A Bloy and his Blog

Very sad news in the music world today. South African reggae musician Lucky Dube was shot dead in an attempted carjacking.

Lucky Dube’s music was just a joy to listen to. His beautiful tenor voice singing along with those reggae rhythms was something special. True to reggae traditions, his songs often had a strong social message, singing against things like apartheid, social injustice, violence and crime, and the epidemic of AIDS. The folks who run Lucky Dube’s website wrote “the death of Lucky Dube leaves a great void in the music industry, as 25 years of music suddenly ends in tragedy.”

read the rest of: Lucky Dube, 1964-2007

Several months ago I started linking to sample MP3 files, when I write about music I’m listening to. Since then I’ve been looking for a simple way to add a Flash player to stream those files right from the page. Today I found a post by someone who discovered the Google player used in Gmail can be used on any website.

Update, July 13: It seems Google has changed the parameters of the player and it no longer works properly. The good news is I have found a decent player which I can install on this site.

read the rest of: Streaming MP3 files

I’ve been wanting to replace my old MP3 player for a while now. It’s a few years old, so the features and storage capacity are lacking compared to players on the market now. I decided to give in to my technolust and started shopping around.

Part of me was reluctant to go with an Apple iPod. My old player was from Sansa, and concerns about Apple’s proprietary software bothered me a bit. After reading some online reviews, I decided to try one of the new Sansa models. I was not impressed. The controls seemed clumsy and hard to get used to. I experimented with loading music from my computer onto the player, and that was a clumsy experience as well. So, I returned the Sansa player, and picked up a 4 GB Apple iPod Nano. Wow! What a nice device. Yes that’s right, I am now one of the Pod People.

read the rest of: One of the pod people

Today is the first day of spring (in the northern hemisphere). Here in Madison it’s been pretty cold and windy. It reminds me of a song written by David Gray, “What Does It Matter,” an outstanding version of which is on Mary Black’s excellent CD, Shine.

What should it matter if the sun don’t rise
Its midnight forever in my Janie’s eyes
What should it matter if it comes on spring
When I’m finding winter in everything

Lived in this cold wind city all of my life
Walking around still looks the same
Same people coming and going
It doesn’t feel right
See it all now
From so far away

All of the wisdom that I held so high
Shining and useless as this April sky
The hedgerows are singing and it comes on spring
But I’m finding winter in everything

So my stereo receiver was suffering the effects of old age, I had some Christmas money in my pocket, and it was time for a new one. After browsing some online product reviews, I had a some specific models to look for. I went to a few electronics stores and found one of the recommended receivers, at a good price. I brought it home and begun the monumental task of unplugging all the components, speakers, antennas, from my old receiver and plugging them in the new one.

I got to the cassette deck. There are a lot of places to plug things in to the back of my new receiver, but where were the ones for the tape deck? There were none. The receiver had no input or output receptacles for a tape deck. That was something I needed to look for while I was shopping??

read the rest of: Death of the cassette

I recently had the best musical discovery of the year. I realize 2005 is not even half over, but after listening to this discovery over the past week or two I have no doubt it will be my best of the year. No, it isn’t a new band, or a new CD. It’s Radio Paradise, an internet-based radio station.

Commercial free, Radio Paradise is completely listener supported and, in this listener’s humble opinion, very worthy of any support you can give it.

read the rest of: Radio Paradise

While I was in Washington, I did not want to miss visiting the war memorials on the mall. Especially the new World War II Memorial (above) and the Vietnam Memorial (below), which I had never been to.

read the rest of: The War Memorials