Category Archives: Personal

A very sad day – The passing of Leonard Nimoy

Leonard_Nimoy_by_Gage_Skidmore
Leonard Nimoy at the 2011 Phoenix Comicon in Phoenix, Arizona.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia. CC-BY-SA 3.0

A very sad day indeed. I’ve enjoyed his work immensely and will greatly miss his cameos on the current ST movie series.

Mr. Spock’s, values, outlook and insights have contributed to the person I became. Reason over emotion, knowledge over ignorance and understanding over dogma; ideals ingrained in Mr. Spock and ones I wish to embody myself.

But dude, a singing career?  Seriously?  What were you thinking? Bad move Space Cadet. http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-way-i-feel-mw0000997017

Is anybody out there?

At the beginning of the year I began the #photo365 project; posting a picture a day from my catalog of images dating back to the 70’s. I’ve made it to half way point and thought I’d take a breath for a few observations…

– It’s harder than I thought but not in the way you’d think. I have a hard time narrowing it down to a single image per day.

– Several themes have emerged. #monomonday (black & white images), #tbt (throwback thursday) and music related shots on Fri and Sat. Weds. are usually travel related, but not all the time.

– Does anyone see them? Only a small percentage of my posts get a single LIKE or comment. I have to wonder if they are even being included in the news feeds of my friends.

Please, if you are seeing them, and if they tickle your fancy, even a tiny bit, I would greatly appreciate a LIKE. A SHARE would be wonderful, but only if you really like it. Any feedback,even a “That’s rubbish! Give your camera to a blind orangutan and it’ll do a better job!” comment will help feed my middle-age deflated ego. It will also let me know that someone, anyone, is actually seeing them.

Thanks!

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

First, to answer a few questions that I’m sure have been plaguing you since last I wrote…

  • No, I didn’t succumb to the a Icy Fingers Of Death after leaving my drift covered home in search of food and water.
  • Yes, I am still running two companies (Frontier Digital – technology consulting and Receptive Audio – audio messaging for retail & hospitality).  Both are thriving.
  • No, I haven’t given up on FrameAlbum.
  • and Yes, I’m still shooting photos.

Truth be told, my ‘jobs’ have occupied an large amount of my life leaving little time for fun projects, like FrameAlbum.  The service is still running, and feeding frames all over the world.  But alas I have not been able to give it the attention it deserves.

Hope springs infernal, or something…

Along with the much anticipated arrival of spring in my hemisphere comes a large project to my desk.  I’ve accumulated several servers over the years, spread around a few hosting providers, with no real rhyme or reason to it.  Most of them are getting rather long in the tooth and are becoming difficult to update because of all the ‘fixes’ I’ve put in place over the years. The time has come to clean things up.

I’ve started work to consolidate all my various internet projects onto a single set of servers running on Amazon’s EC2 service.  This affords my the opportunity to update all the system and supporting software up to current releases and to reduce my overall costs.  Most of my smaller projects have already been moved and this site will have moved by the time you read this.

Included in this project is the FrameAlbum service.  As I move it to it’s new home I’ll be cleaning up the worst of the problem cases (such as the password issue) and giving it a performance boost along the way.

Don’t give up on me yet folks — I ain’t dead yet.

Koko ‘Queen of the Blues’ Taylor dies

No snappy headline this time…

I’ve got a list…  a list of legends that I want to see perform before they pass from this reality.  I’ve recently taken inventor of the electric guitar and modern recording techniques Les Paul — it was in a word, amazing.  I think I’m still grinning from that show.

In the summer of 2007 I saw Koko Taylor perform at the Lowell Summer Music Series.  Even at the ripe old age of 78 she could still belt out a tune.  Her band was tight and the lead guitar even managed to take the term ‘lick’ literally as he managed to ‘play’ his axe with his tongue!

I don’t think there is any doubt that Koko qualifies as a legend; her trademark song Wang Dang Doodle (written by Willie Dixion — yet another legend) has been covered by a diverse array of artists from Ted Nugent to Grateful Dead and PJ Harvey.

Her gravelly voice and powerful style were unmistakeable.  I’m very glad to have seen her before she shuffled off her mortal coil.

Time to update the list…

You can see my photos from this show on Flickr.