First read this article: Florida bill would require bloggers who write about the governor and legislators to register with the state
Continue readingGloria: A Tech
Ok, one of the many things that I do is technical theater. The project I’m currently working on is a production of Gloria: A Life being mounted by OffBook Productions. One of the annoying things about the show, however, is that it specifies all sorts of media but doesn’t give you any clue about where to find these video and audio recordings. So, as a service to other audio/video techs who might be working on mounting a production of this amazing show, I’m providing a bunch of links to where I found things. Why should all this work go to waste once our production is over?
Continue readingThe Massacree Revisited… again
With the news breaking that there was a seven hour gap in Trump’s phone logs on January 6, 2021, I got to thinking about the 18 minute and 20 second gap in the Nixon tapes, which, of course, made me think of Alice’s Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited. I wanted to quote the additional lyrics, but, much to my annoyance, even lyrics sites that claimed to have the lyrics to The Massacre Revisited, they all had the lyrics to the original Alice’s Restaurant.
So here, without further ado, is the ADDITIONAL lyric at the end of The Massacre Revisited.
Continue readingAnatomy of a Scam
So one of my acquaintances who has mail at verizon.net via AOL got hacked, and I wanted to go through it to show people all the red flags they should be seeing when they get an email like this.
Continue readingMake it Bigger!
Make it bigger!
Neil Patrick Harris – 2013 Tony Awards
That’s right, it’s bigger!
I just built this thing like half an hour ago!
Since David Willis has been offering magnets as premiums in his Dumbing of Age Kickstarter campaigns, I’ve been getting all of them. First, they lived on my refrigerator. Then I bought a 2-ft x 3-ft magnetic whiteboard to display them. This hung in my office, but then I moved to another house, and I stopped having my own office, so the whiteboard was stuffed in a corner in the basement puppet workshop.

Then two things happened: I got the magnets with Willis’ TENTH book… and I finally got a new closet for Christmas.
Continue readingOn loving Jews
“I also want you to try to love us. It has always felt true to me that we are not liked. Many people like me as an individual person, but I have always felt that my truest Jewish self is not a loved and welcomed thing, and that as a collective whole, we are not wanted.”
I want to tell you a story. I won’t tell it as well as I want to, because as much as people tell me that I write well, I find that I’m never able to express what I really want to express in my writing. There’s always something ineffable that I’m not able to capture, and I’ve felt like that’s what differentiates my utilitarian writing from what truly gifted practitioners are able to create.
I am Irish Catholic. Continue reading
Rest In Peace, Tommy
My wife put it best on Facebook, so I’m just going to echo her words:
I was up for hours last night, staring at the ceiling. Trying to find the right words. After about two dozen drafts of this post, I decided to be short on description, but long on love and gratitude.
Last night Pack and I received the call we had been quietly dreading. At 9:40pm Tommy went into cardiac arrest. We raced to Oradell Animal Hospital to be with him and they were able to revive him long enough for us to have the chance to say goodbye…
Continue reading
Don’t claim copyright unless you ACTUALLY made something
One of my friends, Roy Atkinson, used to make a living as a singer/songwriter. I love the songs he wrote, and while I missed getting to hear him sing when he retired from being a musician, I loved getting to geek out with him talking about his new career in computers.
But today, he noticed something on the internet: someone was claiming one of his songs as their own. Now, the person isn’t attempting to make any money off the song, but when I did a search on the lyrics, that site was the only one that came up. Nowhere was there any reference to Roy’s 1982 album “Beginnings and Ends”, where this song is track 4 on side 1.
The dude was claiming to have written the song for a woman he met, and had the audacity to write:
(Song is copyrighted) **Please don’t steal**
“Another Bottle of Wine” -for [woman’s handle redacted]
I could not allow that to stand.
So I went to the Internet Archive, and I found an archive of the song lyrics and guitar tablature from another friend’s cover of the song in 1994 that was captured by the Wayback Machine off my website in January 1998. Hopefully, here it will get a little Google love and that plagiarist’s bad copy of the lyrics won’t be the only hit in Google, and my friend can get the credit he deserves.
Pay the Bill in the Morning
by Roy Atkinson
as sung by Dennis D’Asaro.
Dennis capoed 3 (in C) when he played this 1 Dec 94. It is rekeyed here to be in D (capo 1)
Transcription thanks to Alan Catelli (catela@rpi.edu).
D D/F# Bm
It was a casual conversation
G A D
In a casual kind of a place
G A D Bm
Just a passing fasination
G Bm A
Though I must say she had an interesting face
She was a small town girl, a bit lonesome;
I was one of the boys in the band.
Small town girls, good Lord, I've know some;
I was getting tired of the one night stands...
I said:
Chorus
D A Bm Bm/A
"Bring us down another bottle of wine, Maria;
G A D
Let us have another hour of time.
G A D G Em
I'll go home when I can stand to be alone,
Bm A
But here and now I'm doing just fine...
D
Bring me some wine..."
She said that she had a man in the service;
I said, "Well, I've got a woman back home."
She said, "You're looking kinda nervous."
I said, "Yeah, I'd really rather be gone."
She said, "Well, you can't help what your feeling;
And, my friend, neither can I:
Sometimes you can't touch the ceiling
Even if you're reaching for the sky."
And she said,
Chorus
Well, I guess I know what your thinking:
And, my friend, you're thinking it wrong.
If you think what I'd been drinking
Made me want to take the girl home.
Sometimes you pay the bill in the morning
For the place where your spending the night.
You can't say you had no warning
When deep in your heart you know it ain't right...
Chorus
Sometimes, its something she says that's worth keeping...
Sometimes, its something you read in her smile...
Lets you go home, spend the night sleeping,
Sometimes, that's what you need for a while.
Sometimes you pay the bill in the morning
For the bed where your spending the night.
Please don't say you never had warning
When deep in your heart you know it ain't right...
Chorus (ad libbed)
I promised some photos of my video harness
Here’s the video screen attached to my harness while the camera’s filming another one of our characters.
Sorry, I don’t have more photos. I’ll try to get some taken next time we film.
(original post: Learning Puppetry tech…)
Oooh! Fun with git and bash!
I stumble across all sorts of things when I browse the web late at night after my wife has gone to sleep. Last Monday night, I ran across Oh My Zsh, which is a framework for doing all sorts of things with your Z Shell prompt…
and, being a bash bigot, I thought “Hey, I ought to be able to do that in bash!”. I was especially taken by all the git repository information that could be displayed in the prompt, so I went looking and I found https://github.com/magicmonty/bash-git-prompt, which did pretty much the same thing for bash, but without all the fancy angled edges:
Now, this was nice, but you’ll note that the pathname for your current directory appears twice: once in your prompt, and once in your titlebar. I’ve already been putting information in my titlebar for years
and I didn’t really want to duplicate information. So I started looking at how to customize this bash git prompt.
Fortunately, there’s a whole section on configuration in the documentation, and, with just a little tweaking
# This theme for gitprompt.sh is optimized for the
# "Solarized Dark" and "Solarized Light" color schemes
# tweaked for Ubuntu terminal fonts
override_git_prompt_colors() {
GIT_PROMPT_THEME=Custom
GIT_PROMPT_LEADING_SPACE=0
GIT_PROMPT_PREFIX=""
GIT_PROMPT_SUFFIX=""
GIT_PROMPT_THEME_NAME="Solarized"
GIT_PROMPT_STAGED="${Yellow}●"
GIT_PROMPT_CHANGED="${BoldBlue}∆" # delta means change!
GIT_PROMPT_STASHED="${BoldMagenta}⚑ "
GIT_PROMPT_CLEAN="${Green}✔"
GIT_PROMPT_BRANCH="${Yellow}"
GIT_PROMPT_END_COMMON="_LAST_COMMAND_INDICATOR_ ${BoldBlue}${Time12a}${ResetColor}"
GIT_PROMPT_END_USER="\n${GIT_PROMPT_END_COMMON} $ "
GIT_PROMPT_END_ROOT="\n${GIT_PROMPT_END_COMMON} # "
GIT_PROMPT_START="\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\007\]"
PROMPT_START="\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\007\]"
PROMPT_END="${GIT_PROMPT_END_COMMON} $ "
}
reload_git_prompt_colors "Solarized"
I was able to turn my bash prompt into something a little more useful when I’m coding!
