The Bull Og

Offline since 1976. Online since 1994.

Seven Billion - The City Solution

"Per capita, city dwellers tread more lightly [...] Their apartments take less energy to heat, cool, and light than do houses. Most important, people in dense cities drive less. Their destinations are close enough to walk to, and enough people are going to the same places to make public transit practical. In cities like New York, per capita energy use and carbon emissions are much lower than the national average."

select vs select_tag vs collection_select

Love the simple, rules-of-thumb write-up on which to use, when.

"Use select when you require a basic drop-down selection box populated
with data not sourced from a database."

"Use select_tag when you require a drop-down selection box populated
with data not sourced from a database, and are happy to hard code the
default selected option tag."

"Use collection_select when you require a drop-down selection box,
whose source is a model/object."

http://shiningthrough.co.uk/Select-helper-methods-in-Ruby-on-Rails

From My Time With Marzuki

One day, many years ago when I was finishing my undergrad at a small college in West Michigan, I sat in as a session drummer for a local band.  Indie folk rock wasn't my thing but I knew a couple of people in the band so I did them a favor.  

Not long thereafter, Shannon Stephens - lead singer of the band - handed me a cassette recording of that session. I tossed it in a box and forgot about it.  Little did I know, that band - Marzuki - would go on to do big things in the folk indie rock scene.

About two years ago, I saw mention of Sufjan Stevens in some mainstream media, but couldn't believe my eyes.  It didn't take long (a few searches) to find out that it was one-and-the-same.  

I became curious about the location of that cassette from so many years before, but couldn't find it in any of my boxes in San Francisco. When I was last in Michigan, about a year ago, I sifted through my dusty belongings and finally found it. 

For the last year, it collected dust again. This evening, though, I finally sat down and with the help of instructions from Lifehacker (and a bit of help from my wife Visda to get Audacity set up,) I digiitzed all three tracks at a little over ten minutes of music.  Here's a shot of the cassette and my wife's tape-player (which had also been gathering dust as you can imagine):

Tape_player_and_marzuki_tape

I was ecstatic to digitze all three songs (hooking up the tape-player to my Mac Mini and capturing the output went smoothly) and wanted to share them, but since I'm not exactly sure if I have the copyright to post the entire songs, I decided to sample them and post to Soundcloud to test the waters.  

Please excuse the cleanliness of the edits: it was my first time using Audacity. 

In the first entitled Why Don't You Want Me, you'll hear me on bongos.  

In the second track - Burn Through Me - I switch to drumset.  You'll hear Sufjan on recorder.

In the final track, don't strain to hear too much of me: best I can tell from the recording (and remember) - I sat this one out, but do listen for Sufjan's recorder again. Here's Longing: 

 

 Enjoy.