Radiohead has released their song “Reckoner” as individual tracks for people to remix, much like they did earlier this year for the song Nude. This time I am taking up the gauntlet. I downloaded the tracks, and I have already started using Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch to get all Leif Inge on it.
I have owned 3 pianos. All of them have been cheap or free. The one I own now cost me $150, plus $200 to have it moved. Some keys stick, and it’s pretty out of tune. That’s how I roll.
I got my first piano for $25 at a thrift store in Orlando, and I recorded virtually nothing with it before I moved and had to have an army of helpers through it in a dumpster. My second piano was free, and I kept it in my garage when I lived in Union Beach. In December of 2006, as my family and I were getting ready to move, I vowed that I would record an improvisation on its wonderful out of tune-ness before I had to leave it.
So I am posting here, in its runmastered raw-ness, that 11 minute improvisation. Enjoy.
Micro-Post 3
So my idea of posting everyday isn’t quite working out – I’ll have to see where my natural schedule of micro-posting ends up.
I just wanted to let everyone know that I bottled my second annual pumpkin ale yesterday, and put a bit into my mini-draft system for instant gratification. I made it a little lighter than normal, and I may have gone too light. But I think it’s pretty clean tasting, so hopefully the bottles will age well.
In the hopper now is a blue-moon style white ale that I may have ruined. More on that as the story progresses.
Micro-Post 2
An article in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago examined how the use of email can be compared to gambling addition. Here’s a good quote:
Dr Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. “Both slot machines and email follow something called a ‘variable interval reinforcement schedule’,” he says, “which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there’s something wonderful – an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip – and I get a reward.” This is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking email, even when we’ve only just looked.
I don’t know if I feel this way about email, but this describes my relationship to my RSS feeds on Google reader to a tee. I end up checking my feeds every 5 or 10 minutes looking for something interesting in the sea of ho-hum posts.
Am I alone, or does anyone else feel this way?
[As an aside - do you think I am contributing to the problem with my concept of Micro-Posts?]
Micro-Post 1
I have been back from vacation for 2 weeks now, but I have been falling into the trap of never posting here, mainly because when I think of something to post it always seems like it will take too long to put my thoughts together.
In the interest of getting at least some of my thoughts out there, even if it is in an MTV montage format, I am going to start Micro-Posting. That means I will endeavor to post every day, but take only a couple of minutes to do so. Let’s see if it works.