Category: Site News - Page 11 - UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

A new song (and a new title)

I’ve just posted an early, as-yet-incomplete version of my latest track, “Every Stroke of the Oar Seemed to Enrage the Missouri.” The title is a line from an old educational film from the ’50s that surfaced as part of a video project at my job.

I’ve also given the album its proper title now. Hors d’Oeuvreture is out, Highway 34 Revisited is in (with all due respect to Bob Dylan). The cover is not finalized, but as with the music, I have posted an in-progress version of it.

To read more and listen to full-length MP3s of the tracks, visit the album’s page.

Love Spatula (I don’t know what it means either)

The first release candidate for the track formerly known as “Bluesy Groovesy” is ready.

As for the title… I have a list I’ve been compiling over the past couple of years (ever since I finished my last solo CD, which was in June 2005) of potential song titles. That’s been the source of most of the titles I’ve used so far in this project. (I’m saving the best few for last… but it’s mostly just about finding a title that seems like a good match for the music.)

Well… I had this one title in the list. “Love Spatula.” I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean, and I can’t remember why or how I came up with it. It seems like it’s probably one of those situations where I misheard someone speaking to me, thought they said “love spatula,” and found the phrase so strangely intriguing that I had to write it down.

At any rate, it seemed fitting for this song, for whatever reason. Enjoy.

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!

Another new song in the works…

I’m working on another song for my new CD. This one’s in the bluesy/funky vein, with a working title of “Bluesy Groovesy.” (Hey, it’s only a working title.)

I realized while listening back to this that it’s actually somewhat reminiscent of latter-day Red Hot Chili Peppers. With a sucky bass player. :P

This is just the basic track right now… it definitely needs something over the top… to, uh… put it over the top.

Update March 2, 2007: I’m now up to version 0.6; more details are on the CD page. Still needs some keyboards and maybe some sax or other instruments but I’m waiting for my MIDI controller keyboard to arrive (which should be today if the snow doesn’t keep the FedEx truck away again… they gave up on trying to make the delivery yesterday; Tom Hanks would not be happy).

Note: To conserve server space, I’m clearing out older versions of the Hors d’Oeuvreture songs. Visit the album page to hear the latest available version of each track!

Take a trip on the “Morgantown Expressway”

The first release candidate (version 1.2) of “Morgantown Expressway” is ready. I have a rather humorous track of my almost-4-year-old son rambling on about light sabers and Pokémon, which he did directly after sitting in while I recorded the saxophone parts, and I’m still debating whether to include it in the final mix or not. Here, it is not.

WordPress is great, but the documentation leaves a little to be desired…

Alas, the woes of using open source software rear their heads. WordPress abounds with undocumented, or at least very poorly documented, features.

My dilemma: the default function for displaying a list of page links (used on this site to populate the Points of Interest panel in the sidebar) sorts links alphabetically, and there isn’t any obvious way to make it sort by the database’s menu_order field, which logically, to me at least, should be the default especially given that this is how they’re sorted in the admin tool.

Finding little help in the documentation or by my usual means (Google), I decided it couldn’t be done without modification. In my previous installation of WordPress I actually modified the core code itself to change the sort order, but when I upgraded to version 2.1.1 today, it overwrote that change. This time I decided to try the plug-in approach, so my changes would actually stick through version changes, and so I could get familiar with the powerful but arcane plug-in system WordPress uses for extensibility.

After poking around futilely trying to get my plug-in to work (to the point where it was sorting all of my blog posts the way I wanted the pages to be, but not the page list), I stumbled upon a relevant post in the WordPress forums, where a snide jab at “theme designers” (which seemed to be such a broad swipe that it included me) happened to mention an input parameter in the function that calls the page list!

Silly me… the system has built right in a very simple way to sort the list by whatever field you want, and all you have to do is pass in the right parameters in your theme files. The change couldn’t have been simpler… but learning that it was possible certainly could have!