04.27.09
Posted in General at 7:52 am by Steve
No, I’m not referring to the recent news of Swine Flu from Mexico that may (or may not) have reached the New York area. I’m talking about PC virii, well the Conficker virus to be specific.
So, I know that at least a few of my PC using friends have recently contracted the Conficker virus because a very private email address, that has never been posted anywhere, is now receiving tons of spam daily.
I’d like to personally thank all those people for not having working anti-virus software and also for buying a PC when they have no idea how to harden it to keep it safe from these types of attacks. I now have to spend my time changing this email address and alerting everyone who had it about the change to stop receiving the spam.
Over the years I have used just about every system available: DOS, AppleDOS, ProDOS, UNIX, Classic Mac OS, Windows, OS X, Linux, et al. In this day and age there is no good reason to buy a PC. Microsoft is still building Windows around a DOS core. Yes, that’s state-of-the-art technology for 1982! I don’t care how much Microsoft has spend marketing “the latest & greatest”. It is still based on technology that is coming up on 30 years old, with 30 year old security holes that never envisioned an always online world. It’s archaic attitude toward privacy & security is laughable or, I should say, would be laughable if so many people weren’t actively using it an exposing the rest of us to these gargantuan security flaws.
Here’s a hint – if you don’t know how to manually edit the registry, don’t know which services to disable (or set to manual) and have never heard of msconfig – buy a Mac. You know, everyone should just buy a Mac anyway. If you can’t afford a new system right now – wipe your hard drive and install Ubuntu.
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04.20.09
Posted in Music at 8:45 pm by Steve
All my life I have been in search of the “perfect guitar”. That one instrument that gives me everything I want in tone, feel and playability. Of course, the longer I’ve played, the better I became and the more intricate my technique, it became less and less likely a single instrument could ever deliver everything I wanted. At one point in my life I was accumulating guitars at a break-neck pace. Buying new ones and unloading older ones. The I started buying other instruments to satisfy my need for other sounds.
Between my wife & myself we have a total of 13 guitars (4 electric, 9 acoustic), 2 bass guitars, 2 mandolins, 2 violins, 2 dulcimers, a drum set and various pieces of hand percussion. Storage and care of these instruments gets to be more and more of a chore, yet I can’t seem to find one that I would be willing to part with. And even though many of them go unnoticed for months at a time while I have my current favorite, I will go back to the others and remember why it was I bought them and what they provided that the others lacked.
I suppose the hardest part to deal with is that I really do want to have my one guitar that gives me everything I need. I just don’t think it exists. I even feel guilty about having so many instruments. I used to think my 1995 Taylor 812c was that perfect guitar, but I recently have gone back to my 1997 Taylor 810-WMB and am just smitten with the huge, all-encompassing sound of that instrument and the deep and sonorous low-end. It doesn’t have the delicate top end that the 812c has, but it has a power and depth that the 812c will never have.
If I could somehow magically meld these two guitars into a single instrument I would have my perfect acoustic. As far as the electric goes…well, that’s a story for another day.
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