Neil Fein's Blog

Passover cleaning has commenced in the Fein household! After I mentioned this to Barbara, she said: "But it doesn't start until next week." Silly.

After a Sunday afternoon of Passover/spring-cleaning activities, I showered, changed, and looked in the backyard. A few minutes later, I was tramping out there with a ladder, a utility knife, and a screwdriver (to open and close the utility knife). And about fifteen minutes later, I had demolished the sukkah frame which had been standing tall in our backyard since October. ^[1] And I have a bump on my forehead from a falling utility knife handle. It makes my head look bigger.

Later, we did some errands downtown, which included finding out that there's French wine kosher for Passover (!). ^[2]

We ended up going to Marita's^[3] for dinner. Mmm. Mushrooms.

^[1] Craig pointed out that, at this point, it's only another seven months until I have to put it up again.

^[2] A quick google turns up a page asking that Jewish groups boycott French products but not French wine that is explicitly kosher. It's a complex issue, well worth reading about.

^[3] It wasn't nearly as crowded as this link makes it out to be.

Cleo's was very full tonight. I was the second act on stage^[1].

While Millicent is an excellent fingerstyle guitar, she's doesn't produce the best sound while miked; she's a very quiet guitar. My options are to either install a pickup^[2], or just use Kate as my regular road guitar.

Set list:

Eyes Up Front
There's That Song
The Rainbow Connection
Never Had A Brother

The songs got progressivly better responses; I think I'm getting better at constructing set lists.

It was gratifying to see a lot of friends show up to see me; alas, Cleo's has started to get their act together and is starting their open mics close to on time these days; people started arriving after I played. But the audience I played to was very appreciative.


^[1] Such as it is; the "stage" is more like a section of floor than a stage.

^[2] This would be prohibitively expensive right now; a shame, since Millicent is such a nice sized guitar (i.e., small).

I'm rewriting Hold Up The Wall, so the demo that's up there will soon go the way of all early demos. I'm banging my head against the ending.

Towards the goal of procrastinating finishing this damn song, I've rearranged my desk at home. All papers and discs have either been organized, put to the side (I have a drafting table that's really just a filing cabinet without the filing or the cabinet), or shredded. All I lack is some sort of platforms to put the monitor speakers on, about 4" high, and I'll be happy.

Oh yeah... I called Aardvark-Vanaheim, the publishers of Cerebus^[1], on their order line. I asked about the availability of the final phonebook, and they told me it'll be out in (cross your fingers) June if all goes well. But the neat part was the guy answering the phone was Dave Sim himself. His reputation as a nasty misogynist is quite unwarranted, or at least not apparent; he was quite pleasant to speak to.

Cerebus 300, an essay by that guy who does Bob the Angry Flower.

"Holy crap, this is one big comic."
--Stephen Notley

^[1] Substantiated rumor time: Mr. Sim is, according to Gerhard, quite the technophobe, and consequently there's no direct weblink. Do a search at the Cerebus Yahoo group/mailing list thing -- watch out for spoilers! -- and you'll find the post I'm talking about. My theory is that he's been unwilling to let the unfolding phenomenon of the Internet distract him from finishing the 20-something year, 300-issue run of Cerebus. Irregardless, this site is the most comprehensive I've found. Don't let the apparent cobwebbiness of the front page fool you, keep digging.

We recorded tracks last night, and decided to use GarageBand, mostly out of curiosity. It's kinda like using a groove box combined with a recording app. I've gotta sit and play with rhythms at some point.

Problem: Clicking on a link in Entourage, while running under Mac OS X 10.2 in classic (MacOS 9) mode brings up that link in Internet Explorer. I keep IE around for compatibility with websites that require it, but I don't want to use it if I don't need to.

The "Internet" control panel in OS 9 doesn't "see" Safari as an application, so that's out. The solution is to go back to the OSX Finder, open System Preferences, click on Internet, click on the Web tab, and there select Safari as the default browser. After that, the Internet control panel in classic will have Safari as an option; select it.

Articles on Sedna are popping up all over.

Scientists Find Another Huge Mini-World in Outer Solar System at space.com has a lot of links to articles that explain why there is such a controversy over whether Sedna and Pluto are or are not planets. It's more than just the size of the object that's important to astronomers.

Also, today's Astronomy Picture of the Day has an artist's rendition of Sedna. (This painting is the current desktop picture on the Windoze box at work and on the Mac at home.)

(Article by By Dr David Whitehouse, seen on the BBC site.)

Astronomers have detected what could be the Solar System's 10th planet.

It was first seen by astronomers using California's Mount Palomar Observatory, and has been given the name "Sedna" after the Inuit goddess of the ocean.

Observations show it measures about 1,180-2,360km (730-1,470 miles) across, making it similar in size to Pluto.

There is likely to be some debate about whether it qualifies as a true planet, but some scientists are already saying it re-defines our Solar System.

Article continues...

(Note: This was called to my attention to Warren Ellis's blog.

Just got home from being the DJ at Celeste's Post-Purim Party. I do this once a year, and every year I say to myself: I should get better DJing equipment, along the lines of DJ-level CD players and a proper mixer. And, and-- every year I decide (again) that it's silly to buy equipment for a gig that happens every 12 months. Aargh... Since Celeste always calls me "DJ Neil" during these things, the picture to the right is a logo, that I drew on the back of a paper plate in the middle of a longer song. I got home and tried to scan it in, but the scanner didn't work, so I ended up redoing the whole thing in Freehand, which is easier than it sounds.

The new G3^[1] continues to work well -- it's fast, stable, and a joy to use. I've now transfered over all my files but for about 900 mb of audio; masters and demos, mostly in AIFF format. The web browsers and email and Fetch^[2] are all working very well.

I haven't decided if I'll make the move from Microsoft Entourage to Apple Mail. It looks like a great program, but the last mail program Apple took over sank into oblivion within a year.

Unfortunately, I can't get my printer, an Epson Stylor Color 740, to work in classic mode, as the installer for the drivers doesn't understand OSX file structure and refuses to install the drivers. Aargh. Does anyone know how to get around this? Or should I just copy the drivers from my old computer and be done with it?


^[1] A hand-me-down, but faster than the clone I've been using. Thanks again, Judith!

^[2] Fetch is an FTP program, and a damn good one.

Artistic Differences, that wacky hobby group-that-isn't-really-a-group of Bruce, Grazina and myself, laid down tracks to a new song the other day.

Bob the Angry Flower books
by Stephen Notley

If you've been following the comic on Notley's site, or even if you've just seen some of the grammar strips, you've got the idea. These are all one-shot strips, so the books aren't one big story (with the exception of the fourth book).

Bob The Angry Flower: In Defence of Fascism is his first book, and it shows. It took about halfway through for the strips to get interesting.

Bob The Angry Flower: Coffee with Sinistar continues the marked improvement in Notley's writing and drawing.

Everybody vs. Bob The Angry Flower has a short storyline, a few pages, possibly written for the book? Not certain. The supporting characters start to truly come alive here.

Bob The Angry Flower: The Ultimate Book of Perfect Energy is his best yet. The enclosed grammar strips get a little tiresome, but the book proper is very, very good. The UBOPE (as the official site refers to it) includes an extra story called "Lovebot Conquers All" that's worth the price of the book all by itself.

In general, I'd recommend the third and fourth books to just about anyone with a quirky sense of humor, and all of them to those of you who are enamored with our friendly neighborhood acerbic flower. I ordered them direct from the author's site, and they're autographed with a little sketch of Bob. Cool!

Bruce dragged me into see the 1st Sundays Comedy Film Festival in Manhattan. He worked on a film in this month's show, "An Apple A Day" with the Puppethead Players. You can view the film on their website.

Much fun! Go see them, pay your $5 and support these local artists. It's set up by Chicago City Limits, who I'd love to see perform in a straight-out improv show.

Fill In the Blank or the Improbable Improvables or whatever they're calling themselves these days was great! The performed last night in Edison, and Martha and I went out to see our old improv group and how they're doing.

Well, they're still making the sketches a tad too long, but they're improved immensely since the last show. They have some new improv schtick and it's very funny; I was on the floor near the end, trying to remember to breathe in between gasping laughter.

And I didn't see any problem with hesitating to speak of; in the one game they tend to have problems in, they very wisely had audience members call out "Die!" at any excuse.

It's kinda unclear who's leading the group on stage, but they have a good dynamic that makes that almost not needed.

Overall, a great show, and I'm proud of the kids! (Even though one or two are older than I am.)

I've added a page of links, a Book reviews page that points to reviews I've done in this blog. My feeling is that this makes them more accessible to casual readers, making this site more useful.

I've also signed up with Amazon's Associates program, which means that when you click on a book title from this site, I get a referral fee from it. I've initially set it up so I just get credit with Amazon, which will allow me to buy more books so I can review them, and so on. This includes both good reviews and pans and everything in between. I figured, as long as I'm providing the links, I may as well profit, even if it's a small amount per book.