That’s right, just in from mother amazon is Chapelle’s Show Season 2 DVD. Unfortunately, I’m not going to have time to watch tonight since we’re going to see episode II, but it’s something to rush home to tomorrow.

I know what you’re thinking, this is a purely content free post…sorry, I needed someone to brag to as Blossom was too busy to acknowledge my victory in getting the discs before her. More content rich posts to come!

I recently posted about taking offense to some culturally insensitive humor on the GuitarGas blog. Simon was open enough to post a comment:

While I’m not in any sense what you might call “informed” politically, I don’t regard myself as racist in any traditional sense. Indeed on other blogs I have condemned that sort of smug and unquestioned racism that I come across frequently.

And so an open letter to GuitarGas:

Actually, I was glad to hear your apology. Unfortunately, I’ve been fighting production problems at work (a missing closing tag in a configuration file for those who enjoy details ) and thus no time for personal surfing. I’m still somewhat offput by some of the comments posted in response to mine on your site, but not so much that I haven’t already re-subscribed.

I’ve been reading your blog for a while, and also enjoying some of your pics on Flickr. This probably sounds stupid, but in some way I’d felt we’d established a relationsip…the same sort of relationship I have with Buddy Guy (that is, me as consumer of your creativity), but a relationship none the less. Even the post in question contained great info for a beginner guitarist like myself. It was dissappointing to find out that I am not among the people you consider a part of your readership. I have no intention of dictating language policies for the interweb. I will, and do, make choices as to who values my readership, and the diversity of their readership in general.

What pissed me off was your insensitivity to your readers. I don’t believe you would have made a similar joke if I, or anyone other black person was in the room with you at the time. I don’t believe it.

I’m not making that assertion because I believe you are secretly a Combat 18 member, quite the opposite. On the other hand, I think if you made the same joke at a party with someone of a different race present, you would have winced and thought better of it. I think if you had thought about me, or potentially hundreds of other readers of your blog who may have lived through a lifetime of bigotry and a history (almost all of my country’s history) of being less than a person, you would have realized that it wasn’t funny or ironic or anything like that.

Here’s a fun experiment. Find some black guys at a local council estate and read them your blog post. See if they think it’s funny. Now go to a local library and find some black guys. Try the same test. I think you’ll get exactly the reaction you expect. That being the case, why use the same joke behind the veil of the keyboard[mental note: good song title]?

Personally, I get very annoyed being the black guitarist, the black this, the black that. It’s not fun being in mainly white arenas where sometimes subconscious racism bubbles to the surface in the form of “jokes” or “irony” or “sendups”. It’s not fun dealing with people whose only experience of black people is the latest crunk video. Most of the time I bite my tongue and say nothing, but I make a mental note not to return to those places.

Now, the N word gets bandied about quite often now-a-days. You’d be stunned at some of the japanese commercials I’ve seen. Regardless, I don’t think you can say you would have made the same joke if I had been over your house jamming while you wrote that post.

At any rate, I’m more than willing to move on. The word was removed, the post is still great, and hopefully you’ll think twice about who reads your words and what messages you may be sending with them.

Last night I felt lazy, and couldn’t get myself into practicing. So I wrote a silly little song instead. At some point I’m going to have to work on finishing some of these little sketches…

Song For Sarah

by Gerrard

For a few weeks now my home machine has been rebooting itself mid-operation, or just plain hanging. After reboots, dump files were sent to Windows Crash Analysis, but the website they redirected me to only explained the error as a problem with an unidentified driver. I tried all of the usual things, but all of my devices seemed to be operating well.

The event log had several errors like:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: System Error
Event Category: (102)
Event ID: 1003
Date: 5/5/2005
Time: 7:45:34 AM
User: N/A
Computer: MYCOMPUTER
Description:
Error code 1000007f, parameter1 00000008, parameter2 80042000,
parameter3 00000000, parameter4 00000000.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 53 79 73 74 65 6d 20 45 System E
0008: 72 72 6f 72 20 20 45 72 rror Er
0010: 72 6f 72 20 63 6f 64 65 ror code
0018: 20 31 30 30 30 30 30 37 1000007
0020: 66 20 20 50 61 72 61 6d f Param
0028: 65 74 65 72 73 20 30 30 eters 00
0030: 30 30 30 30 30 38 2c 20 000008,
0038: 38 30 30 34 32 30 30 30 80042000
0040: 2c 20 30 30 30 30 30 30 , 000000
0048: 30 30 2c 20 30 30 30 30 00, 0000
0050: 30 30 30 30 0000

Have you gotten a blue screen of death, or had a crash or hang where the system error code was 1000007f? Did it mention a driver called filespy.sys? Are you running Tascam’s GigaStudio? Believe it or not, Gigastudio seems to have been at the root of my home machine’s recent instability. I’ve never used the software (it came as a free add-on with my external soundcard), so I uninstalled it about a week ago. Bingo, no more crashes.

The really weird thing is I’ve had GigaStudio installed for a few months, and never even thought to look at it as the possible culprit. It turns out that GigaStudio includes a file monitoring feature (implemented by the aforementioned driver filespy.sys), which seems to have caused Windows to freak out.

I’ve done some web searching and it seems like I’m not the only one who has been bitten by this.

As always, YMMV. I’m not a professional driver debugger or computer maintenance engineer, just sharing my experience in hope that someone else who runs into this may find it helpful.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Not being a Time Magazine subscriber, I can’t access their recent story on the Chappelle Show, but this ap news article includes a quote from the article which should scare Chapelle fans:

Comedy Central president Doug Herzog…has told staff he believes there won’t be a “Chappelle’s Show” in 2005, but leaves the option open for the comedian’s return.

Uh oh, that sucks.

Another Time Magazine article from their website (no subscription necessary) gives a little more insight into where Dave’s head is at. The article also mentions that Dave converted to Islam a few years ago, which was news to me.

On Thursday, Ray and I were chitchatting on the phone when he mentioned that he’d just added an old friend of ours to his myspace friend’s list. My HS girlfriend’s best friend in fact.

When we got off the phone, I ran over to the nerd box and quickly found her profile. Despite my expectations, she was an adult and not still the fifteen year old I’d known. I wanted to send her a “hey, how are you doing? married, kids, hobbies?” catchup type message, but I couldn’t bring myself too. I almost couldn’t bear to know, I just wanted all of us to go back to Brentwod and be teenagers again. Instead I sent some meaningless message like we’d never stopped talking.

When Ray called, I was fooling around making random noises in Drop C tuning. Nu-metal sucks, but everyone likes to fool around with one finger chords once in a while, no? I tried alternate tunings for the first time about a week and a half ago and it was starting not to feel like heresy.

Anyway, I got a bug in my ear thinking about old times. Thinking about how much more I’m like everyone else than I thought when I was fifteen…and I felt like the exception to all the normal things. I switched to Open G (keif style) and in ten minutes came up with “There’s Away”. It’s just a sketch at this point, and the sound quality is terrible, but I feel like sharing…so have at it. Expect version 2.0 shortly.

There’s Away

by Gerrard

Right about the time when the spell was being broken, and the craft portion of the songwriting was beginning, Sarah came home from Bellydancing. She opened the door and I remembered how great being an adult can be, even if it’s not exactly like your teenage dreams. Write a song, kiss your girlfriend, and poof the melancholy is gone!

…and yes, I’m spelling it that way on purpose .

p.s. Sorry if I’m sounding a little pretensious about my two chord, sung in off key, cheesy song. I’ve been reading Songwriters on Songwriting and feeling like an artiste lately.

None of the “after the fact” ViewState decoders, like WilsonDotNet’s or Fritz Onion’s, have ever worked for me. I always get strange errors, and I’ve never been able to figure out why. So, I decided to create a server control which can be placed directly onto the page you’re trying to performance tune. It’s called Viewstate Displayer Control, and you can see a demo of it in action in my sandbox. It displays a DHTML tree of all of the controls on the page, and the items that they have stored in viewstate. It’s not very fancy, and doesn’t support a ton of data types, but it should be helpful in a pinch.

It’s also nowhere near as cool as the decoders that let you take the viewstate from an existing page and analyze it. You have to add the control to your page in order for it to work, something you probably won’t want to do in production . However, if you’re like me and the non-invasive decoders haven’t work for your pages, you now have another option.

Enjoy!

I’ve been enjoying a UK based guitar gear blog called GuitarGAS for a bit, until I read the first lines of a distortion pedal review posted today:

A po’ nigger in da ghetto can never have too many distortion devices in his bag.

Is that supposed to be witty? What the heck does it have to do with the Digitech Hot Rod distortion pedal you’re supposed to be reviewing?

Unsubscribed.

Every game day, I come home from work and check channel 26 to see if Fox Sports (Cablevision’s channel which has the rights to show Mets games in NYC) is back. Yes, I know that’s pathetic .

Imagine my surprise today when Fox Sports was actually there! That’s right, the Mets are finally back on TV!. One more reason to support Eliot Spitzer?

Just in time, I was getting really sick of listening to the games on the radio.

Here’s a saturday morning time waster for you…

South Park Studio let’s you generate your own South Park character. Who hasn’t wanted to be a potty mouther fourth grader? This is sort of the South Park version of the character generating wizards you’ve probably seen in RPG video games or Tony Hawk. Have at it!