I love WordPress.  But because it’s so popular, it’s a target.  That means hackers are able to find exploits and get into my site content, loading it up with malware and SEO links.

It just took me two hours to kill everything from my old site in my web directory, change passwords and usernames, and then reinstall the latest version of WordPress.  We’re giving it one more try.  The hackers get back in and we do something entirely different with the domain.

That said, you’re not going to find me doing too much blogging these days.  There are other places to share photos of your kids and post rants about digital marketing.  And I’ve pretty much stopped ranting about politics.  Doesn’t leave much for potential subject matter.  Still, maybe I’ll come back and post when it’s something too long for Facebook and Twitter, and not appropriate for the other places where I blog.

Sound good?

Hope you don’t mind the new look.   Someone keeps hacking into my site and hiding code in my page templates.   Usually it’s black-hat SEO stuff for boner pills and whatnot, but sometimes it’s other stuff.   I got tired of cleaning up my old template, so now I’m using a new one.

I used to have this great standing policy that I’ve let lapse recently.   It went like this – if anyone asked me to go to a live music event with them, I’d go.

Why would someone behave like Jim Carrey’s character in “Yes Man” when concerts are concerned?   I made the rule when I was in college, and it served me well.   The early 90s in Virginia, where I went to school at Washington & Lee, were a great time and place for music.   It was also a time for my likes and dislikes to shift a bit.   I graduated high school a slobbering hard rock fan and didn’t listen to anything unless it was in the Van Halen/AC-DC/Aerosmith realm.   Then I got to school and everybody was listening to other stuff.   I had no idea at the time, but musical tastes were shifting and we were going to get exposed to some great music from bands that would go on to do bigger and better things.   To give you an idea of some of the acts I saw in the 1990-1994 period by sticking to my policy, here’s some of the artist I saw (some of them at fraternity houses or small college shows):

• Dave Matthews (in particular, many gigs at the W&L Phi Delta Theta house during Spring Term my senior year)
• Toad the Wet Sprocket
• Gin Blossoms (hung out with them in their hotel room, too, and got an interview for the school paper)
• Blues Traveler
• Soul Asylum
• The Smithereens

At the time, I had no idea how big any of these bands were or how big they’d get.   I saw a lot of other shows, too, with artists that were more established and I’m now very thankful for that.   Then there were a million bands and artists that I saw who didn’t “make it” but probably should have.   I’ve also got a running list of bands I’d probably be uncomfortable admitting that I’ve seen live – Air Supply, Journey, that annoying boy band that did that “I Wanna Sex You Up” song (can’t remember and don’t feel like Googling).   But I’ll take the bad cheesy with the good.

Point is, I can’t remember every really having a bad time at a live music event.   (Well, there was that one time at the Tibetan Freedom Concert at RFK where that girl got struck by lightning.)   So I’m wondering why I don’t go like I used to.   Of course, it has a lot to do with the fact that I’m too old to be seen in clubs and that I have a wife and 18-month-old daughter at home.   But I think I need to get back to going to shows again.

You never know when you’re going to witness history.   You never know when you’re going to get exposed to an up-and-coming artist that’s about to give you music that will be your life’s soundtrack in the coming years.   You never know when you’re going to have a good time out with your friends, seeing some band and creating a story you’re going to tell over beers 10 years from now.

So go out today and find something to go see.   Go to the bar down the block and check out the live music.   Go book tickets to a live show you’ve been meaning to see.   Tell your bud with the spare ticket you’d love to go to the show with him.   (Yes, I turned down a spare Lady Gaga ticket and even though I’m not really a fan, I should have taken up my buddy on it…)   Just get out there.   I have so many fond memories of going to shows that I really should be making an effort to do it more often.

So stop reading this, open up a web browser and go buy some tickets.   Just go.

Snow is supposed to be fun, dammit!   25 inches of snow isn’t, though.   News 12 said Holtsville got over two feet, and considering what I went through this weekend, I believe it.

Saturday, I figured out that getting Craig’s plow and attaching it to my truck wasn’t an easy task.   The frame rails on a Dodge 1500 are completely different from the 2500, plus there’s about 5 hours of wiring involved.   So I called up LaCorte Equipment in Calverton to see if they stocked the plow for my John Deere.   They did, and they put one aside for me.   Jimmy and I picked it up and then spent the better part of Saturday putting it together.   Saturday night I took the mower deck off and then made a pass when there was only about six inches on the ground and the plow performed beautifully.   I plowed all the way from the house to the cul-de-sac and it was great.

I started digging out early Sunday morning.   Here’s the first thing I saw. It actually wasn’t too bad.   I’d push the snow as far as the tractor would push it, back up and then shovel for a bit.   Once I cleared out enough room for the plow to operate, I’d start it back up again.   So I went back and forth for a few hours until my wife told me someone was on their way with a truck plow to un-bury us.   He was supposed to be there by noon.   He didn’t show up at all.   I started digging again at 1 PM or so, after I put a new battery in my quad, got it started up and figured out the snow was too deep to go riding.

I got the truck unburied, so I started it up and put it into 4WD.   Unfortunately, the snow was really deep and the snow underneath was turning into ice.   I slid off the driveway sideways and hit a tree.   It wasn’t too bad – you can barely see the dent, but it made me angry that I wasn’t more careful.   I did manage to get the truck out, though, and I backed it down the road in 4WD with the snow up to the grille.   So that was our path out.

Even with the path I carved with the truck, though, the snow was too deep to get through.   I worked my way down the driveway and managed to finish up most of the driveway by the afternoon.   I made one more run down to the cul-de-sac with the truck and discovered that none of the secondary streets were plowed yet.   I was barely able to get out of the development.   Lauren was calling landscapers with plows.   One of her friends from work had a brother who was supposed to come and bail us out, but his power steering blew up on a previous job, so he couldn’t make it.   I gave up after the driveway was relatively clear, but most of the road remained.

This morning, someone my wife contacted came by and plowed the whole road and what remained of the driveway.   I used the John Deere to get my wife’s car out of the gat

I’m getting flack for not telling anyone what I want for Christmas.   I can’t be the only one who hates answering that question, right?

So yeah, here’s the linkety-link to my Amazon Wish List. Pretty much everything is on there, except for the Geostationary Orbital Precision Laser Cannon.   I don’t think they sell those online anymore.

Forgive me, father. It’s been two months since my last confession update.

When I was in high school, I had a computer science teacher who tried to describe a stack (the data structure, that is). Her first analogy about a stack of lunch trays in the cafeteria didn’t work. The “A-Ha!” moment for me came when she was describing how to recursively move through a stack. “Have you ever been cleaning your house,” she asked. “And you go to another room looking for something to help you tidy up the first room? And then you notice something in the second room that needs to be straightened up before you can return to the first room?” I got it.

Unfortunately, my personal life feels like I’ve got an unmanageable stack right now.   I’m working my way through it, but it’s frustrating.   Here’s a slice of the stack right now.

I want to play my guitar.   Before I can do that, I need to unpack all my music gear in the basement.   Before I can unpack all my music gear, I have to put walls up in the basement because if I unpack before I put walls up, I’ll have to pack everything back up so stuff can be out of the way while we work on the framing and drywall.   Before I can put walls up in the basement, I need to figure out when my brother in law Jimmy can help me with it.   Before I can do that, Jimmy has to finish patching all the holes we made when we replaced the air conditioning.

There’s a lot more.   It seems like every project has some sort of dependency that’s keeping me from getting to it.   Like once Jimmy is done patching holes and spackling, I should probably paint all the walls downstairs.   But we ought not to do that before we have everyone over for Christmas, lest I create a mess that can’t be cleaned up before everyone gets there.

In this way, every time I have free time at home, I feel anxiety because there is a metric assload of things that need to be done, but most of them can’t be done until something else is done first.   Some days, I feel like saying “Damn the order in which things should be done.”   Maybe I should just break into the middle of the stack in the interest of getting stuff done.

I will have a week between Christmas and New Year’s, where I can take some time to address some projects and maybe cut the stack down.   We’ll see.

Speaking of free time, there isn’t much of it.   So there’s not a heck of a lot to report when it comes to new personal developments.   I’m still very happy spending time with my family, but sometimes feel like I’m stuck in second gear and can’t get into third, because I’m the type of person who needs to feel like he’s always making progress on multiple fronts in order to feel fulfilled.

It helps to have a wonderful wife and an amazingly cute daughter.   Here’s a recent pic.

I showed this pic to a client recently.   She said “She looks like Cindy Lou Who!” (from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas).   Funny, because someone stopped my wife a few weeks ago in a store and said the same thing.

I should learn to take it easy and count my blessings.

Last night, I was invited over to the Fifth Avenue offices of Future US, where I got to hang out with some friends from Guitar World.   We were treated to a night of listening to terrific playing from some of the longtime contributors to the magazine.   With beer.

This was really cool for me, because I got to meet some of the guys whose bylines I had seen in the publication for years and see them play – Andy Aledort, Jimmy Brown and Paul Riario among them.   Editor in Chief Brad Tolinski was there, too.   It was doubly cool when these guys hung out with us after putting on a classic rock clinic that featured some great tunes from the Allman Bros, Pink Floyd, Led Zep and Guns N’ Roses.   These guys are really passionate about their guitars and their playing.   Jimmy Brown in particular spent some time talking with me and some of the guys about vibrato technique, custom mods he made to his Gibson SG and tips for getting the most out of practice time.

It was a great time.   Thanks to everyone at Guitar World for making it happen and for inviting me.

I’d like those advertisers who place ads within New York’s free daily papers to devote a minute or two to thinking about how their message is perceived in those vehicles.   One of the things I’m struggling with is that in a world where The New York Times and other non-free papers are struggling to stay in business, these free daily papers continue to book business and distribute their product.   An ad in the Times enhances a brand – I’m not so sure about how people perceive brands that advertise in the free dailies.

Consider for a moment that the best a free paper can do is tell you how many copies are printed and distributed.   “Distributed” in this context, though, takes on a different meaning than the one many media buyers might be used to.   Many of the papers are dropped off at kiosks.   A great many are literally shoved into the faces of subway, bus and rail commuters as they make their way to work.   Often, it’s done in a rude or pushy fashion.   That the garbage cans on any corner where the paper pushers are handing them out tend to quickly fill up with copies of the paper is testament to the notion that many commuters really don’t want them.

There’s the environmental impact of wasting so many trees.   Then there’s the drain on public resources – we pay sanitation people to empty public garbage cans, and we pay people who have to pick up copies that are simply discarded in the street.   Piles of the papers end up abandoned in phone kiosks and in the middle of the sidewalk.   Someone has to get paid to collect the trash and get rid of it.

Not to mention that we all pay a cost when we stand in line, waiting to enter and exit the subway.   When we get to the top of the subway stairs, or to the main exits from Penn Station, we find that the reason we’ve been held up is that there is a bunch of paper pushers crowding the tops of the stairs, pushing newspapers in people’s faces.   The MTA spends money reminding people to quickly exit the landings of escalators once they get to the end.   And yet, the free dailies are paying people to stand there and push their product, holding up the lines for everyone in order to distribute a product that a lot of people don’t want.

Some of these papers pushers are downright rude.   Today I stopped under the awning of a place I visit frequently for a coffee or egg sandwich, just to get out of the rain.   I was told rudely by a paper pusher (and in colorful language) that I needed to get out of the way so he could give out his papers.   On a public sidewalk.

And that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, and what prompted me to write this post that’s been ruminating in my head for a few years.   From time to time, I know marketers stop by here to read some of my blog posts.   And I just wanted to remind those people who care about their brand that they ought to consider steering clear of the free dailies.   You might not be getting what you’re paying for, and it might not be presenting your brand in the most favorable light.   Consider underwriting other vehicles.

The earliest I can remember music and computers beginning to come together was when I was a kid playing with my Commodore 64.   I can’t remember the name of the program, but it allowed me to input music scores and edit them, and the computer would play them back in this weird square-wave tone.   Just a few years later, I was introduced to MIDI by my middle school music teacher, and that started a wave of my own little pet theories about how music and computers would eventually come together.   No, I never foresaw the rise of MP3, but I did wonder many times how we might use computers to record our musical ideas.   I also wondered (probably after my drummer didn’t show up for the umpteenth band rehearsal) when computers could allow one person to record drums, bass, keys, guitar and vocals.

By the time I moved out of my parents’ house, I had a lot of those tools.   When I bought my first serious PC, I also bought MIDI and digital audio interfaces in the hopes that I could spend some time getting the ideas out of my head and on to some recording medium.   For a short period of time, when I was living in Manhattan, that’s exactly what I did.   I would do consulting work from my apartment on the Upper East Side, spending time looking at dot com business and marketing plans, improving them and collecting checks from clients for most of the day.   At night and with whatever free time I had, I’d record stuff.

At a turning point in my life, I took a full-time job at an ad agency that had previously hired me as a consultant.   Lots of time that I used to spend on recording became time I’d spend at the office.   Then 9/11 happened, I started my own agency and then moved out of Manhattan and back to Long Island.   I got married.   I moved a couple times.   I had a kid.   I still have all the gear, but little time to use it.

I have a lot of gear – stuff that would make many studio rats salivate.   Guitars, keyboards, computers, giant piles of rackmount gear, a P/A system – you name it.   It’s all sitting in my basement waiting for me to get back to it.

There are times I think about what it would take to get back into it.   My wife jokes with me about it.   She says one day I’ll come home and find it all sold.

That’s just the thing.   When all the home improvement projects have died down, when Kate is sleeping upstairs and Lauren wants to watch Desperate Housewives, I want to go down in the basement and get some ideas out of my head and onto a hard drive.

Right now, everything in my basement is pushed toward the middle of the house, in giant piles.   It hasn’t moved since the mold contractor completely upended everything.   Everything is clean, but it’s all sitting in a big room with four concrete walls and miscellaneous air conditioning ducts hanging all over the place.   I rarely go down there because I know about all the other things that need to happen in the basement before I can even THINK about setting up:

1. We have to finish the air conditioning.   Hopefully, that will be done in a week or two.
2. I have to coat all the walls with Drylok.   There’s a big 5-gallon pail awaiting me in the garage.
3. I have to have a fight with my wife.   Yeah, I know.   Basically it goes like this – I shared my proposed floorplan for what I think the basement should look like and it doesn’t match what she thinks it should look like.   I requested we put up some sheet rock for two small rooms with a sliding window between them – A room for the computer and the board and some studio monitors, and then another room for miking up instruments and such.   The second room could double as our exercise room.   I dunno where this is going to net out, but my vision doesn’t match my wife’s.
4. I should probably replace all the sheet rock the mold contractor took away.
5. The electrician needs to figure out what’s going on down there.   Wire outlets, get rid of some wires left over from when the previous owner had satellite TV, install some lighting and a bunch of other stuff.
6. Maybe put in some flooring.

So there’s a bunch of stuff that needs to happen before I can even think about setting up.   Add to this the list of projects that probably need to get done before I can attack THESE projects and the notion of sitting down to record a song seems light-years away.

Still, I’m really looking forward to one day having a studio again.   It’s how I always pictured my life – Working hard at a job, taking vacations with the family, doing the Dad thing, but spending some time making music when everybody’s asleep or the kids are outside playing.   One day I’ll get there.   It’s just so far off in the distance.

It’s really ironic.   I always thought the tough part would be getting all the gear together.   “Oh, man, how am I ever going to afford that Mac Pro?” or “How am I going to mic a Marshall combo so that it sounds like a wall of stacks?”   It was never “Where am I going to find the time?” or “Where am I going to find the space for all this stuff?”   For a while, time and space were all I had.   Now I’ve got all the gear and no time.

I know it’s been a while since I posted.   Planning season, lots going on with the house…you know the story.

Anyway, there’s been a post rattling around inside my head for a few days now, and I gotta get it out there.   It deals with one of my biggest frustrations – the lack of good rock music.

Part of me wonders if this is what my Dad must have felt like as Doo-Wop died and the music he grew up on started to fade away.   It must have been frustrating to not be able to replicate that great feeling you get when you buy a record you absolutely love, go home and literally wear out the record because you love the song so much.   As far as I’m concerned, there have been precious few of those records since I graduated college.   Worse yet, they’ve been more difficult to locate.

I think the advent of digital technologies forever altered the way music is put out.   But there was one change that I thought would come about that never really did.   Whereas when I was a kid, a band could put out an album with only one or two good songs on it and still chalk up album sales, the dynamic is completely altered in the age of iTunes.   Now that every song is a single, kids can and do cherry-pick the songs they like and pay only 99 cents a pop for them, rather than blow $10-15 on an entire album and be disappointed when they listen to it all the way through.   I thought this would force artists to weed out the weak stuff and give us more songs that could stand on their own.   Fat chance.

I think I must have underestimated inertia.   I can rattle off dozens of bands that put out a great song and pushed it on satellite and Internet radio and got me interested enough to buy a whole album.   Maybe they won’t score album sales with the kiddies, but they might be getting full-album sales from older buyers like me who are used to supporting artists with good tracks by buying the entire thing.   Problem is, I’m probably now going to switch my habits because I’m tired of getting burned.

I think the overall problem, though, goes back to weak songwriting.   There just aren’t that many artists who can continually and consistently churn out great songs.   Mind you, I’m talking about great songs, not great tracks.

There’s another problem.   My mechanism for discovering great music has completely broken down.   When I was in high school, my friends and I would spend a lot of time listening to music together.   We’d cruise around in one another’s cars, or we’d sit around in someone’s basement listening to stuff, and it was a great way to find out what everyone else was listening to and discovering.   I recall eagerly anticipating bringing an album that no one had heard yet to the next gathering, popping in a cassette tape and saying, “Wait’ll you get a load of THIS!”

When I was in college, we’d all be going to see new bands every weekend.   When I lived in a fraternity house, everyone would have stereos in their room and would be blasting stuff they liked all the time.   It was impossible to NOT be exposed to new stuff.

Now that I’m old and lame, I can do two things – 1) Ask my buddies what they’re listening to, and 2) Log on to stuff like Pandora or get Apple to make music recommendations for me.   Problem is, the technology just isn’t there yet, and my friends are all stuck in the same ruts I’m in, their mechanisms for discovering new music having broken down the same way mine have.   As a technologist, I have some faith that someday, a technology solution will emerge that will help connect people with music they like.   But it’s just not there today.   Apple tells me I might like AC/DC.   Great, I knew that in 1980.

Since 2000, I’ve discovered maybe a dozen albums that I like to listen to all the way through.   Here are some of them:

• Coheed & Cambria – Second Stage Turbine Blade
• The Click Five – Greetings from Imrie House
• Creeper Lagoon – Watering Ghost Garden
• Further Seems Forever – Hide Nothing
• Gringo Love Show – Gringo Love Show
• Jack’s Mannequin – Everything In Transit
• Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American
• Mae – The Everglow
• Matt Wertz – Twentythree Places
• My Chemical Romance – The Black Parade

Of the artists listed above, only a handful released anything afterward with strong enough songwriting to carry me through the album all the way through.   Coheed drowned in their own concept albums.   Gringo Love Show broke up.   Mae released disappointing follow-ups.   Jimmy Eat World put out albums with a couple strong songs per release, but with junk strewn throughout the rest.

My point here is that I really don’t have too many artists to cling to anymore.   When I was a kid, I’d wear out just about everything that Van Halen, AC/DC, Def Leppard, the Police, Pink Floyd and Ozzy put out.   Where are those consistently good artists today?

I guess no one wants to slide into middle age and become that nostalgic old fart who sits around dismissing what kids are listening to and comparing it to what was popular “back in the day.”   But you know what?   I am.   I’m hoping technology will save me.   Then there’s what my cousin is doing.   I can only hope that he and Sandy decide to take Dromedary off hiatus and help us get guitar-driven rock back.   I don’t always like everything Cousin Al recommends, but he’s responsible for my finding at least two or three of the really enjoyable albums I listed above.

Screw my MTV.   I want my rock back.