smokerblog

By the Book

Following Harm Tron:

• Grab the nearest book.


• Open the book to page 23.


• Find the fifth sentence.


• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

This file looks complicated, but for these purposes, all we need to do is add a new context entry; it should go directly before the </Host> XML tag, which will lead to that portion of the file that looks like listing 1.5

- James Turner, MYSQL and JSP Web Applications

Kind of boring, but I am at work (eating a grilled cheese & tuna sandwich and trying not to get grease on the keyboard) ...

UPDATE: 08:33 PM

Here's the book sitting closest to my keyboard at home:

Lifts her cup of black unsweetened coffee.

- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Upcoming Jazz Fest

Tickets for the 3rd annual Rochester International Jazz Festival are going on sale today—lots of tasty acts to check out. The headliners include Oscar Peterson, Marian McPartland (host of NPR's Piano Jazz), Bobby McFerrin, and the Rite of Strings super-trio. I'm particularly interested in Brad Mehldau, who is opening for Bobby McFerrin and Jack DeJohnette.

Other interesting acts (at least from what I can tell listening to the mp3s clips) include Shikandaza, Mose Allison, and James Blood Ulmer. Out-of-towners (or in-towners who don't get out that often) should really check out Bob Sneider, one of our local jazz treasures.

The festival runs from June 4 through the 12; mark your calendars!

Flat Stanley's Last Outing

It was a fun visit, but it's time for Flat Stanley to go back home. Before he left, Flat Stanley got to see the Genesee River at a couple of different places in town. We wished he could stay longer, but Flat Stanley was eager to get back to tell Caleb about all of the fun he had while he was our guest.

Musical Family Tree

For those who are curious about the influences (and influencees) of musical artists, there is a cool site, Music Plasma, which provides a visual representation of bands and their ties to each other. This site works best for popular genres such as pop, jazz, and country. Classical searches seem to confuse the site a little.

The site requires Flash and is a nifty example of visually representing related data. Another fun example is the search engine kartOO. Enter a search term and receive a "map" of the results, complete with links to sites, lines tying related sites together, and related keywords for expanding of refing your search.

Functionally, these sites offer no advantage over traditional searches on Amazon or google, but for those who respond to visual stimuli, they are fun sites to experiment with.

Flat Stanley Update

Today Stanley helped Kari out at work.