Now in Chicago, sitting in the lobby of the W Hotel looking out over Lake Michigan.

One of my goals while I'm here is to locate a good blues and/or jazz bar. Anything else on the must-do list for a short Chicago visit?

Some of you may remember the Sef Gonzales case, and the ensuing furore about the house being sold without disclosure of the fact that the murders occurred there. Since then, some real estate contracts have started featuring a "Gonzales disclosure". This one, forwarded by a friend, takes the cake for being the most comprehensive and disturbing:

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Videos are too much hard work, but I think I've figured out how to embed a Flash sound player, which means that I can now share little snippets of sound.

Here's some mucking around I did last night with an unusual scale... insert picture of unknownblogger with his harem of beautiful girls in the hot Arabian sun...

Following up from yesterday's entry, tonight I successfully executed my first Telecaster string change (go me ( Read more... )

I just broke my first guitar string. I feel like there should be some sort of initiation rite that goes with this...

Ah well, a change of strings was well overdue!

Spotted by my boss...


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For the message tone on my mobile phone, I usually use the Nokia "Special" tone, which goes dot-dot-dot dash-dash dot-dot-dot (SMS). I'm sure other manufacturers have something similar ( Read more... )

I've been really enjoying my guitar adventures recently, and I thought I would try and regularly post a video, since it's good motivation to practice. This week's instalment is the intro to Santana's Europa, which is something that I've been playing for a while but I was experimenting today with playing over a backing track.

I'm using the ( Read more... )

Last night I was at a small and fun acoustic evening at the Roxbury Hotel featuring Hayley Legg, Ruby for Lucy, and The John Hardaker Direction - the last of which featured a double bass, guitar and flute doing some pretty cool jazz stuff ( Read more... )

From some old IBM slides:

This presentation compares apples and oranges.

• At least they are both types of fruit!