So there I was, sitting at my desk at work, minding my own business, when suddenly I realized… he was watching me.
Yes, peering over the edge of my flat-panel monitor, that evil Burger King was staring into my very soul!
Whew… I deserve a break today. (OK, so that’s McDonald’s. Have it your way.)
By the way, yes, that’s Anakin next to him. Go ahead, Anakin… kill him! He’s too dangerous to be left alive!
Say it ain’t so! Well, it’s so. I have my Music Man StingRay 5 bass up for auction on eBay.
I love that bass, but I just can’t justify having a $1400 bass that sits in its case 99% of the time. Especially when I can sell it and use the money to buy both a bass and a guitar from Fender’s Mexican factory. And have almost half the money left over.
Say what you will about Ed Roman, but he had it right when he was talking about the likes of Fender and Gibson. (I think he was ripping more on Gibson, because of their obscenely high prices for U.S.-made guitars, but the message applies to Fender too.) Fender has 3 basic lines of products: their low-end beginner instruments made in China under the Squier brand, their “standard” line of Fender guitars made in Mexico, and the high-end stuff made in California. But the fact is, while there’s a huge chasm in quality between the Chinese Squiers and the Mexican Fenders, at about double the retail price, there’s very little difference between the very nice Mexican Fenders and the vastly overpriced American Fenders.
This was reinforced for me last weekend when I played my father-in-law’s Mexican-made Precision Bass. He bought it to play for the contemporary services at his church, based on my recommendation. I figured it would be a decent, reliable instrument, and it would only set him back 400 bucks. I had owned a Mexican-made Fender Jazz back in high school, and it was great until I decided to take it apart and muck around with it, and even after that it was still pretty decent. But I think the Mexican factory has made great strides; if I didn’t know better, I’d never guess that P-Bass wasn’t a U.S. model.
So it is, in a week or less the Music Man will be on its way to a new home, and I’ll be applying that cash towards…
…and…
…and while I’m at it, this, to (finally!) rip all of my LPs…
Often I have pondered, when watching bands like Styx, Boston or Queen, just when rock musicians were at their ugliest. Certainly there was a moment when hair (both atop the head and facial) and clothes hit their simultaneous nadir, and rock stars looked as bad as they ever possibly could.
Chances were always good, I felt, that that point had occurred in the 1970s. MTV hadn’t launched yet, and use of hair products was limited to, at best, an occasional shampoo.
Well I’ve always felt that the 1980s really didn’t start until about 1982, or at least not until that fateful moment on August 1, 1981, when MTV launched with the Buggles’ (who were none too telegenic themselves) “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Therefore, according to my logic (plus the logic of math, if you happen to be one of those who celebrated the millennium a year later than everyone else), 1980 was, technically, still a part of the era known as “the ’70s.”
And now, with the recent release of some 1980 concert footage in a special CD/DVD repackaging of the Genesis classic, Duke, I have photographic proof that the fateful year that signified the dawn of a new and perhaps even more frightening decade (what with the election of one Ronald Wilson Reagan) was also the year at which rock star fashion truly reached its lowest imaginable point. Continue if you dare…
Exhibit A is one Phil Collins. As you can tell by his demeanor, he realizes how bad he looks. He’s not actually singing here; he’s desperately pleading with the audience for someone to, for the love of God, call a barber.
Here we have Exhibit B, the band’s touring guitarist, Daryl Stuermer. Judging by his ‘stache-n-‘fro combo, blinding yellow shirt, pleated white pants and the obligatory suspenders, he would fit in equally well as a sub with Kansas, Boston, Chicago, Asia, or any other band named after a place.
Exhibit C actually has nothing to do with my case for 1980 as the worst year in rock fashion, although I guess now that I stop to look at it, Phil’s Hawaiian shirt is rather loud. Mainly I just wanted to post this photo because I was in utter disbelief when I saw the mutilated head of his tambourine. How do you do that?!
Fairly often, it’s necessary in PHP programming to write your code around the fact that, most of the time, PHP does not distinguish between null, false and 0, although there is, nonetheless, a distinction between all three.
Today I ran into one of the few instances where I was expecting PHP to treat them as equivalent, but it did not.
Often I am working with arrays, and I write conditionals that should only execute if there are elements in the array. Technically the proper check for the status of an array-type variable is the is_array() function, but most of the time I don’t use that. I may have initialized the array variable or not, but that’s irrelevant to me; what I care about is whether there’s anything in the array, so I just use count() instead.
These days I’m working on some object-oriented code, and I’ve been writing several “get” methods that return either an array of data or, as I had originally written them, a false value if no matching data exists.
Fine. But then I applied some of this new OO code to an existing page, and found that one of my count()-based conditionals was evaluating incorrectly. I checked the variable, whose value was set by one of the object methods, and as anticipated, its value was false. But strangely, the count() function was returning 1 rather than 0 when applied to the variable.
I resisted my initial temptation to switch from count() to is_array() because I don’t want to have to change every place where I use it. Then I tried changing the “failed” return value of the method from false to null and, what do you know, it worked!
So now I’ve gone through all of my various “get” methods and, on failure, they’re returning null instead of false.
I frequently rail against how seemingly everything that’s for sale these days is made in China, often under harsh conditions and occasionally, as we’ve seen recently with the Thomas the Tank Engine debacle, containing toxic chemicals.
This giant industrial complex China has created is generally a mystery to most Americans. So many things we own are produced there, yet we know almost nothing about it.
Enter Edward Burtynsky, and his photo gallery of an inside look at Chinese industry, published today by Wired.