baconworks

bacon January 10th, 2008

 
As the votes continue rolling in for the tune writing contest, something has been on my mind. Before I get to my question, let me remind you that all votes must be in by 5pm EST, Friday, January 11th. So, if you haven’t voted yet, now is your chance.

With that out of the way, here is what I’ve been wondering: What impact does a name or a title have on your decision making process?

Let me lead in with an example. My boss recently told me that she is planning on running the Flying Pig Marathon. Why this particular marathon? Because of the name. She is willing to run 26 miles and 385 yards, in this particular marathon, because of the name. Now, I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t even drive my car 26 miles because of the name, but I digress.

Here is what I want to know. Are you more likely to learn a tune because of the name? We could even run a little side contest…ooh, good idea, let’s run a side contest. This contest, actually it is more of a survey, is much simpler than the first. Of the twenty tunes submitted to the contest, is there one or two where the names are really compelling? Which name do you like the most and why? Instead of emailing me, simply leave a comment to this post with your favorite names so everyone can see.

My votes goes to The Festering Fish, because of the disgusting alliteration, and The Feast of the Geese Eaters because of the intrigue and the imagery that it conjures up.

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bacon September 3rd, 2007

 
For those that are interested, I did all of my audio recording in Switzerland on an Edirol R-09. I had never used it before and, in fact, a co-worker loaned it to me the day before I left for Europe. I threw some fresh AA batteries in, 2 gig of SD memory and I was off to the races. I found it very easy to use and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a high quality, compact recording device. I recorded in some very adverse settings such as bars filled with drummers and fifers. In spite of the conditions the quality of the recordings were consistently good.

In addition, I found it really easy to transfer tracks to my computer. Just plug it in via a USB port and it was instantly recognized as another hard drive. Simple.

Amazon has it listed for $349. I give it an A+.

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bacon August 31st, 2007

 
I’d like to take a quick pause in my Mariner posts to give a nod to the spammers. Every day I filter out loads of spam that I receive as comments. Today I got one that I found amusing. It contained one line of compliments followed by a link to some porn site, followed by another line of compliments, followed by another link to porn, and so on. Just so they feel as thought they have some measure of success I am going to post the lines of compliments, minus the links to the porn. Here they are:

Very good web forum, great work and thank you for your service.
What beautiful text and visitors!
The Author, you - genius…
The Good lad an author! I much like site!
Very good contents…
The Author, you - genius…
I am glad to find this forum!

How does Mr. Spammer know that all my visitors are good looking? Impressive. I especially like the bit about ‘Author, you -genius’. Thank you spammers, you’re too kind.

O.k., now back to our regularly scheduled program.

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bacon August 8th, 2007

 
My buddy Joe and I have had a handful of lunchtime practices to prepare for our upcoming trip. On the last day of our last practice, during our last run-through of Drummelhund before our trip to Switzerland the building manager of The MathWorks drove up and asked if we were from The MathWorks. ‘Yes’, I replied. ‘Well’, he said, ’someone filed a complaint about the noise.’ Here is the amusing part. They thought we were an ice cream truck…playing the same tune over and over and over. Well, it certainly is not the first time someone has asked me to stop playing, but this might be the most unique complaint so far. See you in Switzerland!

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bacon August 1st, 2007

I stumbled upon this old picture today:
 


 
That is me on the right and my buddy Roger on the left. We were new to the Mariners and enjoying an ale just moments before a performance at the Roman amphitheater in Augst, Switzerland, which I will be returning to next week. It was the first time I had ever played in front of an audience that really cared and I can’t tell you how hard it was to play a fife while my knees were shaking.

The picture was taken seventeen years ago. Ugh!

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bacon June 12th, 2007

I just came across this nice set of tunes on YouTube. As a fretted instrument musician I have always struggled with removing the capo in the middle of a set of tunes as a result of an unexpected key change. This kid has a novel technique for dealing with the problem. Watch what he does with the capo about halfway through the video.
 

I would love to know what kind of capo he was using.

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bacon June 12th, 2007

Two pictures were sent along to me that I wanted to share. The first, taken by Karen Royce, is from last Friday’s show with Skip Healy. Skip is on the left, Roger in the middle and I on the right looking very relaxed. Check out all the old drums behind us. They were rattling all night long.
 

The second is an aerial shot of the amphitheater that I will be performing in later this summer with the Ancient Mariners.

 

From the photo it appears that there is no fence or gate or anything preventing the local yokels from wandering down to the Roman playground and knockn’ back a few Warteck’s. Only in Europe.

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bacon April 16th, 2007

 
I have a long overdue ‘Thank You’ to send out. I’m going to cover may ass by telling you that I was waiting for the right time…which is now.

You see, about a year ago I was sitting in my office when my boss came a knockn’ and asked me if I could take a guy to lunch who had been interviewing at The MathWorks for most of the day. She said, ‘you don’t actually have to interview him, just keep him busy for an hour.’ Great. Do you know what a challenge it can be to take a complete stranger to lunch, be on your most professional behavior, not talk about the reason he is there to begin with, be interesting so the guy doesn’t think our company hires a bunch of bozos and not spill something? Since I like both my boss and my job I agreed to humor the guy for an hour.

The guy’s name was Luke Stark. Ten minutes into lunch we both realized that we had lots in common and before long we were yammering on about traditional music, electronic music, recording and audio on the web. I told him that I had started a recording a bunch years back but have been fairly inactive as of late, parked at a musical rest stop you might say. In any case, we exchanged contact info in case the job thing didn’t work out. Fortunately for me it did. It was the best non-interview I ever conducted.

Once at The MathWorks Luke began nudging me.
Luke: When are you going to get back to recording some of that fife music?
Me: Geez, I’d love to but I really don’t have any equipment, time, motivation…
Luke: Don’t be lame, I’ll bring in my rig and we can try it out.

Thus, he dragged me back onto the musical highway. We tried out some of his equipment, which was like dangling a hooked worm before a catfish. He then loaned me some equipment. Mmm, tasty worm. And then, he forced my to buy my own equipment, which I never would have done were it not for the barbed hook in my lip. Now I spend hours nestled away in my basement recording the Celtic equivalent of Time Out, which my wife is really thrilled about because she knows it will be just the biggest hit and once the royalties start rolling in we’ll be able to take that trek in Nepal that we’ve always dreamed of. Then, of course, I had to start a damn blog, sucking every last morsel of energy I have, so that I can share my progress.

So, Luke, in all sincerity, thanks. I’m sure I wouldn’t be doing this today if it weren’t for you.

Now, if anyone is interested finding out more about this Luke fellow and his cool music you can do so at his fresh new blog called Mighty Bee of Ynturest. I expect great things so pay him a visit.

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bacon April 12th, 2007

After some discussion I have added RSS feeds for comments.
 

 
Incidentally, if you don’t know what RSS is there are lots of good articles to get you started.

Also, I got rid of the music rating on the comment page. Everyone has been too kind and simply gave me fives. Unfortunately this was not helping with my goal of highlighting tunes that are most popular. So, in its replacement I am trying a different approach. I installed a plugin called Popularity-Contest that calculates popularity based on traffic. The most popular posts will show up on the right side of the page under ‘most popular post’. I still need to figure out how to flag most popular tunes.

So, while I’m at it, here is a list of the WordPress plugins that I use on this site:

1. Popularity-Contest
2. Akismet - Spam prevention
3. Contact Form ][ - So you can contact me.
4. Get Recent Comments - Used to display most recent comments - duh.
5. Permalink Redirect - Permalink Redirect ensures that pages and entries are always accessed via the permalink. Otherwise, a 301 redirect will be issued
6. podPress - Makes podcasting simple by automatically adding the necessary podpress elements to my RSS feed.
7. Ultimate Tag Warrior - I use this to tag my posts and pages as I create them.
8. Sociable - Makes it easy to link into social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and technorati

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bacon April 11th, 2007

Google, what a wonderful thing. They’ve created all sorts of cool tools including one called Google Analytics. If you are the admin of a website you can sign up for Google Analytics and they will provide you with interesting information about the traffic to your site. For example, below is a map of the world personalized for me by Google. All the orange dots on the map represent the locations from which people, including you, are visiting my site. Cool!
 

 

Now, before you freak out, let me assuage your fears. Google is not giving me your social security number, bank statements or the keys to your car. But what they do give me is a sense of who is visiting and what you find interesting. This information helps me shape the content I provide. For example, here is a view of the top content on my site.
 

From this I can see that, other than the home page, people are visiting discography most, which is good for me to know since I have not really spent much time on that part of the site. Maybe I should. Other interesting bits of data…people spend only eighteen seconds on the music page but they never leave the site from that page, which implies that they are clicking on a link to music. I’m happy about that.

Some other things I’ve noticed…it took about a month before someone from Ireland finally noticed that I have a site about Irish music. I guess I have to work on my marketing strategy. Also, I had a dot suddenly appear in the Pacific Ocean one day. I though, ‘hey, turtles from the Galapagos are check’n me out!’. On further inspection it appears to be surfers from Hawaii. Surfers love slip jigs.

So, tell me about your dot! Do you play traditional music? Fife & Drum? Just passing by? Leave a comment and let me know!

Lastly, is anyone willing to fess up to which dot is sending me all the spam about Viagra?

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