3.31.2011 Toad The Wet Sprocket at Higher Ground

We saw Toad The Wet Sprocket at Higher Ground last night. It was a great show. The last time they came to Higher Ground was apparently 15 years ago, before they had broken up. The band played a few new unreleased songs, as well as, of course, all of their most popular songs from the 90's. As a 6 piece, the arrangements and overall sound of the songs were pretty much exactly as they are on the albums, with the addition of lap steel and keyboard player Johnny Hawthorne to fill out the sound.

November Guest Receives Airplay on 30 U.S. Radio Stations

This afternoon we were delightfully surprised to receive a report containing 30 RADIO STATIONS across the US who have picked up November Guest this week. Here is the current list of radio stations you can now hear us on:

KAXE (Grand Rapids, MN)

WROQ (Greenville, SC)

KRSC (Claremore, OK)

WKPS (State College, PA)

WKWZ (Syosset, NY)

WMSR (Auburn, AL)

KCLC (St. Charles, MO)

WIZN (Burlington, VT)

WMBR (Cambridge, MA)

WMEB (Orono, ME)

WNCW (Spindale, NC)

WOAS (Ontonagon, MI)

WQAQ (Hamden, CT)

WSUP (Platteville, WI)

WUMD (Dearborn, MI)

CFMU (Hamilton, ON)

KDHX (St. Louis, MO)

KFAN (Fredericksburg, TX)

KOTO (Telluride, CO)

KPUR (Forest Grove, OR)

KSUT (Ignacio, CO)

KUMD (Duluth, MN)

MSPR (Moorehead, KY)

WBZC1 (Atco, NJ)

WJHU (Baltimore, MD)

WMLU (Farmville, VA)

WMNF (Tampa, FL)

WMPG (Portland, ME)

WPMD (Norwalk, CA)

WUTK (Knoxville, TN)

And btw, wow, there's a place called Farmville, VA? I wonder if they'll be sued out of existence by Zynga.

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

www.pornfunk.com

Longford Row - Traditional Irish Music

www.longfordrow.com

November Guest - Indie rock band from Randolph, VT

www.novemberguest.com

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!

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:

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

July 2nd, Buzz Out Loud

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!

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.

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.