Dec/090
Joined Slackjaw – A Blues Band
I am now in a professional blues band!
This has been a dream for me ever since I started playing guitar! I am so excited about this new musical venture. We are:
- John Thompson – Guitar & Vocals
- Randy Marinelli – Drums
- Carl Capodice – Bass & Vocals
Check us out on Myspace. We combine down & dirty blues with a dash of modern rock, and with a nice variation. We will be gigging in places around Central Jersey. See our Myspace for a list of our upcoming shows.
The songs available on our myspace aren’t exactly top quality but we will record updated versions of each song.
Aug/090
New Music Discovery
So here is a list of new bands I’ve been listening to. I’ve been listening to a lot of Pandora, which is a great internet radio site that really helps me discover new music.
- Meshuggah
- Megadeth
- Lamb of God
- Mastadon
- Mudvayne
- Metallica (older albums)
I’ve also been listening to a lot of music from Grooveshark. Grooveshark is a lot like Pandora except instead of being a radio station, you can just search for whatever band you want to listen to and find whatever song you want to hear. And it’s all free. It’s much better than Last.fm if you just want to listen to music, because most of the songs available on Last.fm are just clips and not the full song. Last.fm is more like a social network for music, whereas Grooveshark is more like a music search engine and streamer.
Check out my favorite song on Meshuggah’s latest album, Obzen. It’s called Dancers to a Discordant System.
Aug/090
Geeky post about Helvetica
I’ve made another geeky blog post about Helvetica here. Basically, it explains that my computer didn’t come with Helvetica when I bought it, and that it’s one of the standard, web-friendly fonts because it’s so universal because everybody’s supposed to have it. Well not me. But now I have it. Along with 99 more versions of the font.
Jul/090
Blog views, DownThemAll, and Browsers
It’s amazing that I’m getting views on this blog since I don’t have anything good to say. I’m surprised some people are reading this stuff. Anyway I’ve added a DownThemAll button to my sidebar because I like DownThemAll. For those of you who don’t know, DownThemAll is a Firefox addon that enables super fast download speeds. It’s a download manager that gives you a list of all downloadable elements on a web page, including images, audio, video, and links, and enables you to downthemall at once or just pick what you want. There are other filtering options but I mainly use it as a download accelerator. And it actually accelerates…a lot.
I switch between using Google Chrome and Firefox for different purposes. Whenever I’m using Chrome, out of all the addons I use in Firefox, I miss DownThemAll the most.
Now the reason I use two different browsers is simple. Memory usage. Firefox tends to really eat up all my memory with it’s caching and addons, but Chrome is less memory intensive. I have access to more features in Firefox, but for simple browsing I usually just use Chrome. Both are open source, and much better than Internet Explorer. I’ve tried Safari, but I just can’t get around the fact that it doesn’t run very well on my machine. I like the new features in Safari 4, like the new “Top Sites” page and “Cover Flow” for web pages. But I’m sure it runs better on a mac than a pc.
Jul/090
New Brain Drinks
I’ve recently tried Brain Toniq, which is a delicious drink that comes in a Red Bull sized can (8.4oz), and contains only organic and natural botanical ingredients. It’s not an energy drink, but it sort of clears the mind. I actually found it in a store (Wegman’s) and it’s a great alternative to Red Bull. If you’re a Red Bull drinker, I strongly suggest trying this new organic drink.
It’s a bit more expensive if you buy them in bulk online, which I thought was weird. But Revision 3 has a promo code that you can use that gives you 10% off your order. It’s $2.19 a piece at the Wegman’s by my house, but it’s $8 for a pack of 4.
I’ve also recently tried this new (new to me) Jasmine Tea from this japanese company called ITO EN. I’ve never tried Jasmine Tea before, but basically it’s green tea with a dash of jasmine flowers added into the mix. It’s an acquired taste, and at first you think you’re just drinking water. But you get a delicious jasmine aftertaste, which is delicious. It’s good for you too.
The bottle is covered in japanese lettering, which is cool. I enjoy japanese stuff, so I tried it mainly because it’s japanese. Here is a pic of the bottle.
So give these a try if you like drinking healthy stuff.
Jul/090
Headers, and the Devil’s Bible
Ok so I figured out how to add my own header image to this theme. I haven’t really figured out how to apply a header image to my own html pages, though. Especially through CSS. I want to be able to apply a background image using CSS, and have it show up correctly. So far I’ve just been having difficulty. I’ll get it eventually.
I’ve been screwing around with Tumblr themes lately. Tumblr is a revolutionary blogging platform because it’s super simple. A theme can be edited by using Custom CSS or just by editing the actual HTML code of the theme.
Check out this thing:
It’s the Codex Gigas. It’s latin for “Giant Book”. It was written before the year 1229, and is the largest medieval manuscript in history. The pages are made out of calf skin. This book is also called the “Devil’s Bible”.
It had 320 pages at one point, but 8 of the pages were removed. No one knows who removed them, and why they removed them. But the book contains both the Old and New Testament of the bible, as well as magical spells and ancient health remedies.
One of the most peculiar things about this book is that the actual writing remains unchanged throughout, with no signs of aging. Usually writing a book of this length would take a decade or more for one person to write. There is an interesting legend behind the writing of this book. Some people say that this book was written in one night by one monk. The monk has been said to have sold his soul to the devil in order to write it. This kind of stuff intrigues me.
Here is an article about this book at National Geographic.
Jul/090
My Guitar is Fried
I need a new guitar. Period. I’ve owned this strat for a long long time, about 10 years. I’ve been playing it non-stop ever since I got it. The frets are worn to no end, and the fretboard needs a deep cleaning.
The guitar would be in decent shape if it weren’t for the frets. I could have the fingerboard refretted, but it might cost half the price of the guitar itself. So it’s about that time to get a new guitar. I would like to get a real american Strat, but I don’t have the money for that right now. I’m actually quite broke, so I don’t have the money for a new guitar at all.
But one day I will have the money, and I will go buy a new guitar. I just have to deal with this guitar in the meantime.
I play a lot in 5th position (a lot of A pentatonic scales), so the 5th, 6th, and 7th frets are worn the most. When I try to dig into the notes, the strings snap back against the frets and make this quack sound that is displeasing to the ear. I’ve tried raising the action a bit and adjusting the truss rod, but it hasn’t corrected this problem. The main strings that are affected are the high E and B strings. I’d like to learn more about guitar setup, but I feel like I’ve taken decent care of it over the years. I’ve just played it too much.
But really, can a guitar be played too much? Well I’ve found out that it can. But it’s not a bad thing to play too much. It’s what I love, and it remains my main passion in life. Drums is my second passion, and web design and development is my third.
Well, that’s all I have to say about that…for now. Rock on!
- This post was taken from my other blog here.
Jul/090
Added Sidebar Nav to Learning site.
Ok so I’ve added sidebar navigation to my “learning” site created with VWD (Visual Web Developer). I’ve found out that the Design view in VWD doesn’t necessarily reflect how the layout will look in an actual web browser. For instance, while looking at the layout of the page in Design view, the sidebar was completely out of the way of the content. But when rendering the page in Firefox, the sidebar wasn’t where it was supposed to be, as it was intersecting with the content element.
I’ve fixed this problem in Firefox, but the page might look different if the user’s screen resolution is less than 1280×1024, which is my current screen resolution. I have yet to test how this page looks in other browsers, and at different resolutions.
You can find this little page at carlcapodice.com/learning. More updates to come as I slowly increase my CSS styling skillz!
Oh btw, I’ve installed the Web Developer toolbar in Firefox, and I think it’s a great addition to any web developer’s toolbox. It complements Firebug very well.
Jul/090
Playing Around With CMS’s
What have I been up to, you ask? Well, I’ve been working a lot. I’ve also been surfing the web to see what else I can learn about web development before I go back to school in September. I’ve come across the three most popular Content Management Systems besides Wordpress, which are Drupal, Joomla, and Movable Type.
I will install all four CMS’s to my server, each in a different directory. I will have to create a MySQL database for each CMS. My goal is to get familiar with them and acquire hands-on experience from each.
Jun/090
New Domains and New Site
I’ve been working on my site-building skills and I’ve added a few domains to my collection. Well, it’s barely a collection…it’s a pair of domains.
So I now own “carliscool.com” and “carlcapodice.com”. I’ve told everyone that it’s official, I am now cool.
My domain says so.
So anyways I was thinking about what to do with this new domain. Right now it’s fully hosted with Dreamhost, but I might want to map this domain to my Tumblr blog. Gina Trapani has done this with her scribbling.net tumblelog.
Tumblr is great because it’s a free blogging platform and you can map your own domain name to your tumblelog for free. You can do the same thing with a Wordpress.com blog, but it’s not free.
But anyway, I’ve also created another new site at dev.carlcapodice.com. This is where I will be testing out new development stuff. And it seemed like everyone else had a “dev” sub-domain, why not me?
I like the fact that I can create an unlimited amount of sub-domains. I might just use sub-domains for everything instead of sub-directories. Actually, that might be a bad idea.
But anyways feel free to check out these sites and lemme know what you think! I will probably be installing Wordpress to carliscool.com, so I can easily update it.
Happy Coding!
Twitter
- guitarguy234: Can someone please tell me whats the point of a heated steering wheel? I mean, seriously? That's too much luxury.
- guitarguy234: Back on Twitter. It's snowing outside. My show was cancelled b/c of it. Damn the snow!!!
- guitarguy234: The Nissan Cube is no mini MPV (multi-purpose vehicle). It's like a personal touring van. I'd love to drive thru NYC in that thing.
- guitarguy234: Back on twitter and it feels good. Happy Thanksgiving! Here's my new fave song. http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Hide_And_Seek/10821
- guitarguy234: I'm in a band! We're called Slackjaw, and we play the blues, with a touch of hard rock. Check us out on Myspace. http://bit.ly/42sh67
