When I was getting into the Greatful Dead a while ago, I always read that they had started as the Warlocks and as a jug band. Until recently, I had no idea what that meant. While listening to NPR this weekend, I heard a sound slightly familiar. It sounds a big like the Garcia and Grisman records I love, but there were quotes from all types of music, multiple instruments trading fours and eights, and too much improvisation. It eventually turned from folk to rock in a transformation I was perplexed by.
How did they do that?
Then I realized it was a jug band. I have no idea which one, but it's my new goal to hunt them down. More to follow. In the meantime, check out Country Joe and the Fish and Will Shade's Memphis Jug Band.
Opinion
I've been getting more involved in Slow Food recently. I have a garden, possible bee hive, and lots of other foodie related projects in the works.
Vanessa and I volunteered for this last weekend's Slow Crab event in the SF County Building in Golden Gate Park. What a blast! We'll now be on the "A" team for Slow Food events around the Bay Area organized by our friend, Vera. She is a wonderful cook and person.
Slow food, I feel, is missing some of the sustainability principles, but at least is getting people thinking about where their food comes from. The manifesto is basically a development of the mission "Good, Clean and Fair". If everything you consume (food or not) is good, clean and fair in all regards, from raw materials to distruction, then you're doing better than most Americans. Doing better is not what we're all after, though, we want to set some new guidelines like Queen Victoria did with manners and dress.
Check out http://slowfood.com/ if you love your food, or if you're sick of shopping at Target and eating at Applebee's.
Programming
This is quick because I can't share much of what I've been doing these last few months. I've learned a lot, and have attempted to make programs in languages new to me (Java and Ruby mainly...on Android).
One thing that bugs me to high heaven is working on Linux boxes all day, and coming back to write documentation in Windows (something required of me) and missing all of the great command line tricks *nix gives you. One thing is tab completion.
There's an easy fix for this and it has to do with the registry. Since Windows 2000, the default completion character is the null character...and that doesn't work!
So, if you want tab completion, start regedit by Start > Run... > type 'regedit' > click OK.
Browse to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Command Processor
Change the value to REG_DWORD 0x09 (hex), which is the ASCII value for horizontal tab.
Change the value to REG_DWORD 0x09 (hex), which is the ASCII value for horizontal tab.
