Kelly Richey Live

Posted on by Dana
Share

Thanks to my parents, who watched the kids last night so I could go out for a change, I got to see the Kelly Richey Band live at Darwin’s. Kelly was awesome. If you get a chance to see her, you should. Here is a repost of a clip of Kelly playing Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe”:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ab8St0qZuD8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

When we saw her at Darwin’s, she played behind her head, just like she does here, and it was so cool.

I have to tell a little story — when we walked in the bar, we sat down in the back. I looked around the room a bit, then noticed Steve was sitting right next to Kelly Richey. She and the band were at the next table. After the show, I got a chance to meet Kelly and talk with her. She was very nice and approachable, and so gracious.

I’m a fan for life, and now I can’t wait to see her again when I get a chance.

[tags]Kelly Richey, blues[/tags]

Related posts:

The Black Crowes

GarageBand.com

Good Covers


Share

Book List Meme

Posted on by Dana
Share

This one looks fun (via the Classical Bookworm). Here is how it works:

  • Books I’ve read
  • Books I want to read
  • Books I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole
  • Books on my bookshelves
  • ? Books I’ve never heard of
  • # Books I’ve seen in movie or TV form
  • ! Books I’ve blogged about
  • Books I’m indifferent to
  1. ! The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
  2. #! Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
  3. #! To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
  4. #! Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) (Lara took my copy!)
  5. #! The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
  6. #! The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
  7. #! The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
  8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
  9. ! Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
  10. ? A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
  11. #! Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
  12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
  13. #! Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
  14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
  15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
  16. #! Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
  17. ? Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
  18. # The Stand (Stephen King)
  19. #! Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
  20. ! Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
  21. #! The Hobbit (Tolkien)
  22. ! The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
  23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
  24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
  25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
  26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
  27. # Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
  28. # The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
  29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
  30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
  31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
  32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
  33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
  34. 1984 (George Orwell)
  35. #! The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
  36. ? The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
  37. ? The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
  38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
  39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
  40. ? The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
  41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
  42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
  43. ? Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
  44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
  45. ! Bible
  46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
  47. #! The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
  48. ! Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt) (tried it; too depressing)
  49. # The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
  50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
  51. ! The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
  52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
  53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
  54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
  55. #! The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
  56. ? The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
  57. #! Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
  58. #! The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
  59. ! The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
  60. The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
  61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
  62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
  63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
  64. #! Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
  65. ? Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
  66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
  67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
  68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
  69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
  70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) (tried to read in French, but didn’t get far)
  71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
  72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
  73. Shogun (James Clavell)
  74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
  75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
  76. ? The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
  78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
  79. ? The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
  80. # Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
  81. ? Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
  82. # Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
  83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
  84. ? Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
  85. Emma (Jane Austen)
  86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
  87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
  88. ? The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
  89. ? Blindness (Jose Saramago)
  90. ? Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
  91. ? In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
  92. # Lord of the Flies (Golding)
  93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
  94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
  95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
  96. # The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
  97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
  98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
  99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
  100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

[tags]literature, book, meme[/tags]

Related posts:

Potter Party

New eReader App and Updates

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens


Share

DailyLit

Posted on by Dana
Share

Are you a busy mom who has always wanted to read the classics but has limited time?  Do you have a full-time job that saps your energy and leaves you unable to read at the end of a long day?

Have I got a site for you!  DailyLit (via Anne).

I’m finally tackling Moby Dick, but choosing a book was hard.

Related posts:

The Fellowship of the Ring

Review: The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett

Literature Carnival, Twelfth Edition


Share

Roadhouse #104

Posted on by Dana
Share

Tony Steidler-Dennison has posted the 104th Roadhouse podcast. He hasn’t posted the show notes at his blog yet, but when he does, I’ll link them. Meanwhile, enjoy the podcast, which includes my special requests Kelly Richey and Susan Tedeschi:

[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/8472413/view]

This week’s podcast marks Tony’s second anniversary. Congratulations, Tony!

Update: Tony posted show notes.

Related posts:

Kelly Richey Live

Blues Lovers Rejoice!

I Want Someone Badly


Share

2001: A Space Odyssey

Posted on by Dana
Share

Flipping channels this afternoon, we discovered that 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing on Turner Classic Movies. One of the things that occurred to me when we watched the film was how difficult it really is to determine what the future will be like. The future depicted in the movie was accurate about the following innovations, all available in 2001 (via Wikipedia):

  • Flat-screen computer monitors
  • Small, portable flat-screen televisions (we actually watched the film on a small flat-screen, although it’s not portable)
  • Television screens with wide aspect ratio
  • Glass cockpits in spacecraft
  • The proliferation of television stations
  • Telephone numbers (in the 1960’s, phone numbers had fewer digits; the film depicts 2001 phone numbers as having more digits)
  • Corporations such as IBM, Hilton, and Aeroflot still in existence (this one would be particularly tough to predict, I think)
  • Credit cards with data stripes
  • Biometric identification (I even had to use handprint ID to get in the dining hall at UGA when I was a student there)
  • The shape of the Orion III Pan Am Orbital Clipper was echoed in X-34, a prototype craft (though that may have been an intentional nod to the movie)

Other aspects of life in 2001 proved harder to predict. By 2001, we really didn’t have the following:

  • Proliferation of good-quality, high-resolution videophones
  • Commonplace space travel (do you ever wonder if the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger was responsible for that, to some degree?)
  • Moon colonies
  • Manned missions to Jupiter aren’t feasible (one could argue a mission to Mars is feasible, but not likely to happen for some time)
  • Orbiting hotels (à la The Jetsons?)
  • Routine commercial space flight
  • Technology to put humans in long-term suspended animation
  • Sentient computers that exhibit self-motivation and indepedent judgment
  • Computers with error-free performance records
  • Pam Am Airlines (in any form), the Bell System, and Howard Johnson’s (as of January, there are only three HoJo’s left) restaurants are no longer with us
  • The Soviet Union

In my opinion, however, the film is still ground-breaking. Not many filmmakers today have the nerve to do some of the things Stanley Kubrick did — the open ending, the use of quiet and sound (who can forget the segments when the only sound is Dave’s breathing).

My dad had the soundtrack to 2001 on vinyl. When I was a teenager, I put in on the stereo and listened. I remember tears streaming down my face as I listened to the Gayane Adagio from Khatchaturian. At the time, I thought it was the saddest music I had ever heard, and I believe it still is.

The scene in which Dave has to shut down HAL is one of the most moving scenes in science fiction cinema. I can’t find a video of the whole scene, but here is the end:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/WliFIfXNTEY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I wish it had the part when HAL tells Dave he is afraid. It’s chilling.

What do you think this movie means?

[tags]Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2001, HAL 9000, YouTube[/tags]

Related posts:

The Thorn Birds

Top Ten Tuesday: Books to be Made into Movies

Miss Austen Regrets


Share

I Want Someone Badly

Posted on by Dana
Share

I don’t listen to the second CD in my Grace Legacy Edition by Jeff Buckley, which is something I guess I need to remedy. I had forgotten there were such gems as the “Stax-inspired” “I Want Someone Badly,” which was written by Nathan Larson of Shudder to Think. This track combines two musical loves — Buckley and the blues. Awesome.

Download link

[tags]Jeff Buckley, I Want Someone Badly, Shudder to Think, Nathan Larson, Grace[/tags]

Related posts:

Jeff Buckley

Sunday Salon—October 16, 2011

Blues Lovers Rejoice!


Share

Anarchy Media Player and Odeo Plugins

Posted on by Dana
Share

I am very lazy. Up until now, in order to post YouTube videos and Odeo podcasts, I have had to jump through a few hoops. For non-WordPress users, this won’t mean much, but for those of you who use WP and want to be able to post flash media and want to learn how, this post is for you.

The first thing I had to do was login and click on my Users tab. Next, I had to click on the “Your Profile” tab. Under “Personal Options,” I had to uncheck the checkbox that says “Use the visual editor when writing.” I like using the visual editor (aka the rich text editor) because it enables me to see things easier and work more easily with the HTML I use. In fact, newbies can use the editor and blog without knowing any HTML at all. I learned HTML some years ago when I was using a journaling system that pretty much forced me to learn it in order to make any changes in my template, but nowadays, one really doesn’t need to know any HTML to write online (it helps, but it is totally unnecessary).

After turning of the visual editor, I could then post any sort of embedded flash video or podcast. I found those extra steps I had to take something of a pain, and I was rather hoping I could find a plugin that would enable me to work around this problem. I am happy to report that I have found two such plugins today.

Patrick Chia‘s Odeo Plugin enables me to insert an Odeo player into a post with a minimum of trouble. I simply locate the URL to the Odeo file I want to play and insert it between brackets like so:

Odeo code

I did a little editing of the wp-odeo.php file. The code calls for the gray Odeo player, but I don’t like that one (mainly because it has a pink button that I feel clashes with my blog template), so I opened the file with notepade and searched for the following text:

wp-odeo code

and substituted all instances when I saw “gray” with “black”:

wp-odeo code black

You will need to look through the file to find all of the instances in which the code is used. I found that I needed to replace the word “gray” with black three times; for some reason, one part of the code already said black. As far as I can tell, the plugin does not give the option to choose from among several embedded players. If this is incorrect, someone please let me know. Therefore, if you don’t like the gray one, you should figure out what the code is for the other types. You can do this at Odeo’s site if you click on the link that says Embeddable Player (it will appear underneath the player on the page where your podcast is located). You will be presented with six options. If you would like the large gray player with the pink button, you don’t need to do anything. If you want another player, simply replace the code in the file that calls for the gray player with the code for the player of your choice. Here is a sample of this plugin at work on this blog:

[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/7391113/view]

Easy!

Now, I’m not sure if this next plugin will also play Odeo files or not; the plugin’s author didn’t mention Odeo. However, it will play all kinds of media files from your own uploaded files (such as movies and mp3’s) to flash swf files. It is called Anarchy Media Player, and it was created by An-Archos. You don’t have to be running WP to use it, but it is very WP-friendly. One caution. Be careful and and actually read so that you download the right version. I got it on the third try after I slowed down enough to actually read the site and see which one I needed. If you have upgraded to 2.1, you need to download the 2.0 Beta version of AMP for WP 2.1. Be careful that you don’t download the version for WP 2.0; it won’t work properly. I’m not crazy about the buttons provided to use on WP’s rich text (or visual) editor, as I don’t think they are intuitive. I think I will be consulting the site for some time until I can remember wat they do; however, it is much easier than going through the process I have had to use up until now just to share a video.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/cxWOWdq-wO0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

[tags]WordPresss, plugins, Anarchy Media Player, Odeo[/tags]

Related posts:

The Future of the Literature Carnival

R.I.P. Challenge

Literature Carnival, Ninth Edition


Share

Blues Lovers Rejoice!

Posted on by Dana
Share

The Delta Blues Museum has a new podcast centered around the theme of Hard Times Blues.


powered by ODEO

You can view show notes at The Uncensored History of the Blues: Show 24 — Hard Times Blues.

Tony Steidler-Dennison also has his weekly podcast showcasing “the best blues you never heard” at The Roadhouse Podcast. You can view this week’s show notes at The Roadhouse 103. I nominated Tony for Best Podcast at the Best of Blogs awards. He puts together an awesome hour-long show every single week. I look forward to a lazy Saturday or Sunday of exposure to some great blues, and Tony, you’ll make me cry if you ever stop doing the show! Listen to the latest podcast here:


powered by ODEO

[tags]blues, Roadhouse Podcast, Delta Blues Museum[/tags]

Related posts:

Audrey Hepburn

Kelly Richey's Blog

Roadhouse #104


Share

Upgrading

Posted on by Dana
Share

I recently upgraded to WordPress 2.1, and I’m really happy with it. I knew the time would come when I would need to sift through all my plugins to see which ones needed to be updated in order to continue to work, but it seemed like such an arduous task. I particularly hate updating the plugin that allows you see what I’m currently reading in the sidebar because the default templates do not work with my blog template, and I have to do a lot of tweaking. I have now upgraded to the most recent version of each plugin I use on each of my blogs. I also took the time to delete plugins I don’t use.

I have to admit that all the customization via plugins is one of my favorite things about WordPress. I noticed that Lorelle recently posted about the most popular plugins, and I discovered quite a few plugins I didn’t know about. I have to admit that I don’t sift through the plugins site very often. In fact, I don’t visit at all unless I have a specific task in mind, and I think I might be able to find a plugin to do it. I didn’t implement all the new plugins on this site, but you might notice a few new features.

Some of my favorite new site features:

  • Autosave: Every few minutes, the post draft automatically saves so I won’t ever lose a post again.
  • Redesigned login screen: This is something you’d never see, but I have to admit that the screen I see when I login is now much prettier.
  • Tabbed editor: This allows me to switch back and forth between the text editor and html code, which is something that was kind of a pain before.
  • Popularity Contest: This plugin places links to my most popular posts as determined by the number of comments and search engine hits, among other things, now appears in my left sidebar.
  • Related posts: I elected not to implement this plugin at this blog, but on my education blog, I thought it would help readers find nuggets in my archives that might be useful.
  • Bad Behavior: I admit that I had heard of this plugin, but for some reason, I thought it was only available to WordPress users at WordPress.com. I have been having trouble with spammers contacting me through my genealogy blog contact form. So far, since I installed this plugin, I haven’t received a spam e-mail via my contact form, but I don’t expect that particular problem to stop immediately. It looks as though Bad Behavior will stop spammers from getting at my site in the first place, so I should also notice fewer junk comments in my Comments Spam folder. Akismet does a great job preventing me from getting comment spam, but I figure one more layer of defense can’t hurt. I can’t believe we have to do things like this just to make sure all comments we receive are legitimate. Spammers are disgusting.

Let me know if anything seems broken. I had a plugin that interfered with my readers’ ability to comment on my education blog, so let me know if you are having any problems with anything on my site.

Related posts:

Comments

Literature Carnival, Second Edition

Movable Type 3.2


Share

The Never Forget Project

Posted on by Dana
Share

I know some of my family and friends who might be interested in a current project I’m brewing with a colleague don’t read my education blog regularly, so I thought I would let those of you who check in here more often know about it.

The Reflective Teacher is a second-year teacher. He has amazing ideas and shares them on his blog, which, by the way, has an appropriate title, for he is one of the most reflective teachers I’ve ever known. He mentioned in a recent post that he was doing a unit on the Holocaust, and I offered my resources as a teacher at a Jewish high school to help. Over the course of a couple of days, my offer turned into a full collaboration between his students in mine. My students will share their family histories, allowing his students the opportunity to learn how to conduct an interview and research. We are talking about a possible book. This project could potentially be pretty amazing. You can learn more about it in the following places:

Related posts:

Boston #2

Boston #5

2017: Reading Year in Review


Share