Author: Peter

Tuesday Night Music Club

Tuesday, October 1

Local bassist Andrew Downing and his group The Great Uncles of the Revolution, at a nice little church in west London.

I’m familiar with Andrew from his stint with Lenni Jabour, and have become a fan of his (and his fellow Uncles Jesse Zubot, Steve Dawson and Kevin Turcotte). Nominally a jazz quartet–bass, guitar, violin and trumpet–they did a full set of original music, followed by a version of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf that was just plain cool.

Tuesday, October 8

Local folk(?) trio Sirens, at the dedication of the Wolf Performance Hall at London’s new central library.

I’m still not sure just how I got invited to this, but I’m not about to complain. Donna, Amber and Jo-Ann did a short set, followed by speeches from the various donors and officials involved in getting the hall built, followed by a Sirens finale. It’s a beautiful location, and there’s no better group than Sirens to have christened it officially. More money in the room than I could count, from Norton Wolf (the hall’s namesake) to the Jefferys (local benefactors) to Lindsey Elwood (the head of the downtown business association) to lots of other names and families I can’t recall.

Tuesday, October 15

Dayna Manning at the newly-painted Club Phoenix.

This is going to happen in about half an hour, along with Holly McNarland and Wide Mouth Mason. I’m not going to be there… something about picking up my parents after their three-week holiday in Slovakia… but I did buy her sophomore CD this evening, and it’s good. Hope she’s going to be back in the area sometime soon. (Dayna, if you’re out there, soon means before another five years pass!) The last time I saw her was when she opened for Colin James on a rainy afternoon at Harris Park–I stayed through the rain to listen to her, then left before James took the stage–so a solo show in her hometown, which is only an hour away, would be just the ticket.

Not about Viking songs or Hormel products

Mark Wickens noticed the same thing that I did today, bogus referrers in his webserver log. Where I just blocked the hosts manually in my firewall rules, apparently he’s making some changes to his Apache config. (The entry has since been deleted; however, he let me know that the Apache changes were similar, just using the Order and Deny rules.)

Hunting for others who’ve seen this, I found a post from Rafe Colburn (via Daypop, which is actually working today) that says I’m not sure what the expected return on such spam is, or why they’d bother with it, but I am somewhat intrigued. He also found this Kuro5hin entry from last year.

Mark has noticed spammers previously and dealt with them in his linkback scripts: There is some attempt made to screen out search engines, bogus referrers, or referrers that no longer link to me for some reason. (The purpose of this is to track conversations and rewards links; people who link to me and then remove the link do not deserve to be rewarded. You know who you are.)

Finally, Stuart Langridge makes reference to the problem in passing, but his post is mostly about Pingback.

Pingback

Ian Hickson has been going on for a while about Pingback. The spec says there are six known implementations; one of these is a server for Movable Type by Stuart Langridge, but I defy anyone to find it on his site. If it’s only for private use, I don’t mind, but in that case why advertise it… and if it’s already written, what does this mean?

(If it sounds like I want something for nothing… well, I guess I do, although I’ll provide whatever I can in return in the form of bug reports, patches, etc. As a friend’s e-mail signature says, humans are tool users, and I’m nothing if not human.)

Not that it matters, of course–trackbacks and pingbacks are just a big popularity contest anyway, right?

The Diurnal Record

We’ve decided to start writing our entries in first person plural (the royal we). Those who find our new style annoying, we believe, need to deal with it and move on. At least we don’t have meaningless graphics and snarky references to others all over the place.

We aren’t XHTML and CSS experts. (We don’t mind taking potshots at those who are, however.) While we’re not above a little self-promotion, our primary goal is simple: to learn about and use Web standards correctly and effectively. We enjoy reading others’ opinions as much as our own, but we won’t fail to call them out on the (rare) occasions when we disagree.

We’re about finished for now, because our head hurts. We know now that this affectation is why some people produce an off-putting holier-than-thou impression. If we write any more like this we’re afraid we’ll freeze this way.

Welcome to my home page

Apparently almost 2.2 million web pages are under construction. (Most of the top ten references are anti-under-construction-image pages.) Only 3600 are not.

There are a lot (about 120,000 by Google’s estimate) of friendly people out there on the web who actually welcome you to their pages. I wonder if they’re as friendly in person?

Just under 2 million people say hello (not counting programmers). Slightly more say goodbye. (Several are quite rude about it.)

What can we deduce from these facts?

  • There are about 2.2036 million pages (in English) on the world wide web, most of which are unfinished.
  • People are happier for you to leave their pages than they are for you to visit them.
  • If you’ve actually read this far, you’ve obviously overstayed your welcome. Please leave, or I won’t bother to fi

In the key of Oscar

Dr. Oscar Peterson has more talent in his right arm than an army of clones of me could ever hope to acquire. Even with restricted use of his left hand, he’s still one of the best jazz pianists ever, and I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to see him and his NATO quartet tonight. The crowd at the Festival Theatre in Stratford gave him no fewer than four standing ovations, the first before he performed a single note, and the last going on for close to five minutes and two curtain calls.

In the last seven days I’ve seen a jazz singer near the beginning of her career, Jennifer Thorpe; an incredible quartet fresh from their first major award, the Great Uncles of the Revolution, winners of the 2002 Grand Prix at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal; and one of the greats, Dr. Peterson.

It’s been a good week.

It’s contagious

Mike has set up a weblog on his sick day. I’m only marginally upset that his looks cooler than mine.

In other news, I’m starting to think I should just redistribute Dive Into Mark, Hixie’s Natural Log, and the Daily Report every day instead of trying to write my own entries. Mark and Zeldman both point out Microsoft’s anti-standards retro redesign today, and Hixie has been having fun with numbering and glyphs. Not to be outdone, Eric Meyer and the folks on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets are way too clever for their own good…. I’m about to set up the CSS signature #peterjanes-homeip-net #peterjanes-ca for my own pages.

Just a half a mile from the railroad track

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’d never actually listened to Alice’s Restaurant until today, prompted by a documentary on CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition called You Can Get Anything You Want: Arlo Guthrie’s New Religion.

The weird thing–and I use that word deliberately–is that my brother and I independently recognized it as the stylistic source for one of Weird Al Yankovic‘s early original songs, Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung. Al does a lot of these style parodies, and I often like them better than his actual song parodies.

(I should point out that we’re hardly the first ones to notice the similarities.)

This post also gives me an excuse to quote Arlo’s father, Woody:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Woody Guthrie, via Eric Costello