daveryder.com [the official dave ryder website]

Dan the man and I celebrated his birthday the 22cd (by drinking many beers and jamming at his home studio), so I thought I’d extend our best wishes to Dan here on teh internets - who BTW plays bass, guitar, keyboards and harmonica (and sings, too - oh yeah he’s a regular one man band).

No, really he is seriously super talented, he has always fronted his own band and is an awesome songwriter (and has done for years - ever since I met him during the Rhythm Gypsy days, way back when), and we are very lucky he is willing to play the bass for us and take time from his own projects to help us out.

Thanks budski, and Happy Birthday!

Don Xavier Cole’s birthday is today, and tomorrow it is Miles Davis’ birthday, which seems appropriate as they are both badass trumpet players. In fact, I can’t speak highly enough of Don in regards to his piano and trumpet playing, and his creativity because although the band shares song writing credit on most of our songs, it’s Don who frequently comes up with the chord progression or melody that sparks it off, or suggests a bridge or rhythmic device that is used more often than not.

In short, he’s AWESOME and we’re very lucky to have him as a major force in our band. A lot of our songs wouldn’t even exist without him. Here’s a photo of the preposterous monstrosity himself (BTW to be called a monster amongst the hep jazz cats is considered a compliment):

Curiously enough, the great guitar player Sonny Sharrock also died on Miles’s birthday (which is really weird considering he played with Miles on A Tribute to Jack Johnson, obviously NOT the Jack Johnson you’re probably thinking of). I only bring that up because our drummer Kent had frequently compared my playing to Sharrock’s before I had even heard of him, which I think is just a series of strange coincidences. But cool. And flattering.

Anyway Happy Bithday Don! (I can always remember Don’s birthday from a line in Rush’s Lakeside Park: “Everyone would gather on the 24th of May, sitting in the sand to watch the fireworks display”.

I think we are going to stop doing the BitTorrent thing for now until we see how this whole deal with the MPAA suing TorrentSpy for $110 million dollars plays out. Obviously, if the judgement stands up during the appeals process the MPAA is going to go after other BitTorrent trackers like sharks on a feeding frenzy. This will effectively shut them down, and only places like Pirate Bay that are located outside of the US and not subject to their laws will keep their doors open. And for a number of reasons I’m not going to go into here , I don’t like pirate bay and they’ve already been shut down twice. Plus, they’re not free and are facing legal battles too.

But that’s neither here nor there - my main objection isn’t the legality of BitTorrent, per se, but is more of a time issue: why should I spend (waste) time creating BitTorrents and uploading the seed .torrents if that entire house of cards is going to come crumbling down soon anyway?

Besides, with todays broadband speeds it only takes a few seconds to download one of our songs directly from our server anyway, and then our fans aren’t having their IP addresses logged like they would be by going to a torrent tracker.

BTW, our songs are free and it is perfectly legal to download and share our music with anybody you like. I own the copyright to all of The Dave Ryder Band music and give you permission as outlined by our Creative Commons License .

I love XKCD. This comic especially struck my funny bone:

Also I wanted to mention that I installed the Il Filosofo Automatic WordPress Database Backup Plugin (whew that’s a mouthful) a while back, and it’s working perfectly. Everyday at around 3:00 PM I get an email with my WordPress database attached as a MySQL file. How cool is that?

Today I installed the Registration Blacklist Plugin by Scott Horne. I kept getting a new user registration (sometimes several per day) from komatoz.net emails, but the site is clearly not interested in music, it is spammer city, those bastards (shakes fist).

It allows you to add domains and emails that you want to ban from registering as users. So we’ll see how well it works, if I don’t post about it again you can just assume it works and everything is all cool and shizzit.

So it turns out that permalinks suck - they look pretty but it changed the htaccess to the point that when you wanted to go to a directory like the downloads directory, WordPress just gave you a 404 error. After spending days trying to find a fix I finally just said, “fuck it” and turned them off. Which led me to my next discovery: password protecting the downloads directory messed up my linking directly to the mp3s in that directory (duh). I can come up with a work-around for that, but time issues are forcing me to put that on the back burner for now.

(EDIT: after re-reading the wordpress codex link above, I’ve got a few more ideas about how I can fix the permalinks issue, but that’s still on the back-burner, too).

Like tonight, another new version of WordPress was released, so I fired up the ol’ auto-update plugin and took care of it, but that was just another thing taking away time I needed to spend getting this site up to at least a bare-bones level of acceptableness.

The good news is I found out these problems now and was able to fix them with relatively little effort and now will be able to focus on other things. Yay.

Well I finally got around to sending out the first Newsletter, mostly a little test of PHPList (which powers my newsletter) and of course there have turned out to be issues I hadn’t foreseen, mostly having to do with people who use gmail, hotmail and yahoo (oh that’s not too big of a percentage, is it?).

The basic problem is this: I wanted to send the email as HTML, so I could make it look similar to the rest of my site, and be able to include a newsletter logo at the top which is clickable , and be able to include images in the body occasionally, also. Here is the logo (I had to shrink it a bit to fit here, so the font looks a little funky):

I have grown used to styling HTML with CSS, and since gmail and hotmail strip <style> tags, many people received a newsletter with black text on a black background (just lovely). If you’re interested, here is more information on how I worked around the problem. Also this article by Xavier Frenette was very helpful, too.

If you want to see the newsletter the way you were supposed to, it is in the newsletter archive (Newsletter #1).

So I will be sending out a second newsletter very soon, pointing the original recipients here for an explanation of the black-on-black fiasco, plus there were a few things I’d left out and wanted to add, anyway. ‘thorry for the inconvenienthe (that is a HHGTTG reference for all you fellow Douglas Adams fans).

Nobody has yet to figure out the secret code in my header:

15.18.21.2.11.5.21.1.19.1.13.13.5.8.11.7.24

The clue is in the upper right hand corner of the header: X=4

It’s a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered with secret sauce (Jimmy James).

I installed Justin Blanton’s Smart Archive WordPress plugin today for my archives page. However, if you want to run PHP code from within a WP Page you have to install a plugin to allow WordPress to execute the code (why? uh, I dunno. you just have to.).

So, I found the Exec-PHP plugin by Sören that is extremely well documented, works nicely and is kept up-to-date. Nice work by both of those guys.

I only had one minor difficulty understanding how to call the Smart Archives function, but that was just my php ignorance - the plugin works perfectly .

Occasionally I want to hear a real audio stream, like this Syd Barrett documentary at the BBC.

Unfortunately, the RealPlayer sucks, for a number of reasons. But I found a place where you can download a special version of the RealPlayer that has none of their spyware features, is expiry-free and nuisance-free: The BBC website.

(One quick note: These are mac and pc downloads - for linux you want the awesome Helix RealPlayer, but of course if you use linux you already know that, ‘cus that’s just how we linux guys roll. Okay, I’m not a real linux guy, I just dabble a little with Ubuntu.)

Because of Great Britain’s strict public service remit, the BBC made a unique deal with Real Network to allow this version of the RealPlayer, which you can obtain by downloading it via the BBC website.

Super sweet!