kpgraham

Anyone who drives faster than you is a jerk. Anyone who drives slower is an idiot.

Harp player here. When I first started playing, I had a Gindick's book, Country and Blues Harmonica For the Musically Hopeless. This was maybe 35 years ago. I would recommend that book and the tape (cd? mp3?) that comes with it, for beginners. You can't see the notes you are playing on a harmonica. You have to hear them. You start by playing clear single notes and then shaping the note by articulating eeeh-yah or something similar and the note magically bends. You have to hear the note so you can tell if the note bends. It is very organic, and I don't think an app will help much. It may confirm what is happening, but it is not going to help if you can't do it. Personally, I played along with Little Walter's greatest hits on my hour long morning commute, and eventually it was just natural to bend the notes at the right time. My advice is to look for Jason Ricci on YouTube. He has hundreds or thousands of videos on beginner to advanced subjects. He is a weird dude, but I've never known a better teacher.

Howie the Crab was a weirdly warm place on social media. The daily cute pictures and videos of a pet land crab attracted hundreds of thousands of followers. The funny hats, visiting squirrels, a hedgehog, and friendly narrative always made the feed a nice place to visit. Rest in Peace Howie.

Damn! One of my old books can be found in the Anna's Archive search. The book has been out of print for years. I pity the Meta users who get results based on something that I wrote. (Check Anna's for 'Keith P. Graham', and the first book listed is mine.)

I got work with a Xerox Star when I had a job at Western Union. It was wonderful. It took many years for Mac and Windows to catch up.

I have always thought that Dylan showed up drunk, and they started late, so he could sober up a bit. It was New Year's Eve, 1971.

I was there. It started three hours late. They showed a samurai movie with subtitles while we waited. My GF was sick from all the smoke. Dylan seemed drunk. But it is a fantastic album!

It used to be possible to make a radio receiver out of a diaper pin and a blue razor blade. The coating on the blade acted like a crystal. You needed a cheap pair of headphones or a tiny transistor radio speaker. I made one when I was a kid, and I could clearly pick up 77 ABC in New York City from 50 miles away. Razor blades aren't blue anymore, but there must be other things that work.

Same here. In the 1950s and 1960s, I never saw any deer near where I live. Now they are a nuisance animal.

In the early 1980s, I got a job at Western Union (the old telecom company, not the thing it became). I was programming special reports in 4GL languages like RAMIS and MARK IV plus a little COBOL, and I was asked at one point to see if I could find a use for the Xerox Star, a descendant of the Alto. It was the first time I had ever heard of a mouse, and I had never seen a real GUI before. The system was very cool, but my experience was that it was best used as a word processor and typesetting machine. It had a programming environment, but I did have a language manual and was never able to write any programs for it.

I loved the machine, and even wrote part of a short story using the word processor. They moved it to corporate headquarters after two weeks, so I did not get very far with it, but I remember loving the experience. Windows was a poor substitute to the feel of the Star interface.

I repair tube guitar amplifiers from time to time, and I cringe when I see the 50L6 power tube and the 35Z4 rectifier. These tubes light up like lightbulbs, and run so hot that the amplifier case is often charred near them. The chassis shows staining from the heat, and the plastic tube socket can even melt. These amps always hum because the same reasoning that goes for the cheap on the circuit design also uses cheap and low value capacitors. I hate these circuits. Several times I've gutted the chassis, screwed a power transformer in place and wired the amp as a tweed champ, Gibson Skylark or Premier 50, so I have a chassis with the right number of tube sockets and pots, and I get a brand-new vintage amp for the cost of a used transformer. I have a Gretsch amp that had two 50L6 tubes, that made a beautiful 1957 Fender Pro amp and sounds wonderful.