One of my long-standing goals is to front a traditional/country band called Matthew Gruman & the [Something] [Something]. In the meantime, I have saturday afternoons to play with.

The worst part about covering Tom Waits songs is making the choice between ever listening to the original again, and self-esteem.

The thing I don’t like about serial commas is trying to automate their formatting. I can’t find examples anywhere, so here’s my PHP code to do it. The way I use it is a while() loop after querying a database, but it will work with any loop (i.e. a foreach’d array). $num_authors is the total number of records. $count_authors is set to 1 before the loop.

The code

if ($num_authors == 1)
{
	echo $author;
}
else
{
	if ($num_authors > $count_authors)
	{
		if (($count_authors + 1) == $num_authors)
		{
			if ($num_authors == 2)
			{
				echo "$author and ";
			}
			else
			{
				echo "$author, and ";
			}
		}
		else
		{
			echo "$author, ";
		}
	}
	elseif ($num_authors == $count_authors)
	{
		echo $author;
	}
      	else
	{
		// error message
	}
	$count_authors++;
}

I made The SHAWC Project this weekend. It’s a “photo project” I’ve ben doing for years, and now I can call it a Photo Project.

It’s very beta, but works in modern non-IE browsers for sure. Please participate!

Last winter a kitchen accident resulted in a “distal fingertip amputation” (i.e. I cut off a small part of my finger). So I made some math music on a keyboard.

The tab

This one’s really simple, but one of my favourite bass riffs.

G|--4-----2-----------|
D|----5-----0---2-----|
A|--------------------|
E|-----------------0--|

-or-

G|--4-----------------|
D|----5---7-----------|
A|----------5---7-----|
E|-----------------0--|

The song

Listen here.

And I watched her through the rain coming through the ceiling and thought back to Salt Lake; and my father, Sid, who ran the Capitol Theatre. It was a movie house, but it had been an old vaudeville house, and he wanted to bring live performances back to the Capitol. In 1948, he invited Marian Anderson to come and sing there. And I remembered we went to the train station to pick her up and took her to the biggest hotel in town—the Hotel Utah—but they wouldn’t let her stay there because she was black. And I remember my father’s humiliation, and her humiliation, as I saw her singing there through the rain.

And I realized right then; I said “Brenden right then, I knew that it was all wrong; that it all had to change. And that that change had to start with me.”

My niece’s harmonica skills aren’t up to par yet, so I jammed with her phone message.

I finally put up a portfolio!

Outside the Vancouver Art Gallery on February 14th, 2009.