Music, opinions, and portfolio of Mark Eagleton, musician and web developer in Northern CA.
This is where I tell you what I really think. This website doesn’t support comments by design, that is what your blog is for!
A friend of mine who has recently gotten back into the double bass, asked me about gut strings the other day. Like most bass players, I struggled (and still do) with choosing strings for my instrument. I don’t know if classical or jazz players struggle as much with this issue, but for Americana music, string choice can directly affect what styles of music you can effectively play on your instrument, and how long you can physically endure playing it.
The International Space Station (ISS) is cool. It’s a multi-section science lab in low Earth orbit (about 240 miles up), constructed and manned by personal from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russian Federal Space Agency (RKA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency(JAXA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). It travels at over 17,000 miles per hour, completely circling the globe every 91 minutes.
See? Cool.
About a month ago, I tendered my resignation at ground(ctrl). The experience has been surreal. I contributed a good portion of my life to the cause there. While I’m extremely proud of the team we assembled and what we were able to accomplish in five short years, it has been a relief to have a few weeks off to reflect and decompress without the pressure of what has to be done when I get back.
A hero, contrarian, and defender of free speach is gone. We knew it was imminant, but this makes it no less easy. These are my thoughts on the great man which I regret not making public before his death.
Stephen Colbert interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is worth every second of your time. 5,082 seconds of your time specifically.
Lots of people site Mail.app as one of the best new features of Mac OS X Lion. I agree, but it seems to be for the opposite reason.
I discovered a bug with Safari 1.5 (7534.48.3) that effects text color of block level elements that have a double border with an rgba color value that has an alpha setting lower than 1. Video inside!
New advancements in pro audio suddenly blow me away. I forgot how useful electricity could be when applied to musics.
I made a video of my AeroPress. Music by the West Nile Ramblers.
I made myself a canned response to long-winded email messages with multiple recipients that contain one or more non-disclosure email signatures. In the name of efficient communication, I encourage you to copy, modify and reuse this message liberally.
In a recent project, I wanted to apply a CSS transition to the hover state of a table row and some menu items. The problem was that my hover state used a gradient background and I wanted the gradient to fade in and out. Background colors can be faded in, but background images can only be moved around. My solution was to fade in a background color and animate the position of the background image.
Many of my friends have said 2010 was a bad year for them. I can surly empathize. I’ve had my share of rough years; not 2010, though! I was fortunate to have had a very enjoyable one. Here are some highlights and maybe a little perspective.
In the spirit of International Blasphemy Rights Day 2010, I wish to direct your attention to a video of Muslims attacking Lars Vilks during his talk at Uppsala University in Sweden.
I’m beefing up the “Tweet this” option in an event calendar CMS I’m working on for a friend, and I needed a quick way to determine the next Auto_increment value of my events table to provide a link to the event on the website. The query for this is totally easy:
SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'events';This query returns all kinds of useful information about the given table, including the current Auto_increment value. Learn more about how I applied my newly learned trick inside!
Happy Flag Day, USA.
In an opinion piece for the Daily Democrat, Pastor Andy Flowers for the Calvary Baptist Church argues that evolution by natural selection requires just as much faith in the unknown as his job as a Pastor. In it he sites some common creationist arguments against evolution that have been thoroughly addressed and dismantled over the past few centuries.
This is pretty status quo for a Baptist Minister. Normally I wouldn’t pay much thought to an article like this in a local newspaper’s Faith column, but Mr. Flowers is grossly misinformed about one of the most basic tenants of biology, and he is teaching this misinformation in my community. I feel I need to at least put the truth out there for people to see it.
Evolution through natural selection is a fact. There are proven, testable examples of it all around us. An endless supply of peer reviewed research supports it (as does the fossil record). Here I will address his main arguments, and offer some alternative reading to the Creation Answers Book that Pastor Flowers is offering for free.
I have been pining for a definitive, stock solution for managing my calendars on my iPhone since I got my first iPhone. I have a combination of MobileMe and Google calendars that I use. I didn’t like the idea of having an unused calendar app on my phone, so rather than look for a third party app to manage calendaring, chose to suffer with having read-only calendars on my iPhone.
No more! My boss found the mystery solution and passed it on to me, and I, in turn, am passing it on to you.
I got sick again. Just in time for a double bill show.
I’m learning Dear Old Dixie for the new Pleasant Valley Boys album we’re cutting. Our schtick is authentic traditional bluegrass, so the recordings we’re pulling our arrangements from aren’t exactly the highest of fidelity. Capo by SuperMegaUltraGroovie has come in quite handy.
My buddy Scott turned me onto Die Antwoord a few days ago. I wound up with an advance of their forthcoming album, “$0$” and can’t stop listening to it. I haven’t been this completely blown away by an album in quite a long time. Maybe a decade.
I have taken pride in my paperless workflow for over six years. When I say paperless, I also mean CD/DVD less as well. I simply don’t print and don’t burn. That is until last night. My wife bought a fricken laser printer (the kind with a fricken laser) on a whim at BestBuy.