jcast2: Being Odd Has Been Good To Me

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J sings at Jono's wedding reception
Playing at Jono’s wedding reception – Jono hiding behind his nephew

I’ve been playing a song my buddy Jono wrote, called “God Has Been Good To Me,” for a while now. So when he got married just before Christmas, we threw him a roast, and I wrote some alternate lyrics for the occasion. First you’ll hear my version of “God Has Been Good To Me,” then you’ll hear my roast/tribute to Jono called “Being Odd Has Been Good To Me.” I overdubbed a guitar solo with delay on the first; you can hear the dog whining and birds singing in the second.

I’ve started posting stuff from the roast, starting with Chris’s slideshow of Jono’s life in pictures at my personal blog, EverydayJ.com.

"There Are Only Five Computers On Earth"

I was just reading this article in Businessweek on Google’s cloud computing when I came across this striking idea:

“In a sense,” says Yahoo Research Chief Prabhakar Raghavan, “there are only five computers on earth.” He lists Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Few others, he says, can turn electricity into computing power with comparable efficiency.

jcast1: Songs From The Porches of Port A and A-Town

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Here’s my first podcast, or jCast as I like to call it, fresh from the porch. The first song, “And Townes Said,” comes from the porch of a beach house off the Texas coast at Port Aransas, enhanced by the sounds of the power tools being used to build a house next door. I recorded the second song, Jackson Browne’s “Rock Me On The Water,” back on my porch in Austin. Doug graciously provided the smooth background groove.

Dreams as Rehearsals

I just read this interesting article about dreams in Psychology Today. Basically, as the theory goes, we dream to rehearse, mostly to prepare for the wost. Evolutionarily, this provides an adaptive advantage, explaining why, as the researcher stipulates, most of our dreams are survival scenarios meant originally to prepare us for life or death situations for which there is often no second chance. This researcher points out that most dreams are nightmares, though we do rehearse fantasies and solutions too. After recently listening to Radio Lab’s episode on dreams, this article confirms the utility of “sleeping on it” for songwriters and guitar players who write songs and practice guitar pieces in their sleep, waking to find the song or the riff flows easily the next morning.