Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Ed Craver and Esther Golton make my Monday!

“It could feel as overwhelming as standing in a room with too many masterpieces”

On Monday morning at 07:01 here in Singapore I wasn’t tucked in bed asleep, I was plugged into the computer listening to Ed Craver reading some of his brilliant prose and works on Whole Wheat Radio!

Ed Craver and Esther Golton at the Wheat Palace in Talkeetna, Alaska, USA
Ed Craver and Esther Golton at the Wheat Palace in Talkeetna, Alaska, USA

I was expecting to type up a short review of Mr Craver’s readings shortly after hearing them, but as I sit here listening to how much Esther Golton would love to grow lots and lots of sweet corn, I’m absolutely, completely speechless. It’s as though anything I attempt to put into words here would be hopelessly insufficient, if that makes any sense at all. I’ve rewritten this entire post now well over a dozen times, and it still seems inadequate!

Mr Craver took us to the rich farming land in Alaska, to his Island with his livestock, even to a sticky situation he found himself in involving a gigantic boar and a certain sensitive operation! The imagery he conjured up with his brilliant grasp of language was intoxicating and transported me right to frigid Alaskan winters as I sat on my balcony on the seventh floor of our apartment block in hot, humid downtown Singapore.

Ed Craver and Esther Golton on the other side of the planet on an early Monday morning
Ed Craver and Esther Golton on the other side of the world on an early Monday morning

As a young man who grew up entirely in cities around Australia and Asia, Mr Craver’s stories of farm life and living out in one of the most isolated places on earth particularly touched me, and his wicked and witty sense of humour literally had my laughing out loud, much to the dismay of my sister trying to sleep in the room next door!

And to top it off, we had Esther singing Shadu during intermission… what’s the technical musical term I’m looking for again? Oh yeah… YAY!

I’m hoping Jimbob will upload this as an audio magazine so that if you couldn’t catch the performace you can listen later. Heck I want to be able to hear it again myself!

ASIDE: Corn corn! Sweet corn! I’d grow lots of corn!
Corn corn! Sweet corn! All I’d grow is corn!

So there ends my hopelessly inadequate review of Ed Craver Live at the Wheat Palace with Esther Golton. Thank you guys, you were brilliant and made a usually dull and depressing Monday morning into the high of my week! Cheers :-D

From WWR: The Renovators Don’t Ski

My current dangerous musical obsession from Whole Wheat Radio is The Renovators! From their artist page:

Need a change of view? Call The Renovators! Adjustments to the spirit? Installments of humor? Try The Renovators!! A new attic or front porch? RENOVATORS!!!! They have the tools. They know the styles.

The Berger Brothers, Ted Hemberger on drums and Al Hemberger on bass and vocals, have made a name for themselves recording and playing throughout the Northeast.

Get renovated!

They have an official website, and their music is available from CDBaby.

The song that started this obsession is the hilarious, upbeat and fun song I Don’t Ski off the album Rhythm and Blueprints.

I don’t ski

I’ve got a bad knee
Please, let me be
Don’t wanna ski
I don’t ski

But, that’s just me
You may disagree
Do you want to ski? Feel free
I don’t ski

Pardon me
I’d rather go climb a tree
Or stay at home, And have tea
I don’t ski

I don’t chickadee,
It’s too bourgeoisie
I have no pedigree, I’m no VIP
I don’t ski

I hereby decree
So, get away from me
And MYOB
Because I don’t ski

Nor on snow, lake or sea
Not 1, 2 or 3
Tell the powers that be
I’ll be in my MPV
I’m heading to Miami

Welcome home Esther!

For those who follow the developments over on Whole Wheat Radio, the queen of the airwaves Esther Golton has just arrived back from her latest musical tour!

Jim and Esther at the Wheat Palace, Talkeetna!

I know I speak for all the wheaties, wheatheads and wheatypeoples when I say it’s good to have you back, and we’re all looking forward to hearing your voice again from time to time on the morning shows with Jim. Cheers from Singapore!

My submitted Whole Wheat logo

If you don’t know about Whole Wheat Radio, it’s an online radio station produced in Talkeetna Alaska, in the States. They play only independent music, and have a thriving listener community which I’m proud to be a part of. You can rate songs you hear, you can edit their wiki pages and if you listen in for long enough you might hear Jim and Esther speaking live :).

Sleek Openbox in KDE on FreeBSD

We all readily admit that KDE is the greatest desktop environment ever developed for BSD, Linux, Solaris and other Unix-like operating systems, but that’s not to say it can be improved by, or complimented with, other software.

ASIDE: Some people may not agree with my statement that KDE is the greatest desktop environment ever developed for Unix-like operating systems. I readily admit that Xfce is also very nice, especially when you’re using lots of GTK+ applications.

If you’re a GNOME person, well I guess we can’t all be perfect ;-)

Case in point, the Openbox window manager. Window managers draw the widgets, title bars, resize handles and other elements onto application windows. Desktop environments such as KDE, GNOME or Xfce bundle their own window managers along with software developed specifically for their environments, such as Konqueror for KDE.

Despite this bundling, it it is possible to replace the default window manager with one that you choose. You may do this to reduce memory usage, change functionality, or even just for a different visual style.

Openbox running in KDE (with Amarok listening to Whole Wheat Radio!)
Openbox running in KDE (with Amarok listening to Whole Wheat Radio!)

To use Openbox instead of Kwin in KDE on a FreeBSD (or similarly configured) machine:

  1. Update your ports tree, then
    cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/openbox/ && make install clean.
    Alternatively, just install the package with pkg_add -rv openbox
  2. Open the .xinitrc config file in your home directory
  3. Comment out # exec startkde (add a pound sign / hash)
  4. Add exec openbox-kde-session

For NetBSD, you’ll want to update pkgsrc then /usr/pkgsrc/wm/openbox/ && make install clean clean-depends instead in step 1.

To make it easier to change visual themes, the layout of the widgets and so forth, you might also want to install the ObConf tool which is also available in FreeBSD Ports and in NetBSD’s pkgsrc.

John Williams and all that… jazz

Not to be confused with the Aussie gitarist John Williams who I am also a fan of.

I think it’s something different when you’re listening to Whole Wheat Radio or any other internet radio station and something comes on that you recognise. I’ve discovered so many artists listening to WWR (Kevin So, Guy Clark, Esther Golton (d’uh!), Doofus, The Philadelphia Jug Band, Gypsy Jazz, Jim Brannigan, Caleb Coffee), but this is the first time I’ve come across someone I already knew.

I originally discovered John Williams not on Whole Wheat, but on Magnatune, the record label and website that isn’t evil:

I’m a guitar player, mostly electric, steel string acoustic too. I do session work, songwriting, and production projects. I have a well-outfitted home studio for songwriting and some production, and I also work with a nationally acclaimed pro studio here in Seattle.

I love his blues and jazz compositions and really appreciate the depth of his music. His Dusty Porch and Long Ride Home albums are on my (increasingly lengthly) Whole Wheat shopping list. My favourite song of his so far is Almond Joy which you can preview before you buy on Magnatune.

Given Magnatunes’ very liberal and friendly licencing policy for podcasters, I might play a sample on the next Rubenerd Show… hey I hadn’t thought of that. I’m smarter than I look.

John Williams links:

Is Whole Wheat Radio down?

Just came back from working (on a Saturday, argh!) only to discover that I couldn’t access the Whole Wheat Radio website, and both the low and high audio streams just keep buffering without sound :(.

Screenshot on my DIY Athlon desktop (FreeBSD 6.2 of course!):

Whole Wheat Radio error :(

Our DSL connection here in Malaysia is far from reliable so quite possibly this is a local problem, or it could be something else. Anyone else having trouble? I was all ready to put in another Kevin So request :(.

The only other thing I can think of is maybe it’s offline for maintainence because at this time of day most of North America is asleep.

UPDATE: Sunday, 01:30am: The streams not being able to connect were a result of my computer changing its IP address. DHCP sucks. But I still can’t access the site

Kuala Lumpur International Airport WiFi is sweet!

So I was at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA to people in the know) for a long drawn out reason which I won’t attempt to explain here, and I found myself trying their free WiFi access. Given my experience with TMNet’s WiFi at the Starbucks coffee shops here I was a bit skeptical about how good it was going to be. As it turns out it was faster than out DSL at home!

As you would know if you read this site in any manner resembling regularity I love screenshots, so here are some from my WiFi adventures :D.

Here’s the initial welcome screen when I logged on for free on my MacBook Pro:

klia_mac_thumb.png

Here’s the welcome screen when I booted into Haruhi KDE FreeBSD ;):

Haruhi KDE FreeBSD

And what better thing to do on free WiFi network in a Malaysian airport but listen to Whole Wheat Radio?

klia_wholewheatradio_thumb.png