Month: September 2006

Rhythm guitar geniuses

 

Ivy frequently has stunning rhythm guitar parts–a little bit of extra texture, a little melody. Two examples: “Blame In On Yourself” from Long Distance, and Apartment Life’s “Quick, Painless, and Easy” The latter I’ve been casually wondering how to play for some time so I finally sat down and figure it out.

Ivy “Quick, Painless, and Easy” (rhythm guitar)

First, raise the B string to C so C and E can ring open together (it’s possible with standard tuning but the E+ is a pain to get your fingers in and out of). Everywhere but the chorus the A string quiet drones. The named chord is the effective harmony with the electric bass in the recording (how you might play it on piano, etc.)

Tuning = E-A-D-G-C-E (raise B to C)

Intro/Verse
  Amaj7      x-0-6-6-4-0
  Cmaj7/G    x-0-5-4-0-0
  Fmaj7      x-0-3-2-0-0
  E+         x-0-2-1-0-0
  Am7        x-0-7-5-7-0
  Cmaj7/G    x-0-5-4-0-0
  Fmaj7      x-0-3-2-0-0
  Cmaj7/G    x-0-5-4-0-0

Pre-chorus (twice)
  Amaj7      x-0-6-6-4-0
  Cmaj7/G    x-0-5-4-0-0
  D6add9/F#  x-0-4-4-2-0
  Fmaj7      x-0-3-2-0-0

Chorus
  C          3-3-2-0-0-0
  D          x-0-0-2-2-2
  C          3-3-2-0-0-0
  D          x-0-0-2-2-2
  C          3-3-2-0-0-0
  D          x-0-0-2-2-2
  Fmaj7      1-3-3-2-0-0
  G6add4     3-5-5-4-0-0

Why I hate upgrading computers

 

Last month I spent many, many hours researching the seemingly simple tasks of upgrading the RAM on two of our PCs and upgrading the CPU on one.

“Compy” is our old Sony Vaio, which, after swimming through the documentation, I found requires extra-expensive and rare-ish RAMBUS RAM available from basically 0 reputable sources, so eventually I won an eBay auction: $40 for 256MB. This was 19 days ago and it’s yet to arrive. Long story short the seller had “Paypal problems” and didn’t get around to sending it until yesterday.

Compy also has an old P4 1.3G CPU and very foggy documentation told me it was “upgradeable” (but to what?) I figured out the fastest chip for that socket type was 1.7G. Fair enough, I found a “working pull” 1.7 for $20–for a 30% speed increase that’d be worth it. Chip shipped quick, never worked and, of course, I’ve no way to tell if it’s a MOBO compatibility issue (there’s no researchable MOBO chipset/model#, it may just not support the higher voltage) or if the chip was just DOA. $20 wasted.

“Homey” is my main desktop and, after much research, I determined it requires dual-channel RAM, but not the kind you see advertised everywhere, rather the much rarer “low density” dual-channel RAM. Maybe I should’ve just paid the extra $15 for RAM from crucual.com, but a man’s gotta save money! I dug and dug through eBay listings and random vendors until I eventually found 512MB for around $58. It was an enjoyable two weeks before a power surge at our house managed to kill it tonight (when windows repeatably failed to load, I used the very handy memtest86 to verify the DIMM was dead).

Why do I suspect the RAMBUS RAM is gonna fail, too?

Update 9/23: (sigh) 26 days after paying for Compy’s RAM I got in the mail incompatible Samsung “ECC” RAM–completely different than the pictured non-ECC NEC RAM. Along the way the seller refused 4 requests for the shipping confirmation #. I’ve filed a complaint with Paypal.

Mark Wirtz

 

This compilation of Mark Wirtz-produced songs rocks. Especially if you like 60’s girl groups with wall-of-everything+kitchen-sink productions, dramatic breaks that are just waiting to be sampled, bubblegum pop songs with psychadelic edges. There are duds and some dumb lyrics here and there, but it’s a great variety of sounds and clever pop songwriting.

Some highlights:
Today Without You – Samantha Jones
Rumours – Kippington Lodge
I’m Waiting For The Day – Peanut (Best cover of a Beach Boys song?)

Could Expression break the tedium of CSS design?

 

I’ve been dealing with CSS layout quirks and bugs for seven years and, frankly, by now the thrill of designing an elegant style sheet by hand has worn off. The process of choosing the right lengths and font-sizes, and setting all these properties by hand (even with autocomplete) is just unacceptably tedious and just bogs you down. The “CSS panels” various apps have just don’t save enough time; I can almost always edit the rules by hand faster than scrolling through lists of properties and clicking in value boxes. Yes, a 2nd monitor auto-refreshing the page would help, but I’m still guessing at values, saving, repeating endlessly.

I just want to drag and drop elements into place, maybe in a DOM tree view in a side panel, then zoom in and adjust layout properties like margin and padding by dragging handles or using the mousewheel, same with font-sizes in %/ems. Even if it stores these properties in inline style attributes, this would be a huge time-saver. Just also give me a wizard to take all inline styles and merge them into my external files intelligently, maybe let me pick the ids or choose when to use various contextual selectors.

It looks like Microsoft’s Expression designer has some of these features. Dreamweaver has a nice page zoom and yeah, you can stretch tables around like it’s 1996, but it doesn’t cut it. Right now DW8 is my primary editor, but as I do less front-end work I can forsee it losing ground to more capable PHP editors (if they could just match DW’s site management tools).