There but for the grace of God go any of us. Enjoy the solitude and music of small family gatherings.
The Pacific Cascade Big Band played their last holiday gig yesterday at Bravern in Bellevue. The PCBB is a relatively new band for me, one started by splitting the Woodinville Community Jazz band into two groups; one is funk and the PCBB is vintage jazz. We didn’t get any of the star players from the WCB Jazz band and had to recruit some of our own to fill out the roster.
Over a year later and now we are gigging monthly and fast becoming a better band. This video was taken by my wife Suzy at the Bravern Christmas gig.
Happy holidays all. Here’s hoping your festive events are filled with loving family, friends, good music and times.
We started talking about this new instrument re-designed and hand-finished by Benedikt Eppelsheim in the Woodwind Forum in the post titled IW C Sop by Eppelsheim? So I have ordered one and look forward to reading music over Suzy’s shoulder as she plays piano.
Here’s the copy:
E&R – “C SOPRANO”
Designed by Eppelsheim & Reese
Projected Release Date: Nov 30th, 2009
Gizmodo has a great gallery of photos from a design book series published by Phaidon called Pioneers, Mass Production, and New Technologies. It’s a three-volume set showcasing 333 of the best designed products from the past century, including Lockheed’s Blackbird aircraft, Technics’ turntables, and the Etch A Sketch. Pictured here is the Ur-Leica camera, designed in 1913; it was the predecessor to the Leica 1 and one of the first cameras to take single shots using cinematic film.
Pioneers, Products From Phaidon Design Classics on Amazon [via Gizmodo]
One of my fav service providers, Project Honey Pot is a community of tens of thousands of web and email administrators from more than 170 countries around the world who are working together to track online fraud and abuse. The Project has been online since 2004 and each day receives millions of email and comment spam messages which are catalogued and shared with law enforcement and security partners.
If you run a website, own a domain, or contribute to an online forum you can join Project Honey Pot or at the very least check them out. I’d like to highlight their “1 Billion Spammers Served” post and recommend that you read it.
Our 1 Billionth Spam Message
Dec 15, 2009
On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message. The message, a picture of which is displayed below, was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot.
Every time Project Honey Pot receives a message we estimate that another 125,000 are sent to real victims. Our billionth message represents approximately 125 trillion spam messages that have been sent since Project Honey Pot started in 2004.
At this milestone, we wanted to take a second to report some of our findings. Our goal is not to rehash the same old insights but instead to give a new picture that only looking at five years and a billion data points can produce. (There are a lot of charts, tables, and visuals tracking the statistics like this one.)
We decided to look at the number of compromised machines operating within the country divided by the number of security professionals operating in the country. This gives us a relative IT security score. As a proxy for the number of security professionals we used members in Project Honey Pot. Here are the results:
We had a gig last night and the band was hot. Halfway through the second set the singer calls up some guy named Jason who introduces us to a girl he won a dance contest with earlier this year. He took a knee and proposed to her in front of the whole audience, maybe 200+ dancers.
Here’s a taste of the music we performed with a tenor solo by Charlie Wickham:
Happy holiday folks.
A furniture salesman wanted to expand the line of furniture in his store, so he decided to visit Paris to see what he could find. After arriving in the famed French capital, he met with some manufacturers and selected a line that he thought would sell well back home in the States.
To celebrate the new acquisition, he decided to visit a small bistro and have a glass of wine. As he sat enjoying his wine, he noticed that the small place was quite crowded, and that the one other chair at his table was the only vacant seat in the house.
Before long, a very beautiful young Parisian woman came to his table, asked him something in French (which he did not understand), and motioned toward the chair. He invited her to sit down. He tried to speak to her in English, but she did not speak the language. After a couple minutes of trying to communicate with her, he took a napkin and drew a picture of a wine glass and showed it to her. Her eyes lit up! She nodded, and he ordered a glass of wine for her.
After the two of them were sitting at the table drinking wine for a while, he took another napkin and drew a picture of a plate with food on it, and she nodded. They left the bistro and found a quiet cafe that featured a small group playing romantic music. They ordered dinner and ate.
Then he took another napkin and drew a picture of a couple dancing. She nodded, and they got up and moved to the dance floor. They danced until the cafe closed and the band was packing up.
Back at their table, the young lady took a napkin and drew a picture of a four-poster bed. The man nodded.
To this day, he has no idea how she was able to figure out that he was in the furniture business!
Friend Ciprian has taken the pains to create 99 (oof!) ready-to-use Windows 7 desktop shortcuts ! Simply download them and place the one’s you want on your Windows 7 desktop.
The collection of 99 shortcuts have been neatly classified and the zipped download includes the following folders with these shortcuts:
Shut Down Menu – Hibernate, Lock / Switch User, Log Off, Restart, Shut Down, Sleep.
Troubleshooting – Aero Troubleshoot, Audio Playing Troubleshoot, Audio Recording Troubleshoot, Hardware & Devices Troubleshoot, HomeGroup Troubleshoot, Incoming Connections Troubleshoot, Internet Connections Troubleshoot, Internet Explorer Performance Troubleshoot, Internet Explorer Safety Troubleshoot, Network Adapter Troubleshoot, Performance Troubleshoot, Power Troubleshoot, Printing Troubleshoot, Shared Files & Folders Troubleshoot, System Maintenance Troubleshoot, Windows Media Player DVD Troubleshoot, Windows Media Player Library Troubleshoot, Windows Media Player Settings Troubleshoot, Windows Troubleshooting Tools.
Windows Programs – Calculator, Command Prompt, Internet Explorer, Math Input Panel, Media Center, Notepad, Paint, Remote Desktop Connection, Run, Sidebar, Snipping Tool, Sound Recorder, Sticky Notes, Sync Center, Windows DVD Maker, Windows Explorer, Windows Fax and Scan, Windows Media Player, Windows Update, Wordpad, XPS Viewer.
Ease of Access – Ease of Access, Magnify, Narrator, On-Screen Keyboard, Speech Recognition.
Don’t say I’ve never given you anything. :o)
Quinn the Eskimo Vintage Horns
The Bis Key Chronicles 