guapacha.com

I’ve decided to while away my boring weeknights by learning to play an instrument. In school I played the cornet for a short while, I think I could play Oh When The Saints by the end of it, but that’s about it for my musical career. So, the question is – what to play? So far I have it narrowed down to the following:

1. flamenco guitar – I love flamenco music so it would be cool to be able to play it
2. banjo – there is some great banjo music and today I heard jazz banjo which was uncanningly awesome, and there is something about the banjo that appeals to my sense of wanting to do something a little different
3. mandolin – they’re small, sound good and are supposed to be amongst the easiest of the stringed instruments, and my wife really likes it
4. saxophone – I really wanted a sax when I was a kid and I still do, but the type I want to play is very expensive, tough to learn and just seems impractical.

So I’m going to think about it for a while, but not too long or I will end up doing nothing: I know me somewhat. Maybe we’ll see mandolin.guapacha.com in the near future??

Fifth Judicial District of Pennsylvania

In order to shame people into paying their fines, the city of Pittsburgh has put up a website where you can enter any surname or any street name and see any Summary Offense charges for that name or location. I entered Sanders and there were plenty of hits, oh the shame! The only person I know in Pittsburgh doesn’t seem to have any though – well done Vanessa.

If you’re an Apple fan boy (Josh) then no doubt you’re wetting yourself today with, at last, the official announcement of a shipping date for the new version of OS X, Leopard. It sure does look sweet and I’ll admit that I’ll be in the queue at some point to get my own copy. $129 ain’t bad, but if you can find four friends, you can have it for just $40 a head.

The side business has all but died these days but recently I had someone ask me to make a ‘backup’ of some 8mm films for them before they lent them to someone. Sure no problem I say. I set everything up and when it comes time to calibrate the digital camera onto the projector lens I see that the picture is totally grey. Doesn’t matter what I do, the camera can’t see anything. A little web research – looks like the CCD chip has died. At one time I had three camcorders:

1. A Sony purchased pre-8mm film business which turned out not to have a good enough optical zoom; I gave it away when I bought:
2. A Canon Optura 20, very nice quality but one day the firewire port gave up and I was no longer able to transfer the image to the computer. Next!
3. A trip to Cost Co for something cheap resulted in a Samsung SCD103, it worked great until this CCD chip business

How hard is it to keep a camcorder running? I’m not doing much film transfer work so I don’t really want to buy yet another camera but I have some potential work that I’d like to do. The alternative is to send one of the cameras for repair at a minimum $157, but a brand new replacement at Cost Co is not that much more. Sometimes the digital world is a PITA.

I just love this song from Kate Nash, called Foundations, and you can get it on the iTunes Music Store for 99c!