Where’s My White Shirt And Cigarette?

I’ve been getting into presentation recording and screencasting a bit recently. It’s been an interesting experience. My first pass at it used a small mike I scraped up from my musician wife, and it was a pain trying to get it sound just right. (This is besides all the logistics of trying to make a quiet recording in a home office for the amount time necessary to record an hourlong presentation – stuff the dogs in a room, generally alone in the house, not a time of day with school buses roaring past, etc. etc.)

On the recommendation of my friend Dan Holme I bought a Samson Podcasting Kit, which comes with a prosumer (professional / consumer) quality cardioid USB microphone, a professional-looking vibration eliminating suspension mount (below), a stand to put ‘em in, and a shiny silver carrying case that makes me feel like I should be handcuffed to it.

Get Camtasia set up, get the mike level right, start up a VM and run the preso from it so you can run Slide Show in a contained size, capture that screen, put on your headphones so you can review the recording, open your printed notes if you’re a perfectionist like me…and be damned if I don’t feel like Edward R. Murrow or something! (With dogs barking in the background instead of bombs dropping.)

I found I even ended up holding up the notes exactly like radio announcers do, because there’s a very narrow sweet spot where your mouth is positioned at the mike correctly and you can still see the notes. The only thing Ed didn’t have is the copy of 64-bit Windows 7 in front of him :).

Technorati Tags: podcasting,camtasia,Samson,Edward R. Murrow,Murrow

Native OS Boot from VHD: The Windows 7 Way

Those of us that need to use a server OS from what’s normally perceived as a client (e.g., demonstrating a Windows Server feature or application on our notebook during a breakout session) have had to work with different ways to achieve it, and none were all that convenient.

Usually it entailed taking a SWAG* at the amount of disk space you needed for your primary OS, then splitting the volume to leave room for the second OS. In the days of small notebook disks, these estimations were precious indeed. Another option was to install a second hard drive – usually requiring you to lose the CD/DVD-ROM drive. (Hey, you usually worked rather than watched movies on the airplane anyway, yah?) The more daring of us simply installed the server OS and used it as we would a client OS, generally sacrificing device support and power management in the process. I could never quite do that; I valued the notebook-specific features too much when I traveled.

The situation has gotten a whole lot better with Windows 7. (What hasn’t?) With Windows 7 on virtualization-compliant hardware like my ThinkPad T61P, you can boot directly to a .VHD file.

What does this mean?

• No more partition guessing. Your second (or third, or fourth) OS simply resides in a .VHD file on your primary partition.
• It’s flexible. You can add and remove OSes as easily as moving the files around and modifying the boot menu with BCDEDIT.
• It’s fast. I’ve not run any tests, but it sure seems to be as fast as right off the metal. I wouldn’t have known the difference from a “real” boot. (What is real any more, anyway?)
• Your other partitions appear as  D:, E:, etc. on the VHD-booted OS. All your physical disk volume data is visible; I change the location of My Documents on the secondary OS so it points to my primary documents folder.

Steps to book a second OS from VHD

1. Create a .VHD containing an OS of your choice. I probably wouldn’t bother with Windows XP, because if you’re running Windows 7 you can install Windows Virtual PC for free and have a bootable XP image. You can build your image on either Hyper-V or Virtual PC.
   
2. Make a copy of the VHD in case something goes wrong!
   
3. run SYSPREP:
   
   %windir%/system32/sysprep/sysprep.exe /generalize
   /shutdown
   
   to create an image that will customize itself according to the new hardware it finds itself on. If you don’t run SYSPREP, be sure to remove the integration add-ins from your VHD before you copy it over.
   
4. Copy the VHD to your notebook.
   
5. Configure your boot menu to recognize the VHD. For this, I lifted – er, “reused” -  the following from a TechNet article:

To add a native-boot VHD to an existing Windows 7 boot menu

If you are deploying the VHD to a computer with an existing Windows 7 or Windows Server® 2008 R2 installation, you can use the BCDedit tool to make the new VHD bootable and add it to the boot menu. For more information about using the BCDedit tool, see this Microsoft Web site.

Note : Before you begin, you can back up your BCD store using the BCDedit tool with the /export option. For example, at a command prompt, type: bcdedit /export c:\bcdbackup

1. Copy an existing boot entry for a Windows 7 installation. You will then modify the copy for use as the VHD boot entry. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /copy {default} /d "R2 VHD Boot"

   Where “R2 VHD Boot” is what will appear in the boot menu. When the BCDedit command completes successfully, it returns a {GUID} as output in the Command Prompt window.
   

2. Locate the {GUID} in the command-prompt output for the previous command. Copy the GUID, including the braces, to use in the following steps. (I recommend enabling QuickEdit in the window’s properties so you can easily cut and paste the GUID. )
   
3. Set the device and osdevice options for the VHD boot entry. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[c:]\VMs\windows7.vhd
   bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[c:]\VMs\windows7.vhd
   

   or whatever you’ve named the VHD. Note the syntax for the VHD location.

4. Set the boot entry for the VHD as the default boot entry. When the computer restarts, the boot menu will display all of the Windows installations on the computer and boot into the VHD after the operating-system selection countdown completes. At a command prompt, type:
   bcdedit /default {guid}
   

   (Being conservative and not familiar with BCDEDIT, I went into the System properties on my Windows 7 boot and made sure that Windows 7 was the default, in case something went horribly wrong.)

5. Some x86-based systems require a boot configuration option for the kernel in order to detect certain hardware information and successfully native-boot from a VHD. At a command prompt, type:

   bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on
   (I did this on my x64 system too.)

   
   

That’s it. You should now be able to shut down and reboot into your secondary OS. It will complete its installation from the sysprep, and you’ll be ready to go.

There’s one more really useful step if your secondary OS is Windows 2008 R2. Even though it’s from the same code base as Windows 7, R2 doesn’t seem to automatically recognize range of hardware. So, when you open up Device Manager (devmgmt.msc from the Run menu for the lazy like me) you’ll probably end up with a collection of yellow exclamation points for hardware that isn’t recognized. You can correct most of these errors with this trick: Right-click on them, choose Update Drivers, and point the update location to d:\windows\system32\DriverStore\FileRepository. This is where the Windows 7 drivers for your hardware are stored. If the hardware works on Windows 7 you can make it work on R2 with this trick. You can also update drivers that did load on R2 – but with the generic Microsoft drivers -  with the manufacturer-specific drivers automatically downloaded from Windows Update while you were booted in Windows 7.

* Scientific wild-assed guess.

** Update ** Boot from VHD will only be available in Windows 7 Ultimate Edition.

Technorati Tags: Boot from VHD,Windows 7,VHD,Windows Server 2008 R2,R2

Analyzing your Windows 7 Notebook Battery Performance

One of the many nice features of Windows 7 is its increased energy efficiency. (Anything that lets me finish a movie on a long flight is goodness!) What I didn’t know until now is that you can actually generate a report that outlines your exact power usage and how to improve it (though somewhat cryptically).

Just run

powercfg -energy -output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\Energy_Report.html

from an elevated command prompt (I created a batch file, then a shortcut to it with the Run As Administrator option checked). It will run for 60 seconds, then drop a very detailed energy report on your desktop in HTML format. 

I haven’t analyzed the report other than to see that I’m burning electrons at a good rate. But it’s on purpose as I’m running in high performance profile at the moment. Thanks to http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4569-power-efficiency-diagnostics-report.html for this tip! For more information on Windows 7 energy efficiency, please see

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/06/windows-7-energy-efficiency.aspx

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,power efficiency,battery efficiency report

You’d Think I’d Learn

Today was the Plano Bike Association’s Memorial Day ridefest, and like last year I wanted to participate. I’ve (finally) been riding more regularly, encouraged by the fact that as beautiful as my   is to look at, it’s better to ride.

In the start-up confusion, with probably a hundred cyclists milling around in the Arbor Hills Nature Preserve parking lot, you have to make your decisions fast – and live with the result. Today I put an exclamation point to my previous post; that which doesn’t give you a heart attack makes you stronger.

“25 miles, over here! 14-15 MPH!” Hmmm, my back is sore today but that’s too slow.

“50 miles, over here! Medium pace!” Hmmm, might be too long. I haven’t ridden more than a 30 mile ride yet, but the speed has been fairly high.

“40 miles, faster pace!” The distance is right, but I can’t quite tell about the speed. I carefully eye the riders lining up for the group; I don’t see too many emaciated hammerheads in it. I opt for shorter distance vs. speed.

Well. Long story short, we averaged about 22 MPH for the 17 miles I was with them before I cracked and was spat out the back of the peleton. I could hang with them in the flat, but just didn’t have the depth yet in my legs to accelerate up the hills the way they did.  One of the ride leaders paced me and another blown-up rider back up to the main group. I was composing what I was going to say to my wife to have her drive all the way out to the airport to pick me up when we stopped at a convenience store.

The 50 miler group was there also, and I shifted over to them. I was none too happy about adding an extra ten miles to my ride when I was already tired, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. Thankfully, at 16 to 17 MPH  the pace was more to my taste (and condition), and I completed the day with 54 miles at about 18 MPH – slightly longer, and slightly faster, than anyone else in that group due to my dalliance with the hammerheads. And let me tell you, a measly 1 MPH difference in average speed is a BIG difference in effort!

Walking slowly to the park pavilion after the ride, I received a tweet from Lance Armstrong that said, “Ouch ouch ouch, and more ouch.” Apparently today in the Giro d’Italia was really hard. But at least I was in good company!

After a little post-ride repair work (warm bath, back wrap), I feel pretty good. Other than the two minutes it takes me to climb the stairs…

Technorati Tags: Plano Bicycle Association

What Steve Larsen taught all of us

I learned from no less than Lance Armstrong today that Steve Larsen died Tuesday evening after collapsing during a running workout. He apparently suffered a heart attack.

This wasn’t the death of some couch potato salaryman trying to   get in shape for his class reunion. Steve Larsen was probably the only professional who competed and won major races as a mountain biker, road biker and triathlete. He had a wife and five children. And he was all of 39.

 

To quote Velonews:

Larsen began racing in the 1980s and was on the Motorola team for three years in the early 1990s, racing the Giro d'Italia and other major European events. He then moved into mountain biking, winning the NORBA National Cross-Country title in 1997 and 2000.

In 2001, he switched to triathlon, qualifying for the Ironman in his first year in the sport, and finishing ninth at the Hawaii event. He also competed in XTerra offroad triathlons. He was reportedly the only American to compete in the world championships for road, mountain bike, track, cyclocross and triathlon. He was a member of the 1993 U.S. world road championship team that helped Lance Armstrong win his first world title.

When something like this happens, the second thing everyone does (hopefully it’s the second, after feeling sorrowful) is measure how close they are to the deceased’s situation. This is, of course, what’s bothered me: He was in better shape than all of us.

I’m significantly older than Steve was. I always comforted myself in the knowledge that (in addition to checkups) I push myself to my maximum heart rate often enough that if I was going to have a heart attack, it would have happened by now.

So much for that theory.

But…tonight is a beautiful spring evening in Texas, not even much wind, so I went for a club ride with the Plano Bike Association. 30 miles @ 17 MPH average with peaks of 25-26. Getting back in one piece, acquitted myself without TOO much wheelsucking, feeling thoroughly exercised like only a road ride does, shower, and spend a few minutes in the evening backyard watching the martins chirp like parakeets on steroids.

Get out there, accept the reasonable risks you always have, and don’t shy away just because you don’t repair as fast as you used to. Woody Allen once said, “90% of success in life is just showing up.” Show up at work, show up at the dojo, the starting line, the conference, the volunteer booth. That’s all you can do, isn’t it?

I think Lance has a good summary of the situation:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go do some pullups…

Technorati Tags: Steve Larsen,Lance Armstrong,Plano Bike Association

Creating a Virtual Machine Manager Guest OS Profile for volume clients that use KMS

I’m sitting in a VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) session by Mikael Nystrom called “Building The Master Image”. He provided an answer to a problem I’ve been wondering about (but honestly haven’t really pursued) for a long time.

The OS Guest Profile is a VMM component that specifies the operating system configuration to be used when VMM builds a new VM. When you build an OS Guest Profile, one of the fields you must complete is the product key. No problem, right? Well yes-ish. If you are building a Windows 2008 / R2 or Vista / Windows 7 machine in volume configuration, the preferred method is to use KMS. That’s the session I gave yesterday.

The problem is that a volume-built KMS client does not require a license key – indeed there’s no place for it. And there’s no equivalent key supplied with your license to put in the profile’s license key field. So what’s a VMM admin to do?

What I just learned is that there’s a table in the Volume Activation Deployment Guide that contains KMS client setup keys to be used exactly for that purpose. Depending on which OS you’re building, you use the corresponding key in the Guest OS Profile. You can bet I’m going to include this in the next version of my Volume Activation talk.

Technorati Tags: KMS,Volume activation,VMM,SCVMM,Virtual Machine Manager,license key,guest OS profile

3.74!

…out of a possible 4.0 in the evaluations for my session yesterday. 74% were “very satisified”, 26% were satisfied, and no one was anything less. One comment was that the title should have been “Activation and Licensing Demystified” (good idea), another said “Thanks for that session. Finally got it.” 91 attendees for a session on (zzzzzzzz) volume activation!

On the strength of the session, the track chair verbally invited me back next year on the spot :).

Technorati Tags: volume activation,Windows 7,Windows Server 2008,Vista,R2,Windows Server 2008 R2,microsoft

IT Manager panel discussions at Tech Ed

I had a chance yesterday morning to participate in a great IT Manager track on real-world challenges around virtualization. It was great to be able to simply sit on the panel with Edwin Yuen (aka “Ed-V”) from the virtualization team, Baldwin Ng for solution accelerators, Kevin Remde (all-round technical evangelist),  Peter Meister from Microsoft working on cloud computing efforts, Art Wittman from InfoWorld Analytics, and all the audience members that participated in the back and forth conversation. Great insights, and great fun as well!

Technorati Tags: Tech Ed,Edwin Yuen,Baldwin Ng,Kevin Remde,Peter Meister,Art Wittman,virtualization

Recession Tech (Ed)

I've gotten lazy about blogging in the last few weeks, and it suddenly occurred to me yesterday that duh, this week probably merits some comment. I'm spending the week at Tech Ed 09, Microsoft’s main conference for IT professionals.

Attendance is understandably down; there are supposedly 6,000 attendees – about half of a good year’s population. The Los Angeles Convention Center is big, and though there are a lot of people here it definitely doesn’t feel as packed as in the past.

For the first time at a conference I'm wearing three different hats. Usually nowadays I’m at a conference because I’m presenting, and this week is no exception. I’m doing a session on volume activation. (It’s not my main area of expertise, but I had to do it for Intel, it’s confusing at first look, and people really need to know about it.) For the first time, I’m working with a Microsoft product team, Technical Audience Group Marketing (TAGM), to assist them in meeting with and talking to IT pros and IT managers in sessions and roundtables. Finally,  I’m also acting as an attendee and trying to get in as many System Center and virtualization sessions as my other duties allow. So it's a busy week!

I also always try to take time to reconnect with my professional colleagues and friends - Gil, MarkM, MarkR, Rhonda, Brian, Ulf, Laura, Karen, Jeff, Sheila, Kim, Kevin - that's I'm lucky enough to know and new friends that I make while here. Probably the biggest, but least appreciated benefit of speaking at conferences is that you can develop a network of really interesting, world-class people you'd never meet otherwise. I'm a person that's perfectly content working without the minute-to-minute in person people interaction that happens in an office; I've been working from home full time for the last nine years. My circle of colleagues doesn't necessarily communicate a lot with each other in between functions. After all, they're similar personality types as I am: kinda schizophrenic because they do long periods of working by yourself, interspersed with bursts of very public presenting to hundreds of people and visiting with your friends. But we do have a great time when we get together!

Technorati Tags: Tech Ed,Microsoft

Proximity doesn’t confer talent…

Today’s an interesting day. I’ve over on Microsoft Campus in Building 99 to help review Tech Ed dry runs for the IT Manager track. 99 is a new building, with a floor-to-ceiling atrium and large stairwell. It’s the new home of Microsoft Research, which is one of the largest (in terms of $$) pure research divisions of any company in the world. That may be, but today I didn’t see any human powered helicopters or levitating Segways or the like (jet belts are SO passé).

What I did see is the former president of India giving a speech and having a Q&A session, via webcast, on an enormous movie-theater-sized screen and projector in the atrium. So interesting here on Microsoft campus, with little Priuii shuttle cars flitting about providing transportation between the little city here of buildings.

RichCopy

Just saw that my friend Joe has commented on an article by  another friend Joshua about a killer file copy utility called RichCopy. It certainly looks like the successor to the ubiquitous RoboCopy, and far more.

One of my great failings in life – besides not investing in Starbucks in the early 90’s when I did understand the value of a latte – is I never got around to writing a GUI for Robocopy, which is a command line utility. Derk Benisch of Microsoft finally did, and Josh mentions that his article on it has been viewed more than 220,000 times. <sigh> Fame and fortune continue to elude me :). So it’s a pleasure to see this integrated, GUI-based, multithreaded utility available to us all. Tell your admin friends!

North Korea

I recently heard a devastatingly accurate (and funny) description of North Korea from a British journalist:

“North Korea is like a slightly autistic child at a family gathering, throwing toys out of its pram to get attention.”

I suppose one could argue it’s throwing Molotov cocktails out of it’s pram.

It’s Hard Being A Parent

My Sunday afternoons here at Trinity Hall are numbered. On Friday my son walked out of a Great Dallas Youth Orchestra audition to rejoin next year’s orchestra, saying he wasn’t interested in it any more. He’s spent a year in it, and although a talented string bass player, never really had his heart in it. So my excuse for being down in Dallas near my favorite Irish pub ends in May.

Its a hard blow to take for a number of reasons. My wife and I are both musicians (I’m lapsed, but she’s a pro classical musician, gigging with several local orchestras) and music has always been an integral part of our household. Connor played piano from an early age, and when he reached 6th grade, we used our musical connections to have him try out a wide range of instruments so he’d be happy with his choice. (How many of us ended up playing instruments due to a random choice on our or our parent’s part? Or due to a director’s need to fill instrumentation?) Of all things, he chose double bass then later added electric bass. He was good at it, too, so he could succeed without the hated practicing. We always thought of him as a low brass player – he loves crude humor :) – and probably should have influenced him that way, as he doesn’t really relate to orchestra players. He thinks they’re too uptight and straight-laced.

As my wife and I are both martial artists (www.okinawankarateclub.com), he’s also participated in that from an early age. With a combination of that background and natural gifts, to my bemusement we have a serious jock in the household. (I was a passable gym student, but didn’t find my athletic passion until I discovered cycling and karate.) He’s going to be a captain of his high school wrestling team next year, and his MA background separates him from everyone else.

But for the last couple of years he’s been fighting us every step of the way – and he’s stupendously stubborn. We’ve finally given up on piano lessons with a wonderful piano teacher he relates to, he’s stopped his electric bass playing, and now has walked out of his GDYO opportunity for next year. He’s still in high school orchestra, but by his lights it’s so easy he coasts through it. (Of course, his director may have a different opinion.)

It’s the classic problem we’ve all heard about: Both parents and child have the child’s best interests in mind (hopefully), but both have very different opinions on how to do this. The parents (hopefully) have the long view, while the child knows and decides based on what’s in front of him. If the child is stubborn the problem’s compounded. What tears me up is watching the child narrow his options for the future based on the inconveniences of the moment. And the closing of an era with our child that’s lasted two-thirds of his life.

Ironically, just this morning I was looking over a conference presentation this morning where I’d included my own spin on Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. I think I’ve gone through most of those stages this weekend. It’s been very emotional for me – the Irish popping out rather than the stoic. And to put another twist on it, he just passed a promotional test for ikyu (first degree brown belt), which is the final test before his black belt test. He did a terrific job…but it’s far from certain that he wants his black belt. I’ve made it very clear to him this weekend that if he really does want it, it’s time to step up to the plate and act like it. Only time will tell.

Oh, I fully realize things could be a LOT worse. But nonetheless it’s stressful for me.

MVP Summit 2009!

I’m finally at the 2009 MVP Summit on Microsoft campus and downtown Seattle! Other committments kept me from arriving until today, but I hope to dive into the details as soon as possible. By popular demand, the first two days of the summit are spent cloistered with the product teams of your MVP role. For me it’s always been the directory services team; since employees tend to move on to other areas when a product’s been release, it’s been interesting to watch people come and go from the team. And of course, over the past 10 years I’ve been working closely with Microsoft I’ve grown to know a lot of people that are now in a lot of different areas.

We’ll be focusing on deep technical detail and feedback on the new features in Windows Server 2008 R2, and beyond.

Long days, long nights. I’ve loosely organized an outing tonight to a couple of Seattle’s more interesting bars, and it looks like we’ll get good attendance. This is the time when people start making cracks about how the AD world would suffer if we all got hit by a bus :).

Be an Active Directory Expert In About 50 Easy Steps

For those of you that work with AD on a part time basis - like the millions of IT generalists out there - the Directory Services team has posted a nice entry on how to get better at it. 

It's a 4600-word blog entry on the areas you need to be well-versed in if you want to be designing and administering Active Directory. It's very thorough; he mentions "The process of building the depth of knowledge required may take years to acquire. With some help and guidance I hope to reduce this time to several months." That's the truth - this sort of thing would have been really handy for me years ago. <cranky old man with bad dentures doing a Walter Brennan impression> "When I was learning about AD, I had to listen to PDC '99 session audio tapes over and over again. There was no documentation." </cranky old man with bad dentures>

You can find it at http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2009/01/30/seeing-the-domains-through-the-forest-what-you-need-to-know-to-build-your-career-in-directory-services-technologies.aspx.

Technorati Tags: Active Directory

An Extraordinary Gift

On Saturday, I received an extraordinary gift from Sean Robinson, one of our newest black belts at the Okinawan Karate Club of Dallas. He presented me with a bamboo bo (six-foot staff) hand-worked in great detail with martial arts sayings in both English and kanji, figures demonstrating waza (martial arts techniques), and artwork from my life like my name and that of my extended family, other  hobbies such as archery, music - even some Irish bits!

I'm very touched and grateful to Sean (hey, us Seans Of The Correct Spelling have to stick together). But I'm especially grateful to Sean's father, Van Herron. Van is a martial artist and teacher of some 40 years' experience, and he crafted the bo as a favor to Sean. He is a member of that generation of Vietnam-era veterans who grew up in martial arts while stationed on Okinawa; some the finest martial artists this country has ever seen toiled as students in small dojos there at the same time as Van. Sean, you must be in hock to him for a loonngg time!

I've taken a number of photographs of the bo here, where you can see all the details. Take the time to read the sayings; there's a lot of good thought there.

I've also done an experimental Photosynth of the bo, which is a 3D representation created from regular 2D photos. It's 77% "synthy", which is pretty good, but it could definitely be better.

Thanks again Sean - and thank you very much Van!

A Happy Hour

Every once in a great while, the complicated scheduling that makes up our lives just comes together perfectly...and who are we to not take advantage of the gift?

Trinity Hall is a terrific Irish pub in Dallas, down in Mockingbird Station hard by Southern Methodist University. Built by Irishman Marius Donnelly, he imported all kinds of hardware from there, so it does have the look and feel of a traditional place (and I've been fortunate enough to have sampled quite a number of them). The place plays a variety of live music, though its background sound system rock doesn't seem to match the atmosphere too much. And they do serve the Guinness at the right temperature!

On Sunday afternoons the place completes the transformation to a rural pub by playing traditional Irish folk music (aka "trad"). Unfortunately, up in Plano I can count on making it down to central Dallas on a Thursday night or Sunday afternoon maybe once a year. I don't know about you, but once in the throes of weekend projects it's a bit impractical for me to nip off to the pub a half-hour away on freeways for a quick pint. Not to mention the aforementioned projects mysteriously don't get done upon return, either.

Enter the GDYO, the Greater Dallas Youth Orchestra. My talented but unmotivated son was accepted to play with them, and so we must take him down to SMU on...every Sunday afternoon. Oh. Darn. As it happens, his rehearsal and the Trinity Hall session overlaps from 5 to 6 PM, so I can catch an hour's worth of playing. After that, the session's over and the Celtic Cinderella turns back into a piped-in pop-music pumpkin.

So, on Sunday afternoons it's off to the coal mines for me, abandoning whatever worthy project I'm working on at the time - thinning papers out of the filing cabinet, folding clothes, excavating a dead rat out of the insulation above the master bedroom closet - to take Connor off to SMU.

And if you should happen to find yourself at Trinity Hall between 5 and 6, the odds are good you'll find me somewhere near the band with a Guinness or Smithwicks and a plate of chicken curry, tapping my foot with the rest of the patrons as the session players turn out "The Hut On Staffen Island".

Technorati Tags: Trinity hall,traditional Irish music,trad,Celtic music,trinity hall session players

One Guy, Two Guitars, Twelve Strings, Twenty-Four Fingers

George Lucas is quoted as saying that the video of a movie is only half the experience; the audio is the other half. I was reminded of this when we saw Leo Kottke in performance last Saturday night.

For a Leo concert experience I'll reverse that quote. For you unfortunate people that have never heard of Leo, he is quite simply the grandmaster of the finger picked twelve string guitar. (Yes, I know about the late Michael Hedges, who was fabulous. Leo once said "that guy has an octopus for a left hand".) Sometimes it sounds like there are two people playing.

Leo Kottke performing "Airproofing"

He has an instantly recognizable style: Technically outrageous, very rhythmic (watch his performances below; his whole body bounces up and down to his playing) but beautifully melodic.

For the other half: He's just this regular guy from MInneapolis that walks out on stage in jeans and a button down shirt or blazer with two guitars. When he's not playing a tune he has this rambling, digressing monologue with himself about the tune he's about to play, what happened to him the other day, what it was like being beaten up as the new kid in town, working in a morgue, unknowingly telling Bob Dylan what he really thought of Bob's music...the list goes on. And while he's talking to you, he's absentmindedly playing random bits with a technique that most guitarists would give both thumbs to have. He has a surprisingly gravely voice - he once described his singing as "geese farts on a muggy day" - and a very dry delivery. He's hilarious in a really unique way. He's not trying to be a comic; he's just really funny. His "LIve" CD does a pretty good job of capturing his live performance.

He performed an hour and twenty minute set with no break, playing a selection of tunes from his 40-year career. And he doesn't look that age either :). Two of my favorites are "Little Martha", and, especially, "Rings". I didn't embed it into this entry because it deserves to be seen in its own window (and be sure to switch to high quality). This is a good distillation of Leo, and he often closes with it: Monologue, humor, spontaneity, singing, musicality, technique, and sheer love for what he's doing.

He never comes to Dallas, that hotbed of folk music and college kids (not), but if he should make it to your town (like Sacramento or Denver or Olympia), don't miss him.

Technorati Tags: Leo Kottke,Kottke

Bohemian Rhapsaround

In 1976, I was a junior in high school and riding my bike all the time. (In '76 there was no question of "mountain" or "road".) My good friend Ken Weikal and I were driving down to Columbus, Ohio in his family's big green "alligator" station wagon to join our Pine Lake Bike friends to ride in TOSRV - Tour Of The Scioto River Valley. A punishing bike rally, it goes from Columbus 105 miles south to Portmsouth Ohio, and then back the next day. Of course we all did it nearly cold. Idiots. You should have heard the screams and moans as butts hit saddles on Sunday morning. But I digress :).

Bohemian Rhapsody was in heavy rotation that summer, and Ken and I heard it constantly in the drive from Detroit to Columbus. Fast-forward to yesterday. My son Connor and I were driving across Ontario Canada, in a blinding snowstorm in the "snow belt" between London and Sarnia. We were visiting Ken that evening, and Bohemian Rhapsody was on the radio. We cranked it up and sang to it, just like Ken and I did over 30 years ago*. Kind of cool to see that sort of thing come around again :).

*Damn that makes me sound old!

Technorati Tags: TOSRV,Queen,Bohemian Rhapsody

Mobile Me

Ahh, the holidays and house projects. With the help of a step ladder and an improvised hook / hook installer made up of a broom handle with a deep saw cut in one end (also resulting in a shallow saw cut on me), I finally installed the Hotchkiss Tri-Lumen mobile I'd bought at the Art Institute of Chicago almost a year ago.

It had been sitting in my closet since last March, because I had to move our cheesy builder's foyer light out of the way and we have about an 18 foot ceiling there. The result is attached!