from last time we visited:

I’ve been working on a bunch of bluegrass tunes recently, this is my best imitation of tony rice. the tune is “temperance reel” from his self titled record on rounder. unsurprisingly, he plays it faster than I do.

I’ve been listening a lot to this horace silver album, which is really interesting because most of it is a trio date with mr. silver on piano, art blakey on drums and 3 different bassists: gene ramey, curly russell and percy heath. each bassist plays on 4 different tunes, and it’s a great way to hear the subtleties of each player in the same context (i.e. piano and drums) and how they change the feel/sound of the group.

I’ve been listening a lot more intently to bassists, drummers and the way they interact ever since I started reading do the math, ethan iverson’s excellent blog. he’s had excellent interviews with ron carter and stanley crouch where they talk about the finer points of rhythm sections, and also had a great feature piece where he got a lot of modern players to talk about their favorite bass records.

I am playing tonight (and every tuesday night) at room 18, 18 spring st in nyc with wataru uchida. 9-12pm.

This saturday, 8/25, I’m playing as part of Rob Perle’s trio at Greenwich Village Bistro at 13 carmine st, also from 9-12.

I was very honored to be able to compose a processional for one of my closest friends recently, and I ended up writing out my first ever solo guitar arrangement for it. I have done some solo arrangements, but never really made it official by writing it out. anyways, here’s a recording and here’s the sheet music. the arrangement and the tune are very straightforward and simple, probably the simplest thing I’ve ever written. at the actual wedding, andrew and I played it as a duo on two guitars (he usually plays upright bass). I have been meaning to write some music for bowed upright and classical guitar for several years, so maybe that will be next.

tomorrow morning I’m trying out aurora, which is allegedly going to turn my mac into an alarm clock. I’ll report back on how it goes.

maybe I have just gotten a little unlucky in this regard, but most of the startups I’ve worked for and with have had very tight hardware budgets.This has never really made sense to me as a developer, and certainly doesn’t make sense to me from a management/budgeting perspective. I have no idea what the budget is like at my current gig, but here’s a real world, just happened to me today example of why I am perplexed by companies not spending a lot of money on hardware in their software engineering groups.

I was doing a build of our application on an older development box everyone uses, and it was taking between 3 and 5 minutes. not long enough to work on another project simultaneously, not short enough to avoid uncomfortable waits for completion. I remember that my boss told me about another, brand new with all the latest hardware server to use that might be coming online soon, so I check and it is up and no one else is on it. on the new box my build is down to 35 seconds!

if I can save 3 minutes per build, and I do 20 per day, then that’s an hour a day in saved time. for a team of 5 developers that’s 25 hours/week of people not waiting around for a build to finish. this example today is 11% of my day, and a significantly larger portion of the time I actually spend writing code.

I don’t really want this to turn into a rant, but if you are going to pay a guy as much money as most developers get paid to write code, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t include the cost of having a new machine on his desk twice a year, and all the latest hardware in the development environment. hardware just keeps getting cheaper and faster, and yet at my last job I had the same computer for 2 years, and we had to battle for hardware constantly. just yesterday I spent 2 hours with a co worker on a problem we were having because of an outdated operating system, at my previous job the number of application servers in production dropped by half once we got new machines, and saved tons of time during deployment.

java primitive array sizes must be initialized with an int. who knew? this little fact now joins the illustrious category of things I just learned that everyone else knows, alongside where pimentos come from and how to fold a plastic sandwich bag.

it always takes me forever to check out new bands, so of course everyone probably knows about gogol bordello already, but holy shit do they kick ass. I’m listening to “super taranta!”, and clearly need to see them live asap.

my parents built us these beautiful bookshelves (which sarah designed) for our apartment. we had a dividing wall between the bed and the living area, but we also had a ton of books in boxes and stacked on windowsills, so we knocked out the wall and put in these bookcases. one of the great things about them is they are 6 boxes that can be stacked in any configuration, so we’ll be able to use them no matter where we live. it’s really awesome having all our books out and accessible again, we both have “to be read” shelves so I’ll post the contents of mine pretty soon.

the stuff my dad can do with wood is just phenomonal, he can build anything. so far he has built us a hallway cabinet, desks, bookcases, a cd rack (with a very cool infinity inlay) and when I was little he built me a desk. it’s a colonial desk and fit together perfectly solid before it was ever glued, as the entire thing was dovetailed together. I later found out he wanted to use only the tools they would have had available in the time period the desk was from, so he cut every single dovetail by hand. one of my earlier memories is him showing me a pile of wood and telling me it would be a desk someday, and me not believing him. boy was I wrong. thanks, dad.