Category Notes

A super easy way to show me some love

So, here’s a nifty Safari extension I spotted a while back: Affiliatizer for Safari. Install it, and in your Safari preferences, you can add three Amazon affiliate codes to be randomly added to Amazon.com links throughout the web!

So, if you really think I’m nifty, install this sucker, and add berk-20 as all three affiliate codes, and I’ll be receiving affiliate earnings.

Or, if you’re a Firefox user, install this extension, which will run a user script that automatically adds my affiliate ID to your Amazon links, no fuss, no muss.

Love you, mean it.

Playing a gig @ The Precinct tonight!

Kept meaning to send this out sooner, but oh well. A band I play with is playing at Precinct, which is at 70 Union Sq., Somerville tonight.

The whole night starts at about 8pm, we go on at 10:15pm sharp, cover is $5 (and it all comes our way, so you’d be supporting us directly!)

We play a mix of R&B, reggae, and jazz, and tonight it’s Richard Matra on tenor sax, Keith Cornella & Neil Itzler on guitars, myself on bass and Tony Hall on drums.

Hope to see you there!

Matrajah (3rd set, my band):

Jalopy (2nd set):

Evan Laflamme (opener):

The Precinct’s Yelp page

The Precinct’s Facebook page

Ping!

So Apple just let loose with lots of cool stuff this past Wednesday, including a new version of iTunes. The usual UI changes (the change to the bottom toolbar is quite tasty to my eyes, but the icon, well, I’ve already switched it out), a few feature refinements (when playing music via AirTunes, check out the per-device volume by selecting the “Multiple Speakers…” bit!), and Ping.

I’m really digging Ping, and while it seems to be starting out simply, as always with Apple, they’ll slowly build upon it.

So, find me on Ping!

It’s my party

Twenty seven years ago today, I showed up. So far, it’s been a hell of a ride. Moving from New Jersey to North Carolina, attending Catholic school for my entire primary & secondary education, learning music, getting into computers, picking up the bass, traveling the world with my family, moving to Boston & going to Berklee, graduating from Berklee, working for Apple, Inc., ending up working for myself as a web developer…

Not too shabby for twenty seven years. Let’s take a look at me near the beginning:

A photo of me holding my baby sister

Me & my little sis in Jan of ’86; I’m 2 years old, she’s 6 mos.

And here I am now:

A photo of me about a week & a half before my 27th birthday.

A photo my mom took of me about a week & a half before my 27th birthday.

Pretty cool. Here’s to the next twenty-seven years.

So far, so good…

So it’s been a few months into 2010. I’ve made good on my promise to plug back into the music scene; been playing almost every Sunday with Rich Matra’s reggae/jazz band Matrajah. My friend JoBeth got me the spot, and Rich has liked my playing so far. The band is definitely a rotating ensemble, with Rich holding down tenor sax & sometimes vocals and myself on bass, but the drum chair & the guitar spot have been different almost every week. This week though, JoBeth returns to the drum throne, and Neal Itzler is on guitar, so that’ll be great.

Neal, oddly enough, was my first semester ensemble teacher at Berklee, so it’s kinda bizarre to be on the bandstand with him, but he’s a killer guitarist, and definitely helps keep things together on the bandstand.

Along with that, my buddy Andy hit me up to start a rock cover band, and, while I was tired of the cover scene a few years ago, I’ve recharged enough by now to give it a shot. We had some mutual friends lined up for the guitar & drum spots, but they had to pull out after realizing they were over committed. So if anyone out there wants to play some rock music, say the word!

As for work, that’s been going well! Still doing things exclusively with Elative Marketing, my friend Kyung Min’s company, and that’s worked out really well. Money is still tough though, since it comes in spurts (for example, I’m waiting on two big checks this week, which will be my first paychecks since mid-February), so that’s a bit hard, but I’m definitely learning greater discipline, which is really good for me. I’ll be posting some follow-up posts about some of the sites I’ve completed recently, and discussing them in greater depth on the Elative blog.

I’m still not fully adjusted back to being single, but then again the last time I was single for more than about a month was in 2005 (Amber & I got together February 2006). I still see her, and there’s a part of me that still feels a twinge, and I sometimes find myself wondering “what if it had worked out?” But I made my decision, and as painful as it was, I still think it was the best one for both of us.

The weather has finally turned warm this week (after a monsoon-like three day rainstorm), and that’s kinda what prompted this post. A little “spring cleaning” as it were. Oh, and so far, I’ve made good on my Project 52 commitment, so that’s almost one quarter down. We’ll see how I do after another few months.

Oh, and those of you lurking, reading my posts, come on now, you can comment you know! I even enabled the ability to log in using your Twitter account if you want to. I’m still working on the Facebook Connect thing, that’s a little tougher, but I’ll get it.

Work Hard and Be Kind

This got lost in my pile of drafts, but the message is a great one, and deserves to be repeated.

Work hard and be kind.

(Via when fire and the ocean floor collide. : theduty : justfeelngtired : dannorton)

More iPad musings

So I read this article by Rob Foster, On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing, and it really resonated. I’ve heard the same sort of things from the people in my life, and the folks who’ve asked me about the iPad I’ve given a similar answer: “This would be perfect for [relative/friend].”

My favorite quote from his article, in reference to his technophobic friend, talking about his iPhone: “I had never once seen him exhibit any excitement over technology but the next time I saw him, he could barely contain his enthusiasm for his new phone.”

Awesome.

Is that a gig?

It is! I’m playing a show tomorrow night with a band called Matrajah, at the Woodbine Club, located at 57 Blue Hill Ave, Boston MA.

Making the attempt

I post here somewhat infrequently, and I’d like to be better about that. So, I’ve committed myself to Project52, which takes its name from the 52 weeks of the year, and the aim of the project is to write at least one blog post every week for a year. I’ll be tagging all of my posts this year “Project52” in an effort to monitor my progress.

We’ll see how I’ve done come this time next year.

Best New Blog of 2009: The Awl

So there’s a fun article, Best New Blogs of 2009, over at The Bygone Bureau, and one of the picks is The Awl, which is probably one of the most incisive sets of writing I’ve ever had the delight to come across. It now has a spot in my newsreader, but I want to highlight one of their movie reviews as being hilariously awesome. Full disclosure, the movie in question, The Hangover, is one I enjoyed, but I still find the review to be quite apt.

Now, even better than the review though, are the comments. Oh my lord there’s some serious gold in these comments. My favorite? this one. Seriously, “sanctimonious asshole shark cage” is the most hilariously amazing set of prose I’ve read in a long while. Enjoy.