Walt at Random

I probably shouldn’t write at all until at least yesterday, since I’m now 15 hours into the “travel day” and just skimmed through 458 library blog posts and 150 others (and, surprisingly, only flagged a dozen to look at again later–but I’d say at least 100 of those posts are repetitions because of Bloglines or blogging software glitches).

Still, before I forget, in no particular order, and with zero cosmic significance:

• There is no Ten in the LITA Top Tech Trends. I’ve seen that extraneous word in at least two blogs. It’s TTT: Top Tech Trends. Not TTTT.
• The time given for each TTT panelist was decided, at Midwinter, by the TTT committee and the TTT panelists. I wasn’t there. I was just The Enforcer. (Actually, a one-minute sign and a red “time up” sign were being held up in the front row of the audience–but I quickly realized that the panelists couldn’t see the signs. Too bad. I really was hoping not to say anything after summarizing Sarah Houghton’s trends…). I think five minutes is probably about right; in this case, it was literally the only way to save half an hour for managed audience questions. I think the managed-questions portion went very well (as did the whole thing, and since I’m no longer a panelist, I can say that): Most questions were included, while avoiding diatribes. (And I must apologize to Sarah: I left out “brighter” in the range of adjectives that distinguish the LiB from the bozo offering her trends.)
• I wonder whether we’ll ever have an accurate number for how many people were at ALA–which is not necessarily the same as the registration count. Exhibits felt light; my hotel noted that a number of people had cancelled at the last minute; I wouldn’t be surprised if a thousand or more people just didn’t show up. Why? Because of the “lift” problem I noted pre-conference: There just weren’t enough airplane seats on the key travel days. I know of people paying $700 for flights booked more than a month ahead, $900 for flights booked fairly well ahead–and of one person being quoted $3,000 for a coach seat a week ahead. I can say that a $900 fare would have increased my total conference expenses by nearly 50%; for a lot of people, the extra $300 to $600 or more–or just the inability to book a flight at all without staying late or going in early–may have prevented attendance.
• That said, there were still probably at least 15,000 librarians and vendors in New Orleans, and I believe most of us found attendance worthwhile. I wouldn’t have missed it…
• Apologies in general to people who might have expected to run into me and didn’t. Thanks to a combination of factors–the strain of the last couple months, four or five days of pre-ALA weather in Mountain View where the lack of air conditioning made 92 to 96 degrees difficult to bear, getting a really bad night’s [lack of] sleep Friday night, the effect of the front half of the Convention Center being closed–I was just plumb exhausted by mid-day Saturday, and took what measures I could to protect energy. That meant spending less time at social functions and marginal (for me) programs than I might otherwise have, definitely not trying to stay up for the 10:30-midnight blogger/Louisiana librarian gathering, skipping a couple of kind invitations to fancy dinners that would keep me up too late… and generally laying a little bit low.
• I’m grateful to all the folks who asked how things were going in terms of OCLC-RLG and my future. I think the short answer “It’s probably going to be all good, personally at least,” is better than the slightly longer answers I was giving. [OK, I might not word it exactly that way, but, well...]
• And, given that cheap entertainment playing slot poker was one way to preserve a little energy and sanity, I should report that Harrah’s New Orleans has good music–I’m guessing it’s more or less the same blend of oldies used in other Harrah’s, but with every third or fourth song replaced by something local (songs about New Orleans, zydeco music, songs by other NO musicians, etc.). And, unlike some casinos last time we were in Reno, the music wasn’t playing SO LOUD IT HURT YOUR EARS.
• Sure, I went to some programs. Sure, I toured all of the exhibits. Maybe I’ll have something to say about them later–but seems like lots of other people are covering things pretty well. (Cop out? You betcha.)

Oh, and I have to mention the LITA breakfast for 23 of the former presidents, as part of the division’s 40th anniversary celebration. (LITA isn’t 40 years old, but the division is: It originally had a different name, Information Science and Automation Division or ISAD.) Great stuff, and a good chance to see a bunch of people I really don’t run into that often.

Added next day: It probably isn’t obvious from the above, although my pre-conference posts may have hinted at it, but:

• Keeping ALA in New Orleans was exactly the right thing to do. Exactly. I believed it when the decision was made. I believed it after the misreported story about killings in a drug-infested area of New Orleans. And I believed it even more while I was there, starting with the cabbie who, while grumping a little about ALA’s proficiency at sending people to the airport shuttles, expressed delight at us being there (his house is “OK,” but his furnishings were a total loss)–and all the way through.
• Despite all the wonderful voluntarism, donations to NOPL funds, “over”tipping, ALA wasn’t there as a charity operation. We were there as a conference, with conferees having the usual good time in and after events. (”The usual good time” for NO being a little different than “the usual good time” for, say, Orlando.)
• As I commented on John Blyberg’s first-rate post-ALA note: We did good. New Orleans did good.

Once in a while, I glance at “Web pages that suck.”

Usually very well-chosen examples of utterly horrendous web techniques.

Today’s, though, is an oddity: The Oak Ridge Boys site.

Not that the site doesn’t suck–but Vincent Flanders, proprietor of WPTS, usually excludes musical groups and artists from consideration, because such sites are expected to push the envelope.

So why did he make an exception? Because of this “incredible grammar error”:

The Oak Ridge Boys is one of America’s best known country acts.

I sent Flanders email saying that, by my standards, that’s not a grammatical error at all. The Oak Ridge Boys is a musical group; it takes the singular, just as The United States of America or The Beatles or … (at least in American English, given that corporate entities are “people” in the U.S.).

Would you say “The United States are the world’s leading exporters of pop culture”? No, you wouldn’t,

The members of The Oak Ridge Boys are musicians. The Oak Ridge Boys is a group.

Night before last, we moved forward one more week in our viewing of Moonlighting, season 3 (we never watch more than one episode of any show on DVD in any one week…).

The episode was one of the truly remarkable ones that help explain why the show always had trouble staying on schedule. You see the title above. It features a lengthy modern dance sequence set to “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” written and performed by Billy Joel. It’s a great sequence–and a great episode.

In some ways, it harks back to perhaps the most remarkable episode of Season 2, “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” which–among other things–was broadcast in black & white, over the objections of the network.

In any case, the episode is another highlight of one of the truly great series.

Aficionados will know that we’re in for a truly special treat next week: The only episode that we happened to tape at the time, on an expensive S-VHS cassette, which we’ve kept intact ever since and watched several times.

I remember reading about the Music Genome Project a while back. Don’t recall whether I ever wrote anything about it–the effort to classify individual pieces of music along several hundred axes as to how they sound. Chances are, I would have been curious but skeptical. (Well, duh: Walt Crawford would have been curious but skeptical…)

Somebody (?) pointed me to an LA Times article on Pandora, a streaming music website making the Music Genome Project into a real service. The article is enthusiastic, suggesting that this service can nudge you to new music that you’re likely to like but might never have heard of–and that new musicians love the idea, with music companies being cautiously interested.

I don’t listen to music as background much (except in the car), but I had to do some other things in the vicinity of the computer, so I thought I’d give it a try. You start a new “station” by providing Pandora with one or more songs and/or one or more artists you like, and “tune” it by giving a thumb’s up or thumb’s down to individual songs it comes up with. You can define up to a hundred stations, and have a free account (with ads) or a $36/year account (without ads). It’s streaming audio at 128k MP3, and it sounds better than most MP3 streams I’ve heard.

My “station” started with Randy Newman (surprise, surprise), to which I quickly added Tom Paxton and James Taylor. I only listened for about 20 minutes–but damned if it wasn’t hard to move away from the station. Sure, some of the songs were from the artists I chose. But the others were, with one exception, right on the money–and they were all songs and artists I would not have known about.

This isn’t social software: Your radio stations are only influenced by the work of the project itself and your own choices (but you can choose “favorite” stations and email your stations to other people). It might not work at all for you. I still don’t see that I’m going to spend a bunch of time listening at my PC. But, well, so far, I’m impressed.

Hmm. Wonder what Joni Mitchell, Ry Cooder, and Boz Scaggs might yield… Some day, when I have some time free…

Quick update, now that I’ve installed my snazzy new MS Wireless Natural Pro keyboard & optical mouse…finally, there’s a wireless MS Natural keyboard, and the wireless mouse is even better than my old Logitech wired optical…: So that’s my second Pandora station, Mitchell Scaggs Cooder. Right now it’s playing “Ooh Baby” by Gilbert O’Sullivan–and I think I can see why. This station tests my own likes, since I only like most of Joni Mitchell, maybe 1/3 of Boz Scaggs, and some unknown but large fraction of Ry Cooder. Hmm. “Back on the Road,” Earth Wind & Fire. Makes sense, and I’d never make that connection. I see how people find Pandora a trifle addicting…

This probably is the last post before Midwinter, and it’s not a “library post.”

Nope, this is about TV and music, sort of.

We tried out the premiere of Love Monkey last night. (Yes, it was on Tuesday–but it was 10-11 p.m., and I just don’t stay up that late. Our S-VHS recorder still works just fine, though–no DVR, not yet…) We loved Tom Cavanaugh (sp?) in Ed, and the premise seemed promising (although it’s odd that it’s on so late), so…

Overall conclusion: We’re not sure. It’s part of the record list for the period in which I’m gone; we’ll give it another try. We’re slow to add new TV shows, but this one may have promise.

But…

Twice in the episode–once as a, shall we say, odd choice as a baby shower gift, once as an offhand gesture as Tom started his new job–there was a handoff/gift of The Essential Bob Dylan. And on both occasions, Tom (who’s supposed to be a great A&R man with a golden ear and encyclopedic knowledge of music and the recording industry) made a comment about “Every song he ever recorded.”

The trouble is, The Essential Bob Dylan isn’t like all those “555-” phone numbers. It’s one of many Sony “The Essential…” twofers (here’s the Gracenote search result, look at Disc 1 and Disc 2–the third link is either wrong or for some bizarre single-disc version), one of the reasons I can’t quite bring myself to boycott Sony entirely.

“The Essential…” sets provide well-chosen, usually well-mastered cross-sections of an artist’s Columbia-related career in two very full CDs, usually 70 to 75 minutes each, typically as many as 20 songs per CD; some stores have sold the sets for as little as $12 to $14, making them incredible bargains for artists that aren’t well represented in your collection. I’ve probably purchased a dozen of them over the years. (The qualifier above is important: if most of an artist’s work was not with Columbia-affiliated labels, you’re only getting an odd chunk.)

But, geez, “every song ever recorded” by Bob Dylan would be a pretty big box set, unless it was released on Blu-ray discs (in which case, with 50GB capacity per disc, you could theoretically put the equivalent of 130 CDs in a two-disc set, and I think that would be more than enough for all of Dylan’s recordings).

And the CD box was sufficiently visible to lead me to believe that it actually was The Essential Bob Dylan. It was the thickness of a typical “Essential” two-disc set.

Why does this matter? Maybe it doesn’t–but suspension of disbelief in a “normal” TV show or movie is a tricky thing. I winced both times Tom made the ludicrous claim. I strongly suspect that both mentions were “in-show advertising,” paid for by Sony; otherwise, a made-up name like “The Bob Dylan Universe” would have avoided the break with reality. Sort of a shame, really.

Despite the overwhelming response to this post, or in the wan hope that both of you actually read it but couldn’t come up with any guesses as to the organizing principle at work, I’m going to use [waste] another post.

Here’s another CD-R playlist, made using exactly the same general organizing principle as in the other post–but in this case, the specifics are such that the organizing principle could have been used to make a mix cassette back in LP days. Actually, I believe I used the same principle and this particular instance of the principle to do so, but of course the results were much different.

So here’s the playlist. I’ll take guesses (or lack thereof) until November 6 or so, then finally break down and tell a breathlessly waiting nobody what the principle is:

• Jump Up Behind Me - James Taylor
• Girl from the North Country - Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan
• I Need to Be in Love - The Carpenters
• Avalon - Randy Newman
• Steel Rail Blues - Gordon Lightfoot
• Red Sails in the Sunset - Fats Domino
• Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway) - Billy Joel
• Better Class of Losers - Randy Travis
• Miracle of Miracles - Fiddler on the Roof
• Blue Mountain Road - Tom Paxton
• Embrace Me, You Child - Carly Simon
• Joe Knows How to Live - Eddy Raven
• Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning - Willie Nelson
• Nikita - Elton John
• Power and the Glory - Phil Ochs
• Cool Cool Water - The Beach Boys
• The Duke (live mono version) - Dave Brubeck
• Desire - Boz Scaggs
• Kodachrome - Paul Simon
• Maid of Constant Sorrow - Judy Collins
• New York’s Not My Home - Jim Croce

Any guesses? (There’s actually a second CD-R, with precisely the same organizing principle but 22 different songs, including “Circus” by Eric Clapton, “Best of Friends” by Joan Baez, “Seamless Life” by Vance Gilbert, and “Joshua Gone Barbados” by Tom Rush, if that helps.)

This one surprised the heck out of me, particularly because it uses one particular word, “boycott,” that I’d never expect to see in this particular venue, the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s the link, directly to a Freedom to tinker post, directly to Walter Mossberg’s column.

Lest you think Edward Felten is distorting Mossberg’s view, here’s the column itself.

What Mossberg is advocating, at least in this area, is what I’d consider a reasonably balanced view of copyright. I tend to agree with Felten (who, after all, spends much of his professional life studying this stuff) that the kind of “benevolent DRM” Mossberg wants isn’t feasible, but that’s another issue.

My own feelings on this are pretty clear, and posted recently, in C&I: There’s no music that I need so badly that I’d buy a pseudo-CD. I never lend CDs; I never sell a CD and retain ripped copies; I never rip CDs that I borrow from the library. But I reject efforts to control how I produce mix CD-Rs for my own use.

Time for another game of sorts.

Here’s the playlist for a CD-R I made just over a year ago. All of the cuts are connected by a single clear connection.

Your task: Guess the connection. Prizes: Limited glory, no fame. If we ever have another C&I “in person” get-together, you’ll get a handsome 8.5×11 print from one of my wife’s travel photos. (So will everyone else there, but you’ll get first choice.)

Two clues–one of them a red herring:

1. One cut features an instrument that’s not heard all that often, played by the creator of a particular playing technique for that instrument. The only time I was ever on the radio (other than a “Talk of the Nation” hour a few years back in which I probably said 200 words total), I was singing and playing that instrument using that technique.

2. It would not have been possible to make this particular CD-R in the days of LPs (not for technological reasons; a mix tape wouldn’t have worked either)–but the connection would have made even more sense, in a somewhat different instance.

• “Wildwood Flower”–the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Mother Maybelle Carter and others
• “Golliwog’s Cakewalk”–Julian Bream & John Williams
• “Jesse James”–Ry Cooder
• “Marie Christine”–Gordon Lightfoot
• “You Can Leave Your Hat On”–Randy Newman
• “Mendocino County Line”–Willie Nelson & Lee Ann Womack
• “It’s Worth Believin’”–Gordon Lightfoot
• “Invention in C Minor”–Billy Joel
• “When Irish Girls Grow Up”–Tom Russell
• “Amazing Grace”–Judy Collins
• “(They Long to Be) Close to You”–The Carpenters
• “Crossroads”–Gordon Lightfoot
• “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”–Randy Newman
• “If You Could Touch Her At All”–Willie Nelson
• “Old Dan’s Records”–Gordon Lightfoot
• “Aladdin’s Word”–Aladdin soundtrack
• “April Come She Will”–Simon & Garfunkel
• “All of Me”–Willie Nelson
• “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters”–Elton John
• “Our Prayer”–the Beach Boys
• “El Testamen de Amelia”–John Williams
• “Ragtime”–Randy Newman, solo piano version

First correct answer within the next week wins. Otherwise, I’ll annotate this entry with the answer, on or after October 26.

More stuff you won’t find in the forthcoming Cites & Insights 5:12:

• An expanded commentary on possible futures and win:win vs. zero-sum scenarios.
• 4,000 words that were in the edited essays, but brought the whole issue to 27 pages with 20,500+ words. The first-round cut (which deleted the blather in the previous post, and a bunch of other stuff) brought that down to 18,000 words and 24 pages. Another round of cuts, mostly commentary, brought that down to 16,500 words and 22 pages. That issue will be coming soon. (How soon? Within the next hour.) A really good editor could doubtless bring that down to 20, 18, or 16 pages–but at some point it would cease to be my commentary.
• This other piece of blather, sacrificed during round two. So, of 4,000 excess words, I’ve tossed fewer than 1,000 your way via these two posts. The other 3,000 are where they probably should be: In that great bit-bucket in the sky.

Better than the Original?

This has come up before: The possibility that a CD-R can sound better than the CD from which it was recorded—and the ancillary situation in which an audio reviewer who considers LPs vastly superior to CDs in sound quality uses CD-Rs to demonstrate the differences between turntables and cartridges (as recorded to CD-R).

Part of me wants to say “hogwash” when I hear the first claim, putting it in the same category as improving CD sound by painting a green stripe around the edge, freezing the CD, or demagnetizing it—pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo that works just as long as the person listening believes it works.

But in the case of CD-R vs. CD, it’s not entirely clear that it’s nonsense—at least not if you believe that jitter and error correction can have subliminally audible side effects. Once a CD has been ripped to a hard disk, assuming the ripping works properly (and you’re ripping to a .WAV or .AIF file or to a lossless compression format), there should be no errors and jitter should no longer be a factor. While playback jitter from a CD-R made from that file may still be a factor, the one-off CD-R should have no errors (unlike pressed CDs, which are likely to have some small and fully correctable error rate).

Will I swear that any of my CD-Rs (re-expanded from 320K MP3 compression) sound better than the CDs they came from? No, but I also have very modest sound equipment and somewhat damaged hearing. Do I think a few of the cuts are cleaner and less edgy than the originals? Yes—but that may actually be the effects of lossy compression. Do all claims that CD-R copies can sound better than the originals fall into the snake oil realm? I no longer believe they do. But when it comes to holding a little box over the CD for a minute to permanently improve the sound—there I’m back on the side of the skeptics.

Another trivial entry because it’s hard to focus on important ones…and another “if there’s ever a memoir” entry.

A while back (more than a decade, less than a quarter-century) my wife and I were both getting radios installed in our cars and walked around while it was being done. “Around,” in this case, taking us past a music store. Where we went in and my wife started looking at pianos.

After trying out pretty much everything in the store, she settled on–and fell in love with–a Schimmel vertical grand. You may never have heard of Schimmel, but they’re one of the great German piano companies, with (I believe) the same action as Boesendorfer. This group of piano stores got two shipments a year of Schimmels: five grand pianos and one vertical grand in each shipment. (This was a long time ago; things may have changed.)

A vertical grand is not the same as an upright. A vertical grand is a grand piano with the soundboard tilted 90 degrees, so it stands upright–but the weight, construction, and sound are those of a grand. In the case of the Schimmel, that’s a crystalline, bell-like purity; it’s not hard to fall in love with it.

I’m not sure whether it was the same day, but I do know that we wound up buying the piano, which we really couldn’t afford at the time: Certainly the last consumer loan we ever took out. (The piano cost more than a small car, although certainly nowhere near as much as a Boesendorfer! And this was a long time ago…although I believe the “car” comparison is still valid.)

My wife’s been playing on and off ever since. She takes a while to read music, but plays with feeling and soul. It’s purely a hobby, of course, but worth every cent we spent on the piano (and since then on tuning).

That’s not the story. This is.

A few years back, my wife bugged me to start playing. She knew that I read music (on good days, I can sight-read for singing): After all, I grew up in a Methodist household where we were all in various church choirs from an early age, and my mother had a teaching credential in music. She knew that I knew how to play the piano–my mother convinced me to play all the way through each song in the Methodist hymnal (fine four-part arrangements!) one summer, giving me some royal reward like $10 for completing the 500+ songs. And when I was in the Berkeley Community Chorus (again, a LONG time ago–at least 30 years), I rented a piano so I could hold extra practice sessions with the other baritones/basses, since we really needed the extra practice.

So I tried. And stopped.

The reason? Right up there in the title of this post. I realized something, listening to my wife play (and watching her) and listening to myself at the keyboard.

To wit: I don’t play piano. I can type the sheet music with reasonable agility: I “get the notes right.” But that’s not playing–it’s not making music.

I’d like to think I’m an acceptably good hack-level writer: I’m not just typing words.

But at the piano, I’m just typing notes. And that’s a waste of my time and no joy for the listener.

Library Dust has this post relating Katrina to the Great 1927 Flood.

Worth reading.

I was taken aback because I can’t seem to get Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927″ from his Good Old Boys tribute to the South out of my head. The song is about the 1927 flood. “Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline”: That doesn’t sound so bad right now.

I wonder whether a politician with the stature of the Kingfish is what’s needed at this point?

At some point in the ongoing set of “biblioblogosphere” discussions, I believe someone suggested that I should go ahead and list my “favorite blogs” and why they are my favorites–just as a number of people have now commented on lesser-known blogs they particularly like.

I haven’t done that, partly for the same reason I’m uncomfortable with a number of surveys: Something that became pointed when, a few years ago, the person who arranged a speech and who learned that I read science fiction asked me to name my five favorite science fiction authors.

I couldn’t. For some reason, my mind doesn’t seem to work that way.

I can’t give you a list of my five favorite science fiction authors, or my five favorite books, or my five favorite cuisines, or my five favorite movies, or my five favorite cruise destinations, or my five favorite songs or albums or musicians…or, for that matter, even my five favorite magazines. And certainly not my five favorite weblogs.

Or, for that matter, my single favorite in any of those categories.

[Yes, I can name my favorite cruise lines, but only within the relatively narrow confines of those I've been on, and within the small realm of cruise lines in general. Crystal, Radisson Seven Seas, Windstar, *maybe* Delta Queen. But since there's only one other surviving cruise line that we've been on--as well as a bunch of bankrupt or otherwise-departed lines, that's not a very meaningful list.]

I’m not claiming broad experience or a love of diversity or any of that nonsense. I just don’t seem to choose favorites in a lot of areas, at least not that I’m aware of. It may be a failing; it may just be a personality quirk. (I may not be normal, but nobody is, as Willie Nelson sez.)

Oddly enough, this allows me to check off a note that’s been in my “blog or C&I ideas” notebook for a long time–maybe a long time because it’s a personal post rather than an “about” post. It’s a piece of an unlikely-to-be-written memoir…

Yesterday, I posted a comment on this post, a “five years later” comment about Library Stuff that included some doubt as to what it was and where it was going. So did a bunch of other people: The Big Name library bloggers (of which I’m not one) pretty much agree that we all have blocks from time to time–I’m still emerging from a huge block–and that summer’s a perfect time to take a break in blogging and come back refreshed.

(A suggestion, Steven C.: Get a more reliable comment system! It took me two tries for YACCS not to time out, and more than half the time I’ve given up on commenting at Library Stuff because of YACCS/RateYourMusic problems.)

As part of my post, I included the comment “You’ll be back. (You have to hear the Austrian accent in your mind.)” [That may not be the exact wording; it's really hard to get through to YACCS comments some times, and I'm not trying yet again.]

Other than including the “congratulations on five years of service to the library field” that I failed to include in my comment–I give Steven C. a bad time now and then for being too eager to shut down “older” net media, but that’s only because he’s worth reading and paying attention to–this post [another unparseable Saturday morning sentence, almost done] is because I wasn’t really hearing the Governator saying “I’ll be back” when I wrote the post.

I was really hearing Lucifer, in the guise of Randy Newman, singing “I’ll be back on top again, running things…”–from You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down, one of the many great songs on Newman’s, um, less than wildly best-selling musical-on-CD, Randy Newman’s Faust. (I have the single-CD version; some day, I’ll get the two-CD version…)

As I thought about it, I decided that comparing Steven C. to Lucifer might be misinterpreted. And that almost nobody’s ever heard the Newman song (Randy Newman says the royalties from Faust should keep his daughters in toothpaste through college). And that some folks hereabouts might take offense at what I suspect is Newman’s view of religion, as expressed in the wonderful Glory Train.

The point? None, really: It is, after all, a Saturday in August that’s likely to be hot. I’m working at my splendiferous new 19″ Sony LCD (yes, my wife figured out a way to protect the screen from our cats–it involves a cheap Target poster frame’s plexiglass front panel, two cup hooks, and some Velcro straps). The day’s going to be another hot one.

Those of you not hung up on “sacrilege” might enjoy Randy Newman’s Faust. It features James Taylor as the Lord–I mean, who else?–and some great work from Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, and Don Henley. Gainesville is one of the prettiest “city-related songs” (it’s a love song of sorts) in Newman’s enormous city-related catalog. Feels Like Home is another wonderful ballad. And, before it turns into a religious discussion, Glory Train is a classic upbeat spiritual anthem.

Not that anyone cares, but here’s the answer to the trivia question posted here.

• Gabe Kaplan has played in at least one final table (the televised table) on the World Poker Tour: He’s become a fairly accomplished poker player.
• Gabe Kaplan is probably best known for playing Mr. Kotter on Welcome Back, Kotter on TV many years ago (1975-1979).
• The side trip to Coconut Grove: John B. Sebastian wrote and sang the theme song on Welcome Back, Kotter–”Welcome Back,” one of the nicer TV theme songs (from the days when TV shows actually had theme songs, lyrics and all.
• And John B. Sebastian was the lead singer and primary writer for the Lovin’ Spoonful, a group that released “Coconut Grove” (a lovely ballad). End of the side trip.
• A 21-year-old actor established himself playing Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter–one John Travolta.
• One of John Travolta’s more interesting roles more recently was Michael, the cigarette-smoking angel, in Michael (1996).
• (Some of) the music for Michael, including the song “Heaven is My Home,” was written by Randy Newman.

OK, seven steps.

The gist: my personal website has moved–to waltcrawford.name.

If you’re a traditionalist, http://waltcrawford.com will work (and if you’re really a traditionalist, so will www.waltcrawford.com).

If you’re wondering, waltcrawford.name is hosted by the same fine host as WebJunction and a whole bunch of other library-type sites, including this weblog: lishost.org.

“Losing it”? Well, the walt.crawford.home.att.net site now consists of a note that my website has moved and a link to the new page. Right now, I’m paying att.worldnet $19.95/month to keep that page up (since I’ve moved on to SBC Yahoo! DSL, and that account includes dialup if I need it). I won’t pay that for very long–two or three months at the outside.

Which means my primo ranking in web search engines is likely to be useless for a while. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the new site to reach the first page of results…

Jim Croce? Well, I first registered waltcrawford.com. When I told my wife about it and about the newish “.name” domainspace, she thought I really should use waltcrawford.name as a domain–after all, until/unless I offer some items for sale, it’s not commercial, but it’s based on my name.

So, thanks to 1and1.com (the registrar I used: I could not get godaddy.com’s order form to stop asking for nonexistant mandatory form elements–and 1and1.com is cheaper, at $5.99/year), “I got a name.”

If you’re wondering, there’s nothing new on the new site–but I’ve moved over almost all of the old junk, dated as it may be.

Update: I really do need to thank Blake Carver for easing the transition to LIShost. I’m still a novice at all this DNS and SSH and similar stuff…and having a web editor/FTP client that shows nicely abbreviated forms of Unix directories doesn’t help a lot.