birthdays are good. I’m going to go drink some bourbon and have some good indian food with sarah!

you can gzip javascript files, and firefox and IE know how to handle them. with all the huge .js libraries everyone uses these days, this is a great thing if page weight is a concern. note that I picked this up from steve souder’s awesome web performance tuner,yslow.

here is me playing “my one and only love” solo. I am really trying to get better at playing solo, as you are really exposed and I feel it helps with conception. a lot of times, with a group, having a concept for playing a tune can come naturally from the situation, but when playing solo I feel like it’s a more conscious process. this could just be my lack of experience playing solo however.

I recently recorded a new string quartet, written for my friend andrew and his wife morgan, and rerecorded two older string quartets I wrote for our wedding. I am thinking of starting a side business in which I write custom music for people’s weddings. not sure how much work I’ll get, but I love writing music and it might be really fun. anyways:

• recessional
• processional
• for andrew and morgan

here is a transcription I did of peter bernstein’s solo on “billie’s bounce”, from the melvin rhyne trio cd mel’s spell. you can hear pete playing it here, but if you like the music please pick up a copy, it’s a wonderful album on a small label that deserves your support.some interesting notes on the solo: 

• pete frequently uses a minor chord a half step above to resolve into the next chord, check out the F# melodic minor into Bb7 in bar 16-17, followed by a Bbm back to the F7
• in the 3rd chorus, pete plays a Abm-Db7 going into Gm7 instead of the usual Am7-D7
• bar 48 is another classic half step resolution from F# to F
• he leads into the last 4 bars of the chorus with some kind of C augmented sound a lot.
• the last chorus has some really nice lines, bar 82-83 is a classic pete line where he starts things off straightforwardly and then really takes it somewhere interesting.

anyways, I’m sure there are a few mistakes, so if anyone finds any feel free to drop a note in the comments. enjoy!

from lance armstrong on weight (he lost 7 pounds between marathons):

“Just like in cycling, your body weight is a huge factor,” Armstrong said. “It’s no accident that the best in the world weigh 120 pounds.”

even though I’ve recently experienced the same thing, losing 15 pounds and seeing my running speed and distance I was able to cover skyrocket, I didn’t really put 2 and 2 together and realize they were so closely correlated. it makes a lot of sense now though.

I just noticed the “very short introduction” series of books bythis company (pdf summary). even though I have a shelf full of books to read and just embarked on an 700 page biography of muhammad ali, the consumerist in me wants to buy the full set of these right now as I LOVE stuff like this.

however, the new yorker that lives in a small apt with limited shelf space in me is probably going to prevail. also, I would rarely if ever read stuff like this more than once, so buying them wouldn’t have much value. maybe they have a subscription program or ebook or something…

I jailbroke my iphone earlier this week, the tiff/safari exploit just made it too easy. since all you do is visit a web page, I figure nothing too bad can happen from a “steve jobs bricking my phone in the next release” perspective. it’s their security hole after all.

anyways, the infrastructure the folks at apptapp have set up for package management is amazing. it’s very high quality software, and the 3rd party programs you can dl (I have an ssh client, nes emulator, and a theme management thing) all seem to work well. the nes emulator is particularly nice, it’s pretty cool to play super mario brothers on the train.