I just got back this morning about 4:00 a.m. with the family, from my dad’s wedding in Boothbay, Maine. We had a fantastic time and as best man, I even managed to pull off a fairly decent toast to the happy couple. We just love my dad’s new wife, and meeting her family was great. I think everyone else had a wonderful time too.

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p>We stayed at a really great place, the Lawnmere Inn. If the idea of a 19th century English seaside resort sounds good to you, this is your kind of place. Almost all the rooms have a beautiful water view, and there are reasonable rates for both on- and off-season. And the staff are warm, gracious, and very accommodating.

We had a great show on Saturday night at Andy’s in Maryland, despite our beloved drummer Rich being stricken with back problems that left him in agony and unable to travel with us. It was very interesting when a couple of patrons, annoyed by the loud conversation at an adjacent table, and after repeated attempts at more subtle shushing, got up and asked the talkers to kindly shut up. It’s refreshing to see people so interested in hearing live music that it becomes the focus of their attention, rather than treating the musicians like they were an automatic jukebox or background noise.

I don’t carry a digital camera with me, unfortunately, and don’t have one in my phone because they’re not permitted at my office. So I couldn’t record in any way the tornado I saw today just north of my house.

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p>As you crest a hill on the main road leading to my subdivision, there is a small field on the left, roughly 10 or 15 acres, which sits off the north side of the road. When I came over the hill, I saw directly ahead of me some wispy pale grey moisture which contrasted starkly with the dark gray-green skies overhead. The wisps were drifting upward at an angle, and as I watched they began to rotate somewhat. This was not the tornado.

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p>I was not really happy about being on the road, but there aren’t many choices for places to stop and take cover, and other than the wisps, I saw no sign of cloud rotation. I also didn’t hear the rumbling or roaring that tends to presage a tornado’s appearance. Nevertheless, I pulled into the 7-Eleven near our subdivision, figuring that if there was a true emergency I could seek cover inside the squat brick building.

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p>When I looked across the cornfield as I pulled into the parking lot, I saw, just a mile or two north, a large dark area where several funnel clouds were forming. Fortunately, the system was moving north, as the radio warnings had confirmed during my drive. I watched in awe as I saw the huge gyrating mass of cloud, until the funnels were no longer visible over a ridge of trees.

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p>Apparently the tornado activity has been very serious throughout the area this evening, and as I listen to a local radio station via Internet stream, it seems that the line of severe weather is not calming as it moves north. Thankfully everybody at home, my family, and my colleagues at work are all fine.

Excellent! I’m heading to the 2004 Mid-Atlantic Stick Seminar in October. My teacher and friend Greg Howard will be delivering top-notch instruction, along with several other incredibly talented Stick players. I’m hoping my friend Chris is coming as well, since I haven’t seen him in a while and want to catch up on all his doin’s.

This week on fedora-devel-list there was an incredibly interesting project announced by ace Red Hat developer Havoc Pennington, called Stateless Linux. It sounds fascinating!

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p>Unfortunately, the PDF that Havoc floated around is practically useless on a lot of platforms (apparently including Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.x on Microsoft Windows and Fedora Core 2′s gpdf application). It was created using OpenOffice.org, the open-source office productivity suite, which has built-in functionality to produce Acrobat PDF files.

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p>I never use this function in OpenOffice.org; instead I “print” the file to a generic PostScript file (I have a dedicated “printer” definition for this purpose), and use the ps2pdf utility to convert the PostScript file to PDF. I never have any problems with this method, and the PDF files seem to commute perfectly to other platforms.

Today I’m out on the road with Leah and the band. We’re playing at the Grape Street Pub tonight in Philly.

This week I’ve been in RHS 333, and met the new instructor here at Tysons Corner. She’s from Norway (by way of the UK) and is a very knowledgeable and interesting person. I suppose I’ll be seeing a lot of this classroom over the next few months as I pursue the RHCA certification. Thankfully it will be with a good instructor!

I blew off some other projects today to mess around with my home studio. Most of my recording is done to a DAW (digital audio workstation) — in my case, a fancy way of saying I have special software with which to do recording, mixing, editing and so forth. Unfortunately, it only runs in Windows; there aren’t really professional level tools for Linux yet. You can do a lot of the basics in Linux (recording, mixing), but the tools are awkward, don’t have consistent interfaces, and less plentiful than in the payware world.

Anyway, I did some work on tracks from an old friend of mine, Jenny Boyle. We started recording some demo tracks in my buddy Rich’s basement, and today I pulled them out and added some material. This is what I ended up with.

There are some glaring problems. There are no backing vocals as yet (maybe Jenny will be interested in getting together again?). The vocal that’s there was originally a scratch track, so there’s monitor bleed all over it from when we were doing the original demo tracking. Plus I had to auto-tune it slightly to keep from going mad; it’s a little too aggressive in a couple spots. The guitars go a little hinky in the bridge because my hands are a little out of shape after playing nothing but bass for so many months. The intro guitar is too up front, and the snare is buried too far back.

Some cool things too: My Variax is playing the part of every guitar on the record except the intro guitar, which I think is my old Strat, long since departed. There’s a couple Les Pauls in there, a Strat, and a Rickenbacker 360-12, with my GuitarPort serving as the ampage rampage. The strings and organ are courtesy of my Alesis QS7.1. I’m starting to get the hang of compression, and it’s a pity this mix is over-compressed, but them’s the breaks if you want to sound like a “real record” these days.

Jenny sang vocals, Rich played drums, and everything else you can blame on me.

I’m extremely proud to be an official editor on the Fedora Documentation Project. We produce documentation for Fedora Core, the completely free Linux operating system which takes its heritage from Red Hat Linux. If you are interested in writing or otherwise contributing, you should definitely join the fedora-docs-list, the mailing list for the Fedora Documentation Project. We are in need of both ideas and material, so either (or both) are appreciated!

Apropos of the last post, everyone on Earth should run out and buy The Honeydogs’ latest record, 10,000 Years. A beautiful and blistering anti-war rock opera, with songs you’ll be humming for days after the first listen.

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p>The album was almost entirely written in 1999, so it’s actually not a liberal knee-jerk kind of record. It’s more of a meditation on the aftermath of the WWII legacy, with imagery that draws from Brave New World, 1984 and other dystopian literary landmarks with equal dexterity. It also happens to make dreck like Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut seem atrociously childlike in comparison.

One of the best things about the record is that it’s on Aimee Mann and Michael Penn’s independent record label, United Musicians, and so when you buy it, you’re supporting some of the best independent music around.