Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Where's Scott? (My Current Musical Endeavors)

As some may already be aware, my lineup of musical endeavors has changed a little over the last few months. As of November 2010, I am no longer with 80's & 90's group Shakedown (I wish them all the best!)

I have branched out into a variety of other music projects. You can catch my performances with the following groups:

PornFunk - Indie rock band from Randolph, VT

Longford Row - Traditional Irish Music

November Guest - Indie rock band from Randolph, VT

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you will be able to stay apprised of all of my upcoming performance dates.

To start with, I'll be performing at Ri Ra's (Burlington, VT) on New Year's Eve (12/31/2010) from 5-8pm, for First Night. If you stop by that evening, you can catch me playing upright bass with Irish band Longford Row.

Cheers!

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Gear review: Fender B-Dec 30 Amplifier


Today I'm going to review my Fender B-Dec 30. This assumes you've already perused the product literature and are already familiar with the features listed. If not, you can check it out on the Fender website. It's a small bass guitar amp, designed mainly for practice, but packed with features. I bought it new for around $350. I've owned it for a little over 2 years now, and have used it quite a bit for:

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

My Theme is Featured on the Buzz Out Loud Podcast

You can hear my Buzz Out Loud theme remix featured at the end of Friday's (7/2/2010) show. I have been dubbed the keytar-playing, "Unicorn Of Rock" by Friday's BOL crew. They seemed to like it though.

Check it out, starting around 36:00


I told them that my computer didn't catch on fire when I played the riff - only my keytar did. Glad to have been connected via a USB hub!

Saturday, June 12, 2010

The trouble with greylisting

Greylisting is one of several fairly common methods of preventing bulk spam from getting into a mail server. In short, the concept is based on the following idea: The receiving mail server is contacted by a sending server it has never seen before. Rather than accept the (possibly spam) message, it issues a message to this effect:
Dear sending mail server: I'm having a problem right now, and can't accept your message. Please try again later.
The thought is that, if it is really serious about delivering it, it will try again in a little while. Most bulk spam mail servers are not configured to retry. as they expect that most of the harvested addresses they attempt to deliver to are going to fail for one reason or another. A real mail server, however, will try back after a few minutes. At that time, the greylisting server will (in theory) recognize the retry attempt, accept the message, and make a note never to test that host with this rather rude procedure again.

There are at least a few problems with this method, that I have seen.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

A look at my first live internet gig

Last Wednesday night, my band November Guest pulled off their first internet gig, on ustream.tv. I thought I'd give some of my first impressions.

Monday, May 10, 2010

I'm Making A New Podcast Theme

I'll confess, I haven't been a regular listener of CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast, but I happened to tune in about 2 weeks ago. At that time, I learned about the Buzz Out Loud Remix Contest. It's a pretty exciting opportunity for me, since I ABSOLUTELY LOVE COMPOSING PODCAST THEMES.

As a musician /composer, I have had a really hard time finding a medium that works for me, due to my quirky background and limitations. These include:
  1. My partialness to the underground demoscene sound, which is lo-fi, 8-bitty, and well, sort of unique and special interest (put gently) for the ears of most radio-loving listeners.
  2. A short attention span, causing me to lose interest while writing songs with lyrics...
  3. " "... songs that last more than 30 seconds or so.
My brother's college buddy had a saying: "there's a butt for every seat". Well, if there's a medium for every artist, I think I've found mine. Podcast themes are short, VERY unique (a requirement, in fact), and generally instrumental.

I've tried my hand a composing/producing a handful of podcast themes, including for such podcasts as Dinosaurs: Before They Were Fuels, as well as Fresh Ubuntu (although you'll not find any credit anywhere on their site indicating so... *AHEM*, GUYS). Anyway, they've been pretty good, if I do say so myself. Without going too deeply into what values I believe a podcast theme should have (I'll save that for another post), they succeed in combining interesting elements from the podcast, personified through my background, into a well articulated, contained, and fairly polished theme song.

So I knew I needed to outdo myself. The BOL podcast has a lot of listener-ship. There will be a lot of competition. Over the course of the last week or 2, I have tweaked, scrutinized, polished, and tuned my composition. I've heard it on my studio monitors, headphones, computer speakers, in the car, in the living room... you get my drift. But now it must be "done" - it's time to present my submission to the CNET team. I'm not taking the chance that something stupid will happen, causing my submission to be screwed up or lost by the time the 5/12 deadline hits.

Whether or not mine is selected for the theme, I can say that it's a step up from anything I've done thus far. I think it represents the beginning of a whole new tier of podcast theme production for me. I'm looking forward to seeing it up on the CNET website, and I'm pretty sure it will at least hold it's own with the "heavy hitters".

May the best podcast theme win! (And let's face it, it'll be nice to have something better than the 4 track Acid loop they have been using until now. No offense, BOL team.)

Welcome to my "New" "Old" Blog

This is about to become a much more special place for me. In fact, it's the biggest thing to happen here since June 6th, 2002, as 2 friends and I were trying to come up with a name for our consumer rant site, and someone shouted out "Scamwagon!". It just rolls off the tongue.

In short, I've decided to consolidate my internet presence down as much as possible. I currently have 3 or 4 blogs, not to mention a facebook, 4 Myspaces, 4 Twitter accounts, and, it seems like, 234,432 websites to maintain. It has come to my attention that these days, the Internet values quality a lot more than quantity (just ask Google!).

So to that end, I am consolidating some of my blogs, etc. as much as possible. The information posted will remain, but new tech-related posts will go on to my (ONE!) remaining blog, Scamwagon, which was formally relegated exclusively to political and consumer rants. Instead of creating separate blogs for each of the crazy interests I have (cars, music, computers, to name a few), you'll be able to find all of my posts on one, single blog site: this one. If you are reading this via Facebook, great. That's another example of how I will consolidate, by connecting mediums as much as possible, so I only have to publish content once.

If you're reading this post, you're already tuned in. Wow, look at the added value already!

Monday, April 12, 2010

480 Million Needles Floating In Space

The dumb things people will do for war. I just read about this 1963 experiment, where the US launched a package of 480 million tiny needles into space, in order to create an artificial ionosphere that we could bounce radio signals off. The idea was to provide a backup method of communications in case our undersea cables were taken out by the enemy.

It "worked" for a couple of months, and then scattered to the point that it would no longer provide any effect, other than to obscure communications attempts beyond the orbit altitude of these needles, which it probably still does to some extent today. On top of that, this blanket of space junk is one of the many things that modern spacecraft have to avoid when doing, for example, real advancement for mankind.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Why Reward /Offer Cards Suck

Ok, here's another scam to watch out for. "Reward" debit cards. These are becoming all the rage. If you haven't seen one yet, rest assured you will. They may eventually replace all offer checks sent to you by companies (things like rebates, rewards, gifts, etc.) Popular amounts are $25 - $100.

They are basically debit cards with a fixed limit for the amount the company is giving you. If you have used one, here's a familiar scenario.

Joe has a $50 debit card he got from a cell phone rebate. He used it to buy dinner last night, and has $35.42 left on it. Today Joe finishes pumping his gas. The total comes up to $38.42. Joe inserts / hands the clerk his offer debit card and attempts to pay. Uh oh, transaction denied. No big deal, Joe can use it to buy something cheaper. Except, HOW MANY THINGS CAN YOU BUY WITH A DEBIT CARD UNDER $35.00? Here's the short list of reasons why these cards suck:

  • Transactions for more than the balance of the card are denied. Yes you can split the transaction between 2 cards, if you know how much you have left on the card, and you are using it at a location where this is possible, but who has time to screw around?
  • The balance is a pain in the ass to find out. It usually involves creating an account on some website or calling an obscure 800 number and typing in many digits.
  • It screws up your accounting, if you like to track your spending through your bank statement.

Essentially, they know you're not going to be able to access the last bit of the money. So in essence, they are giving you $25-$100, but there's a pretty good chance that they may only actually have to spend about $5-$85.

The irony of it all is that they are frequently touted as being a "more convenient" alternative to traditional check payments. Keep your debit card, I'll take a good old fashioned check.

Monday, March 08, 2010

Broadvoice unable to call Fairpoint phone numbers

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but since last night, I am unable to call any Vermont landline (a.k.a. FAIRPOINT) phone numbers from my Broadvoice line. Message is: "I'm sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed." The same issue also exists at work, where we also use Broadvoice.

I called Broadvoice tech support, and they said the problem is on Fairpoint's end. They've reported it several times.

On an interesting and semi-related note, I have experienced (twice in the past) a problem where people with Verizon Wireless couldn't dial my Broadvoice line (similar message). I got through to someone at Verizon Wireless, and they were able to confirm and fix the problem. They said the issue was with routing tables (the dialing kind, not the IP kind).

Of course, being a Verizon Wireless customer also, it was a lot easier for me to get them to listen.

Saturday, March 06, 2010

Do this simple mod to your OEM Droid dock, take police style car camera footage.

You see the craziest things driving down the road in Vermont. The other day I was driving over a mountain in a snow storm, and thought about how now one would believe what I was going through unless I had some video. Unfortunately, the last thing I was going to do was try to hold a camera while driving, rally-style, through heavy snow.

I glared at my Droid, perched in the perfect position to record the view out the front windshield. All I would need to do was hit the camera button, and hit record! But alas, the Droid dock has no hole in the back for the camera to see through. I vowed that day that I would take the 5 minutes to drill the stupid thing, and easily open up a whole new world of hands-free video footage.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Prem tech visits the wrong location

I finally had the chance to play around with xtranormal.com. It's pretty addictive. You can make a machinima movie very quickly (once you learn how to deal with a few idiosyncrasies). I would recommend steering clear of the "Take 5" button, as it pretty much ought to be relabeled "trash my video".

If you aren't familiar, there is a subculture of "premise technicians" (technicians that go on site to make repairs), for certain well known cable and telephone companies. It's not a rewarding job. There is a raft load of satirical videos on Youtube, using xtranormal machinima, in the format of sort of "a day in the life" of a prem tech.

So, with that as my inspiration, here's my first piece. Yes, this is based on a true story. Some liberties were taken, and the names were changed to protect the guilty. Audio track is NSFW.