UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

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!

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.

Read more about the new album here.

Update February 24, 2007: I’ve tweaked the mix a bit; here’s version 1.4, which I think is going to be the final version that will make it onto the album.

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!

Now here’s something interesting. Apparently a (now deceased) pianist released a series of CDs under her own name that were actually identical to other previously released CDs by other artists!

I’ve had it happen a few times that I would put a rather obscure CD into my computer and CDDB would incorrectly identify it as something else. This is because their key to identifying a CD is the number and length of all of the tracks, which generally is unique, but of course it’s not impossible for two CDs to have the same number of tracks, and for their respective lengths all to match. Out of the 700 or so CDs in my collection, I’d say 10 to 15 of them had this happen when I ripped them in iTunes.

Usually the false matches are so obviously wrong that there’s little room for confusion, but in this case things were different!

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!

I’m working on a new tune for Hors d’Oeuvreture. It’s a little goofy, and at 176 BPM, it’s probably the fastest track I’ve ever recorded. The tempo also inspired its title, “Morgantown Expressway.”

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!