How Does It Know?

I really haven’t ANYTHING to say lately. I am really busy with work lately, but also have been finding the time to work on a new little EP for Part Time Songs… It’s gonna be a song we played live in the Low Hello, a song I demoed for the Low Hello and a brand new one. The previously written songs being re-recorded. My first 3 song EP. Can you even call that an EP? Seems like it should be illegal. I’m hoping to finish that before me&D leave for Paris.

Oh yeah! We’re leaving for Paris on April 13th! I am très surexcité. (I am not sure if that French is a correct construction. Or if this parenthetical note is, either). It could not come soon enough.

After that, the plan is to put down final drums on the studio EP we’re working on. I wish I had something more solid to let you listen to, but I don’t at the moment.

Oh yeah! Check out Google Sky. I really like how it lets you overlay a historical sky map. Nice touch.

Till next time!

The styles for fonts, colors, etc are back in business. The right side column stuff I had is lost forever. Might even just leave it. Probably not. I’m pretty sure I’ll get the desire to put a big link to Part Time Songs at top eventually.

Tonight it is incredibly snowy and stuff, so I spent a couple hours upgrading Wordpress, due to the security concern raised in my last post. I was .3 versions behind, and the previous commenter reminded me of it.

I figured it’d be easier than it really was. Turned out my old theme really hosed things up badly after I did the installation. I couldn’t access the dashboard, couldn’t log in at all, and the blog was all text. So I deleted everything (except the database) and did the one-click install my host provides. Clean slate. Good deal. Change the config to use the old tables instead of the new ones (this is kinda clever, I thought, it lets you specify a prefix for the tables to use… my original ones were “wp_”, and the new tables it made were some random string “wp_asdfa_”… this is so you can have more than one blog in the same DB… me, I never did that, and I’m kinda glad. It seems like I’d get them mixed up a lot).

ANYWAY, so the blog isn’t looking quite the way it used to… it’s using the upgraded version of the same theme I WAS using, but this is its original state, before the modifications I made. I tried just using the old theme after the successful reinstallation, and it screwed things up again. So, this is the theme for now, until I can make some time to do my customizations. I need to compare the stylesheets and see if I can use any of it.

Maybe the blog gods are just trying to tell me it’s time for a facelift on the site.

Good night!

Well, my first post about the Wordpress migration got deleted, because I hadn’t changed a MySQL server name in a config file. I backed up the old database, and restored it to the new database server. Then I made the post about the migration and then I deleted the old database. Turns out the posts were still saving to the old database, and I only realized that after deleting the old database (because of the “Um, there’s no database called that” error I got). Anyway, whatever. I think it’s all set up correctly now.

Another weird thing is that my blog at thelowhello.com got haxxor’d (or however the haxxors would spell it. Any haxxors out there?)… I got an email from Google saying that my site might be harmful to people’s computers. I did a Google search, and here’s what I saw:

So, yeah, stuff in German and French about a Caribbean online casino! Great! I opened up the last post I had made in that blog, sometime last summer, and saw that yup, there was that text and some other Javascript in there. Great again! So Wordpress somehow allowed a SQL injection somewhere… I deleted the offending text and saved the entry, but this actually came at an all right time, because I had been planning to stop hosting that blog anymore and letting the URL lapse. Because we don’t need it anymore and I don’t plan to use it (or that URL) at all.

Anyway, I guess I have some reading to do about Wordpress vulnerabilities. Should be an interesting project. Probably should check plug-ins, too. I haven’t written any myself, so at least I know it’s not *my* code.

So I have this now:
Part Time Songs

Visit for the full post, but basically it’s a way to release music all in one place, without regard for band names or proper projects. Basically a nice sense of freedom to do whatever I want.

In a similar vein, I will probably be migrating this site over to howdoesitknow.com, since that is now the title of the blog, and I’ve always felt just a SLIGHT bit silly having a blog whose URL was my full name. So we’ll see when I get that done. I need to back everything Wordpress related up (including the mySQL DB) before I do anything, I suppose.

Sorry dudes and non-dudes… I haven’t been blogging much because I’ve become addicted to Scrabulous on Facebook… Which makes sense, as that was the primary reason I joined Facebook in the first place and I love Scrabble.

Apparently Bill Gates is deleting his Facebook account for partly the same Scrabulous-related reasons.

(link by way of Angela at Unabridged

Bought me a couple of domains for things.

A) The new EP in the new year will be called “How Does It Know?”. Yeah, I know, it’s the name of this blog too, but that was an unintentional byproduct of me writing a song called “How Does It Know?”, and then subsequently hating the song and totally scrapping it, but still wanting to name the EP after it. Illogical sure, but that’s like most of my decisions, so it’s ok.

http://howdoesitknow.com

B) In addition to the new EP, I’m gonna try to get back to doing sort of a Song of the Month thing, but instead of one song every month, it’ll be like 3 “volumes” of 5 songs each (yeah, essentially a few EPs) that I record totally in my basement. So you get the low Song of the Month quality, but in batches of 4 or 5 or whatever. Not a fully thought out project yet, but I have at least 3 songs I’m going to use, but won’t be on the studio recorded EP. Anyway, I’m calling it Part Time Songs, and I guess the first one will be out in Q1 of 2008 sometime.

http://parttimesongs.com

That’s about it… I’ll update about when these two places actually have some real content, etc. Good night!

Some guy’s interesting encounter with a menu offering Wikipedia as a food item.

As long as I’m talking food, I might as well say that we tried the Trader Joe’s Thai Red Curry simmer sauce, and it is really good. Has more of a spicy savory flavor to it than the Yellow Curry. I’m not sure which I like better, but I guess (due to having it twice) am leaning towards the yellow. So, if you haven’t been paying attention, it goes something like this:

Yellow >= Red > Green

I still have the Marsala, Korma and Punjab Spinach sauces to try. I tried the General Tso’s sauce (a very small amount drizzled on a chicken sandwich), which was very nice too, but I dunno if I’d want it slathered all over something. I think I’ll continue using it as a condiment in small amounts. But for now, we’re going to and buy up a bunch of the Red and Yellow sauces while we can, because Trader Joe’s tends to stop selling items based on whatever factors and has a constantly rotating inventory.

I mean, who wouldn’t love a family band, consisting of mom, dad and 11 year old daughter drumming, dressed in thrift-store chic, and singing songs about slides they’ve procured at flea markets and yard sales, while said slides are being projected on the wall behind them?

Sadly, I’ve never witnessed them do their show live, but last night we watched their DVD Off and On Broadway. It was very good, if a little short. But it included documentary-style footage showing them in everyday life and on tour. Jason Trachtenburg is hilarious in general, and it was cool to find out that Tina Trachtenburg was the brain behind the whole concept, even though she doesn’t normally perform on stage (she’s the one projecting the slides). The onstage footage was also very well filmed and really fun.

Hopefully I’ll get to see them next time they come through town.

In blog news, I cleaned up the Music and MP3 page so stuff isn’t as cluttered and unappealing.

A funny little video mockumentary type of thing about the “design team” that made MS Paint. Enjoy! And have a good long weekend (if you’re not working, that is).

MS Paint video

(link found on the Good Experience blog I read sometimes)

P.S. I actually do really like MS Paint. Most of the computer drawn flyers for my old band were made with a combination of Paint and taking screenshots (and then cropping those screen shots and combining with other elements made in Paint, etc… Real janky.)