They Are Up!

I have posted two entire new gallery addi­tions to the entirely new gallery of pic­tures at the entirely new GrayChatham.com.

Enjoy.

 

So close it hurts

Many of you will happy to know that at the brand new GrayChatham.com I have relaunched the Gray Gallery as it was on the for­mer Geekamongus.com site. This means only one thing: new pic­tures will be com­ing very, very soon. Tonight, if you are lucky.

 

More Free Music

The fine peo­ple at the Red Fer­ret Jour­nal have col­lected a list of sites that offer free music for down­load. There are over 1,000,000 songs avail­able — all with­out a hitch!

So grab your iPod or what­ever device you store your MP3’s on and head over to the WikiM.

Feel like read­ing some heavy mate­r­ial? Check out the next big (or is it lit­tle?) thing: Quan­tum Com­put­ing.

What’s that? You like the free stuff? If you are in the US, you paid for the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, so why not take advan­tage of it and grab some cool Hub­ble Wall­pa­per for your desk­top. There are some really neat images of Thing In Space.

And this is just too weird to pass up. I’m not entirely sure this is sanc­tioned by Burger King, but you must check out the Sub­servient Chicken. Type in some instruc­tions and it will do what you ask. This is just…well, eerie.

 

Complicated

For the last year and a half or so I have been using Quicken Quick­books for man­ag­ing the finances of my home-based busi­ness, Asheville Tech­nolo­gies. I bought the soft­ware orig­i­nally think­ing it would take care of all the stuff I’m bad at: remem­ber­ing to send recur­ring invoices, prepar­ing taxes, and keep­ing track of my check­ing account.

Last night, after Quick­books crashed for the umpteenth time, I decided it was time for a change. The pro­gram was just too com­pli­cated and obfus­cated for my needs, and I found myself not even want­ing to open it when I needed to.

I searched high and low on Google, and finally dis­cov­ered a gem of an appli­ca­tion. It is called CG Invoicer, and is pro­duced by a com­pany called Chicken Girl Soft­ware. Being a fan of barn­yard ani­mals, I knew it was the app for me. The sim­plic­ity and ease of use is exactly what I was look­ing for.

  • Cre­ate a product
  • Cre­ate a client
  • Gen­er­ate an invoice
  • Send invoice via email

It’s unfor­tu­nate that Quicken doesn’t offer some­thing that is watered down for those of us who don’t need to gen­er­ate pro­jected earn­ings in 10 years with cus­tomiz­able bar graphs. Quicken comes with a 200 some-odd page man­ual and has vol­umes of books writ­ten about it. CG Invoicer was so sim­ple to use and easy to fig­ure out, no man­ual or help file was included.

The point of all this is that these big com­pa­nies spend all this money to pack a pro­gram with fea­tures, while a small out­fit can make some­thing sim­ple and func­tional and charge a frac­tion of the cost. This con­cept trans­lates into many other areas too.

The ‘kewl’ news of late for me is that my employer is buy­ing me a G4 Power­book. That’s a Mac lap­top for all you moms and dads ;)

Oh, the mobility!

The bad news is that the fender ben­der my wife had in a park­ing lot last week was her fault and totalled the other person’s car.

Grrr…mobility can bite you in the butt!

 

Made in 1998

Even though Allmusic.com’s new web site was released this week, by tak­ing a look at it, one would think it was cre­ated in 1998. A warn­ing mes­sage to users of non-Internet Explorer browsers is at the top:

Notice: You are access­ing allmusic.com with a browser that is not cur­rently sup­ported. The appear­ance and func­tion­al­ity of the site could be impacted. allmusic.com is opti­mized for Inter­net Explorer 5.5 and above for Windows.

It makes one think they took a time machine back to 1998 to find a web devel­op­ment team. This one wins the “Missed The Bus to 2004″ award.

 

Pickin’ & Grinnin’

Last night marked the first time in nearly 4 years that I played music with Ty and Lance, both of whom were in the bang-tango Sec­ond String Blue­grass Band with me. We met up at Asheville’s Shindig On The Green, a weekly pickin’ party and blue­grass con­cert attended by a cou­ple thou­sand people.

It took a few songs for me to dust off the cob­webs from my fin­gers, but I quickly found myself back into the flow of play­ing my Banjo. We were graced by the pres­ence of Wayne Erb­sen, old-time/bluegrass musi­cian extra­or­di­naire, who accom­pa­nied us with his award-winning fid­dle play­ing. It was a great 3 hours, and made me want to start get­ting back into the banjo again.

We were asked to get onstage and per­form for the crowd, but we all felt a lit­tle iffy about that, so we declined. Maybe next week ;)

For those of you who wish to check out some infa­mous Sec­ond String record­ings, I have them posted at my free Mp3 page, Hober.tk.