The other day the J-Walk blog had a couple pics of Eric Grohe's fabulous trompe-l'œil murals. J-Walk posted this one, and it's one of my favorites from Eric's site.

To give you an idea of what Mr. Grohe does here's another one of my favorites, Liberty Remembers. This one is on a building in Bucyrus, OH, and was commissioned by the Bucyrus Area Community Foundation & Bucyrus Area Chamber of Commerce. He takes a wall that looks like the one on the left, preps it, paints his mural and it turns out looking like the picture below.

The idea of taking an unsightly brick wall and turning into a work of art (that, in this case, is also a nationally recognized monument honoring veterans) is something I consider amongst the best examples of what it means to be human.

It turns out that Mr. Grohe and I are nearly neighbors. He lives in Marysville, WA, less than an hour's drive away. He's done some work here in Washington and I'd love to see it live.

Oh. And in case you're wondering if this is a lot of work for a short-term benefit, the Grohe site says, "For large-scale exterior projects, he prefers to use Keim Mineral Paint from Germany. Murals painted in the 19th century with Keim have retained their original appearance to this day. The paint crystallizes into mineral substrates and will not fade, peel or blister."

I've been looking for an audio widget that works in my blog and/or on the regular pages of my site for some time. I really liked the one I kept seeing all over the place that was very tiny and then expanded sideways when you clicked it in order to show the title and other data. I found out it was a WordPress plugin.

Bummer that. I use Pivot, not WordPress.

Then I found a tutorial on how to use it in other than WordPress pages. I'm all excited, downloaded it and tested it seven ways from Sunday. Alas, it didn't work.

So how about this one? It's a flash player, so if you're one of the 10% of web surfers that don't have flash installed... errrmm... sorry. You won't be able to check it out.

It's sort of plain, and I can't get the "playlist" part to work, but I suspect that the latter is because I need to tell my hosting service to add the MIME type for the special xml files it uses. I'll get to that later and try another test.

The audio is me doing Paper Moon on my Ohana sopranino, the result of another experiment of mine, to wit: ripping the audio from a video. I've thought it would be nice to be able to offer my fans just the audio part of some of my YouTube vids. That experiment worked pretty well. You can download this mp3 if you'd like.

So, how did this experiment work? It worked on my Linux box in Firefox. Did it work for you?

A funny vid from weepingprophet on YouTube enacting "A heated debate between Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie."

The recording is "Leap Frog", from Bird And Diz.  

Click if the embed doesn't work for you.

Seth Godin has a great list of definitions in his post, What kind of open are you looking for?, complete with examples in many cases.

I am particularly giggled about the fact that he spelled "open mike" correctly.

And as one who seems constantly to be bumping up against folk who misuse common descriptors — saying "tab" when they really mean "chord/lyric sheet" springs readily to mind — I was also happy to read, "As change swirls around, the terms matter."

Yes indeed.

For a while now Snake Suspenderz has been turning out our "rehearsal tapes" series. This has been accomplished by gathering around Thadd's Zoom H2 when we're having a rehearsal and recording a tune live into it. No multi-tracky, over-dubby stuff. Just a bit of mastering by Thadd and crunch it into an mp3 and release it into the wild!

On May 5th we did something a bit different. Along with the H2 we had both Thadd's and my cameras on tripods recording video of the whole debacle. I've spent much of today editing all the bits together — the most ambitious iMovie project I've done to date — and the results (and more talk story about it) are after the break.

Recently I finally got my Google calendar and my local calendar talking to each other. It was a bit of a battle, but it's definitely working now. Yay, me. So the next step was to get my local calendar, todo list, contacts, etc. talking with this rather antique Palm III that I was given some months back. After a bit of delay I finally got around to getting the AAA batteries it needed and I hooked up the cradle to the serial port in the back of my Ubuntu Linux box.

Ubuntu came complete with an entry on one of my system menus for "PalmOS Devices" and, with only a bit more tweaking about, I got the thing flying. Yay, me again.

Being a new toy I had to look about to see what else I could do with it. I found some great stuff as well as some further info from other folk who'd done similar things. One of them casually mentioned that he had to change the baud rate up to 115200. When I'd initially set it up that had defaulted to 57600 and I'd left it there. I thought, what the heck, and adjusted it up to 115200. It worked.

It worked the first several times I tried it. Then it started getting hinky. Not connecting at all or quitting in the middle of the sync operation. I muddled about a little bit, all the time thinking, "Damn! I was so happy about this and now it's malfing!"

No, it wasn't. I was.

It finally occurred to me earlier this morning that maybe my machine and/or Palm just didn't like the higher baud rate. Doh!

So I went in and changed it back to 57600. It's happily humming along again. No failed connects, no partial syncs, just like it was doing before I "improved" the baud rate setting.

So the old saw is proven true once again.

Guess that's how they become old saws, hm?

This month I'm having another drawing, this one sponsored by Mainland Ukuleles and me. The prize is the underbridge piezo pickup for a ukulele you see pictured at the left. (You can click the picture for a larger view.)

It comes with all the screws and other parts necessary to install it in the ukulele. Installation requires drilling two holes and lowering the saddle, so you may want to find a luthier to install it for you if, like me, you're not handy with tools. You'll note that this one is the kind that plugs in through the strap button, so if you've wanted to rig a strap for one of your ukes, here's the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

The rules are simple:

1. In 50 words or less, write why you want/need to plug in your ukulele and email it to contests@howlinhobbit.com. Please use "May-Be I'll Go Electric" for the subject.
2. Entries must be received by midnight, PDT, May 31, 2009.
3. One entry per person.

That's it!

A couple important notes:

Since it's a drawing, all entries will go into the hat. This is not a "judged" contest.

I'll be publishing the ones I find most interesting or amusing, as well as the winner's, when I announce the winner in my blog. Because I will be publishing some of them and some of you no doubt have your email set up with your real names, make sure you include a screen name in the message if you don't want to have your real name posted with your entry. 

As in April's contest, this does not put you on any mailing list. Nor will your email be posted on my blog nor transferred to any third party.

I'll be drawing the winner out of a hat on June 1st, 2009 and announcing it as soon after that as I get the video of the drawing posted, but no later than June 3rd.

Good luck to all!

A while ago I was gifted with a box full of tech bits and pieces which included an old Palm III (and its cradle). I have finally gotten around to getting it hooked up to the Linux box and it's now happily synching up with my calendar, contact list, to-do list, etc.

In the process of searching up info on getting it up and flying, I ran across an article explaining how to get Ubuntu Linux to install applications (and files) on it other than the default ones. So I started sniffing around for apps. Free ones, of course.

I found Fretboard almost immediately. It works!

This will display chords, scales and notes on a little fretboard graphic (check the screenshot) for a number of stringed instruments, including ukulele. It's intuitive and easy to use. It's free. It works on my trailing edge technology.

I'm a happy ukulele playing geek!

Right then. When I was recording this video I had it in my head that I'd promised to do the drawing (and announcement) by May 5th. Now that the video is cooked down and uploaded I see that in my original entry about the drawing I said I'd do it by the 8th. So I'm actually early with it, not late. Being early is such a shock that I had to have a brief lie-down.

And to think I was up cursing at the computer glitch(es) that were preventing me from finishing "on time" until nearly 3 in the antemeridian.

Silly me.

In any event, here's the video of the drawing:

And if you can't see the embed, here's the drawing on YouTube.

Congratulations to the winner! I'll be emailing you shortly to get your mailing address.

What? You want me to tell you who the winner is? And spoil the surprise?!

No way.

Well, OK. Here's a little hint... suıʞןıʍǝoɾ.

Thanks again to Ohana Ukuleles for supplying the prize!

Later today I'll be announcing the May drawing, so stay tuned!