This is why YouTube is great. If you’re a Star Wars fan and a grump, you’ll love it. Watch the whole seven part series.

You should come and hear me spin reggae, soul, punk and whatever else I feel like at Second Chance.

More details.

Yes, this is just an excuse for me to show off my new Flash skills.

The end of the decade, my third on the earth, is nigh. I guess you know you’re getting older when the dates start sounding like science fiction. Twenty ten? Seriously? Isn’t that like when Buck Rodgers was supposed to be doing his thing? Anyway, time for a 2009 recap.

In January, I posted my goals for the year:

1. Get back under 250 lbs. I did. Then I ran right back over it. Then in September I hurt my leg and was out of commission for a while. I’m back to running thought. I’ve run 14 times in the last month or so.
2. Play a show. 45 Adapters played 12 shows last year.
3. Play at an open mic show. I thought about it a few times, but it’s pretty scary playing music on an acoustic AND by yourself.
4. Get published by a commercial publication. I wrote my first story since I was 13 years old, but other than that I haven’t made progress on this.
5. Let people know when they have hurt my feelings. I’ve been much more open with people about when they have upset me. In one or two cases it actually worked out and the person I was upset took steps to make me feel better. In most of the cases, it’s meant the end of friendships. I’ve said goodbye to a lot of friendships this year.
6. Stop being a hermit. I’ve had a much better year socially and I even went on a few solo adventures.
7. Get a job. Yeah, not so much on that front.

So, you know, 3 out of 7. I also accomplished one of my life goals, putting out a record. Let’s call it 4 our of 8, which puts me squarely into my normal “mediocre” category. It’s been a crap year, I won’t be sad to see it go. I end it with a lot fewer friends than I started it with, which is never pleasant. I also gained a bunch of weight.

My most embarrassing moment of the year was probably realizing that I mixed up “there” and “their” on the lyric sheet for the 45 Adapters EP. I really don’t know how I let that slip by. Forest, trees, etc.

On a more positive note, I was able to post 14 songs this year. Well, 13 if you don’t count the remix. That’s 38 minutes of music! At this point, I actually have about 26 songs in my little songbook. That’s not bad. Especially since it doesn’t include all of the songs I wrote for BOTB.

Here’s a list:

• Are You Down?
• Bent And Broken (remix)
• Brand New Good Old Days
• Conquer Fear
• Directionless
• Good Times, Women and Irish Whiskey
• Jamming With The Knighthawk
• Nothing To Prove
• Nutmeg
• Paper Times
• Real Danger
• Shabby On The Inside
• Throw It Out
• Victims of Drug Wars
• We Can Win

You can download all of the songs in a nice little zip, if you like. I would appreciate you giving them a listen.

I’ll post my goal list for 2010 in January. Merry Xmas!

[I’m posting this mainly so google will remember it for me]

I don’t have a program to automatically rip the titles out of WPL playlists for making covers and that type of things. So, when the need arises, I use Notepad++ and a little bit of Regular Expression magic. Unfortunately, I always forget to save the syntax. Here goes:

Replace:

<.+\\.+-(.+)\.mp3.+>

With:

\1

It doesn’t work for WAV or WMA files at the moment, but I’ll fix that at some point.

So, the last song of 2009. Wow, it sounds weird to say that. The end of 2009.

You know what’s funny? Our country is going to hell in a hand basket, but instead of working on real solutions we spend our time obsessing about athlete’s sex lives and watching so called reality TV.

The earth is going through serious changes as the American way of life spreads the religion of consumption and dissipation around the planet. We’d rather bury our heads in the sand and pretend that it will all take care of itself, than to make the tough choices that would ensure our long term survival.

Why are willing to spend anything and sacrifice any freedom because we’re afraid of terrorism, but we think it’s offensive to save way more lives by providing free medical care?

Because it’s easier. Because we’re scared. Because we’re basically lazy little monkeys who just ignore real danger when it faces us.

This song was supposed to be “Fear Of Flying”, but it became “Real Danger” somehow. Maybe FOF will be the first song of 2009, since I still like that title.

I was going to write a few more verses and add a guitar solo, but I have to say I kind of like “Real Danger” as a little bite sized chunk. Anyway, any topical points I make in the song will sound as dated as the Macarena in a few years.

I hope you enjoy it.

Real Danger

I’m looking for truth but I’m afraid to find it
If I ever did I ‘d be reminded
of the many things I could have done through the years
I let myself be hemmed in by irrational fears

    We walk the edge of cold dead oblivion
    Blind and deaf to real danger that we’re living in
    We like to pretend that deep down we’re really tough
    When challenges confront us, we focus on the silly stuff

Our leaders are afraid to make the hard choices
Compromise is shouted down by angry voices
Making up excuses while we should be making plans
busy pointing fingers while it’s slipping through our hands

    Chorus

[Download MP3]

Man, I can’t believe I never posted this tune. Here goes!

There are two parts to my brain. The creative part just keeps pumping out ideas and I do my best never to get in it’s way. Then there’s the second part of my brain, the editor. He likes to ruminate, to filter, to contextualize. He’s the one that hammers and polishes those raw ideas into something. He’s just as important to the process. But sometimes he gets a unhappy with his role in things. Sometimes he blanches at the ideas that the first part of my brain comes up with.

“That’s too obvious”, he’ll offer.

“Really? A song called about getting drunk”, he’ll grumble.

That’s when I tell him to shut up and play his role.

Which is to say, yes, I did in fact write a song called “Let’s Get Drunk.” Well, the words at any rate. CB wrote the music for this little ditty and then I crammed as many lyrics as I could into it.

Attentive listeners may note that the song with the most obvious title in history manages to mention Thoreau. I never made it all the way through Walden, but I tried on two occasions and still managed to get a lot out of it.

Interesting tidbit, I actually called out other bands for using lyrics like “let’s get drunk”. I wrote this song before we did that interview, so I’m totally a hypocrite.

Last tidbit, two people in the world know me as “the grim reaper”.

…enough rambling. Let’s Get Drunk!

Let’s Get Drunk

music by c. bolton, lyrics by g. lindsay

A world of presets, predestination
shackles and handcuffs sold as customization
Thoreau spoke of quiet desperation

Temporary disablement of consciousness
our only means of celebration, drunkenness
desperate measures taken in the form of inaction
thoughts of individual self considered infractions

Abandon any sense of identity
we’re obsessed with false reality
the emperor is nude, why won’t we see?

We don’t believe in our own experience
Unless it’s on TV we’re indifferent
I guess I’ll chalk it up to mass naiveté
we’re watching an assault on creativity

Let’s Get Drunk!

The choice in front of us is painfully clear
abandon our lives or hide in fear
the cost of paranoia is just so dear

There’s no worse way to live then in fear of death
smell every rose you can until your last breath
but never forget that your end will surely come
make that old grim reaper have to catch you on the run

Let’s Get Drunk!

Nothing ever comes to those who patiently wait
if you’re still breathing then it’s not too late
don’t blame your inaction on the hands of fate

The goal of life is not to get to work on time
Don’t trade away your life for nickels and dimes
old death is hiding just around the bend
when you get there share a drink with him

Let’s Get Drunk!

[Download MP3]

p.s. Here’s the remix. Kinda.

I’ve written about my punk band 45 Adapters before, but I’ve completely forgotten to mention the fact that our debut EP has been released!

You can pick up a copy at Interpunk, Longshot Music or Contra Records.

It feels very rewarding scratching another item off of my life goals list. My high school band BOTB never completed our planned release. We did appearing on a compilation and a split 7” with The Templars, but nothing under our own name. After that band broke up, I assumed I’d never get to put any music out.

It’s been a long road since then, but I’m delighted to finally have this artifact out there in the world. I’ve always daydreamed about some record nerd finding my scratchy old record in a discount bin in some far off future and now that’s actually a possibility.

Onward and upward!

Or, EasyCGI is a horrible web hosting company.

Or, EasyCGI sucks..

This site was previously hosted by a great little firm called Webstrike Solutions. They were responsive to any issues that arose, my site was decently fast loading and I basically never even thought about my hosting. Then, in March, the company was aquired by EasyCGI. There were lots of falling bricks, but I tried to be patient. I know how difficult migrations can be and I assumed that the move would be beneficial in the long term. I shouldn’t have been optimistic.

Right off the bat, my blog (then on the Movable Type platform) didn’t work. I contacted their tech support expecting the kind of friendly and helpful response I’d always received from Webstrike in the past. Instead, they basically offered no assistance. I wound up writing code to get the data into a format that would work for WordPress, their recommended blog platform. That should have been enough for me to move hosts, but I didn’t.

Since then, I’ve had multiple instances of downtime, none of which have been explained. The site eventually comes back, or the error message disappears and my tickets were closed with notes indicating that no issue was found. This kind of sweeping under the rug is a sign of an organization that has a really toxic culture. How do you build up institutional knowledge and prevent re-occurrences of problems if you just make believe they never happened?

BTW, in each circumstance where my site was down I noticed and contacted Tech Support. They seem to do no monitoring of their hosted sites. Unbelievable!

The folks I worked with in their level 1 support tried to be friendly, but they were completely non-technical. Basically, they were robots that read from the prepared script and had no real ability to understand specific problems or to provide advice. Usually chatting with them for a few minutes led to them promising to open a ticket with the level 2 support.

The final straw for me was about a week ago when PHP errors about a MySql module started showing up at the bottom of the pages of my blog. I hadn’t touched anything on the server, so it was obvious that something had happened on their end. The blog still worked, but the pages weren’t loading correctly and the admin pages were at best halfway functional. I contacted a chatbot and after much prodding they actually scrolled to the bottom of the page and saw the error. They escalated my ticket and I went on with my day.

The next day I received a message that they could not find the error message and had closed my ticket. I contacted them via the ticketing form to indicate that the error was in fact there and that they had just not bothered to scroll to the bottom of the page. They never responded. I contacted another chatbot and this gentleman saw the error and re-opened the ticket. A few days later, the ticket was again closed and a note was added that the error wasn’t visible. I checked the site and the error was in fact gone. More than likely, someone made some sort of mistake and then cleaned it up without admitting what they had done.

My blog has also been dog slow. Now, WordPress is known for being kind of sluggish, but this was ridiculous. I tested the site and often had 14 second load times. Personally, any site that doesn’t load for me in 2-3 seconds gets the back button and I never visit again. FTP was slow. Everything was just pretty slow.

…but choosing a host is hard. There are tons of them with slightly differentiated offerings and just as many sites offering “reviews” that are often just obfuscated ads. I kept dithering.

Then, while looking into my WordPress slowness problems I decided to look into adding the WP-Super-Cache plugin to my site. I stumbled onto a blog post by Jess Coburn with instructions for using WP Super Cache on Windows Hosting. It was well written, clear and most importantly it specifically addressed the idea of using WordPress on Windows without any religious platform dogma either way. It turned out that Jess is the CEO of Applied Innovations, a hosting company in Florida.

Well, I made the leap and you are now reading this on my new host. So far, without any changes to the blog, the speed problems seem to be a thing of the past.

The bottom line? EasyCGI sucks! Ask google, that opinion is pretty widespread. I highly recommend that you not do business with them.