Jolene Blaylock

A charitable proposal: The Society for the Preservation for Jolene Blaylock.

I have been itching to do a kick-ass guitar song all by myself in the studio, so I enlisted the help of my daughter Emmy (12) and her friend Yumi (16) to help with camera work and recording controls. They learned a little about the recording process and had some fun as well.

You might remember my first all-me tune, Home at Last by Steely Dan. I received a lot of suggestions for more Steely Dan tunes to do next, and I will get to them someday for sure, but I wanted to do something else first.

I grew up with Steve Miller's greatest hits, and this has always been one of my favorites to play and sing. I admit I had never played it on drums or bass before sitting down to do the video yesterday, but the parts are pretty straight-ahead. The bass took some extra time. Lots of tricky stuff there. The guitar work was pure bliss, and the vocals just popped right out. This might have been the best day I've had in a long time!

I used the same technical setup as with Home at Last. Same cameras, although I know a bit more about lighting now. The drums were first, followed by bass, guitars, and finally vocals. By the time I recorded the vocals it was the wee hours, so you can see a dramatic difference in the light. The daylight shines through the big windows in the studio during the day. Yeah, I could have tweaked the color spectrum a bit, but I really just wanted to get this done and out there. It's a cover tune, after all.

Click here or on the image below to see the Silverlight version in 720p (23mb).

Click here to see the low-fi youtube Flash version.

Click here to download the mp3 (5mb).

Click here to download the hi-def 720p wmv file (110mb).

The He Hole Show

Darth Vader is back making the dumbah news! Carl tells a stanky story of music and mud in Nawlins, Karen wants mandatory bumper stickers and nearly escapes an early death at a skanky bar, Mark recounts a story of Jedis and He-Holes (you just have to listen) and Richard finds the most offensive toy website to ever reside on the Internets.

<Website Scaling War Stories with Richard Campbell/>

Scott and Richard chat (and chat and chat!) about scaling website and scalability in general while at the DevTeach Conference in Toronto.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=132

I figure I owe it to Microsoft and everyone who reads my blog to tell my latest Vista story, and it's good.

I blogged a while back about problems I had with Vista and drivers, etc. I rely on 2 MOTU 24/IO audio interface units in the studio for my main machine, and I just had too many problems with the drivers. Sometimes the devices would just disappear from the system. When they were there they worked great, but I couldn't deal with the unreliability, so I took Vista x64 off my machine. It's a pity because everthing else about it was working fine, except for the well known file copy and hanging issues that everyone was having.

Anyway, my laptop recently died and I had to do a session the next day, so I went to Best Buy and bought the nicest laptop that they had in stock. First of all, all the laptops have Vista installed these days, so short of re-paving the machine when I got home, which I didn't have time to do, I was going to use Vista.

I chose a Toshiba Satellite and the price was right. Check this out. 4GB RAM, a 320GB HD. OK, it's 5400 RPM but hey, the storage is awesome and I don't need blazing HD speed on this puppy. It came with Vista 64-bit SP1. The screen is smaller than I'm used to and the graphics are limited but adequate for what I do with it. The maximum screen resolution is only 1280x800 but I had to get something they had in stock that was decent. The price was only $1299. That was a huge surprise. The Sony laptops were twice that.

So, the first thing I tried to do was to copy my 70 GB music library over to my laptop across a gigabit connection. Bad idea. It sat there thinking about copying for an hour before I hit the cancel button. I went out and got TeraCopy at the suggestion of one of the Regional Directors and I'm happy with that. I  must say though that for normal everyday file copying that problem is pretty much gone in Vista x64 SP1

I've started using the speech recognition features and I'm blown away. I wish there was an easier way to drive the browser with it, but you can't have everything. I also turned off IPv6 on all adapters. That was a good move, as that has been known to cause hangs and I don't use it. Of course I turned off that annoying User Access Control. The audio works great, and the built in photo viewer lets me run through my photos quickly, deleting bad ones and rotating those that need it, saving changes automatically. I love that.

So, I really have nothing to complain about. I love it. I would recommend this laptop with Vista 64 to anyone. I'd just want to tweak it a little before I handed one over to my kids or my mother. :)

Introducing TelerikTV!  Pwop Productions has joined forces with Telerik to bring you a bi-weekly (that's every other week) dnrTV-style show focusing on a project that was built with Telerik's developer tools for .NET

I give you episode #1 complete with a new Telerik Silverlight video player control.

	Lino Tadros on ActiveFocus Lino Tadros from Falafel Software shows off ActiveFocus, a web-based Project Collaboration and Productivity System that his company built using telerik tools.

Mark Miller on The Science of a Great User Experience Part 1

This week Mark Miller brings his Graphical User Interface Expertise from your ears to your eyes. Mark expands on his recent .NET Rocks! show pertaining to the same subject with great tips and visual demos.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=112

<Beyond Continuous Integration: Continuous Monitoring with Owen Rogers/>

Scott sits down with Owen Rogers, one of the original authors of CruiseControl.NET, and hears about his ideas around a hardware and software platform that extends Continuous Integration with Continuous Monitoring.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=131